[HN Gopher] Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
___________________________________________________________________
Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
Author : JeremyTheo
Score : 868 points
Date : 2025-12-29 12:24 UTC (10 hours ago)
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| nephihaha wrote:
| DB is a lot better run than British trains... My God. Twenty
| minutes late is normal in the UK.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| 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.
| f6v wrote:
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I've been on UK trains that were an hour late, others that
| changed platform at least three times, headed to the wrong
| destination etc.
|
| Many are cancelled without a decent reason being given. I
| rarely take British trains now they are so expensive and
| unreliable. Only long distance maybe because buses are
| unpleasant.
| MrOrelliOReilly wrote:
| The author makes effectively the same comment that twenty
| minutes late is normal for Germany (below). I don't have any
| statistics, but anecdotally I've had worse experiences with DB
| than in the UK. DB does not just run late, but has a bad habit
| of teleporting you to random German towns, from which you must
| quickly route find to your original destination (as is the
| exact story of the post).
|
| > It is twenty minutes late. I consider this early.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The TL;DR is: regional trains are usually on time, long-
| distance trains usually are not. If you need to travel
| between cities, plan with an hour buffer time. Basically,
| "show some adaptability".
|
| The one good thing about frequent long-distance delays is
| that you might be lucky and catch an earlier delayed train
| and actually arrive a bit earlier than planned ;)
|
| (also JFC, does the author like to whine about nothing - I'm
| travelling frequently with DB for about 25 years now, and
| while shit happens from time time, most of it is merely a
| slight inconvenience).
| barrkel wrote:
| Plan with a ~40% of travel time buffer if you ought be
| there, and travel the day before if you must be there.
|
| I travel from Basel to Hannover and back every two weeks on
| DB. Trains south are almost always late, trains north
| usually late. Frequently the train is already late in
| Hannover having come from Hamburg. The worst was when I was
| kicked out in Frankfurt and had to stay in a hotel. The
| delays were so bad there were no more trains left that
| could connect me to the last train out of Basel.
|
| Things have been getting better for the past couple of
| months I think though.
| gadders wrote:
| That happens very infrequently on my commuter service in the
| UK. I'd say not more than once every couple of months, normally
| due to someone committing suicide in front of a train.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I stopped travelling by train because of it. I live near a
| station and can see services have become far more infrequent,
| so there is that too.
| ernst_klim wrote:
| > Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.
|
| My biggest gripe with DB is not that it's late, but that it
| quite often cancels the trains. If you decided to go by
| regional trains with 1-2 hops instead of direct (bc you can go
| much cheaper with Deutschlandticket), there's a high chance
| that at least one of your trains get cancelled and things will
| not go according the plan.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Not my experience. I regularly travel by train and a 20 minute
| delay is unusual. Almost every train is on time in my
| experience.
|
| Recently while driving an hour journey turned into a three hour
| journey, and not because my car broke down. I've never
| experienced any delay anywhere near that significant on British
| trains.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| At some point your Regio Express turned into an Intercity. Free
| upgrade!
| huhkerrf wrote:
| DB 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.
| rjh29 wrote:
| UK has airline-style pricing that goes up extortionately as
| seats run out, making it prohibitively expensive to use. It's
| also frequently late and/or trains randomly cancelled, although
| you can plan around it, you end up 1hr+ late on most long
| journeys.
|
| On the plus side: local journeys are great. Delay Repay means
| you get up to 100% of your ticket back if you're delayed. If
| you cannot make the last train due to delays, they're obligated
| to get your home by bus or even by taxi. Train stock is (in my
| area at least) new and very comfortable. Views are good!
| hexbin010 wrote:
| When comparing to the UK you have to also factor in how
| absurdly expensive it is. Eg a monthly ticket to the nearest
| city ~25km away is 292 EUR (nowhere near London. A city with
| not very high wages either). And the train is just 2.5
| carriages and full every day.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| A typical season ticket into London is under 20p a mile.
| Outside of London it's far more expensive (35p a mile is
| common), because the railway has not had the investment
| London has over decades. Platform lengthening (of possible)
| is not cheap, requires buying new land in crowded towns and
| cities. Modern train stock isn't cheap either
|
| 25km each way is 680 miles a month.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Most people will commute ~19 days a month, given vacations
| and sickness.
|
| From my example, that's ~794 miles (corrected) a month,
| PS255, PS0.32/mile. Not as expensive as some other routes
| but still can be as as high as 12% of your take-home wage
| given the low salaries in that city.
|
| Moving onto London... /under/ 20p a mile? Which route is
| that??
|
| Just some random examples I picked:
|
| Alton to Waterloo: PS529, 1786 miles, PS0.29/mile.
|
| Guildford to Waterloo: PS453/mo - 1140 miles a month,
| PS0.39/mile.
|
| Gravesend to London Bridge: PS436/mo, 836 miles a month,
| PS0.52/mile.
|
| Brentwood to Liverpool St: PS336/mo, 706 miles a month,
| PS0.47/mile.
|
| St Albans to Thameslink: PS440/mo, 756 miles a month,
| PS0.58/mile.
|
| (Mileages from https://www.scotrail.co.uk/carbon-calculator
| )
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| Most people do 5 days a week, 46 weeks a year - with 6
| weeks holidays.
|
| Alton to Waterloo is PS5520 a year, 50 miles each way or
| 23,000 miles a year, 24p per mile.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Cool so one single example that doesn't support your
| claim and zero interest in discussing it on a wider
| basis.
| rwmj wrote:
| UK trains are terrible. I don't have direct experience to know
| if they are worse than DB trains, except for DB's dire
| performance being a running joke amongst my German colleagues
| at work.
|
| I bet that UK trains "win" by being far more expensive than
| German trains, along with absurdly complex pricing. If you
| choose the wrong ticket you could also "win" a criminal
| conviction!
|
| Don't worry though! We're currently building the most expensive
| bit of high speed rail in Europe, that won't even go into the
| centre of our capital city [edit: apparently it will now, see
| reply], or further north than the Midlands. Passengers who have
| the audacity to want to travel further north will have to
| transit over to the old tracks, creating even further capacity
| problems.
|
| All of this is entirely avoidable, if the government just took
| a few common sense measures, but sadly it doesn't seem to be
| anyone's priority.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| > We're currently building the most expensive bit of high
| speed rail in Europe
|
| Largest most expensive jobs programme in Europe perhaps more
| accurately... lots of pigs' snouts in the trough.
| turbonaut wrote:
| UK and DE appear to use different punctuality metrics with a
| train being late after 3 minutes in the UK but 6 in DE.
|
| Latest punctuality figures for UK are 84.8% and DE 88.1%.
| Making an assumption on distribution I'd guess UK comes out
| slightly better.
|
| Of note, DE long distance stats are pretty bad!
|
| UK: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/ebmnxxih/performance-
| sta... DE: https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/en/interim-
| group-manageme...
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| I've taken four international DB trains in the last 2
| years, into Germany from Belgium and Denmark, and out to
| Switzerland and Austria.
|
| In all 4 cases the train was delayed in Germany - the
| longest by 4 hours, one by a mere 30 minutes.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| How does the DE figure take canceled trains into account?
| a2fz wrote:
| > that won't even go into the centre of our capital city
|
| Is Euston not the centre? Where all the other trains from the
| north-west come into, and literally on the same road as Kings
| Cross St Pancras? Plus Old Oak Common is going to be an
| interchange with the Elizabeth Line.
|
| People also miss the fact that a big reason why HS2 is being
| built is to take load off of the West Coast Main Line, which
| is running at full capacity at the moment. There's no room to
| run additional services. Even though some unfortunate
| compromises have been made, this will still massively benefit
| parts of the North because they'll be able to get more
| frequent services once the line is no longer clogged up by
| trains from London.
| rwmj wrote:
| Oh I have we uncancelled the Euston connection now. Good
| news finally. Hopefully we'll build beyond Birmingham too,
| because otherwise passengers travelling north of Birmingham
| will add extra stress on the overloaded WCML.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| UK slam door trains where the door appeared locked but then
| came unlatched when another train passed and sucked people
| out to the their deaths before the advent of the safety lock.
| gadders wrote:
| I think it depends on where you are going. My local commuter
| link into London is OK and reliable, if expensive.
|
| Long range trains from, say, London to Manchester are often
| overcrowded and ridiculously priced.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| I take those long distance trains and it amazes me the choice
| and how low the cost is. You can choose an empty high speed
| service in peak time with a 20 minute frequency for a high
| cost (comparable to flying), you can book ahead for a lower
| price - especially in non peak services, or you can choose a
| flexible lower speed (comparable with service in the BR days,
| 3.5 hours) for far cheaper than it ever was.
|
| Season ticket prices are under 20p/mile into London
|
| Nationalisation will likely break this and increase costs for
| all but the richest. For the last decade the public have been
| clamouring for "simplification" because they couldn't
| understand the restriction codes. Now it's being rolled out
| they are of course seeing price rises and complaining "not
| like that!"
| hexbin010 wrote:
| > Season ticket prices are under 20p/mile into London
|
| False, as per my other comment
|
| I agree with your other points though
| em500 wrote:
| Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized.
| They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state
| owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're
| both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main
| determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State
| ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where
| even the sign of the relationship is unclear.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| You're actually misrepresenting it with that imo.
|
| DB is state owned, yes ... but it's run like a private
| company. It's basically the classic "privatize profits,
| socialize losses" - done as a yearly routine.
|
| Not even remotely exaggerating, it's incredibly corrupt.
| snowpid wrote:
| When the owner of DB is owned by the German federal
| government, they all rule the whole company, who gets the
| profit? The German federal government? (It's a sign of
| stupidity to claim DB is privat. It is not. It is not.)
| ffsm8 wrote:
| That's why I said it's incredibly corrupt. It's an
| Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so
| profits would remain in the ownership of the company and
| their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay
| themselves whatever bonuses they want . (Or pay out to
| their shareholders? Lol, nope).
|
| losses get pushed to be picked up by the state/taxes.
|
| That's why it's privatize profits, socialize losses.
|
| But there has just been a leadership change, maybe things
| will improve..
| pell wrote:
| DB's quality decline started when this move to
| privatization happened. They didn't put money into
| maintenance, closed lot of tracks and ignored all warnings
| by experts who predicted this exact scenario more than a
| decade ago. Most of the time now DB issues seem to be
| connected to a lack of available tracks. A super fast ICE
| has to wait for some slow train to clear the path. There's
| an issue on one track and thus the entire traffic is backed
| up till that's resolved.
|
| I do think they're working on improving these conditions.
| But I wish they did more to communicate that. Where is the
| big marketing campaign explaining how they got there,
| apologizing, and explaining how they will do better?
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Welcome to public-private "partnerships", featuring
| socialism for corporations with extractive profiteering of
| users.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Not completely. Transport for Wales is state owned, or at
| least Welsh government, and control most of the local trains
| in Wales and out to some bits of England. Some of the UK
| infrastructure is state owned or funded. The state provides
| the licences as well, so they are not off the hook in that
| sense.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| > UK rail is privatized
|
| 50% of operators are now state owned
|
| Not that it's a guarantee for things to get better...
| jonp888 wrote:
| The determinant is the amount of money invested in
| infrastructure.
|
| No matter whether the train operators and the network
| operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about
| major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the
| government. The network operator just deals with the
| maintenance.
|
| Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly
| seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your
| network runs at 150% capacity every day.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| People who claim the U.K. is worse have no idea what DB is like
| and just think that "nationalisation" makes trains half the
| price and twice as reliable.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I've used trains in the UK and Germany. The German trains are
| cleaner and more spacious (two floors in some cases).
| graemep wrote:
| My experience of the trains themselves has been fine in the UK.
|
| Ticket prices vary a lot and are unpredictable. I have not a
| last minute ticket from London to the midlands for just over
| PS20, but they can be a lot more (several times as much?) for
| the same journey even booking ahead.
|
| I definitely prefer the train to driving if I am going long
| distance by myself, but if its multiple people the car becomes
| a lot cheaper.
|
| Local services in cities are pretty good. I never owned a car
| in London, nor in Manchester until I had a child.
| boxed wrote:
| It's so weird. That doesn't seem to be the lesson to be learned
| from Nazi Germany. The train going on time was not the part to
| fix.
| a2fz wrote:
| Passenger rights are very good in the UK. It's easy to claim
| Delay Repay, where you get 25% refund after a 15 minute delay,
| 50% refund after 30 mins and 100% refund after 60 mins. Other
| train operators are obliged to help you get where you need to
| go if the company you intended to travel with has cancelled
| your trains, or you've missed a connection due to a previous
| train you were on being delayed.
|
| I've had the last train out of central London for the night
| cancelled at about 1am and you can just message the train
| company on social media and they'll pay PS100+ to get you a
| taxi all the way to somewhere like Cambridge.
