[HN Gopher] Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run ...
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Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-08-05 20:32 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/9kInY
| ktallett wrote:
| Is 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.
| cdrini wrote:
| No it's from August 5th. It includes some nice graphs,
| apparently the punctuality really plummeted around 2020.
| bot403 wrote:
| I wish the author would dive into that even a little bit. It
| looks like COVID killed the performance. Why? And what about
| post COVID?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Maybe train personnel out sick?
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| The way neoliberalism dealt with the public sector
| including rail service and infrastructure and then come up
| with "COVID killed Deutsche Bahn" is like saying that poor
| old sucker who was pushed down the staircase succumbed to
| his running nose. The problems run much deeper and were
| already visible in the 70s and 80s, but because it's only
| the public sector and rail traffic, not about more highways
| and more cars and then even more cars it never got fixed.
| Because who needs rails and trains, right.
| soneil wrote:
| Ironically, DB owned many lines in the UK up until recently
| (via their ownership of Arriva)
| TaboZ wrote:
| Jeff Bezos might be interested in that market.
| thinkindie wrote:
| I 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 the service
| quality).
|
| But for many software engineer this is not a big surprise:
| everyone knows that accumulating tech debt and neglecting
| maintence will eventually bite back sooner or later.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> regional and suburban train service has been great_
|
| In which city?
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I don't know what others think, but Munich seemed reliable to
| me.
|
| YMMV
| schroeding wrote:
| The problem in Munich is that everything must go through a
| single two-track part underneath the city center, which is
| at absolute capacity. If anything breaks down there (and it
| does, often, very often), even a small delay in a single
| train, all trains get delayed or skip stops.
|
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| I live in Berlin and while there are sometimes disruptions,
| it's hard to complain when the interval between trains is
| 4-5 minutes. Just get on the next one. Actually, if the
| train is 2-3 minutes late, it makes sense to wait another
| 3-2 minutes after that because it's guaranteed the late
| train will be crowded, and the next one will be
| undercrowded, because most people don't follow this
| principle.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://sbahn.berlin/liniennetz/
| thinkindie wrote:
| Berlin. Until few years ago it was great.
| mc32 wrote:
| There are so many Germans on YouTube mocking both the lack of
| time precisiin as well as the pricing schedule where to get
| reasonably priced tickets is you have to book them three months
| in advance
| namibj wrote:
| No the trick is to get one of the first x% of tickets sold to
| exactly that train. Well, mostly; being early also has some
| influence but the amount of unsold seats is far more
| important.
| layer8 wrote:
| > high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany
|
| Not to excuse the German performance, but part of the reason is
| that the Italian high-speed railway network is significantly
| simpler than the German one, also in terms of interconnections
| with neighbouring countries:
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Italy_TAV.png#/media...
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ICE_Network.png#/med...
| thinkindie wrote:
| Germany is much flatter than Italy - while the the line
| between Bologna and Florence, Florence and Rome, Rome and
| Naples, must go through a lot of mountains or steep hills.
| Also, Italy is a territory with a lot of seismic activity
| every year, and that's something you can't ignore when you
| send trains at 300 km/h.
| fabian2k wrote:
| The punctuality of the trains has been more of a joke for quite a
| bit, I don't think it's a big part of German identity.
|
| The part that is really terrible are the long-distance trains.
| Not that the regional trains are always punctual, their
| reliability varies a lot per route. But they're not as bad as the
| long-distance trains.
|
| One big recent improvement is the Germany ticket, for 58 EUR per
| month you can take any regional train or bus.
| firefax wrote:
| I got the impression they have a different cultural definition
| of "late" -- they'd get as mad about a 15 minute delay as folks
| in the states would get about an hour plus delay.
| MrJohz wrote:
| Maybe twenty years ago, but these days it's pretty common to
| have hour-long delays, or to have trains be cancelled at
| short notice, or rearranged such that you won't get a
| connection. When traveling East/West, I'd pretty much always
| recommend planning a buffer of at least an hour, more if your
| journey involves connections.
| patrickmcnamara wrote:
| 6 minutes is late for DB. But trains are often much later (or
| cancelled).
| jeffbee wrote:
| Germany, like America, is operated by and for the benefit of car
| companies. Their infrastructure difficulties share root causes
| with America's.
| general1726 wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| While I agree that fundamentally the issue is that Germans
| spend more on cars than any other European population (but
| nowhere near as much as Americans), there is also the detail
| that a large share of VWAG is owned by a German state.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| if you judge driving cars as 'sane', sure; I don't
| general1726 wrote:
| I am just opposed to "big auto" idea being responsible for
| lack of investments in train network.
| firefax wrote:
| No 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 with wanting things better... as an American it was a
| pretty good system.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| >they're coddled
|
| >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.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| American here, very tired of the response you note. It's self
| defeating and depressing. Feels like any expectations for a
| good experience, for things to work, to be treated like a
| person, is mocked as childish naivete.
