21–30 of 309 posts
For 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 c…
For 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 c…
What happens if you throw tons of money on something as dysfunctional and lacking a business model? You get Die Bahn.
Calling for “more money” as a central cause is part of the problem.
For years the train from Linz to Vienna was always punctual.
However, recently (Last ~9 Months or so) all trains are super later. The reason is, all of them go through Germany (Innsbruck (via German) -> Salzburg -> Linz ->Vienna), and given everything is delayed in Germany it also delays Austrian trains.
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 Ru…
For 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 c…
What 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 o…
I read somewhere that one of the key issues in Germany is that freight and passenger trains share the same network. While a delay of 15 minutes can be wildly problematic for a passenger train (missing connections, stranding at some godforsaken train station etc.), it is virtually irrelevant for freight. Then again, that should make it easy enough to always prioritize passengers over freight, but either that isn't being done or it's still insufficient.
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…
Having seen the US attempt and lived with the UK railway, the German one is definitely a huge improvement. Yes, it does go wrong sometimes, but my experience at university in the UK was the end of term had two carriages with twice as many passengers as seats, that regularly terminated 20 minutes before the official destination, and my experience visiting the UK now that I live in Berlin is that the UK rail fares are (or often were pre-pandemic) more expensive than the flights to the UK. There's even a standard "money saving trick" on UK fare prices where you split a journey from A to B into A->C, C->B, where C is one of the stops in the route from A to B so you don't need to disembark.
That doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, neither the UK nor the US railways are role models. (I assume Japan is still a role model for rail? Not heard much since the 90s…)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Alos, one important thing that happened in Sweden was that the part that was not privatised was also ran like a for profit company.
The railway infrastructure "CEO" basically stopped a lot of repair work and long term projects and was able to show some very good numbers to the goverment, which they very much liked. 10-15 years later things started falling apart, by which time she was long gone.
This is not motivating anyone to switch from cars to trains.
> 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 thres…