Germany, like America, is operated by and for the benefit of car companies. Their infrastructure difficulties share root causes with America's.
Or there is a sane explanation - People drive cars -> People push their politicians to improve road infrastructure -> less money for other infrastructure -> trains are underfunded -> trains and tracks are having maintenance issues a reliability starts to fall apart -> people drive cars even more.
Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
21–30 of 105 posts
Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> regional and suburban train service has been great In which city?
I don't know what others think, but Munich seemed reliable to me. YMMV
In my experience, you have to take at least one train early if you do not want to come late regularly. Even e.g. the main airport train line, used by tourists, often turns around before the actual airport due to delays.
If you live in the city itself, it's fine, you also have other options. If you live further away, it's barely acceptable to very bad, IMO.
It is reliable-ish, but more "Amtrak Capital Corridor"-reliable than "JR Yamanote Line"-reliable.
Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
#23No longer? They were bitching and moaning when I visited fifteen years ago in my hostel. They got horrified when I told them they're coddled to be annoyed about 15 minute delays and spoke on how things are in the states... anyways this is troubling I guess... but it's not new . Edit: also, I found the English UI to be the best in the EU (yes, better than UK's) and traveled the continent on DB, so while I sympathize w…
>bitching and moaning
Why is this always the American answer when anything good about EU gets brought up that maybe turned worse?
Vacation, workdays, sickdays, parental leave, free schooling and healthcare? and public transport as here.
It is a question of money, investment and what society you want. You chose the Ford F-150.
For me in Sweden, we also have worse rail now, also due to the same issue. Maintenance is never "sexy" weather its fibre or rail. Parking, roads and cars nets points here too sadly.
Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
#24When I toured Germany in the 1980s with a train pass, there were clocks all over the train stations. If the train was scheduled to start at 11:07, when the big hand clicked to 7, the train started to move. It was wonderful. BTW, the D community is all over the world. We schedule a zoom meeting each month. When we began the meetings, and the meeting started at, say, 8, the meeting organizer would say "we need to wait…
This was never discussed, but the pattern was the same every meeting.
I seriously disliked that nonsense.
Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
#25Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
#26When I toured Germany in the 1980s with a train pass, there were clocks all over the train stations. If the train was scheduled to start at 11:07, when the big hand clicked to 7, the train started to move. It was wonderful. BTW, the D community is all over the world. We schedule a zoom meeting each month. When we began the meetings, and the meeting started at, say, 8, the meeting organizer would say "we need to wait…
When I worked at Boeing, we'd have a meeting now and then in a meeting room. The engineers showed up on time. The lead engineers showed up 10m late. The supervisor showed up 30m late. Anyone higher up, even later. This was never discussed, but the pattern was the same every meeting. I seriously disliked that nonsense.
Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> regional and suburban train service has been great In which city?
I don't know what others think, but Munich seemed reliable to me. YMMV
Sibling comment says all traffic in Munich is funneled through the same central section; that's also true for several Berlin lines, but I've never heard of it becoming a problem. Maybe one time. Berlin's network[1] is complex enough that you have plenty of alternate routes available if something like that happens.
Note to future urban planners: a ring railway is a great idea as it provides redundancy of any possible route through the city center. (Very large cities might even need two. The Soviets actually built a second ring to avoid West Berlin, but it doesn't run as a continuous service. You can see various regional services running around the very outside of the network map.)
I've also traveled fairly long distances by regional train (yay Deutschlandticket) and by ICE (absolutely worth it if you're not penny-pinching). It's always disrupted; trains are always late. But I always get to my destination, so I don't mind that much. If you're on a nice and relaxed schedule, like traveling the day before, you'll be fine. It seems an acceptable, despite not ideal, way to run a railway network.
I think that unlike plane travel, where you normally get there exactly on time but there's a small chance you might be seriously delayed, with German train travel you're quite often a few hours delayed (for a cross-country trip) but it's never worse than that. You never have to stay the night in a hotel, you never have to pay extra money to get rebooked, and you never have to sue them afterwards. IIRC, if you're estimated to arrive more than 20 minutes late, you're allowed to just hop on any train towards your destination - the DB app will tell you this - and you don't need a new ticket, though it's recommended to get a note from a customer service desk to prove it occurred.
Note that the German network runs a lot of trains on a lot of tracks - unlike, say, the French TGV network, which has dedicated tracks for TGVs. The German approach allows for more services with less reliability and the French approach provides the opposite. AFAIK, there are a lot more ICE routes than TGV routes because the routes can be pieced together from existing local track segments and incrementally upgraded.
Side note: I've been on a regional train that was delayed 10 minutes, then sat on a siding for another hour to let more important traffic such as ICEs run on schedule past it. There is a tradeoff between resource utilization, and slack which allows for quick return to equilibrium. The more timeslots are occupied, the longer it takes before a delayed train can find a normally empty timeslot to fit into. This also applies to computers.
And people have been complaining about train delays since long before I got here.
Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
#28[flagged]
Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
#29Is 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.
Re: Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
#30I 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?