Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

theocharis.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 1001 posts

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#821

Post by tschwimmer »

creichenbach wrote: post #163
microtonal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) That's very outdated, DB has been terrible for a long time though. Switzerland is still the best though. Here are some stats for 2025: https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped Since you have to scroll down quite a bit to get the list of most reliable European trains (with percentage on time): 1. Switzerland 97.8% 2. The N…

As per my other comment, Swiss trains (especially SBB) are not as pleasant as they get credit for. I get a lot that "you know, in other countries it's much worse", and it reminds me of software hosting, where it was normal in the past to be offline occasionally. Then Google et al. came and showed that much more reliability is possible with good engineering. I think there would be a lot of room for improvement.

Unlike other commenters, I agree that there are some (arguably significant) things to complain about. The first one is price - tickets are quite expensive. I frequently travel Zurich HB -> Lugano. This is 200km and costs a whopping 120+ CHF round trip. Zurich -> Geneva, Zurich Bern are similarly expensive. However, it's a bit hard to fault them as Switzerland is an expensive country and perhaps the high prices keep the service good.

What I am less able to excuse them for is capacity issues, especially on weekend and Friday trains on popular routes in the Summer. That Zurich Lugano train is packed to the gills most weekends during the summer such that it's standing room only for most of the 2 hour ride. They need to add more trains or at least more cars.

Reliability is not something to complain about. The trains are punctual, that's for sure.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#822

Post by tormeh »

hobofan wrote: post #765
3ds wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! When you spend billions on car infrastructure but hardly anything on rails, there will be issues. What people don’t write clickbaity blog posts about is how in general things work very well. I’m currently sitting on a train from Nuremberg to Berlin and it takes less than three hours, it’s on time, quiet and just a good experience. This trip used to take five hours but then the high speed rail track got compl…

Depending on what regions/lines you are exposed to one can definitely land on different sides of "it works well in general" vs. "it doesn't work well in general". Of course if you cite a Sprinter line like Nuremberg Berlin, which has the newest tracks and newest trains, you will have a far better experience than on lines that have the worst maintained tracks and trains. Sadly, the badly maintained ones seem to make u…

The worst parta are in NRW and in particular Cologne (honorary mention: Frankfurt). Unfortunately a lot of people live there and a lot of trains go through there. Don't understand why it's not getting fixed. Every time more money is dedicated to rail the government of the day decide upgrading the stations is what deserves focus.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#823

Post by tormeh »

zepearl wrote: post #810
sajithdilshan wrote: post #223

Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time and if you're unlucky most probably a delay of 4+ hours and missing your connecting train. The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany. I used to date a guy who works at infra department in DB and based on what he told me, I couldn't believe how inef…

> The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany Cannot be - there is no competition in Switzerland, but things run pretty smoothly -> in the case of Germany I'd rather say: "lack of oversight, controls, 'konsequent zu sein'" -> in the case of Germany's DB I think that nobody at all levels gives a *hit about its problems.

Things work well in Switzerland because the Swiss spend a lot more money on rail. That's unfortunately the secret.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#824

Post by rjzzleep »

linmob wrote: post #419
rjzzleep wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The German rails network went downhill when they decided to socialize the losses and privatize the profit. Failure is blamed on the grunt workers, which are absolutely not interested in taking responsibility as a result of this. The fact that there are rotting railways everywhere and the DB waits until it gets so bad for cities to step in and take over part of the cost is a wonderful example of this. The new ICE's sp…

Just an aside, as a railway-nerd: > The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations. While not the fastest ICE, the new ICE-L (assuming you refer to it) with a top speed of 230km/h, is not actually slower than what it is supposed to replace on most routes: InterCity trains, topping out at 200km/h. ICE-L, btw, was planned to be a IC train, but just like before with IC-T/ICE-T (same top speed of 230km/h…

Yeah, I didn't feel like looking up the exact details, so thank you for adding that. I didn't know that it was rebranded like that, I was just baffled at the outcome. Our mechanical engineering professor was responsible for the ICE breaking system a long time ago and those guys were all extremely good.

