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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

#71

Post by Freak_NL »

codegeek wrote: post #35

As a foreigner, I am currently travelling for work in Europe and had a DB train from Munich all the way to Ljubljana (Slovenia) through multiple connections. Interestingly, the trains were on time until we were in Germany but when I reached the last connection in Villach (Austria), suddenly they cancelled the train from Villach->Ljubljuana without any notice at last minute. As a foreigner without any understanding, I…

Villach to Ljubljana is a joined ÖBB and SŽ line, not Deutsch Bahn. Your ticket was with DB, but the train getting cancelled had absolutely nothing to do with them.

If you had asked at the Reisezentrum at Villach station you would have been presented with options to continue your journey, or get a refund.

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

#72

Post by rob74 »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #57
rob74 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Privatizing" is not the correct word for it - DB was reformed and is now a company instead of a government agency, but it's still 100% owned by the state. Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, favoring short term savings over long term sustainability, which led to the sorry state in which German rail infrastructure is today. IMHO the major issue with the reform is that the…

It's the words that were used in the 90s. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung

That's a general article about privatizing state-owned railways all over the world. If you look at the part referring to Germany, it links to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnreform_(Deutschland), and "Bahnreform" is the term that's more commonly used to refer to what happened in Germany.

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

#73

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

I wouldn't mind the delays that much if we had more direct connections between cities. But the reality is that you book a connection to another city, and that connection was never possible in the first place because of some construction work or bad rails or something else. They know they can't make that connection but they never update their schedule to reflect that. And then you are on the first leg of the journey and everything goes to hell. You have to find a replacement train, your reservations are void, you have to wait hours.

And the worst is that you have no recourse. You get 25% of your ticket after ONE HOUR! It makes me so angry.

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

#74

Post by piva00 »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #64
zelphirkalt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not really moved the goalposts according to a comment posted 20+ minutes before yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41190333

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

#75

Post by remolueoend »

macbr wrote: post #30
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…

Having read through the links you provided: You are comparing two different things. DB’s Reisendenpünktlichkeit takes in delays caused by missed connections etc. SBB’s 3 minute delay are just the individual train delays. For that DB has a similar measure which defines punctual as below 6 minutes of delay. So the difference is big (3 vs 6 minutes) but not that big (3 vs 15 minutes).

You are of course right, "Reisendenpünktlichkeit Fernverkehr" hasn't even been published by DB before January 2024 - my bad.

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

#76

Post by fmobus »

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…

And its doubtful any statistics from the German side can be trusted. In more than one occasion, I've personally experienced delayed and cancelled trains that were shown as running on time in every information system. DB either doesn't know where their trains are, or is continuously fudging the numbers.

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

#77

Post by hifromwork »

gniv wrote: post #16
lagrange77 wrote: post #2

How humiliating. A teacher did the same thing to me, it worked.

Based on kdrama, this seems common in Korea. You're 10 seconds late, you can't enter the school grounds.

Interesting culture if that's seen as a punishment. In my school half of the kids would try to be a minute late (so they can't enter the school and 'have to' slack off the whole day).

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

#78

Post by gniv »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #58
gniv wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on kdrama, this seems common in Korea. You're 10 seconds late, you can't enter the school grounds.

Why?! How does this help? That sounds insane and pointless to the education process. Unless the point was to educate your kids to be obedient slaves with childhood trauma for their corporate overlords. We used to have something similar during communist rule in my European country, to teach kids who's boss and to respect authority.

No idea, but seeing how often they show it, I think they agree it's abusive.

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

#79

Post by bombcar »

cmenge wrote: post #26
bombcar wrote: post #3

What to do with late trains is a very interesting problem from a network stability perspective. It’s somewhat akin to the packet dropping question, though packets don’t complain as loudly as passengers. In a rail network with one train a day it’s not a big issue, but with regular service you can’t let a late train get out of control or it blows the entire network out of sync until you have some dead time - which is o…

I agree that it's a hard and interesting problem. Yet other countries seem to be managing it better, or there is something structurally different. I read somewhere that one of the key issues in Germany is that freight and passenger trains share the same network. While a delay of 15 minutes can be wildly problematic for a passenger train (missing connections, stranding at some godforsaken train station etc.), it is vi…

The USA has the freight problem because trains can't pass each other unless there is a siding long enough for the train that is being passed; and the freight trains are too long.

Where there's double-track (or more) it's not as big an issue because the train can pass on the other side of the track (tracks are often handled as if they were a road with one lane going in one direction and the other going the other way, but you can swap around with signaling).

The other major solution (bandaid) is to add dwell time at stations so that there's room to make up - the timetable says when the train will leave not when it will arrive, and if it normally arrives five minutes early, it just waits; if it lost time and arrives one minute before departure, it will just be there a minute and the lost time is made up.

But while that may reduce the "worst case" scenario, it does make the average travel time longer.

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

#80

Post by marcyb5st »

ben_w wrote: post #27
notTooFarGone wrote: post #6

Hard but entirely relatable. Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company…

> 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…

Honestly it's a very low bar and Germans should aspire for better and not for a meager "we are not the worst there is".

I would say you need to compare DB to other Western European railway operator/networks. In my personal experience, DB comes dead last and it's not even close to the 2nd to last. Renfe (Spain), Trenitalia/Italo (Italy), SNCF (France) have much better services, at least on the long-distance routes (> 200KM). So much so that they are a viable alternative to domestic flights.

Additionally, most of those countries also have a much worse geography to contend with (e.g. Italy with the Alps and Appennini) and they still manage to have a nice high-speed rail network that works.

Finally, answering your last point, Japan still is THE role model. So much so that you can get stuff delivered to a train station your train is transiting through (at least with the Shinkansen lines) because the carrier knows exactly when your train will be there. I was astonished by that.

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