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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

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Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#471

Post by School-Cotton »

jonasdegendt wrote: post #428
bombcar wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it Centraal? That would have been my guess.

Hah nope! Even as a Belgian I find the naming of the Brussels train stations maddening. Brussels-Midi is the south station, so Brussel-Zuid. Midi allegedly means south in French, but I've never actually heard it being used over "sud", also south. In conversation, midi also means noon (e.g. used as "meet me at noon"), which for my brain correlates more with central than south, given the context of a day. Not a linguis…

In Europe (and anywhere else north of the Tropic of Cancer), the sun is always approximately due south at noon. That’s the reason for the connection, and “midi” indeed means both south (in some contexts) and noon in French.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#473

Post by busterarm »

geysersam wrote: post #466
purpleflame1257 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Venkatesh Rao offers the following definition of the "Fourth World" Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore. This is what this story reminds me of.

This is just silly. The German train system has problems. Does that mean total civilizational collapse? No, it doesn't.

Collapse is the other end of the spectrum. This is an institution whose practices/policies only serve itself instead of its customers/purpose.

It's progress, taken to its extreme. From a certain point of view it's effectively the same as collapse.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#474

Post by pjmlp »

etothepii wrote: post #234
modo_mario wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Because English has become the lingua franca for Europe. I suspect that now UK has left EU it will be much easier to accept this.

I still lean on UK English though, regarding way of writing and words I tend to use.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#475

Post by skeptic_ai »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #131

I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train). But the idea that you go 55 minutes just because of policy; and skip 15 stations is crazy to me. Again with the assumptions that it can safely stop somewhere for 5m and I’m pretty sure the ans…

Remember the rules are written in blood

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#476

Post by zb3 »

eviks wrote: post #451

> Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so we are on the wrong tracks. We cannot stop.” And of course there is some huge fine or even potentially jail time if you moo in protest and pull that nice red lever to avoid the Christmas present of this bureaucratic idiocy (after all, you have legs that are capable of crossing train tracks and eyes to do that safely)?

It's for emergency.. if that happened to me I'd argue in court that I thought the driver went insane (because a system can't work like that) so it qualified as emergency..

But back to my country (Poland), it's better here - some had problems with physically getting out on the right station, and when the conductor saw it she even encouraged us to pull this lever in those cases so we don't have to get out at the wrong station.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#477

Post by Telemakhos »

this_user wrote: post #403
Zealotux wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a massive German company you heard of, this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility. As a French, the culture shock was brutal and I never really got around that work attitude. I went through a similar issue back when I used to take a…

So much in German work culture - and also culture in general - is about covering your own arse. If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process…

That sounds a lot like industrial safety culture: blame the process, not the worker, so we can iterate on the safety built into the process if there is a failure, because doing so lessens the chance of future failures. It’s a great way to build airplanes.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#478

Post by scotty79 »

tialaramex wrote: post #243
rwmj wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's not safety but money. In the UK, train operators pay station operators a fixed fee to stop. As a result trains can't just stop somewhere randomly (except I hope in an emergency) even if that would benefit many people. All this is, needless to say, very stupid.

The arrangement (now gradually coming to an end) in the UK is very silly, ToCs (which run trains) were district from the ultimate station owner (which was various notionally for-profit companies but of course always ultimately the government) and the track owners. Most of that nonsense is being gradually absorbed into a single government owned passenger rail entity. A "one under" (likely suicide) plus signal problems…

There was a post on hn by someone who built a model to predict which trains are going to be late to get ticket refunds and travel for free (albeit slower).

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#479

Post by tharkun__ »

gmueckl wrote: post #440
db48x wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. An Amtrak train would just stop at the next convenient road crossing, if there were really something preventing them from stopping at the scheduled station. Most Amtrak stations don't even have staff, or any way to prevent people from coming and going, so this would most likely involve construction on the station platform itself. That’s fairly rare but the last time I took the Zephyr headed east there was…

I don't understand ome detail of this story: Amtrak platforms are about 110cm high. That's more than waist high for most people. So how do you let people get on and off at a grade intersection instead of at a platform?

And now you tell me how those doors function at 110cm height instead of ground level ;)

https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Autumn-1...

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#480

Post by rvba »

zahlman wrote: post #421
jltsiren wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had trouble buying train tickets with a credit card in Germany. If I had to guess, your issue was that you were trying to use a card that didn't support chip-and-PIN or contactless payments.

> didn't support chip-and-PIN or contactless payments. As opposed to... swiping the card? Are there really cards out there that exclusively support that?

Prepaid gift cards (please note: those are not store issued) dont have chips and it is sometimes a problem to use them. But I doubt someone would buy a plane ticket with them.
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