|
| Also, not sure how it is in other countries, but in the UK,
| everything is entirely open data. You can go to a site like
| https://map.signalbox.io/ to see a live map of every train in
| the UK, and sites like Realtime Trains let you get all the
| details about every train (eg.
| https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:KGX)
| nephihaha wrote:
| Yes, you'll get a refund. But that isn't much use to you if
| you need to be in a certain place at a certain time.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Some operators begin at 30 minutes
|
| And some operators love to ignore their obligations
|
| Our protections are good on paper but in reality quite poor.
| London is of course better than the rest of the country
| though.
|
| I don't consider having to message a faceless social media
| team on "X" to get a taxi refunded good customer service at
| all. And they are definitely pushing for you to pay first and
| then get a refund, which is not in the spirit of the
| contract. My mother doesn't have "X" and wouldn't know where
| to start
| morsch wrote:
| If you've _never_ been on a train that stops at the right
| station, maybe the problem isn 't with DB.
| trinix912 wrote:
| > DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe
|
| Oh c'mon have you tried trains in Slovenia? The ICE from
| Budapest with a constant 230+ min delay, the regional one from
| Ljubljana to Celje where half the track is seemingly under
| perpetual construction (so transfer to a bus!), passenger
| trains delayed all the time waiting for freight trains, trains
| randomly going 20kph on some segments, and lately even vandals
| sabotaging the tracks. And don't worry, they announce all of
| that exclusively in Slovene with no extra answers.
|
| I've been on DB and it wasn't that bad. It was expensive but at
| least the train didn't max out at 80kph.
| hobofan wrote:
| > 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'm on the other side of this. I end up chaperoning lost
| tourists on my DB disaster trips with a regularity that I
| should be getting a paycheck from DB.
| f6v wrote:
| There'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.
| messe wrote:
| > This includes Denmark as well
|
| I regularly travel on DSB (2.5hr journeys, 4 times a month
| minimum), and only very rarely encounter issues. Staff have
| always been easy to deal with and on the rare occasion I've had
| to be refunded (the carriage with my reserved seat didn't show
| up) I've received it within days.
|
| Avoid trains run by GoCollective though.
| askariwa wrote:
| Nope, leave Italy off the well-functioning rail. I am a
| commuter, i use the train here since 2009 and it's terrible.
| We're going through the same experiences described in the post,
| but often even much worse. On December 1st, my train took 6
| hours to travel 100km instead of 1 hour so we too felt like the
| post author.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| And 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.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Deutsche 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I'm pro car, I would much prefer to relax on a train, but the
| economics just don't work in the UK. I can't think of anywhere
| I want to go where taking the train is cheaper than driving
| orsorna wrote:
| After paying for fuel, insurance, property taxes and
| maintenance (exclude the possibility of a car note in this
| scenario), is it still cheaper than taking the train?
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Yes. Because the trains don't go from my house, and don't
| go everywhere I need to go, so I need a car anyway.
| a2fz wrote:
| Customer service on British trains is excellent. It only takes
| a few minutes to claim Delay Repay if you're delayed more than
| 15 minutes, and you can even set it up to do it automatically
| for you. If your last train back home for the night is
| cancelled at 1am, you can message the company on social media
| and they'll pay PS100+ to sort you out with a taxi for a
| distance like London to Cambridge.
|
| I consistently find railway workers to be some of the most
| helpful and approachable people I have to interact with, which
| is remarkable given the sort of people they have to put up
| with. I think the sort of person you'll be speaking to
| certainly depends on the part of the country you're in though -
| in Scotland and Wales, I've seen people who've been let off for
| having a ticket that expired several days prior, and staff are
| happy to have a friendly chat if the train isn't too busy.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| I've taken trains regularly in England for 25 years. I
| disagree.
|
| What's your experience?
|
| And it's taken a massive turn for the worse since 2020
|
| England is definitely worse than Scotland and Wales I grant
| you that. And fwiw, in Scotland, they have far less powers to
| prosecute compared to England, which is why they seem like
| they are more lenient
|
| As I responded in another thread, not all operators are 15
| minutes. Not that 25/50% often isn't really that much
| compensation...
|
| And that taxi is far from gaurenteed.
|
| I get the sense you had one or two good experiences and
| extrapolated?
| 101008 wrote:
| I 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.
| flexagoon wrote:
| I recently moved to the Netherlands to study, and I experience
| that a lot. Despite almost all official information everywhere
| being written in both Dutch and English, in-train announcements
| are only done in Dutch. I have to constantly listen to the
| announcements and try to understand based off their vibe if
| they sound like something critical or not.
| derfniw wrote:
| Yep, only semi-consistent exception is that Amsterdam Central
| & Schiphol are usually also announced in english. Including
| delays related to these stations.
|
| But, for example, Rotterdam or Utrecht are already a lot less
| likely to be announced in english.
| mcv wrote:
| I was once in a train that announced Schiphol in 5
| languages. That's how you announce an international
| airport.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Dutch announcements in the Netherlands. Fancy that. Almost
| like it's the national language or something.
| tzs wrote:
| 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 on business plus tourists there is a good chance that
| if only one language was to be used for train announcements
| more people on the train would understand if it was in
| English then if it was in Dutch.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Thanksfully, dutch is reasonnably easy to understand (not
| to speak) if you know english and the actual context.
|
| Or maybe that is just me having grown to understand dutch
| and flemish as a cyclocross rider and spectator.
| trvz wrote:
| Ideally announcements should be bilingual, but if there's
| only one language, it's better to inconvenience any
| number of foreigners than even a single native who
| doesn't speak English.
| nephihaha wrote:
| 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.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| And the dutch aren't very well known for their imperial
| mentality?
| integralid wrote:
| Since you moved to Netherlands is understandable they speak
| Dutch. You should consider learning it off you want to get by
| in the society.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| > Why they don't help at all?
|
| If it's anything like the UK, the staff have incredibly secure
| jobs and recently secured some good changes to their working
| conditions/pay. It's probably not in their contract to announce
| in other languages, so they do exactly what their contract says
| graemep wrote:
| I have found station and train staff in the UK to be very
| friendly and helpful.
|
| They do have very good pay (drivers can earn as much as some
| airline pilots) and a very good pension scheme on top of
| that.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| drivers have amazingly good pay compared to say bus
| drivers, but station staff and on board staff don't.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I wish I could say the same. UK trains are so unreliable
| and expensive I barely ever use them.
| pjerem wrote:
| Idk how it is in Germany but my wife is currently trying to
| became a train driver in France and there are far more
| requirements that what you would imagine.
|
| Even if the job is actually opened to basically everyone (and
| that's pretty nice), you have to be in perfect physical and
| psychological shape with pretty strict tests, you have to be
| intellectually apt enough to follow the training which is
| pretty intense. You have to accept work conditions such as
| not knowing your work hours until the day before. You have to
| accept sleeping who knows where at least 2 times a week. You
| have to accept having only one weekend off per month.
|
| So what happens is that when you have that much filters and
| you still want to hire train drivers, you can't afford to
| expect your drivers to know another language on top of all of
| the rest.
| flr03 wrote:
| Nothing is perfect but living in the UK after living in
| France, I have now a lot more love for SNCF than I used
| too.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Why is that? Better service?
| pjerem wrote:
| Actually I'm a taking the train everyday to go to work
| and I have barely any complaint with the SNCF.
|
| Most of the time they do what they can to deal with
| issues.
|
| I don't feel like there are too much issues it's just
| they are extremely bad at communicating issues when they
| happen.
|
| Sometimes the train is not there when it should but on
| the screen it just disappears as if it passed. Most of
| the time it's just 2-5 minutes late but you can't know.
| Maybe it's just late. Maybe the traffic is stopped. Who
| knows.
|
| I just dont understand how they don't have people whose
| job is just writing messages for the information screens.
|
| What is worse is that in my region, they have a pretty
| decent community managers for live information but they
| only post information in twitter because why not. So they
| already have the people doing this work but those people
| are saying different things than what the screen shows.
| Just let them write things on the screens :D
| junon wrote:
| German trains do typically announce in English. If they don't,
| that's the exception. Just ask around. Most people here speak
| English and will be able to repeat what was said, especially if
| they're under 40 or so.
| b3orn wrote:
| Announcements in English aren't done for every station.
| Usually only for central stations and airports.
| reddalo wrote:
| > Most people here speak English
|
| Germany is the country where I found the highest number of
| people not being able to speak English, even people working
| in accomodation!
|
| French people probably know English but they refuse to speak
| it; Italians don't know English that well, but they try their
| best using rolling R's and gestures.
|
| (I'm a bit ironic)
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| English people can speak Italian though, just add a vowel-a
| on-a every-a word-a
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| I've learned they very quickly switch to English if you
| speak to them in German :)
| microtonal wrote:
| _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 Netherlands 93.9%
|
| 3. Belgium 88.6%
|
| 4. Austria 82.2%
|
| 5. France 79.7%
|
| 6. Italy 62.0%
|
| 7. Germany 58.5%
|
| (Not sure why these are the only countries in the list.)
| foxrider wrote:
| 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.
| apexalpha wrote:
| Germany and Italy should gang up together to make the
| trains run on time and... wait a minute.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Talk about a very appropriate domain name lol
| jansan wrote:
| In Germany in 2025 it got worse with only 55% of trains being
| on time (defined very generously as being less than 6 minutes
| late).
| mcv wrote:
| I find this figure absolutely baffling. How can you run a
| train system with half of all trains being late?
| apexalpha wrote:
| Someone has never been outside the Western world, lol.
|
| In many countries the train comes when it comes and goes
| when it can, regardless of any fictional like schedules.
| mcv wrote:
| I have. Mali didn't have trains at all. Our Indonesian
| train was on time.
|
| It's not like countries outside Europe can't make trains
| run on time. Japan's are even more punctual than
| Switzerland's.
| alexfoo wrote:
| (Hence the occasionally heard witty announcement in the
| UK...)
|
| "Please mind the gap between the timetable and reality."
| creichenbach wrote:
| 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.
| mcv wrote:
| I disagree. Swiss trains are a delight. They even have
| trains going up mountains (although some of those cost
| extra). Public transit in Switzerland was extremely
| reliable when I was there, and also according to official
| statistics.
| gregorygoc wrote:
| Complaining about Swiss trains is beyond me.
| nperson wrote:
| The less complex your train network, the easier it is to
| ensure trains are on time. France, Italy and Germany possibly
| have larger networks than Switzerland.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Switzerland has all public transport synchronized across
| the country. In any of the countries you mentioned they
| don't even gave synchronized public transport at city
| level.
| krior wrote:
| The swiss have a more challenging geography and weather
| than Germany.
|
| They also spend far more per capita on their train system.
|
| All that and afaik they still manage to connect all
| important places.
| mcv wrote:
| Then split your network into segments you can handle.
| Switzerland receives lots of international trains. Not only
| that; it has a lot of rail companies, serves even tiny
| villages, and has the highest use per capita in Europe.
| Size of the network is a lame excuse. German trains used to
| be fine. Now they're a disaster.
| izacus wrote:
| No, Swiss SBB is just generally very competent and has
| insane amount of traffic in comparison to any European
| rail.
| microtonal wrote:
| Except that The Netherlands has the busiest rail network in
| Europe [1] and still manages to be second in that list.
|
| [1] https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/acm-rail-monitor-
| netherla...
| flr03 wrote:
| That does not make Germany look any better but I find the
| "percentage on time" not very useful compared to the "years
| of delay" metric. And arguable a average/median delay per
| train would be better? Also some delay volatility data would
| be interesting.
|
| If you look at France for example, 80% of trains are not
| punctual but the "total delays" is actually on the low range,
| France being on the large side with lots of lines, I would
| say that it shows that the delays (20% of the time) are
| actual shorts.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| Canada: 30% on-time
|
| https://media.viarail.ca/en/press-
| releases/2025/q1-2025-time...
| ragall wrote:
| I gather that this is an average of all trains. In Italy, the
| high velocity train are quite punctual, but the slow regional
| trains drag the average down.
| nikeee wrote:
| Keep in mind that a train in Germany counts as one-time if it
| is less than 6 minutes late. In Switzerland, it's 3 minutes.
|
| Also in Germany, a train that did not even arrive does not
| count as too late.
|
| There is also a concept of the "Pofalla-Wende", which is when
| a train is so late that it just does a 180 and drives back,
| to mitigate that the delay doesn't carry over to the train's
| next route. Of course, that means that it skips the stations
| at the end of the route.
| mosura wrote:
| German trains, as recently as the 90s, were phenomenal, and
| integrated superbly with the Swiss and others. It is in the
| 21st century that Germany has gone off the rails.