| consumer451 wrote:
| That's a really dark choice for a headline. Dark, or maybe just
| infantile. Did the editor think they were being witty?
| opan wrote:
| Are you implying it's a WW2 reference? Did not occur to me
| before I saw your comment.
| consumer451 wrote:
| It was the first thing that came to my mind, even though that
| referenced Mussolini. But I think about WWII probably too
| often. Maybe the editor wasn't thinking that at all.
| krapp wrote:
| It would be an odd reference to make since it's usually
| applied to Mussolini, falsely (it's propaganda, he did not
| actually make the trains run on time[0].) I suspect in this
| case it just generally refers to some archetype of efficient
| modern German infrastructure and engineering.
|
| [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/stop-
| sayi...
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second
| movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this..._
| WalterBright wrote:
| When 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 a bit for the rest to join us". I put my foot down and said
| when the meeting is scheduled for 8, it starts at exactly 8.
|
| And everyone shows up on time! It's amazing how that works.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| c-linkage wrote:
| That is why I do not like the American traffic signaling
| system. When the light turns red cross traffic has a two to
| three second delay. My feeling is that if people knew the
| cross traffic would go immediately when the light turned red
| they would certainly stop. But right now they know there's a
| buffer so they just run the red light.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Around here the power goes out to the lights now and then.
| Interestingly, the traffic flows _smoother_ and _faster_
| without the lights! Even the arterials! It 's amazing!
| Drivers simply politely cooperate with each other.
|
| (The same thing happens when a traffic cop handles the
| intersection.)
|
| I'm always assured that the city traffic light engineers
| know what they're doing and design the lights for maximum
| flow. They do no such thing. They are either incompetent or
| deliberately set things up to impede the flow of traffic.
|
| Most of the lights now have cameras on them. Would it be so
| hard to connect them up to AI with the goal of "maximize
| throughput"? Imagine how much gas would be saved. It would
| be tremendous!
| andrewshadura wrote:
| The Netherlands has it.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| This was the biggest culture shock for me coming from military
| aviation to software. In the former, a brief starts exactly on
| time, down to the second. "5-4-3-2-1-hack. Time is 0800."
|
| I think I'd get tarred and feathered if I did that at my
| company.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I think I'd get tarred and feathered if I did that at my
| company.
|
| The problem with it is the boss. Too many bosses show their
| dominance by how much they can force underlings to wait for
| them. The boss is quite capable of starting the meetings on
| time, and the rest will work out.
|
| I do the same thing with chronically late people. I simply
| don't wait for them. The problem resolves itself.
| mzhaase wrote:
| Fun fact, all train clocks in Germany synchronize ever minute.
| That's why the second hand freezes every minute: its actually
| set to be a bit too fast, and then gets held at the top until
| the radio signal comes to let it continue.
|
| https://youtu.be/Er5VIgJqvtg
| junto wrote:
| Last year 38C3: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wann-klappt-der-
| anschluss-wann-n...
| bamboozled wrote:
| When have they ran on time sorry ?
|
| The _last_ time I caught a train in Germany I remember having to
| wait on a freezing platform for ~ 3 hours until they gave up on
| the train and got us a coach and drove us to Hamburg...that was ~
| 9 years ago.
|
| I don't remember having the same issue in Netherlands though.
|
| On the other hand I've been in Japan for a long time, I honestly
| don't remember a single train being late in all that time.
| nudgeOrnurture wrote:
| dude, Germany's identy crisis is that Germans still don't get the
| potential they have. They are still, after decades of American (
| I love America but I think they had it waaaaaay too easy in the
| past decades ) easy mode, not realizing they are playing the game
| of others.
|
| Two bad examples: there's a PhD level genius just a few villages
| away and he still didn't even try to get the funding to build a
| proper mechatronics Hogwarts in our area ( it's 2025 ... ) and a
| nuclear Physics PhD, who's now a banker ( crying laughing joker
| emoji, a fucking banker, like one of those modern Kazakhs, crying
| laughing Joker emoji ) just a little further away .... who's
| daddy is also a Physics PhD and has been in IT for 30 years or so
| ... Iean, sure, money, but is that all "agency" or just the
| result of priming/nudging towards the lower levels?
|
| Good little Germans, just do as I do, keep your lips ( and minds
| ) sealed .... walk away
|
| it's 4 to 8 hours of work per day anyway and you got the brains
| for it, ma dudes and dudettes, what the fuuuuuuuck
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| Who'd have thought a nation would have an identity crisis after
| importing millions of people from every other non-European
| country on the planet? How could anyone have ever possibly
| foreseen this??
| nicbou wrote:
| These problems predate the immigration waves
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