The other aspect is that there is a whole host of periphery issues, one of which is track maintenance, making it so for a lot of segments the ICE will not reach its top speed.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#825

Post by i_am_a_peasant »

SoftTalker wrote: post #543
i_am_a_peasant wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. don’t remind me. my fiancée and I live in different cities in Germany. the train ride is 5 hours. but it has been 15h in the past just because DB is DB. and the only thing we got for it was like a 10 eur discount voucher. 10 hours of my life partner’s time is worth a lot more than 10 eur. i have cussed them and their mothers countless times, DB is a garbage transportation company owned and ran by garbage people.

Sounds like Amtrak in the US, except here you get no compensation at all. And I've always been told how great the European railroads are.

in switzerland it’s amazing. france is way more efficient too because the low and high speed rails are largely physically separated. in germany everything shares everything and they rely on proper scheduling to make it work. which is never proper

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#826

Post by syncsynchalt »

zahlman wrote: post #537
rvba wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A gift card isn't a credit card, though... ?

> A gift card isn't a credit card, though... ?

I supposed it's a matter of semantics, is a prepaid credit card that is gifted not a "gift card"?

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#827

Post by ergocoder »

apexalpha wrote: post #365
foxrider wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After living in Italy for a few years - if you're doing worse than Italy with your train schedule it's time to reflect hard.

Germany and Italy should gang up together to make the trains run on time and... wait a minute.

Hey Japan wants to join. I know we are a bit far away but we can form some sort of a tri-something axis.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#828

Post by rayiner »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #816
rayiner wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not orthogonal. If you look at societies that industrialized early, their social development diverged hundreds of years before industrialization actually happened. When my dad was born in 1951, 90% of the population of Bangladesh lived in villages in extended kinship networks and multi-generational households. In such an environment, the informal rules of families dominate society. Bangladeshis have a very relax…

When it comes to formalized social systems vs. informal ones, I think deciding which is better comes down to what you're trying to optimize for. Some people prefer a more rigid, punctual and formal society, where you know precisely what to expect and what not to expect, and you can rightly get upset when the expectations aren't met. Others (myself included) prefer those societies where everyone knows everyone else an…

> Others (myself included) prefer those societies where everyone knows everyone else and everybody's related if you go back 10 generations. In my experience, which to be fair was as somewhat of an insider to the group, these kinds of societies are less stressful. They feel better to live in.

I agree. My mom comes from a family with thirteen siblings in Bangladesh, and moving to the U.S. was a very lonely experience. I felt the loss, but mostly got over it because I was young. My mom never did. My dad remembers a very happy childhood in his village, even though back then 20% of kids died before age 5.

But if you’re optimizing for economic development, informal societies are a hindrance. Informal societies have strong kinship networks,[1] and the intensity of kinship networks is correlated with many negative metrics: less functioning political institutions, less innovation, less specialization of labor, and lower economic growth: https://historicalpsychology.fas.harvard.edu/assets/files/20... ("We establish a tight empirical relationship between kinship intensity and economic development ... A one-SD-increase in the KII is associated with: ... a ~35% decrease in per capita luminosity and GDP worldwide ... [and] a ~10% decrease ..., within-country."); https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... ("We report a robust association between in-marriage practices and corruption both across countries and within countries.").

[1] I'm not aware of any informal societies that don't have strong kinship networks.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#829

Post by F3nd0 »

nephihaha wrote: post #488
tzs wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netherlands is in the EU. English is the most widely spoken language in the EU, even after the UK left, because it is by far the most common second language. Nearly half of the people in the EU can speak it. In Northern Europe the percentage is even higher. In the Netherlands there are almost as many people who speak it as there are Dutch speakers. Taking into account people from other EU countries who are there…

This is imperial mentality. Dutch is the language of the Netherlands not English and they have the right to use it. If we follow your line Dutch will go the same way as Welsh or Basque.

The ongoing non-adoption of Esperanto remains one of the world's many tragedies.
Post reply on HN