| mnmalst wrote:
| "Off the rails" hehe
| nephihaha wrote:
| German trains were great twenty years ago. I wouldn't be
| surprised if things went haywire after lockdown. Many things
| did. It gave people a licence not to work and introduced a
| sloppiness into everything.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| I'm fairly certain it was before that, as someone living in
| The Netherlands we'd always get warned to make sure there
| was at least 30-60 minute transit time between each stop in
| Germany when travelling international, as the expectation
| was that the train would be (extremely) late.
|
| This was already the case around 2015.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| Trains are still great. Especially the newer generation
| ICEs are beautiful trains and very comfortable.
|
| Just don't count on them that they bring you to your
| destination in a timely manner.
| matrss wrote:
| In other words: it's going downhill ever since the DB was
| privatized.
| Zufriedenheit wrote:
| DB is not privatized. It is 100% owned by the state.
| matrss wrote:
| DB has been reorganized as an AG in the 90s, i.e. a
| corporation under private law. They are forced to (at
| least try to) make a profit for their shareholders, which
| is a common trait of private organizations. They
| consistently do so via short-sighted (mis-)management,
| another common trait with many private organizations.
| This privatized corporation is indeed fully owned by the
| state as its only shareholder, but unfortunately that
| doesn't manifest in the DB being run as the critical
| infrastructure that it is. I suspect that the
| indirections in power over the corporation that the
| privatized structure imposes is a key reason for why it
| became such a disaster.
| smcl wrote:
| I wonder how many times a low-effort "truthy" sounding
| comment like that is written _without_ someone like you
| to correct them and to clarify. There 's also comments
| here suggesting UK's privatisation fixed BR that I do not
| have the energy to correct anymore, so they just sit
| there being wrong for all to see
| arcfour wrote:
| Is their comment true because you want it to be, or is it
| actually factually inaccurate and biased as many other
| people are saying?
| thesimon wrote:
| > They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for
| their shareholders [...]
|
| Not true. Shareholder primacy is not as huge as in
| Delaware.
|
| And in the end it's the government that owns all shares
| and thus can decide how much profit the company should
| make.
| matrss wrote:
| Just because it is even more true elsewhere does not mean
| it is untrue here.
| apexalpha wrote:
| > They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for
| their shareholders,
|
| This is not true at all.
|
| The shareholders set the targets and since the
| shareholder is the government they can set any target
| they want: profitability, more trains, cheaper tickets
| etc..
|
| If the shareholder wants to inject 10% every year in
| stead of taking a profit they are absolutely free to do
| so.
| matrss wrote:
| The DB AG has been specifically founded to be "market-
| oriented" and profit-making, so yes, it is true.
|
| I am sure the state could try to do _something_ about it,
| but I am also sure that a very strong car lobby here in
| Germany is working against that. BTW, the road network,
| which I would consider to conceptually be the same kind
| of infrastructure as the rail network, is to my
| understanding mostly built and maintained by state
| organizations, so it is possible to do it that way.
|
| I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this
| private company with tax payer money so they can continue
| to offer mediocre service" to voters, compared to "let's
| use tax payer money to build and maintain one-of-a-kind
| critical infrastructure from which everyone (with a car,
| which due to the less-than-great alternatives is a lot of
| people) can profit".
|
| Again, having it organized as a private company adds
| indirection, diffuses power and responsibility, and adds
| a certain more or less implicit expectation of what
| private companies are supposed to do. That's my main
| issue with it. Private companies aren't supposed to run
| critical infrastructure as a monopoly for profit. It's
| the states job to provide and maintain critical
| infrastructure in the interest of all.
| apexalpha wrote:
| >The DB AG has been specifically founded to be "market-
| oriented" and profit-making, so yes, it is true.
|
| Again, if the shareholders decide this is the reason:
| yes.
|
| But shareholders can just as easily set other targets or
| incentives.
|
| >I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize
| this private company with tax payer money so they can
| continue to offer mediocre service" to voters,
|
| The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company.
| It is a public company.
| matrss wrote:
| > The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company.
| It is a public company.
|
| It is a private company, as in it is a legal entity under
| private law. This is in contrast to a "offentlich-
| rechtliches Unternehmen" (I don't know if this even has a
| proper translation or equivalent in other jurisdictions).
| There is more than two options here, it can be both
| privatized and public according to your definition.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| Do you know that the government has set those targets?
| ernst_klim wrote:
| That's ridiculous. DB is not even trying to become
| profitable, not is there any evidence that it's sole
| shareholder, aka the government, sets it as a target.
| matrss wrote:
| Well apparently they have been somewhat profitable from
| 2016 to 2019, and they have been paying a dividend to the
| state more often than not. I don't think their goal is
| actively loosing money?
| YorickPeterse wrote:
| The Netherlands has a very similar problem: the train system
| was privatized in the late 90s/early 2000s and has been going
| downhill since the 2010s or so. While it's still better than
| Deutsche Bahn, it's just so much worse compared to how it
| used to be.
| mcv wrote:
| Dutch trains aren't as perfect as the Swiss, but still far,
| far, better than German trains. I think it was about 20
| years ago when NS was ridiculed because of nonsense delays
| caused by leaves on the track (who would possibly expect
| that in the autumn?). I think they're better now. And
| intercity trains leaving every 10 minutes (between
| Amsterdam and Utrecht) helps a lot.
| apexalpha wrote:
| The Dutch train system is _not_ privatised, the government
| owns 100% of both the tracks and the main carrier: the NS.
| thesimon wrote:
| Same in Germany and basically all of the EU.
| tonfa wrote:
| > Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time,
| and the best train system, etc
|
| It's true of Switzerland and probably Austria. Germany is
| famous for having infrastructure issues that will take some
| time to resolve.
|
| Eg see https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped for some stats
| creichenbach wrote:
| I'm a heavy public transport user in Switzerland, and even
| though it's almost a meme how reliable the trains are,
| reality is different. Yes, they operate in a way that make
| the stats look good (x% on time), but they take tradeoff to
| get there. E.g. they won't await connections if another train
| is a few minutes late. So you might have to wait for 30
| minutes for the next one, or even longer if you're unlucky.
| And there's the occasional big incident, where you get stuck
| for several hours. I missed flights that way, even though
| planning in 3 hours of buffer. There is zero compensation in
| such cases as long as they bring you to your destination on
| the same day. Plus, several trains are regularly way too
| crowded.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| They changed the policy maybe 5-years ago about a train
| waiting for a late train to come in because they found that
| it added additional delays to the entire system. I prefer
| the new way.
| creichenbach wrote:
| > it added additional delays to the entire system
|
| Yes, obviously. And that hurts statistics. That's like
| killing sick cattle to be able to say that 100% of yours
| are healthy.
| ragall wrote:
| No, it means they contain the damage and run the system
| in a healthy manner.
| gregorygoc wrote:
| Exactly, seriously complaining about the fact that the
| system is designed to run on time rather than trickle
| down delays is beyond me.
| tonfa wrote:
| In my experience, they do sometimes still wait (at least
| that was the case for a few trips with delays last summer).
|
| (And tbf I'm ok waiting 30min, with Taktfahrplan how much
| you wait is usually max 1h and often much shorter, my
| experience in other countries is often hours of delays in
| case of trouble)
| timthorn wrote:
| I did learn German at school but it didn't help much when
| trying to get to Munich airport last year. I could understand
| what was going on with the cancelled trains at the station I
| boarded at, but the train I did catch end up tipping us all out
| after a few stops.
|
| I could make out a bit of what the driver said, but not enough
| to be sure of the detail, which is what really mattered. I
| expected to miss my flight, but just made it in the end.
| hiq wrote:
| > Germany trains (and Switzerland trains)
|
| Other commenters have already set the record straight, pointing
| out that these are clearly not in the same cluster.
|
| See also https://www.thelocal.de/20250430/switzerland-suspends-
| deutsc...
|
| Pay-walled, but the title says it all: "Switzerland suspends
| Deutsche Bahn trains due to chronic delays". DB is so
| unreliable that it impacts the networks of neighboring
| countries.
| em500 wrote:
| I'd reverse the question ask why Germany (or any other country
| where English is not an official language, and does not majorly
| rely on tourism for income) would provide any public
| information in English? Commercial services can choose to do so
| a matter of self interest, but why would state financed
| services?
| stevage wrote:
| You're really wondering why a state-funded service would
| consider the needs of tourists?
| em500 wrote:
| Yes. AFAICT, catering to the needs of tourists ranks very
| low among German voter priorities.
| Avamander wrote:
| But catering the needs of the tourism sector ranks where?
| johnisgood wrote:
| I do not see the relation, mate.
| larnon wrote:
| Because the State wants to attract well educated
| international workers to fix it's failing economy?
| rixed wrote:
| A "well educated" international worker willing to relocate
| in Germany would probably learn the language.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Educated immigrants often consider countries
| interchangeable. They are in a country, because they
| found an opportunity and took it. But they are not
| committed to stay, because better opportunities could
| arise elsewhere. When you have already immigrated once,
| doing it again is only going to get easier.
|
| Immigrants with fewer opportunities are more likely to
| try to learn the language and integrate. When a country
| is offering them something they can't find anywhere else,
| it makes more sense to go through all that effort. Even
| knowing that they will probably never fully fit in.
| 476392647282 wrote:
| It doesn't, though. It imports millions of uneducated
| illegals.
|
| Why would anyone choose to work their ass off for this
| corrupt regime and pay 50% in taxes?
| Flatterer3544 wrote:
| Problem is that failing to communicate will lead to huge
| productivity holes, so to "fix it", either the natives need
| to learn a non native language or the incoming immigrants
| need to learn the native language..
|
| So, attracting the international workforce to come Germany
| vs being able to fully utilise them are completely
| different ballparks..
| kmeisthax wrote:
| This is Germany we're talking about, right? Something
| like half the population already speaks English to some
| degree and that is specifically concentrated in the part
| of the country that is already highly educated and would
| be working with those immigrants.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| English is the most common lingua franca.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| > we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always
| on time
|
| When taking an international train from Germany to Switzerland,
| don't count on it that it will run through to the final
| destination.
|
| SBB (Swiss National Railways) started to block German trains if
| their delay is more than 15 minutes (so, basically every DB
| train) and won't allow the train on their network.
|
| This is only peripherically educational. Constantly delayed DB
| trains completely fouled up the scheduling on the extremely
| dense Swiss network. So they just won't allow it anymore.
|
| On a sidenote: In 2024 SBB trains were 93.2% punctual.
| Connectivity punctuality (where you have to catch a connecting
| train) was 98.7%. A train is counted as punctual if the delay
| is less than 3 minutes (half the German figure).
| cardanome wrote:
| Germany had a great train system but Germany also has a big
| automobile industry that spends a lot of money on lobbying.
|
| In the end of the 90s with neoliberalism being very popular, it
| was decided to privatize the trains. The effect was only
| minimal investments in the infrastructure and a gradual rotting
| away of the train network. Now we a reaping what we have sown.
|
| The enshitification of the German trains was done on purpose so
| they don't compete with cars.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Funny thing, but the Swiss are looking at banning DB trains
| because they are never on time and messes up Switzerland's
| public transport schedule.
| mcv wrote:
| I thought they already rejected delayed trains. Trains that
| are on time are still allowed. But I'd love to see
| Switzerland take over some of those international
| connections.
| bionade24 wrote:
| > But I'd love to see Switzerland take over some of those
| international connections.
|
| The Giruno EMUs of the SBB serving the Eurocity from
| Hamburg to Basel are having technical malfunctions causing
| delays & aborted trainrides for the last few weeks.
|
| The Eurocity(Express) Zurich-Munich is the most delayed
| long-distance train route in Germany. Most of the German
| route is only single-tracked and overcrowded.
| mcv wrote:
| Swiss trains are always on time. I've heard they've start to
| refuse delayed German trains entry to the country because their
| delays disrupt the system too much. The Swiss train system is
| excellent. The German train system is a joke.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| It's not so bad, with luck you'll eventually end up at a
| station outside of Germany.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| I am suprised Germany has bad trains. I have only used U Bahn
| long time ago which was OK iirc.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| U-Bahn is a closed circle so not much happens (except
| accidents). The issue is with shared rails and there is too
| much traffic. On the road there is also a lot of delay but it's
| more accepted because oneself is in charge. Using the train
| gives up control so you've got easier someone to blame.
| doommius wrote:
| To some extend I'd like rail operators being forced to follow the
| same rules as airlines in terms of compensation for delays. As
| the only thing that seems to work in cases like this is financial
| motivation.
| junon wrote:
| Meh. I have lived here for 7 years, and get a bit tired of these
| sorts of complaints about DB coming from the US. Germans have
| exceedingly little, if any, patience for anything going wrong. DB
| is always painted as this evil, completely broken system when in
| fact it's been a joy compared to e.g. San Francisco.
