Cancelling trains to preserve on-time statistics is the kind of perverse activity you get when metrics aren’t correctly setup.
A cancelled train should be counted as delayed until the next train (close to the worst-case scenario) so as to discourage it.
But the real problem with deteriorating service is that people will put up with it for a long time - as long as they get to where they’re going eventually.
But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
And then you have no riders and trying to get back on track will take 20 years or more.
I can confirm. While there is a fair amount of train infrastructure, it is horribly unreliable. Plan for being delayed for 30-50% of the scheduled travel time.
One time I did a cross-country move from Germany to the NL. Booked myself a 1st class ticket, because I had a ton of luggage and wanted a chill experience. Of course-- train is canceled, which means my seat reservation is also canceled. Next train comes and it's standing room only.
So I paid 3x for comfort, only to get stuck standing in the aisle with all my luggage for 6 hours and an additional transfer. Yes, I can get the ticket refunded, but the point is not about the money. What should I expect out of a service that can so easily be completely downgraded at a moment's notice?
I've been told that since the privatization, the funding was split between DB paying for maintenance while the state provided funds for replacement and new lines. Allegedly this provided an incentive to let things deteriorate until they needed replacement.
Projects are planned, coordinated and funds allocated far in advance, so if the government can't agree on a budget and projects are shelved or canned, restarting the process causes a significant delay.
Last time I had to go somewhere in Germany I used a Flixbus instead of their "high-speed" trains. The fact that I was willingly subjecting myself to a Flixbus, not because of price but because of reliability, really tells you something about the state of trains in Germany.
For Americans: Flixbus a cheap bus service which is often used by people who are not really bothered by social norms.
It's really a pity for a large part of international train travel too, given Germany's central position in Europe. Many people I know (moi incluis) would really like to take the train for holiday or work travel (instead of airplane) but it's just not worth the risk of having to deal with Deutsche Bahn. Holland to Denmark by train, tried it once, never again.
If you lookup the details about the decision to build and construction of Stuttgart 21[1] it's an insane mix of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Partially also a result of laws changing and allowing privatisation of public infrastructure.
This satire [2] about it on German TV is 6 years old now and the project is still increasing in cost and being delayed. It's a pit without a bottom now.
I work in the German healthcare sector, which is partly public and partly private, and I have been doing so for a little over a year. The level of bureaucracy is staggering. There is no shortage of good ideas or genuine innovation, but most of them drown in administrative processes long before they reach implementation and are eventually abandoned.
Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized, yet it still carries much of the old organizational DNA. The result is a company that adapts painfully slowly to changing market needs, compounded by chronic mismanagement.
Germany’s problem is not a lack of innovation or talent. It is structural: excessive bureaucracy, risk-averse management, and incentive systems that reward process compliance over outcomes. Until those change, progress will remain slow regardless of funding or good intentions.
> Waning reliability is but one of many problems for state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which is operating at a loss and regularly subjects its passengers to poor or no Wi-Fi access, seat reservation mix-ups, missing train cars and "technical problems" — a catch-all reason commonly cited by conductors over the train intercom.
As someone who fairly often travels by German ICE (not their regional trains), I've only ever experienced the timetable unreliability.
WiFi is fairly reliable and much much better than for example the Dutch railway (NS) WiFi which never seems to work, and I can't remember the last time it didn't work on an ICE. I've never had any seat reservation mix ups or (knowingly) missing train cars; the last two I've experienced only once in Europe, on a cross border train from Slovenia to Austria, with the seat booked via the ÖBB on a Slovenian train.
When these ICE's are on time and show up, I like them a lot. The seats are very comfortable, there's food service in the train, the seat reservations aren't thát high, and are optional (unlike say high speed rail in Italy, where there's a 15 euro required seat reservation on top of the ticket price), the staff is consistently friendly and so far (I think) they haven't joined the annoying recent trend to put digital ads on the same monitor as the in train timetable.
More so, I really really like the Deutsche Bahn app and use it for trains all over Europe.
