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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

#61

Post by mamonster »

tkubacki wrote: post #40

Apart from the root issue here someone need to remind that Switzerland is the parasite of EU. Basically they have all EU rights and no obligations. EU should tax them heavily so that they contribute to solve e.g. EU transportation issues.

These aren't EU transportation issues, these are GER transportation issues. The most powerful "parasitism" argument against CH is probably the tax arbitrage you can get from Zug/Lucerne, but a lot of that already happens inside EU itself with Luxembourg/Ireland/etc.

But yes, a fight over bigger contributions/more harmonization is inevitable within the next 10 years.

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

#62

Post by TimK65 »

heraldgeezer wrote: post #14
AmericanChopper wrote: post #12

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…

100%. That was a whole series of articles in DN about how the Swedish railways have been run into the ground.

Separating maintenance from operations is a terrible idea and has never worked well on any railway that I'm aware of.

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

#63

Post by snowpid »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #56
snowpid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the point that Deutsche Bahn is goverment owned, it is worth pointing out that Western and Eastern German had " to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. " + much much debts. Calling the Deutsche Bahn private is a very good indicator that the person isn't able to look up Wikipedia Article and think critically.

The process was called Bahnprivatisierung. See Wikipedia article here. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung Translating that to english is train privatization. Does this lead to a privately OWNED company? I never said that. The decision to privatize and to make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows.

It is important to click one more on the header on Wikipedia. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisierung and this is refers to my POV.

In German private means privately owned. It is rare that people out of Germany care about the legal status of Deutsche Bahn thus I used the German meanings and many posters as well.

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

#64

Post by Rinzler89 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #59
remolueoend wrote: post #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 thres…

15 min already? Damn, I remember, when the threshold was at 5m59s and that was already kind of outrageous.

Isn't moving the goalposts convenient?

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

#65

Post by phlo »

There's an amazing talk about DB's punctuality from the 2019 Chaos Communication Congress: BahnMining, David Kriesel. Available in German, and interpreted to English: https://dkriesel.com/blog/2019/1229_video_und_folien_meines_....

My favorite anecdote from riding a German train in Switzerland was a journey from Interlaken (Switzerland) to Frankfurt in Germany. Now if you're not used to train schedules: Stops are quick, and trains are punctual. It's fairly common for stops to just be 2-3 minutes. Connections between trains are often around 5 minutes, sometimes shorter.

So, this Intercity Express departed Interlaken perfectly on schedule, made a bunch of scheduled stops in Spiez, Thun, Bern, and continued on to the border city of Basel. Everything running perfectly on schedule, the train arrived at the Swiss station in Basel, continued (on time) to the German train station that's still in the same city, just a few minutes farther. Having had 3-5 minute stops all the way from early morning to lunchtime, the train then sat in the German station for about 15 minutes, departed with only a minor delay, and just a few yards after exiting the station proceeded to stop, sit on the tracks for half an hour ("to catch up with the prevalent delay conditions on the German rail network"), before starting to move again.

Waiting in a comfy seat on a train with working AC isn't the worst of fates, and we made the final destination within half an hour of the scheduled time, so it all went well -- just funny to observe how different parts of this interconnected network had very different ideas of scheduling.

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

#66

Post by snowpid »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #56
snowpid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the point that Deutsche Bahn is goverment owned, it is worth pointing out that Western and Eastern German had " to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. " + much much debts. Calling the Deutsche Bahn private is a very good indicator that the person isn't able to look up Wikipedia Article and think critically.

The process was called Bahnprivatisierung. See Wikipedia article here. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung Translating that to english is train privatization. Does this lead to a privately OWNED company? I never said that. The decision to privatize and to make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows.

" o make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows. " I refer to the time before 30 years. It was a very problematic time in West and East Germany though were a Goverment Agency by legal.

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

#67

Post by cmenge »

unglaublich wrote: post #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 hour…

You can travel across Japan, similar or even larger distances, with practically no delays.

As a passenger it's not always about the bare number of minutes, the problem is that I might get stranded somewhere, and train stations in Germany are generally very dirty and somewhat unsafe at odd hours.

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

#68

Post by hifromwork »

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #54
ben_w wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now to the most complex train system probably in the world. 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 t…

The ticket splitting thing you refer in the UK to works in other countries also.

How does it work? In my country (at least non-regional trains) the ticket price is calculated as ax+b where b is a constant price and x is the distance in kilometers. So splitting the ticket is always more expensive than buying two separate ones (but there are other reasons to do it, for example it's a trick to use when there's not enough seats to ride a->c directly - but that's an edge case)

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

#70

Post by carlmr »

bun_terminator wrote: post #55

There is no saving the Deutsche Bahn. Everyone who knows someone working there knows this. Just ban everyone currently working there from ever working there again and reshuffle the cards.

They're already severely understaffed, I doubt kicking out the current people working there would help.

On a top management level, maybe, but I don't think train conductors can do much about a train schedule that is impossibly failure-prone, based on ageing and inadequate infrastructure and trains in disrepair.

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