|
| I've only encountered flexibility and slight discomfort in a few
| cases where something has happened. I'm not entirely sure what
| Germans expect DB to do. A car had an interconnecting door
| problem and had to remove that car from the train. Everyone had
| to filter in to other cars to compensate for the lack of seating.
| Should they instead cancel those tickets? Or make them stand? It
| was a full train, and no answer is the correct one for everyone
| involved. I ended up giving my seat to an elderly gentleman and
| sat between cars on the ground. Mild discomfort but literally
| nobody was to blame for this. I suppose I could have gotten the
| next train but I didn't want to wait - that's _also_ not DB 's
| problem to fix.
|
| Another time, my train was delayed for several hours. Of course I
| was quite annoyed but found out the reason was that someone had
| offed themselves in front of one of the trains before it,
| bringing the line to a standstill while it was dealt with.
|
| Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to
| inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor
| helped, and this almost insatiable attitude by some Germans that
| any inconvenience is an offense to Germany seems always to be
| directed at an otherwise highly reliable and robust trnasporation
| system whilst having zero other frame of reference. Seriously,
| come to the US or, from what I've heard, the UK. Then tell me
| Germany's is awful with a straight face.
|
| This article reads exactly like that. You weren't kidnapped. You
| were rerouted. Don't dilute words like that, it just undermines
| your point.
| ernst_klim wrote:
| > Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to
| inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor
| helped
|
| Somehow doesn't happen in most other countries I lived. These
| things are easy to deal with with a bit of redundancy, which as
| I've heard is lacking in Germany these days.
|
| I've had much better experience with trains in Russia despite
| much harsher weather conditions, much larger distances and much
| older cars. This problem is absolutely fixable, just let the
| trains go around problematic sections with redundant routes.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| On the other hand, Russian trains are absurdly slow when
| conpared to Europe. The flagship "high-speed" service barely
| does 200 km/h.
| ernst_klim wrote:
| That's true, but at this point I would prefer slow but
| steady over being disembarked at random *dorf or standstill
| in a middle of nowhere with zero signal and no clue when
| we'll get back on track.
| cowl wrote:
| rerouted? it was a completly different destination, much
| further than he was originally. there is nothing "noone can do"
| about stupid burecracies like "can't stop at this station
| because we are not registered". First they had time to register
| the stop when they changed the itinery, Second if they failed
| that somehow, and most probably because of "there was no manual
| how to do it", in a sittuation like these, stupid rules like
| that should go out of the window and the passengers be let off
| as soon as possible and not 60km away. Somehow they can be
| flexible with the people's time but not with their stupid
| checklists.
| manarth wrote:
| The key explanation for failing to stop at the station is
| that _the train was on the wrong track_. >
| "Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so
| we are on the wrong tracks"
|
| Many stations have a 4 track system: a left track and right
| track which are adjacent to platforms, and 2 tracks in the
| middle, which are designed for non-stopping trains.
|
| If the train was on the middle track, stopping would
| introduce risk and disruption by slowing/stopping the other
| trains travelling on the high-speed non-stopping line, and
| also endanger passengers who would have to dismount at height
| from the train onto an active track, cross the active track,
| and climb up to the platform.
|
| Once the train was routed onto the incorrect track,
| correcting it was likely to be impractical (infrequent track
| transfer points) and stopping on the high-speed track would
| would be excessively disruptive and dangerous.
| mcv wrote:
| Lame excuse. There has to be a better alternative than to
| take them an hour in the wrong direction. Stop and shunt to
| the right track. Stop at one of those other 15 stations
| they skipped. But the best would be to simply avoid these
| kind of unnecessary errors in the first place.
| loglog wrote:
| It was extremely easy for that train to stop in Bonn-Beuel,
| which is anyway far superior to Troisdorf for a train that
| was originally scheduled to stop at Bonn Central Station.
| Failing to stop there shows perfectly how little DB cares
| about its passengers.
| microtonal wrote:
| This is so typical for German bureaucracy. I used to work at
| a German university, which included teaching. I once had a
| small group of students who collectively plagiarized their
| coursework. Some of the group admitted doing so. I went to
| the examination office asking them to enforce the punishment
| for plagiarism (which would increasingly severe with the
| number of offenses).
|
| They simply told me: _this behavior ought to be punished_.
| Which is a euphemism for _but I 'm not going to do it_. They
| didn't want the hassle of potentially dealing with one out of
| many students filing a complaint or worst-case _go to
| Karlsruhe_ (Germans know what that means). Which is exemplary
| of German bureaucracy, nobody wants to make decisions and
| carry responsibility.
|
| I love Germany, but this is really something they need to fix
| going forward, because it stifles society and the economy in
| many ways.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > This article reads exactly like that. You weren't kidnapped.
| You were rerouted.
|
| Obviously. There's a joking undertone in those words. If they
| were serious, they would've called the police.
|
| DB has gained its reputation for good reason. In this case,
| taking someone away into another federal state without giving
| them the option to get out of the train to find alternative
| transport. Their reasoning for not stopping seems to be purely
| bureaucratic.
|
| Maybe the UK is worse; the UK is famous for its extremely high
| prices. The US probably is worse with the way their trains are
| operated. That still doesn't excuse the absolutely awful
| service DB provides in a country as wealthy and developed as
| Germany.
|
| The worst part is that DB wasn't always this terrible. It's now
| playing catch-up with itself, taking care of overdue
| maintainance causing seruous disruptions that should've been
| minor annoyances years ago.
|
| I have been advised by rail enthusiasts to make sure my train
| is scheduled to arrive two to three hours before my transfer,
| because DB will be late. A foolish friend once tried to make
| their transfer with only an hour and a half of scheduled
| margin; they missed their connection and lost their (paid-for)
| seat reservations.
|
| Then there's the government side of things: we, the Dutch, want
| to run more and better train connections to the rest of Europe.
| Germany just doesn't want it to happen, though. Even when the
| Dutch offered to pay to have a broken bridge upgraded, the
| Germans turned down the offer, leaving plans for their old,
| outdated single track bridge in place.
|
| DB probably works fine a lot of the time, but you shouldn't
| accept DB's incompetence as normal. You deserve better.
| microtonal wrote:
| _Even when the Dutch offered to pay to have a broken bridge
| upgraded, the Germans turned down the offer, leaving plans
| for their old, outdated single track bridge in place._
|
| Or how a bridge _Friesenbrucke_ was hit by a ship in 2015 and
| the replacement is still under construction (supposed to be
| finished in 2026 now). As a result no train could drive
| between Groningen and Leer.
|
| To make the whole thing more sad, the replacement bridge has
| to be open 40 minutes every hour because a shipbuilder has
| convinced the Wasserstrassen- und Schifffahrtsamt to do so,
| severely constraining train traffic. No one on the other side
| of the border understands why they haven't built a bridge
| that would allow ships to pass through without opening the
| bridge.
|
| This kind of nonsense is very typical of German bureaucracy
| (I have lived there). Nobody has ambitions and nobody wants
| to stick their neck out.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| The OP, judging by their site, lives in Germany. A lot of
| comments here are coming from Europeans (including Brits BTW).
| So, pray tell, why did you feel the need to get all defensive
| and blame the Murricans?
| pell wrote:
| > Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to
| inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor
| helped [..]
|
| I agree with you that there's a lot of complaining and it does
| get tiresome. The German train system is one of the most
| complex in the world and works closer to an interconnected
| spider web than the typical straight line systems in other
| countries.
|
| However much of this has been predicted in the past. I think
| that's why a lot of people are annoyed. Here are some sources
| if you're interested to read more:
|
| (2006) Audit critique regarding the bad state of DB funding
| after privatization:
| https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/16/008/1600840.pdf
|
| (2011) DB is not spending enough on the track network:
| https://taz.de/Investitionen-in-das-Schienennetz/%215117195/
|
| (2014) State of German train bridges:
| https://www.zeit.de/mobilitaet/2014-09/deutsche-bahn-bruecke...
| gordonhart wrote:
| Nothing here suggests that the author is American beyond his
| blog post being shared on an American website.
| indiantinker wrote:
| DB is weird. They seem to make their own rules and then run the
| game and "dont tell the rules to anyone". I was on my way to
| catch a flight from Munich to my home (Madrid). I didn't knew
| that apparently at one point the train splits into two parts and
| the front part goes to the airport and the other part just goes
| to the nearby cattle farms and comes back in 3 hours.
|
| Google Maps - No idea Citymapper - what? English announcement -
| nien.
|
| Thanks to an old lady, who told me that i needed to switch
| coaches to go the airport. Madre mia!!
| tirant wrote:
| I guess you took the S1 S-Bahn. Yes, it always splits in
| Neufahrn. Part of the train goes to the airport, the other
| section to Freising (a cute University city, by the way)
|
| That is indicated on the platform screens before getting on the
| train. It tells you which part of the train goes where so you
| know which wagon to take.
|
| I found it also not very intuitive first time I took it. But
| hey, when travelling there's always local peculiarities to take
| care of ;)
| froh wrote:
| Hamburg has a similar arrangement, however they make a very
| clear and unmistakable audio announcement in both English and
| German.
|
| im.surprised this not to be the case in Munich??
| sauercrowd wrote:
| Strong disagree. For most parts travelling is a non-event
| these days.
|
| A train that splits, on the way to the airport where there
| will be a lot of non-german speaking people, and for some
| reason only shows it on the platform is insane.
|
| Having a train that splits on that route is already bad
| enough, but you HAVE to emphasize it on the train.
|
| I know that I need to pay attention to this, because I've
| grown up with DB pulling all sorts of fucked up shit, but we
| should not accept that this is reasonable.
| groestl wrote:
| From the top of my head I know three cities which have
| peculiarities when it comes to public transportation to the
| Airport. In two cases, it's obvious they do this to push
| the private train to foreigners, at 5x the ticket rate.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Can you share which cities these two are?
| groestl wrote:
| Stockholm (SL Bus/Train via Marsta 47kr vs. Arlanda
| Express 340 SEK)
|
| Vienna (S-Bahn S7 4.40 EUR vs. City Airport Train 24.90
| EUR)
|
| While with the Stockholm one, the public transport option
| is cheap but a little bit more complicated (there are
| convenient medium priced options too), the Vienna one is
| really just branding and a non-obvious exit to the train
| station.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Ah, Stockholm. Been there as a student, went to Uppsala
| the day I was flying from Arlanda, and the only trains to
| the airport were the insanely expensive Arlanda
| Expresses. Had to take the normal train to Marsta, then
| walk the five kilometers to the airport. Fun times.
| alexfoo wrote:
| London for sure. All three of the Stanstead, Gatwick and
| Heathrow Express services are an absolute rip off
| compared with the alternatives that don't take much
| longer.
|
| Many people use them out of ignorance, expense accounts
| or they have the disposable income not to care.
| ghaff wrote:
| This sort of used to be the case with Heathrow Express in
| London. There was a lot of signage that suggested to the
| unwary that Heathrow Express was the "right" way to get
| into London. Now, especially with the Elizabeth Line,
| while you can save a few minutes with Heathrow Express,
| that's really not a cost-effective alternative for a lot
| of people. (And Piccadilly may be a better option
| depending on your luggage and where you are staying.)
| MaKey wrote:
| There are announcements inside the train. Nowadays also in
| English.
| ilyush wrote:
| Same we missed the right stop on our way back to France. We
| just managed to get in a train going the other way but dB
| personal almost ticketed us a penalty...
| utllitarian wrote:
| It's likely some utilitarian reason, i.e. sacrifice the riders
| on the train for the good of all the other schedules.
|
| This is the one benefit of living in an overly-litigious
| country that has news media which can pick up on a story like
| this. They'd rather have the masses suffer to avoid the legal
| fees and bad press, so instead of sacrificing a train, they'd
| make everyone's lives worse overall.
|
| I'm not arguing for utilitarianism, though. Ir allows dictators
| to thrive.
| bcye wrote:
| Splitting trains is a quite common thing in Germany (though
| more long distance) and communicated in the official app.
|
| If third party apps don't show that information that's on their
| part. Usually it's also said after departure inside the train
| by the conductor, though maybe just on long distance trains.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, although quite often they forget not everyone speaks
| German.
|
| I once had a bit of Schadenfrunde while travelling in
| Netherlands, having the conductor telling us to switch trains
| in Dutch, and all my German fellow travellers wondering what
| it was all about.
| bcye wrote:
| Well it's generally a good idea to ask a fellow traveller
| when you hear an announcement you don't understand.
| Especially if it doesn't use words you've commonly heard
| before. And maybe tell them instead of having
| Schadenfreude?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which is what happened next.