Reading this article makes me ask myself if the route and type of train matters, but also that the article didn't really add anything new from what wasn't already known. With their ongoing frequent delays DB made them an easy target for anything under the sun, but comparatively to other trains in Europe, at least for DB ICE's, delays aside, I feel they're doing quite alright.
At least Germany has trains that go places. Ireland ripped most of their tracks out in the 50's and now there are two separate rail networks that are "joined" by taxi between Heuston and Connoly station in Dublin. Going from Sligo to Ballina (both on the west coast) means going through Dublin. I don't think any airport in Ireland is served by rail.
I moved to Germany from Southern California in 2002 and as a conscientious objector to gridlock and indeed any grid whatsoever, I experienced very distinct happiness at the change of transportation paces between those two worlds, and the very first thing I did was get myself a DB (Deutsche Bahn) membership, which gave me so many nice memories.
I'm very fond of those years of easy train rides all over that part of Europe, and indeed internally within Germany, too. The overnight trains to Munich and Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna (ÖBB membership too), the easy rides between towns all over the Rührgebiet and NRW, the delightful weekend trips to Wuppertal and Bonn and so on. The sleeper cabins, the disco car, the wonderful cold beers served during a summer sojourn to The Hague, and so on. Yes, German trains could get you around, and connected, and after all - the rail systems of Europe are a reason to live there.
So I'm kind of saddened to hear of the demise of things, having left Germany for another land with well-laid rail (Austria), which I use with little sense of a lack of quality. But I do remember days of being very impressed with Germanys' transportation services .. it seems the nation of unlimited speed limits on the autobahn did, in those days, have superlative rail as well.
(Still, that was ±20 years ago. I suppose I shouldn't be that shocked to see time take its toll.)
I once had an idea to build an "probabilistic routing" system that "predicts" the likelihood of arriving at your destination. I.e. "you have a 85% likelihood of arriving in Berlin over Route Y instead of the official Route X because it uses train connection Z, which is historically always late". Obviously the bahn.de routing will only get you the "quickest calculated connection", but then during the travel I rarely have one day where there's no "your connection is not available anymore, please look for an alternative" error in the DB App. Especially if you have to change regional trains 3, 4 or 5 times.
Basically, my method of traveling with Deutsche Bahn has now gotten me back to improving my geography, because I developed an instinct of "try to get as physically close to where you want to go because as soon as you step outside the train, you have no guarantee that the next train will arrive". Rather than immediately planning the entire trip in advance, I'll say "okay I need to head roughly east and I know that larger cities have more frequent connections, so if anything happens, I prefer being stranded in a large city rather than being stuck in No Mans Land just because bahn.de says it's the fastest connection". This is very important when traveling late in the day, to not spend the night at a station.
The downside is obviously that German traveling has now degraded to a state of "medieval mode" traveling, where you have to plan your overnight stops at the local inn while fighting robbers, peasants and bicyclists for a spot in your horse carriage (sorry, I mean "RE3"). But when you are eventually stranded in Knitschendorf-Unteroblingen main station at 23:59pm because bahn.de said that there should be a train here and then staring into the night sky above you, at least you remember that traveling beyond the horizon has finally become magical again. Onto new adventures, travelers! See y'all at Mt. Doom.
Scheduling trains is a complex problem involving many parameters, but the public see only one facet of it: is my train delayed or not?
Of course delays depend on budget and investments, and bureaucracy.
But not only.
For instance, comparing high speed trains in Germany and France can give the impression that German trains are ineficient and slow, but Germany being a much less centralized country, which is good, trains have to make many more stops, oftentimes leading to more complex scheduling and not being able to reach the top speed between stops, and thus less time to catch up on small delays.
Similarly, there are different policies regarding international trains vs national trains, or freight vs passenger, and also different variables they can optimize for: number of delays, total duration of delays, availability of emergency paths, etc, and various policies will yield different sentiment regarding "is my train on time".
What's up with train services reliability in Europe? In my european corner here, I always have to give this advice to people who are new to the city: do NOT use the commute train ever if the deadline is serious and absolute (you got a work interview, a flight, a funeral). Trains get stopped in the middle of the trip, get delayed, or get cancelled all the time!
