More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
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Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
#2How humiliating. A teacher did the same thing to me, it worked.
Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
#3What to do with late trains is a very interesting problem from a network stability perspective.
It’s somewhat akin to the packet dropping question, though packets don’t complain as loudly as passengers.
In a rail network with one train a day it’s not a big issue, but with regular service you can’t let a late train get out of control or it blows the entire network out of sync until you have some dead time - which is one reason some systems have an “hour of the dead” where no trains run - it lets it reset and get back to something sane.
Trying to build a system that has 15 minute heads and can handle a train going late or dying on the rails is really, really hard without ridiculously complexity like quad tracks everywhere and spare train sets at every station.
Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
#4How humiliating. A teacher did the same thing to me, it worked.
You weren't allowed to enter Switzerland?
Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
#5Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
#6Hard but entirely relatable.
Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company and the bad from the government bureaucracy.
Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
#7Seems fair. You can't make it right for everyone, and at one point they need to draw a boundary, to care for your citizens and keep up the standards.
Otherwise everything would fall to the lowest common denominator.
I don't think it's fair for the article to say that a "temporary measure" has now become a permanent one, it likely is temporary until the problem is solved.
Sometimes I ask myself why the schedule of those always-late trains isn't changed. If it would be planned that it always arrives "15min later", people and other transportation could work with that timing so much better.
Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
#8Reading this on a German train that is expected to arrive in Zurich 25 minutes late, hoping that the connection will not be cancelled at the boarder as per usual.
Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
#9For context German trains over the last few years have become increasingly delayed. To the point that it is now the norm.
Official Deutsche Bahn figures are likely underreporting the extent of the problem as the reported times and actual timetables are -aggressively- out of sync (to the frustration of many riders).
It's hard to dissect the true source of the problem as there are various factors at play. However the central cause is starving the system of funds. This presents a strong warning for countries that are trying to encourage the use of public transport in order to meet their climate goals.
Some detail is available here: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-whats-wrong-with-the-deutsche-...
Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
#10> Another figure illustrates why the practice is necessary from a Swiss perspective: in 2023, 92.5 percent of all trains in Switzerland reached their destination on time, compared to only 64 percent for long-distance trains in Germany.
To add a bit more detail: SBB (Swiss federal railways) consider a train on time if it reaches its destination with less than three minutes’ delay [1]. DB (Deutsche Bahn) puts the threshold at 15 minutes ("Reisendenpünktlichkeit") [2].
[1] https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/responsibility-society...
[2] https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...