|
| The point was that even in international trains inside
| Germany, announcements related to trains problems are
| only done in German.
|
| I speak it fluently, including some variations, however
| most travellers do not.
|
| I also remember there used to be ticket machines in NRW
| only in German, about 20 years ago.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I wonder what's the level of mutual ineligibility between
| DE<>NL (probably DE is easier to NL) but it's funny how
| Germans sometimes seem to play dumb and not understand a
| thing in NL
| whstl wrote:
| As a German speaker, spoken Dutch REALLY trips me up
| because of small pronunciation differences in almost
| every word. Written Dutch is way closer.
|
| The Dutch seem to understand German better, but my Dutch
| friends credit that more to education and exposure.
| em-bee wrote:
| they have access to german tv and watch it.
| seszett wrote:
| I don't know about the Dutch but apparently the Flemish
| don't understand German without having learned it at
| school.
|
| I speak both some German and some Dutch (as nth
| languages, I can understand them fine but speaking is hit
| and miss) and sometimes I don't notice which is which and
| answer in the wrong language, to me they're almost the
| same language with a different accent. I translate the
| German into some Frenglish mess for my Flemish friends to
| help them understand and it works great.
| em-bee wrote:
| dutch is a bit harder to understand. like some german
| dialects that not every german understands either, like
| swiss german, luxemburgian or friesian (also spoken in
| the northern parts of the netherlands), or plattdeutsch.
|
| i grew up in austria and in the north of germany so i got
| an early appreciation for understanding dialects. yet
| learning dutch took me a few months of staying in the
| netherlands. on the other hand when i visited luxemburg
| people were shocked that i could understand them when
| they spoke amongst each other
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Frisian is not a dialect, and is not usually spoken
| outside of Frisia (the Dutch province). In German
| Ostfriesland they do speak a German dialect with Frisian
| roots.
| em-bee wrote:
| i was simplifying. the difference between dialect and
| language is fluid. plattdeutsch (low german) is also
| considered a language, as is luxembourgish. frisian btw
| is also spoken in nordfriesland (in schleswig-holstein)
| and there are a few speakers of saterfriesish which is
| the last remaining dialect of east frisian.
| i_don_t_know wrote:
| I'm German, I don't speak Dutch. But I was able to follow
| a Dutch tour guide in Den Haag just fine when she was
| explaining things in Dutch. She kindly repeated
| everything in English for my benefit (I was the only
| foreigner) even though I told her I understood her just
| fine in Dutch.
|
| You have to "adjust your ears" a bit but I think if you
| know German and English then you can understand Dutch
| just fine if it's not slang.
| hopelite wrote:
| It also depends on the particular dialect a German
| speaks. Dutch is effectively old German before all the
| various alterations and "reforms" to the German language
| that were instituted to create fragmentation between the
| germanic people of Europe, i.e., English, Dutch, Germans,
| Austrians, Swiss, Belgians throughout the ~16th-20th
| century by aristocrats driving wedges between peasants
| between kingdoms and dukedoms in order to define their
| own nations/ethnicities through language and culture so
| their royal families could rule over and would find it
| difficult to associate with each other. It is one of the
| things that also contributed to the fragmentation of
| Germany before unification, language barriers that even
| created unique cultures between sides of a valley that
| were in different dukedoms.
|
| A similar thing has caused the tension between the
| germanic and Romance languages that followed the Roman
| border line N to S that separates Europe.
| hopelite wrote:
| Ironically, technically speaking, there are seemingly
| more similarities between British English, i.e., Anglican
| German and current High German due to various perversions
| and "reforms" of the German language over the last many
| decades, in order to drive the Germanic people away from
| each other.
|
| If the EU were a serious and legitimate institution,
| there would be an effort to implement reforms that nudge
| English, Dutch, and present day German all towards better
| mutual intelligibility, NOT diversion from each other
| through perversion and "simplification", or what seems to
| be a pollution and destruction of the current German and
| Dutch language through what at least Germans have a term
| for, "Verdenglichung", i.e., the portmanteau of German
| (De..) and English, prefixed with "ver...", meaning the
| transformation or application of.
| sva_ wrote:
| How dare they speak their own language in their own country
| on a regional train
| ruszki wrote:
| They can. But they should also not be assholes with
| everybody else. And no not just local trains, I got
| information in English exactly zero times when there were
| huge delays on international trains. And it happened 2
| times from 3 when I tried to cross Germany by train. And
| Germans (and Austrians btw) are terrible with this, even
| compared to others. The German site at my multinational
| company at the time was the only site on Earth which had
| to introduce an internal regulation about mandatory
| English, because they just switched to German all the
| time even when there were people on the call from
| different countries. I'm living now in Wien, and they are
| terrible with this even in friendly environments.
| pimeys wrote:
| YMMV. I worked in three different German startups in
| Berlin and I almost never heard anybody speaking German
| in the company, even though more than half of the people
| were from Germany. Maybe it's different in bigger
| companies, or outside Berlin?
| dale_glass wrote:
| I think you still should be able to expect a bit of
| accommodation on trains that cross country borders or go
| to airports.
|
| The EU makes travel between EU countries as easy as
| travel between US states. You can just get on a train
| from Germany to Spain without any prior planning.
| zahlman wrote:
| It's also unusual given how much English you'll hear in
| Germany nowadays (at least in major, tourist-attracting
| cities) in just about any other context.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Too much English. I noticed this indoctrination way back
| when they released Ice Age over there for kids. The title
| wasn't even translated into German.
| sva_ wrote:
| The regional trains usually have announcements in the
| language of the neighboring country when they get close
| to the border
| pjmlp wrote:
| It was an international connection train, ICE, between
| Amsterdam and Cologne....
| Freak_NL wrote:
| So Dutch and German? Actually, those ICE are staffed by
| Dutch NS personnel until Koln where they swap with their
| German DB colleagues. Usually that means Dutch and German
| messages from Amsterdam to Koln (sometimes English too),
| and German afterwards.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Or.. english-speaking people forget not everyone speaks
| english. If you go to another country you have to learn a
| bit about how things are done there, ask for help, etc..,
| most people consider this a normal part of traveling.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great advice which I assume you follow to the letter.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| idk man, I get it's nice if things are clear for you, but
| it's misplaced IMO to have this level of entitlement over
| people speaking their mother tongue in their own country
| pjmlp wrote:
| I hope you get to learn Portuguese well enough that my
| fellow country folks never force themselves to speak any
| other language, in case you happen to visit us, if not,
| oh well.
|
| I am fluent in several European languages and dialects,
| human languages is second nature alongside learning
| programming languages.
|
| As for entitlement, the expectations on international
| trains crossing borders aren't the same as local trains,
| which I left out from the comment, it was an ICE after
| crew change.
| Zak wrote:
| It seems to me long-distance transportation services
| should make the most important announcements in the
| second language most likely to be understood by
| international travelers. In Europe, that usually means
| English.
| hopelite wrote:
| Can you trim your narcissism by assuming that people should
| speak your preferred language in their own country?
|
| The damn narcissistic entitlement and rotten mentality of
| some people.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I speak fluently 6 languages, and a few dialects of them,
| how many do you speak?
| mrks_hy wrote:
| Does it matter to the OP's point how well-spoken you are?
| Biting down some non-constructive snark here.
|
| Yes, English is a good lowest common language, and it is
| mostly that announcements are in English. But learning
| enough of the native language that you are at least
| puzzled enough to ask another passenger seems like a not
| very high and reasonable bar for travel-speak to pick up.
| hopelite wrote:
| Several, what is the point, narcissist?
| trueismywork wrote:
| It is still stupid.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| They still get it wrong quite often. Worst case is when the
| train arrives in reverse cart order, and the carts are
| labeled wrong. Bonus points if your reserved seat is in a
| cart that's missing.
| silversmith wrote:
| Are we really living in a world where you need to have the
| official app - any app! - to ride a train?
| pirates wrote:
| I suppose it isn't required technically, you can still
| purchase tickets at the stations. But oh boy, the
| "official" app for the Shinkansen in Japan might be the
| worst piece of garbage I have ever used.
| ben_w wrote:
| Had something similar from Nuremberg to Suhl and accidentally
| ending up in Bad Kissingen for a bit.
|
| But I don't think DB is unique in this weirdness.
|
| Back in the UK, I think something similar happens on routes
| going past Gatwick; I've only heard English announcements on
| that train despite the airport being one of the ones serving
| London.
|
| Plus, one time I was on a work trip to Liverpool (via London),
| and somewhere around Nottingham or Crewe a fellow passenger
| asked me when we'd be getting to "Liverpool Street":
| https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Liverpool+Street+Station,+Lo...
|
| There's also the way my first leg home from university was
| Aberystwyth to Birmingham New Street, but the train regularly
| terminated early (Shrewsbury? Or was it Wolverhampton?) to game
| the rules.
| ajb wrote:
| What language would you pick first, if you're going to add
| non English to London trains?
|
| The problem with UK announcements is that they are piped to
| multiple places in the station, which is all hard surfaces
| and produces lots of reverberation and echo. This often makes
| them hard to understand even for natives. Also there are some
| stations with really terrible old speakers , such as horn
| speakers.
| kyleee wrote:
| Arabic?
| ben_w wrote:
| I'd ask the airports themselves for the nationalities of
| the tourists departing through them, and specify whichever
| secondary language was most relevant for trains likely to
| be used by tourists accessing those airports accordingly.
|
| If I had to guess, French, German, or Spanish, in that
| order. But it may well be that e.g. Heathrow has a lot more
| Arabic, Stansted gets a lot more German, and Gatwick gets a
| lot more French, Luton gets the Spanish tourists, and City
| is mostly business trips or something.
|
| You're correct about the acoustics, but foam panels are a
| thing that can be installed (or not) independently of this.
| xenocratus wrote:
| We took that train, realised when we got to the other end of
| the line that we hadn't gotten where we expected, then turned
| back to the place where it separates. Waited for the next
| advertised train to airport (it's signalled on the electronic
| board as two separate entries; yes, it says "board whatever
| carriages for airport, and the rest for ...", or at least I
| assume it did, as it was in German of course; but again, it
| literally shows up as two different trains). Train arrives,
| stays there for a while (it's a big train, so the part in front
| of us didn't move so we didn't realise it had already
| separated), then after like 5-6 minutes it leaves. Only as it
| starts moving I notice that a small electronic board on the
| side of the carriage said "airport". The notice board then
| changes and obviously "both" trains disappear.
|
| We were so lucky that we'd decided to go to the airport much
| earlier than we needed.
|
| And don't get me started on the ticketing machines not
| accepting Visa, Mastercard, or Amex at the central station in
| Munchen. Or the web ticketing interface which was at least as
| annoying as the train to use.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| American Express I get. No one uses that in Europe. Visa and
| Mastercard debit cards are what everyone uses and they work
| in all German ticket machines. You weren't trying to use a
| credit card where you?
|
| What language do you expect the Germans to use?
| huhkerrf wrote:
| I don't think the person expected the Germans to use a
| different language, only was saying that they weren't
| entirely sure what it said.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| For a train going to an airport, English.
|
| This is the norm around the world, especially with
| complicated situations like a train splitting in two.
| ragall wrote:
| Lots of people use Amex in Europe. It's very popular as a
| business card.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| I doubt that it is popular with the actual users, only
| with the company that they work for. When I had a company
| issued AMEX card the damn thing was practically useless.
| In fact even in the US there were plenty of places that
| wouldn't accept it.
| em-bee wrote:
| germans don't use credit cards. finding an automated ticket
| machine thst handles credit cards would be extremely rare.
| thesimon wrote:
| DB machines have been accepting all sorts of cards for a
| long time (Visa, AMEX, Discover). Local vending machines
| might vary though.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Starting in 2026, support of digital payments is mandatory
| in Germany for all types of businesses. DB has been card-
| friendly for a long time.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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?
| rvba wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| A gift card isn't a credit card, though... ?
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| You are likely thinking of branded gift cards that are
| specific to one store (or one grouping of stores). An
| Apple or Target gift card, for example.
|
| There are also gift cards that are credit cards. Or,
| really, debit cards. See "open-loop cards" at
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/more-than-you-
| want-to...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If this story was more than a few years ago it's
| plausible that the card didn't have a chip. I still have
| a VISA debit card without a chip, and it was issued only
| two years ago.
|
| Also chip-and-pin is mostly not enabled with American
| credit cards or card payment terminals
| jltsiren wrote:
| Chip and signature, which often means just the chip
| without further authentication.
|
| EMV has multiple options. Many countries (including the
| US) chose the signature option for credit cards for
| convenience and use PINs only with debit cards. Before
| contactless payment apps became common, that was a major
| source of friction when using American credit cards in
| Europe.
| Aloha wrote:
| I'd argue we picked it for legacy reasons - Americans are
| not used to the chip/pin concept, and adopted EMV very
| late because of a variety of legacy reasons (massive
| installed base of mag stripe equipment, and systems to
| deal with the inherent slightly higher fraud).