The solution is to lose even more of your time (as if public transport wasn't slow enough already) and be at the station already for the previous schedule of what you'd ideally need to take. But at that point, sometimes it's just better to go a longer route by subway, or if traffic is not bad, go ahead by car for those occasions.
How? Mama Merkel squandered a decade of budget surplus in millions of "refugees" who crossed multiple safe countries to get to Germany while neglecting all infra and agreed to close nuclear plants. So now Germany is on its way to economic collapse.
I had to travel from Copenhagen to Berlin and Copenhagen to Basel several times, and I was open to choosing a train, but ended up flying to avoid dealing with DB. I really didn’t want the risk of missed connections cascading into messing up my appointments and vacation plans. And now with Fehmarn Belt link under construction, I ask myself, what’s even the point of shaving off a couple of hours from the trip duration if I can’t rely on DB for reliability anyway?
As someone who travels on Deutsche Bahn regularly for work, everyone complains about the train system, but I honestly don't have a lot of issues, maybe a 20-minute delay every so often. I have spent 20 hours on the train system in the last month. I also fly a lot, especially to Germany, and this is far more unreliable and problematic. I was stranded last weekend in Paris due to delays on planes.
> It's not just crumbling tracks and sticky signals that need attention, he explains, but the network operator's overly bureaucratic infrastructure.
> "Every process at Deutsche Bahn is really complicated," Iffländer says. "It takes forever and that frustrates the people that actually want to do something."
Liberals, please take notes. It all started with the train service being privatized to increase efficiency and decrease costs.
The truth is even worse than the article suggests. I use the train every week. Switching train once after 10 Minutes with total started travel time of 2 hours. In only 20% of the time does that actually work. I am happy with only 20 minutes delay as often it ends up 45-60 minutes. Plus the cognitive load because I have to take care to change my travel route depending on where and when I and arrive and I have to regularly check the app, switch platform and alike.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 38.9 ms ] threadA cancelled train should be counted as delayed until the next train (close to the worst-case scenario) so as to discourage it.
But the real problem with deteriorating service is that people will put up with it for a long time - as long as they get to where they’re going eventually.
But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
And then you have no riders and trying to get back on track will take 20 years or more.
So I paid 3x for comfort, only to get stuck standing in the aisle with all my luggage for 6 hours and an additional transfer. Yes, I can get the ticket refunded, but the point is not about the money. What should I expect out of a service that can so easily be completely downgraded at a moment's notice?
Projects are planned, coordinated and funds allocated far in advance, so if the government can't agree on a budget and projects are shelved or canned, restarting the process causes a significant delay.
For Americans: Flixbus a cheap bus service which is often used by people who are not really bothered by social norms.
This satire [2] about it on German TV is 6 years old now and the project is still increasing in cost and being delayed. It's a pit without a bottom now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
[2] https://youtu.be/V49b13fYFik
Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized, yet it still carries much of the old organizational DNA. The result is a company that adapts painfully slowly to changing market needs, compounded by chronic mismanagement.
Germany’s problem is not a lack of innovation or talent. It is structural: excessive bureaucracy, risk-averse management, and incentive systems that reward process compliance over outcomes. Until those change, progress will remain slow regardless of funding or good intentions.
As someone who fairly often travels by German ICE (not their regional trains), I've only ever experienced the timetable unreliability.
WiFi is fairly reliable and much much better than for example the Dutch railway (NS) WiFi which never seems to work, and I can't remember the last time it didn't work on an ICE. I've never had any seat reservation mix ups or (knowingly) missing train cars; the last two I've experienced only once in Europe, on a cross border train from Slovenia to Austria, with the seat booked via the ÖBB on a Slovenian train.
When these ICE's are on time and show up, I like them a lot. The seats are very comfortable, there's food service in the train, the seat reservations aren't thát high, and are optional (unlike say high speed rail in Italy, where there's a 15 euro required seat reservation on top of the ticket price), the staff is consistently friendly and so far (I think) they haven't joined the annoying recent trend to put digital ads on the same monitor as the in train timetable.
More so, I really really like the Deutsche Bahn app and use it for trains all over Europe.
