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Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time

#5
post #3

Is this an old article? They haven't consistently run on time for around a decade. The service is no better than supposedly worse trains in say the UK and is nowhere near say Korea's train system.

No it's from August 5th. It includes some nice graphs, apparently the punctuality really plummeted around 2020.

Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time

#6
I moved to Germany 10 years ago and while regional and suburban train service has been great, the long distance service has been terrible, with high prices, almost no high speed service and no competition. I'm Italian and therefore I had very low expectations, but at least high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany (at least until recently, when lack of regular maintenance work ultimately made its dent into the service quality).

But for many software engineer this is not a big surprise: everyone knows that accumulating tech debt and neglecting maintence will eventually bite back sooner or later.

Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time

#7

I moved to Germany 10 years ago and while regional and suburban train service has been great, the long distance service has been terrible, with high prices, almost no high speed service and no competition. I'm Italian and therefore I had very low expectations, but at least high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany (at least until recently, when lack of regular maintenance work ultimately made its dent into t…

> regional and suburban train service has been great

In which city?

Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time

#8
The punctuality of the trains has been more of a joke for quite a bit, I don't think it's a big part of German identity.

The part that is really terrible are the long-distance trains. Not that the regional trains are always punctual, their reliability varies a lot per route. But they're not as bad as the long-distance trains.

One big recent improvement is the Germany ticket, for 58 EUR per month you can take any regional train or bus.

Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time

#10
post #5
post #3

Is this an old article? They haven't consistently run on time for around a decade. The service is no better than supposedly worse trains in say the UK and is nowhere near say Korea's train system.

No it's from August 5th. It includes some nice graphs, apparently the punctuality really plummeted around 2020.

I wish the author would dive into that even a little bit. It looks like COVID killed the performance. Why? And what about post COVID?
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