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More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

bluewin.ch

11–20 of 309 posts

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#11
The long-distance network in Germany has routes that take more than 8 hours. Delays of 15 minutes are because of network complexity not uncommon.

SBB - Swiss rail - doesn't want its schedule to be affected by the long-distance DB - German - services. So it doesn't allow the DB service to enter the country after a given cut-off delay.

This means that travellers need to transfer to an SBB service for the final 1-2 hours of their trip. This transfer typically takes 15-30 minutes.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#12

Hard 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…

> privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail

It worked great for rail in Japan, so I’m not sure that’s the obvious lesson to learn.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#13
DB has the worst company culture that I'm aware of. Everything has to go by plan, and when it doesn't, someone has to be responsible. So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks.

This has removed the potential for improvisation in dispatching (no one wants to be responsible for delaying that other train), making the train network unable to give any trains room to make up their delays.

There is a reason every other dispatcher has problems with alcoholism.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#14

Hard 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…

> privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail It worked great for rail in Japan, so I’m not sure that’s the obvious lesson to learn.

It HAS NOT worked great for Sweden.

Source: I live in Sweden there was a DN article recently about it. Here it is

https://archive.is/zaGtb

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240721074607/https://www.dn.se...

(Its all too segmented, the trains, the track all different companies now nobody sees the full picture)

and https://archive.is/MztnY

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240726054426/https://www.dn.se...

(The land is not enough to fix trains and the land next to it was reserved but somehow sold to build a sports arena because the train land section became a company that had to post good numbers)

I hear UK is not too happy about their rail too. https://youtu.be/DlTq8DbRs4k?si=yNWcAUZ69nN1B29O

Seems like it just does not work to separate rail and traffic like that.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#15
Just compare the colored rings (green = on time, orange = delayed more than 3 minutes, red = delayed more than 9 minutes) between the trains in Germany, Switzerland, and France here to get a general feeling of how bad things have become with Deutsche Bahn:

https://travic.app/?z=9&x=890440.8&y=6126327.9&l=osm_standar...

And today is a good day in southwestern Germany, just look at the current general redness in the Ruhr area and Cologne.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#18
Note that trains to Zurich and Basel SBB then end in Basel Bad (or sometimes they let it go to Basel SBB). It’s a separate train station in Basel which is run by Deutsche Bahn so it’s not literally “turning back at the border”.

IIRC Swiss passengers waiting in Basel SBB get a replacement train travelling at the original time.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#19

Hard 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…

Can’t comment on the 90s, but it only seems to have become truly unreliable in the last 5 years maybe? I take a train through Germany 2-3 times a year, and delays and faults are pretty much inevitable on every journey.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#20

Hard 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…

> privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail It worked great for rail in Japan, so I’m not sure that’s the obvious lesson to learn.

It worked OK for the UK. Passenger numbers, which had been steadily falling, started to increase. On the other hand, there are complaints about high fares.
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