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Very few Norwegian issued cards, if any, have a magnetic
| strip. It's too easily cloned.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Both my DNB and Nordea cards, as well as my personal and
| corporate Norwegian AMEX cards all have magnetic strip,
| and they've all been issued somewhat recently.
| eisa01 wrote:
| Two years back the S-bahn ticket machines at the aiport
| only supported chip+pin, not contactless. Had to open my
| banking app to figure out my pin code, as I wanted to use
| my corporate Amex
| cfstras wrote:
| A couple years ago, I was at a station waiting for a
| (delayed) ICE train. I couldn't buy a ticket at the machine
| or with the app, since the train had already departed (if it
| had been on schedule). The ticket machine also wouldn't take
| VISA / MasterCard, only the more common Girocard (most people
| still call it EC)
|
| Later, in the train, when I asked the conductor to buy a
| ticket with my Girocard, he said "That's not a commonly used
| payment method" and asked for VISA, or cash (not having any
| to provide change, obviously).
| mft_ wrote:
| Yeah, the S1 from Munich to the airport splits regularly, and
| you have to be in the rear half of the train. The first time
| (as a not-perfect-German-speaker) I'd have missed it but for
| the kindness of another traveller.
|
| Now, at least, the announcements are also in English, which
| frankly is very positive - that DB are improving _anything_
| noticeable. (And to be clear, Bavaria /Germany are absolutely
| not given to accommodating non-German speakers, like, ever.)
| tobias3 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there should be english announcements. Maybe
| they were broken. You also get this information via the
| displays on the wagons and on the screens inside. There is a
| bus/train from Freising to the airport every 10 min that takes
| 15min, so you are not trapped there for hours. Google maps also
| has all the public transport connections available for
| navigation. That it does not support certain things like train
| splits or instant train changes is not DBs problem.
|
| The preferred way to get to the airport is via S8 (not S1). Idk
| how one could push/guide people more to take this one. S8 does
| not split and it definitely has announcements in english. They
| also prioritize keeping S8 running above anything else.
|
| I'd also recommend buying tickets via app, not via ticket
| machines.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| This is pretty common in other countries. I almost got screwed
| multiple times by SNCF (french trains) where they don't
| announce which half of the train goes where on the speakers.
| Even in the official app, it's buried deep: for some reason,
| it's under "Travel Details" and not "Train Details".
|
| It was partially on me because there are assigned seats and
| carriages, but I was late and had to jump in the train. But
| still no vocal announcement of "cars x to y go to z, the others
| go to w".
| elAhmo wrote:
| Hah! We had the same situation taking a train from Marseille
| to Paris. Looked at the seats, entered the proper carriage,
| sit down, and at the next stop someone came and told us we
| took their seats. I was like 'this is 74B' (or whatever),
| 'the ticket is for that seat', until someone managed to tell
| us that we got in the wrong part of the train, and we need to
| move forward.
|
| Now, the train itself was two trains connected together, and
| at the next stop we literally had to run like 100 meters or
| so to make it on time to enter the front part, because there
| was engine near the end/stop.
|
| Not sure would the 2nd half of the train depart, but it was
| super stressful experience.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| This just happened to me a couple days ago trying to get from
| Luxembourg to Heidelberg, got on what I thought was the right
| train at a transfer but was apparently the wrong half,
| announcement only in German, rushing to find a spot for luggage
| in packed train and getting scolded by various Germans and we
| missed it. 3 hours of travel to end up back in Luxembourg and
| we got a very expensive rental car to get to our next couple
| destinations, not proudest travel moment. Next train we took
| was easiest possible scenario, Nuremberg to Munich, one train
| no transfers, assigned carriage, app helpfully shows you where
| to stand, arrived with time to spare. Except the platform
| changed as train was arriving, announcement again only in
| German, asked an attendant if train on other platform was our
| train, "No that train is on platform 9" rush up and down
| platform 9, carriages and train number don't match ask another
| attendant if the original train on the other platform is ours,
| says you have no time, jump on that train, it is right but we
| are on opposite side of train and walk through the entire train
| with luggage again with various Germans giving scolding looks.
| Peaceful way to travel.
| bad_username wrote:
| Your ticket was without assigned seat? Because if there was
| assigned seat, surely the seat would be in the correct
| carriage?
| alexfoo wrote:
| > surely the seat would be in the correct carriage?
|
| You'd think so but you'd be surprised how un-joined-up things
| can be.
| mtmail wrote:
| There's only local trains to Munich airport. Those don't have
| seat numbers.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I had similar experience only in Poland. Where this part of the
| train goes was posted on the glass window on the doors. Somehow
| I missed it and went to a city I didn't intend to.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Splitting trains is not uncommon. Generally for Amtrak there
| will be two conductors one for each part of the train. On the
| platform both conductors will tell you which part of the train
| goes where. They often check tickets more frequently than usual
| just to make sure you are on the right part of the train.
|
| Train splitting is quite acceptable when the customer service
| is alright.
| T0Bi wrote:
| When was this? Took the train (S1) last week and every single
| screen at the stations and in the train explains this in detail
| and there are probably 20 announcements both in German and
| English telling everybody which coach goes to the airport and
| which to Freising.
|
| It's not that complicated.
| estherney wrote:
| (Also, the S8 is usually quicker anyway...unless you somehow
| ended up at Laim, Moosach or Feldmoching.)
| mtmail wrote:
| Those announcements in English have been in place for 20
| years. Neither train to Munich airport (S1, S8) goes to
| cattle farms. Tourists can get confused if they're unaware in
| which part of the train they sit.
| hopelite wrote:
| To be fair (and I am not fan of DB and many other rail
| companies), DB is not the only rail system that splits trains,
| and it is rather clearly indicated, but you have to 1) expect
| something like trains that split at specific stops and 2) know
| what you are looking for on a ticket or billboard, partially
| because indicating that, especially far in advance is a bit of
| a UI/design challenge.
|
| Also, I believe you were trying to write "nein". But why would
| you expect an English announcement in Germany on a German
| train? Google Maps? What does that have to do with that; it's
| an unofficial and only like an 80% solution.
| vander_elst wrote:
| In general the S-Bahn in Munich is a massive s*t show I can
| report more info about this if needed. However, in the S1 going
| to the airport (the train you took) it is quite well described
| that the train splits and it's both on German and in English.
| pm3003 wrote:
| The Munich S-Bahn is usually a delight compared to the Paris
| suburbian RER.
| abigail95 wrote:
| I don't tolerate this kind of thing. If you find yourself in a
| similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say
| chest pain, out of breath, and where you are.
|
| You may find the train has now "registered" itself at the next
| station.
|
| It will reveal driver to be using intentionally tricky language.
| "Cannot stop"
|
| It's not that the train can't stop, trains can obviously stop
| wherever and whenever they want. It's not that the doors cannot
| open - train doors can be opened by the driver or by passengers,
| trains have emergency egress requirements.
|
| The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that train.
| They wanted to complain about it. Comparing it to a kidnapping is
| offensive and absurd. That's now how people act when kidnapped.
| manarth wrote:
| > "If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out -
| call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath"
|
| Being stuck on a train that's arbitrarily changing stops is
| irritating and disruptive to passengers. Faking a medical
| emergency is also disruptive to passengers, and also to the
| emergency services, who may prioritise the hoax call over
| genuine emergencies, which risks other peoples' health.
| > "The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that
| train."
|
| It's pretty clear they did. No-one would prefer complaining
| about an hour-plus unplanned detour over simply following their
| plans and getting off the train. > "Comparing
| it to a kidnapping is offensive and absurd."
|
| It's clear they're using the word "kidnapping" as a hyperbolic
| rhetorical narrative device, and aren't literally comparing it
| to a kidnapping.
| abigail95 wrote:
| It's not a fake emergency. Acute anxiety causes the same
| thing. That's for a hospital to decide, not a train company.
| pell wrote:
| > If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out
| - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath,
| and where you are.
|
| It is if you instruct people how to best lie to emergency
| services because your train was delayed.
| abigail95 wrote:
| I'm sorry for the second reply but the "hyperbolic rhetorical
| narrative device" - is a literal comparison to kidnapping.
| That is what the text says. I struggle to see how it would be
| the opposite, they're not comparing it to a kidnapping?
| danhau wrote:
| I think this just makes a bad situation worse. This can go two
| ways:
|
| - the emergency services will wait at the station the train is
| going to anyway
|
| - your health insurance realizes what you've done and make you
| pay the bills.
| croes wrote:
| So you want to waste the time of an ambulance and emergency
| doctor just to be able to get off a train, which could mean
| that emergency services are lacking elsewhere?
| abigail95 wrote:
| Why is my time less valuable than an ambulance or doctor? You
| have to make a lot of assumptions and normative judgements
| for that to be true, which I reject.
|
| Morally DB (through the driver) is the one lying and saying
| things like "cannot stop". They _don 't want to stop_ -
| that's different. They've already broken the social contract,
| I'm free to do the same.
| Macha wrote:
| The consequence of wasting a doctor or ambulance drivers
| time is depriving someone else of medical care, potentially
| leading to worse medical outcomes, up to death.
|
| I'm sure you're going to pose a hypothetical that you would
| be in the way to save someone's life, but we both know
| that's not true and even in that situation, you could raise
| that with the train company rather than faking a new,
| different medical emergency
| abigail95 wrote:
| I won't give you a new hypothetical, just complete the
| comparison.
|
| It's true an EMS call might reduce QALY (quality adjusted
| life years). It's also true that taking a train full of
| passengers somewhere they don't want to go also reduces
| QALY.
|
| Iterate this enough and DB changes their policy. Now we
| have a new equilibrium. The full game theory of this
| isn't as simple as wasted doctor time = bad.
| throw310822 wrote:
| It's probably less valuable because they're surely working,
| and their job is to save lives and it's time sensitive;
| while there are chances that you're not working and that
| your job is less time-critical than theirs.
|
| However I second your idea that "if the train doesn't stop
| it's because they decided they didn't want it to stop"- and
| therefore they should be considered responsible for
| kidnapping their customers unless it can be proven that it
| was absolutely impossible to stop the train without
| catastrophic consequences.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Why not shoot the driver and take control of the train?
| abigail95 wrote:
| The ad absurdum of this situation would be DB escalating
| it into a full on hijacking scenario where they run the
| train in a loop, forever claiming the train cannot ever
| stop.
|
| In that situation - you do what is necessary to stop the
| train, because nobody else will, which might involve
| killing the driver.
|
| The reason you don't jump straight to shooting the driver
| is that doesn't achieve your goals. There is a long list
| of things to do before needing to kill anyone, so do
| those first.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Ok, I think I understand your viewpoint better. You will
| do the minimum necessary to make the outcome you want
| happen, regardless of what it might be. The goal you want
| and the actions needed to make it come about need not be
| proportional.
| croes wrote:
| EMS on duty vs you on a train, doesn't take a lot of
| assumptions to guess whos wasted time risks more lives. And
| it's not don't want to stop, it's not allowed to stop. Do
| you think it's the driver's decision when and where to
| stop. Unless in case of emergency there s strict rules they
| have to follow.
|
| One simple rule for everybody is: Never ever waste the time
| of EMS.
| abigail95 wrote:
| What if I get 10 people off the train for one EMS call.
|
| What about 100? If you bring an absolute like that to a
| philosophical argument you're backing yourself into a
| corner.
| croes wrote:
| What if one person dies because of this call, what if
| other peoplre follow your example and more people die?
|
| How about that? The driver asks for you to sacrifice your
| life then he will stop the train an let 100 people off
| the train. According to your logic a good choice.
|
| There is a huge difference between wasted time and being
| dead escpecially for the relarives of the dead. Maybe you
| should tell your logic to someone who last someone
| because EMS was late.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Not a good idea to abuse EMS ever. But certainly given a
| sample size of enough people, some will invariably have
| mental breakdowns or panic attacks from being held against
| their will necessitating EMS. Judging and chastising people
| having real panic attacks as fakers is fucking idiotic
| bullshit. Pushing people to the breaking point with
| brinkmanship games will cause all sorts of unnecessary drama
| and workarounds as a matter of survival, and not all of the
| reactions will be positive or properly proportionate.
| abigail95 wrote:
| I'm abusing one government department due to suffering
| abuse from another. If that causes a different kind of
| staffing shortage - that's something I don't have control
| over, but has the same root cause as the DB incompetence.
|
| In my case because I do have not mild but moderate autism
| and panic disorder, it would genuinely feel like a heart
| attack if that happened to me. I wouldn't be lying about my
| symptoms.
