Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
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Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
#2DB is a lot better run than British trains... My God. Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.
Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
#3At some point your Regio Express turned into an Intercity. Free upgrade!
Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
#4DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."
I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.
Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
#5There're certain kinds of rewards to encourage traveling by rail in Europe. For example, a training course I attended refunded part of your travel expenses if you took a long-distance train. And there're people who believe in not flying for the sake of the planet.
But at this point, I'm convinced you should avoid any train in and around Germany. This includes Denmark as well. Just take a plane, but don't have a layover in Germany. The same could probably be said about France. My first train from Paris to Nancy stopped for about 2hrs in the middle of nowhere. As the machinist said: "The train is tired."
Other countries like Italy or Spain seem to actually have well-functioning rail though.
Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
#6And here I was annoyed that the train going half the route (as in schedule, not coz of any accident) is named the same so I got on too early one by accident and had to walk a stop away.
Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
#7DB is a lot better run than British trains... My God. Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.
Competing on which system is more dysfunctional, is .. not a competition we should be in. Especially when there's 0 reason for it to be this way.
Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
#8Deutsche Bahn seems very similar to most of the railway in England. Customer service is non-existent; delays are highly normalised.
The UK government hates how expensive it is to operate, so they are reducing subsidies and massively prioritising the most profitable routes and raising prices.
Staff got nice condition/pay bumps during COVID and all have the attitude that they are doing us a favour. I don't mean that lightly or that I've had one bad experience with a member of staff on a bad day. They are work-shy, offensive, rude, lacking training and plain bad tempered.
I'm very pro car now these days, which is exactly what the Government wants.
Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
#9DB is a lot better run than British trains... My God. Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.
OP mentions "six minutes" as a DB metric. But the thing is that DB doesn't care about trains being late. It's absolutely normal to have an hour delay in Germany. You can be considered lucky if it's under an hour. What will usually happen is that you spend half a day in some village waiting for your connection and travel the rest of the way standing in the doorway with your bags.
Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
#10I know the author mentioned this, but I just got nervous imagining this as a tourist who doesn't speak German at all. This shouldn't be like this. Why they don't help at all?
It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc. But I am sure if this happens here it would be on the cover of newspapers.