Reading this article makes me ask myself if the route and type of train matters, but also that the article didn't really add anything new from what wasn't already known. With their ongoing frequent delays DB made them an easy target for anything under the sun, but comparatively to other trains in Europe, at least for DB ICE's, delays aside, I feel they're doing quite alright.
At least Germany has trains that go places. Ireland ripped most of their tracks out in the 50's and now there are two separate rail networks that are "joined" by taxi between Heuston and Connoly station in Dublin. Going from Sligo to Ballina (both on the west coast) means going through Dublin. I don't think any airport in Ireland is served by rail.
It just says "decades of neglect". It gives little vignettes of bad experiences and a quote from a French person saying the French would revolt.
Any actual explanation?
I'm very fond of those years of easy train rides all over that part of Europe, and indeed internally within Germany, too. The overnight trains to Munich and Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna (ÖBB membership too), the easy rides between towns all over the Rührgebiet and NRW, the delightful weekend trips to Wuppertal and Bonn and so on. The sleeper cabins, the disco car, the wonderful cold beers served during a summer sojourn to The Hague, and so on. Yes, German trains could get you around, and connected, and after all - the rail systems of Europe are a reason to live there.
So I'm kind of saddened to hear of the demise of things, having left Germany for another land with well-laid rail (Austria), which I use with little sense of a lack of quality. But I do remember days of being very impressed with Germanys' transportation services .. it seems the nation of unlimited speed limits on the autobahn did, in those days, have superlative rail as well.
(Still, that was ±20 years ago. I suppose I shouldn't be that shocked to see time take its toll.)
Basically, my method of traveling with Deutsche Bahn has now gotten me back to improving my geography, because I developed an instinct of "try to get as physically close to where you want to go because as soon as you step outside the train, you have no guarantee that the next train will arrive". Rather than immediately planning the entire trip in advance, I'll say "okay I need to head roughly east and I know that larger cities have more frequent connections, so if anything happens, I prefer being stranded in a large city rather than being stuck in No Mans Land just because bahn.de says it's the fastest connection". This is very important when traveling late in the day, to not spend the night at a station.
The downside is obviously that German traveling has now degraded to a state of "medieval mode" traveling, where you have to plan your overnight stops at the local inn while fighting robbers, peasants and bicyclists for a spot in your horse carriage (sorry, I mean "RE3"). But when you are eventually stranded in Knitschendorf-Unteroblingen main station at 23:59pm because bahn.de said that there should be a train here and then staring into the night sky above you, at least you remember that traveling beyond the horizon has finally become magical again. Onto new adventures, travelers! See y'all at Mt. Doom.
Of course delays depend on budget and investments, and bureaucracy.
But not only. For instance, comparing high speed trains in Germany and France can give the impression that German trains are ineficient and slow, but Germany being a much less centralized country, which is good, trains have to make many more stops, oftentimes leading to more complex scheduling and not being able to reach the top speed between stops, and thus less time to catch up on small delays.
Similarly, there are different policies regarding international trains vs national trains, or freight vs passenger, and also different variables they can optimize for: number of delays, total duration of delays, availability of emergency paths, etc, and various policies will yield different sentiment regarding "is my train on time".
A document that gives an overview of the variety of policies across Europe: https://rne.eu/wp-content/uploads/RNE_OverviewOfthePriorityR...
The solution is to lose even more of your time (as if public transport wasn't slow enough already) and be at the station already for the previous schedule of what you'd ideally need to take. But at that point, sometimes it's just better to go a longer route by subway, or if traffic is not bad, go ahead by car for those occasions.
Of course, NPR would never mention this.
> "Every process at Deutsche Bahn is really complicated," Iffländer says. "It takes forever and that frustrates the people that actually want to do something."
Liberals, please take notes. It all started with the train service being privatized to increase efficiency and decrease costs.
The truth is even worse than the article suggests. I use the train every week. Switching train once after 10 Minutes with total started travel time of 2 hours. In only 20% of the time does that actually work. I am happy with only 20 minutes delay as often it ends up 45-60 minutes. Plus the cognitive load because I have to take care to change my travel route depending on where and when I and arrive and I have to regularly check the app, switch platform and alike.