|
| The problem with that is - why do I get access to this
| "out" by being able to call EMS to get off the train?
| (Provided you agree with me that I would be a valid call).
| Why does everyone else have to suffer?
|
| My worldview is they don't. DB wants to take you past 15
| stations? Here's a mechanism to stop them.
|
| I'm agreeing it's an abuse of the system, but it's valid
| because it scales. If there was a flood of EMS calls every
| time DB skipped 15 stations - DB blinks first.
|
| Maybe a better example from me would have been an emergency
| stop button?
| j1elo wrote:
| You're being downvoted because what you propose is an abuse of
| the emergency services system. And that's bad. I wonder who's
| conversely taking action on the badness of DB abusing every
| customer of most of their services.
| abigail95 wrote:
| I don't defend the situation as "good". I can agree on it
| being bad, but the whole situation is bad.
|
| The premise here is kidnapping - I don't think using
| emergency services in a kidnapping is out of the question.
| dominicq wrote:
| I find the downvotes to your comment absurd. The downvoters
| seem to me what Kaczynski called "oversocialized". They accept
| being taken against your will because the system says that's
| how it's supposed to work. And then rationalize their
| conformity with apparent consequences (medical emergency
| services not providing care elsewhere, you being penalized for
| a fake call, and so on).
|
| It shows a concerning lack of agency and a concerning amount of
| conformity.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| I'd agree with you on this, but abusing emergency medical
| services like this is a step too far.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| I'm disappointed that this deviancy is normalized and
| rationalized, and that more people aren't freaking out while
| being held against their will. The status quo continues
| because it's tolerated.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I agree that the decision made by the train here sucks, but I
| think it's pretty clear that the use of "kidnapped" is
| hyperbole. You are not "kidnapped" if the bus driver refuses
| to let you get down in the middle of the freeway. The
| situation is a little similar if the driver is taking you to
| somewhere you don't want to go, because that is also what a
| kidnapper does, but that's where the similarities end.
| abigail95 wrote:
| I'm not asking the bus driver to stop in the middle of a
| highway. I'm asking the bus driver not to go past 15 actual
| bus stops before letting me off. With the drivers rationale
| being - "This bus is not registered at any of those stops".
| saagarjha wrote:
| If you're on an express bus it will do that though?
| tartoran wrote:
| The use of "kidnapped" is hyperbole and a bit click-baity
| but that does not change the story much though.
| f1shy wrote:
| Faking a medical emergency emergency is both illegal and
| immoral.
|
| In Germany in particular, you could be charged for all the
| expenses. A friend of mine did not fake, was in real panic, but
| still was at the end of the "nothing" and had to paid the
| ambulance costs. Not cheap!
|
| If you think you are being kidnapped or whatever, instead of
| lying and abusing EMS, you can call the police, and explain
| clearly what's going on with the truth. If serious enough they
| will be able to act better in that case.
| drunx wrote:
| I lived 15 years in The Netherlands and 3 years ago moved to
| Germany.
|
| Back in NL I used to complain about trains being late...
|
| Boy oh boy was I not ready for Germany and Deutsche Bahn. I heard
| stories, but it was so absurd at times that I treated them as
| comical acts.
|
| Then I traveled long distance on DB...
|
| - trains being late by 15-40 minutes is NORMAL. It's included. At
| this point I feel like it's even planned. - the "thrown out in
| the middle of nowhere" happens! Ruthlessly. Operationally. With
| zero empathy or guidance. One minute you traveled inside the
| train approaching your destination another minute you are on a
| station in some village, knowing nothing about "why?" And "what
| is next?"
|
| I still take trains - but I do not plan any appointments on
| arrival. As arrival is theoretical and not guaranteed. I just
| take a gamble and sink hours into the journey. Read books. Watch
| movies.
|
| P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for the
| absolutely shit service they provide.
| microtonal wrote:
| And being delayed for 15-40 minutes, getting thrown out in the
| middle of nowhere, or having to continue by bus is an
| inconvenience for most people, but a nightmare for people with
| disabilities. Imagine being in a wheelchair, having a digestive
| condition (Crohn, IBS, etc.), or some sort of anxiety. I
| imagine that there are groups of people in Germany that simply
| do not travel anymore.
|
| It is an area where proper governance is failing. I don't know
| about Germany, but in The Netherlands, Dutch law requires at
| least 90% of the trains to be on time (less than 5 minutes
| delay). If national train company do not reach those numbers,
| they are fined and I think in an extreme case they can lose
| their concession.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > Dutch law requires at least 90% of the trains to be on time
| (less than 5 minutes delay
|
| Yes, however, any train delayed more than 30 minutes gets
| canceled entirely and doesn't get counted in the statistics.
| The train this article is talking about would not be
| registered late under Dutch terms (though it probably
| wouldn't have traveled comically far without stopping).
|
| Not saying Dutch trains are as bad as German trains, but
| applying the same laws won't fix DB's problems.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > they are fined
|
| NS is state-owned so all fines are just money transfer
| between two branches of the government. Also, they know that
| "the trains fail with current amount of public funding, I
| wonder if less funding will improve the situation" is not
| good logic. Therefore there won't be any actual fines.
|
| > and I think in an extreme case they can lose their
| concession
|
| And then what? Most of the country will be left without
| trains? The company will be dissolved and replaced by the
| Chinese? Not gonna happen.
| microtonal wrote:
| _And then what? Most of the country will be left without
| trains? The company will be dissolved and replaced by the
| Chinese? Not gonna happen._
|
| I don't think it would happen all at once for the main
| network, but Arriva sure likes to get more and more lines.
| martijnvds wrote:
| > the trains fail with current amount of public funding, I
| wonder if less funding will improve the situation" is not
| good logic
|
| Tell that to the current government (and most of the
| previous governments in recent years).
|
| You can't put money into it! Guess NS will just have to
| increase ticket prices _again_.
| Avamander wrote:
| > P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for
| the absolutely shit service they provide.
|
| That's the famous German efficiency, not to waste time on
| things that were not done or caused by being inefficient in the
| first place. There's no point in wasting time on improving some
| process, fax machines still work, don't they?
| tapia wrote:
| The accountability part is what makes me more angry. I get to
| lose so many (maybe hundreds?) of hours a year because of how
| bad DB works. Meanwhile the executives at DB get their nice
| boni each year and absurdly high wages for what they do...
| which is consistently worsening the train experience year after
| year. Probably none of them even use the train.
| harddrivereque wrote:
| Deutsche Bahn has gone from not perfect to straight up disastrous
| and antisocial in the past years. They use scamming approaches
| more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie. It's
| rightfully headed for insolvency despite billions of wasteful and
| wrongful state funding. I hope that company goes under as soon as
| possible. Any other solution to the railway system management is
| better than DB. DB is not going to make it
| cedilla wrote:
| Deutsche Bahn ist anything but wasteful, it's underfunded to
| the tune of tens of billions per year. Cleaning out trees more
| up to ten meters away from railways was seen as to expensive,
| now 6m tall trees fall in them all the time during storms.
| Having two railways next to each other was seen as unnecessary,
| now we have no backups when one fails.
|
| Swiss railway is seen as the ideal DB should strive for, but
| fact is that Switzerland invests more than double per capita
| into its rail infrastructure. German stinginess now compounded
| over decades, and that's not the fault of management.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| Underfunded and wasteful are not opposites. When there is not
| enough money to do things properly there is often a lot of
| duct tapping going on which waste available resources without
| fixing anything. There is scarcely anything more expensive in
| government than saving money.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| After privatization, the Deutsche Bahn became private
| enterprise and is now 100% owned by the German state. As such,
| insolvency isn't going to happen. Though it would be funny.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| If a company fails this hard, the solution isn't to feed it
| more government money to prop it up. It's to let it fail and
| rebuild from scratch.
|
| Blacklist everyone who was involved above a certain rank. Put
| together an entirely new structure. The only real way to get
| rid of this kind of rot is to make the consequences of
| dysfunction hit.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The DB is and always was fully owned by the government, this
| is not the usual case of "dumbass executives mess things up".
|
| Unfortunately, the DB first got hit by Thatcherite
| neoliberalism in the early 90s that led to "unprofitable"
| things like switches, railyards or lesser-used routes to be
| torn down and the real estate sold off (to prepare for a
| privatization that THANK GOD never happened), and then we got
| 16 years of Conservative traffic/infrastructure ministers
| whose job priority was to funnel money to Bavarian highways
| [1], not towards railways.
|
| Unfortunately, while the left wing loves to prune its ranks
| in purity tests (partially because its voters demand
| accountability), the Conservatives have a solid "better dead
| than red" voter base.
|
| [1] https://www.merkur.de/politik/csu-parteitag-bayern-
| markus-so...
| yeputons wrote:
| > They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's
| and in cases straight up lie.
|
| Would you mind sharing some examples? My only complaints with
| DB are cancellations and delays. Well, the ticketing might be a
| bit confusing the first time you realize "ticket" and "seat
| reservation" are two completely independent entities.
| Similarly, rules for which train you're allowed to take might
| be a bit confusing. But I wouldn't call it scamming.
| throw310822 wrote:
| There is some dark joke to be made about being locked inside a
| German train, kept against your will and running towards who-
| knows-where.
| tirant wrote:
| Please, don't go there.
| j1elo wrote:
| This story, countless other stories. The fellow comments here.
| But then Europe wants us to drop our cars and rely more in public
| transport? Laughable.
| boxed wrote:
| It's not like this in Sweden I can tell you.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Deutsche Bahn has a reputation even inside of Europe. It's not
| like this in other countries.
|
| Your country would have to be laughably corrupt if it couldn't
| build out a public transit system that beats DB.
| andbberger wrote:
| yes the US is laughably corrupt
| fkdk wrote:
| historically german railway had a track record of treating people
| like cattle, but one would expect that not even institutional
| culture changes would take that long
| raverbashing wrote:
| I wonder if people think they will be taken seriously with so
| much hyperbole and drama
|
| > Only then I notice: the driver has been speaking German only.
|
| Oh wow a German conductor in a German train speaking German oh
| how awkward...
|
| No you were not "kidnapped" your train just stopped at a
| different station.
|
| > "That's a different federal state."
|
| Yes and if you go to many cities in Europe and the US you can
| walk from one country to another. Oh wow shocking I know /s
|
| Of course this is Deutsche Bahn at its best (in getting hand and
| feet mixed up) and that compensation is ridiculous. It should at
| least get your ticket back to the place you intended to go.
|
| Neuwied to Troisdorf is 1h by car or train (in a good day of
| course)
| baobun wrote:
| I'm not sure if I should be impressed or concerned that none of
| the passengers pulled the emergency stop.
| locallost wrote:
| I don't know what to make of this. Of course everyone has a right
| to be pissed off for losing time because of someone else's
| mistake, but at the same time the language is... I mean if you
| feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out I am
| not sure how you'd feel if you were really kidnapped. Was my
| family kidnapped when they were sitting for two hours in the
| airplane before takeoff because of xyz? No, it was just an
| unfortunate turn of events that happen from time to time when you
| fly.
|
| German railways could be better, but at the same time it's
| nowhere near the level of complaining the average person makes,
| as in this article. I think it says more about the author than
| the company. "It's twenty minutes late, I consider this early".
| Despite the problems that exist, I wouldn't say I ever had the
| feeling of being relieved the train is only 20 minutes late.
| Especially not with local trains.
| microtonal wrote:
| Still, in Germany only 58.8% of the trains were on time in 2025
| [1]. Maybe it's not as bad as the author states, but it's
| certainly valid complaining about it. I lived in Germany for
| five years and for longer stretches it was certainly very
| common to have a 30-60 minutes delay. A lot of my colleagues
| would even do trips like Stuttgart <-> Leipzig by plane because
| they hated traveling with DB so much.
|
| [1] https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
| locallost wrote:
| I live in Germany and take the train all the time. There were
| always kind of clusters of issues, but lately I haven't had
| many problems, especially not major, don't really remember
| what the last time was I got any compensation for over an
| hour delay. The last time was maybe two years ago.
|
| I wonder sometimes how these things develop because if you're
| objectively pissed off that your train was delayed, I cannot
| imagine enjoying taking the plane, or even worse a car. Like
| I haven't had a plane take off on time in my life. I took
| only a few business trips with the car and was stuck in
| traffic every single time. So objectively despite
| experiencing issues with DB myself, it's a lot better than my
| experience with alternatives. Stuttgart - Leipzig has a
| direct connection, and in my experience the biggest reason
| for a delay is when you miss a connecting train. E.g. your
| train is 15 minutes late but you had only 10 minutes to
| change trains. So other than the train going out of service I
| honestly can't imagine what the issue would be. You sit for
| 4h, can work comfortably, it's quieter than anything else,
| you can have a coffee or a beer, a meal etc. etc. And then
| maybe you'll have a half hour delay, but you can get that
| with anything else also.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection
| didn't work out
|
| It's not "your train connection didn't work out", it's "you
| were planning to go somewhere, and the train took you somewhere
| else entirely, much farther away than when you started, and
| gave you no way out of this, and not even an apology or
| explanation". This is absolutely comparable to a form of
| kidnapping.
| locallost wrote:
| Yes because after kidnapping you are always allowed to leave
| the vehicle you were kidnapped with and continue with your
| day.
|
| Sorry, but no.
| abigail95 wrote:
| If you want to continue the analogy via consequences, it's
| not a defense to kidnapping to say you let them go at the
| end.
| locallost wrote:
| For it to be a kidnapping there needs to be a realistic
| threat you will not be let go. Have a nice day.
| abigail95 wrote:
| Just so you know I was offended at the use of the term
| kidnapping from the article but for different reasons.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If you got into an Uber and they took you to some
| completely different place, many km away from your
| destination, and didn't let you get out of the vehicle
| until they got there, would you not say that they kidnapped
| you? Would you not be tempted to call the police and press
| charges, even if they did tell you that they would let you
| go out once they reached their destination?
| locallost wrote:
| You do understand how a train works?
|
| * It has tracks so it cannot go anywhere it wants to go
|
| * It can only let passengers go at certain places, these
| are called stations
|
| So no, I would not compare it to a random Uber driver
| that takes me somewhere random on a whim. I wouldn't call
| the police if an Uber took me on a different road if the
| original road was closed. Etc.
|
| Please start making sense, thank you. I'm done.
| djoldman wrote:
| > I was trying to travel 35 kilometers. I was now 63 kilometers
| from my grandmother's house. Further away than when I started.
|
| Oh boy. There's something deeply human about the frustrations of
| state institutions and bureaucracy.
|
| From the linked article:
|
| > How are train cancellations and delays compensated when
| traveling with the Deutschland-Ticket?
|
| > In the event of a delay of at least 60 minutes at the
| destination station due to a delay or train cancellation in local
| transport, you will receive EUR1.50 compensation per case.
|
| > Amounts under EUR4 will not be paid out due to a legal de
| minimis threshold. However, you can accumulate multiple late
| payment claims.
|
| https://www.bahn.de/faq/deutschlandticket-verspaetung-erstat...
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| Planes have never diverted people to the wrong country. It's
| always state institutions.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Here's just one example of planes doing exactly that.
| https://dailynewshungary.com/wizz-air-tirana-podgorica-
| fligh...
| yeputons wrote:
| Happens regularly. And if you don't have a visa for the new
| destination, well, too bad.
|
| E.g. on December 20 a WizzAir flight 4768 was diverted to
| Thessaloniki (Greece) instead of its destination Skopje
| (North Macedonia): https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/WZ
| Z4768/history/2025... . Those with Schengen visas (or
| appropriate passports) got a bus to Skopje. The rest
| allegedly waited for three hours and then got returned to
| Cyprus (EU, but not Schengen), but to a different airport
| (Paphos instead of Larnaca). So if someone had a car left on
| Larnaca's parking, too bad.
| maverwa wrote:
| Maybe worth mentioning that this ,,1.50EUR compensation" rule
| only matters if you use the ,,Deutschland-Ticket" which is a
| fixed price ticket for a whole month, unlimited travel on the
| Regio lines (short distance trains, i.e. non IC)
|
| If you bought a regular route ticket you get 25% and more than
| an hour delay, and 50% at more than two hours. Not sure how it
| is with other multi-use tickets.
|
| This, combined with the certain delays CAN make traveling by
| train quite affordable... /s
|
| https://www.bahn.de/service/informationen-buchung/fahrgastre...
| croes wrote:
| That's what you get when you stop seeing train service as a
| service and try to make into a business.
|
| They stopped caring about their main customers and tried to
| compete with planes.
|
| On top of that everything traffic related seems to be reserved
| for the least competent politicians.
| on_the_train wrote:
| DB is a typical German moloch. Insane wages, a culture of anti
| performance. And being eaten alive by consultants. I know someone
| working there. It's a tragedy how they change once good people
| accountofthaha wrote:
| I am never taking the train in Germany or through Germany again
| (or through Belgium, for that matter). The experience is
| consistently bad. NS, DB, and NMBS all perform poorly. Train
| travel itself has become unreliable and frustrating. Ever since I
| got my car, the difference in freedom is obvious.
|
| I do support having basic public transport and solid bike
| infrastructure for young people, but once you're 25 or older,
| there's little justification for relying on such low-quality
| public transport.
|
| I'll be going to Prague next year, and I'm fully willing to drive
| for hours rather than sit on a train that keeps getting delayed,
| is unpleasant to be on, and costs far too much.
| adammarples wrote:
| I thought in Germany you got unlimited train travel for EUR58?
| mschild wrote:
| Yes, but not for the IC and ICE which are long distsnce
| trains. Those are still separate tickets as usual.
| barrkel wrote:
| Local trains, not ICE or IC.
| accountofthaha wrote:
| Not for ICE, the only train worth getting for me. Also I
| don't live in Germany, in the Netherlands. Trains are
| expensive. Even though I live in the Randstad, near big
| cities, I don't have any good public transport here. It's
| just not worth it for me.
| Svip wrote:
| > The train starts moving. The driver announces there are "issues
| around Bonn." He does not specify what kind. No one asks. We have
| learned not to ask.
|
| This is one of those issues I keep mulling about; it seems train
| operators (and airliners for that matter) tend to avoid being
| technically specific about operation problems, and just say
| "problems" and - if they are kind - where the problem is. And I
| cannot decide whether this is the wrong or right approach: how
| much information is too much? The argument is that travellers
| don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed, they
| just want to know when the next train is.
|
| The problem - however - is that train operators come off looking
| like idiots, when they really aren't. As an example, the S-trains
| around Copenhagen have recently switched to a CBTC signal system,
| which has increased punctuality to 97% (below 3 minutes,
| cancelled trains counted). At cold temperatures, railway points
| (or switches, if you will) might become inoperable, as their
| mechanism freeze (of course, there are systems to prevent this,
| but can occur anyway). This happened this November on the S-train
| lines, but the announcement was "signal failure"; which meant the
| train operator (DSB) (and the railway owner (Banedanmark)) kind
| of looked a bit stupid, since the whole point of CBTC was to
| eliminate signal failures entirely (in fact, if you're being
| pedantic, since CBTC has _no_ signals, there technically cannot
| be any signal failures), and had promised as much.
|
| But - then again - travellers really just wanted to know what the
| next train was, but I still think train operators are doing
| themselves a disservice by being oblique about the actual
| problem. Particularly when a problem lasts for several days,
| "technical problems" just makes people think their engineers are
| incompetent, when in reality they have no idea about the severity
| of the problem (because it is not communicated).
|
| I may of course be biased here, since I have a high interest in
| how trains operate, but friends of mine - whose interest is far
| lessen compared to mine - are also frustrated by these opaque
| messages; and I think the reason is a strong sense of lack of
| control - since (assuming one made it to the station on time) up
| until this point, the passenger have done everything right, and
| yet the system failed, and now they are not privy as to why.
| forgingahead wrote:
| My sense is that this has happened over the last 20-30 years as
| overall competence has just dropped in many of these key
| positions. COVID was a good example of this - lots of humming
| and hawing about why decisions were being made, and garbled
| messaging about the reasons. Basically they get angry and
| defensive about blaming the "peanut gallery" or "armchair
| experts" while not being specific, because they themselves
| don't know why or how something is being done, and therefore
| being unable to defend their own positions from solid ground.
| ffuxlpff wrote:
| By always talking only about non specified "problems" and
| getting people not to expect any further information it is
| easier to hide when it's a suicide.
| Vespasian wrote:
| At least the last few times I had those they were announced
| as "accident with injuries along the tracks" or "People on
| the track".
|
| It's usually reported (briefly) in the local news.
| Svip wrote:
| I cannot speak for other countries; but in Denmark, they are
| always crystal clear when the train has hit someone
| (>>personpakorsel<< in Danish); and even when they _suspect_
| they might have hit someone; so when I say "technical
| problems", I mean _technical_ problems. Besides, I am not
| sure I see the point of hiding when they 've hit someone?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| There's a lot of evidence for suicide being socially
| contagious, particularly through communications to the
| general public which will inevitably find their way to
| people who in that moment are particularly vulnerable.
| Newspapers publishing suicides causes an untick in
| subsequent suicides. Newspapers publicizing murder-suicides
| even causes an increase in murder-suicides. Publicized
| information about suicides by train increase the rate of
| suicides by trains.
|
| It is therefore a beat practice to generally avoid mention
| suicide, because mentioning suicide means prompting people
| to think about suicide and in some cases that means
| prompting people to consider suicide. This is known as the
| Werther effect, you can look that up if you'd like to know
| more.
| martin-t wrote:
| Sometimes the train conductor will admit it or you can tell
| because the reason they give is different each time.
|
| I find it stupid, it is what it is, just say it. This double
| speak serves no purpose.
| mschild wrote:
| Part of the reason is that train drivers often dont even know
| themselves. They might simply get the signal to hold the train
| or that it needs to be diverted.
| tapia wrote:
| I am always a bit annoyed when the root of the problem is not
| explained. This is the case most of the time (DB of course). I
| would really like to have a bit more information. Even if there
| is nothing you can do, it helps to understand how big or small
| the problem is. Then you can make a decision based on it. Like
| getting out in the next station or something.
| globular-toast wrote:
| In the UK they do tend to say what the actual problem is, even
| if it's someone "under a train". But it has resulted in mockery
| for things like "leaves on the line" from people who apparently
| know how to run trains safely. You can't win really.
| dmurray wrote:
| Airlines are vague about this (at least in Europe) because
| different types of problems mean different obligations to
| compensate passengers.
|
| After the incident they will determine what's the least
| expensive lie they can plausibly give (perhaps the weather will
| change fast enough that you can blame the weather, perhaps you
| can't lie about an equipment failure when everyone in the
| airport sees you swap out the airplane). If they tell the
| passengers the truth at the time they risk being held to that
| later.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| Thankfully the EU at least has regulations requiring
| compensation. On my last business trip to Europe I got 650
| euros for an overnight delay. The last time I got delayed in
| the US I got a hearty "fuck off" from the gate agent.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Heh, on the other hand the one and only time I arrived
| hours earlier was in the US :) I was flying AMS to SFO via
| Portland, we cleared immigration unusually fast, and when I
| got to my gate (connecting flight was in like 4 hours) the
| lady there asked if I wanted to move to an earlier one,
| boarding in ~20 mins. I said sure, and I even got the
| checked-in luggage at SFO (she did say that there was a
| chance it'd get sent later).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Airlines are often happy to do this as the earlier flight
| is likely not full, and allowing you on it costs them
| nothing while it opens a seat on the later flight which
| they can then sell to a standby passenger.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| On paper yes, but every time my flight was delayed in EU
| the airlines (KLM, Lufthansa, RyanAir) always had a cop
| out, weather, airport issues, etc. and I didn't get
| compensated. Even though other planes managed to fly in the
| same conditions.
| integralid wrote:
| If they refuse you can escalate or hire a company that
| will negotiate for some percentage of profit. In most
| cases I had this problem they gave me a refund, but
| sometimes I had to argue a bit.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| Yet the very fact that airlines routinely _do_ put people up
| in hotels when flights get cancelled is an example of the
| exorbitant privilege of air travel (another being tax-free
| kerosene).
|
| Nobody expects this to happen with train travel. Perhaps they
| should.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| At the station itself, on the other hand, you might as well
| play "delay bingo". Is it an earlier training running late that
| is now slowing down other trains? Is it yet another
| Stellwerksstorung? Or maybe it's urgent track repairs? It might
| also be an Oberleitungsschaden!
|
| To be honest, I don't care about excuses. Yes, problems happen,
| but this is systemic. Does it help me if I know the train
| tracks are broken yet again? It does not. The reasons (excuses)
| they bring up ring hollow. I don't feel that drivers or station
| staff would appear stupid if they don't tell. They are victims,
| too.
| mcv wrote:
| I think they look stupider by not saying anything. They look
| stupid by all of these constant delays, cancellations, and the
| occasional utterly surreal self-inflicted problem like in the
| article. That's what makes them look stupid.
|
| Just explain what's wrong. Arm passengers with the best info
| you can give them. And figure out a way to let people disembark
| close to where they need to be.
|
| DB has become a complete joke. I've had to travel to and
| through Germany several times these past couple of years, and
| almost always there's a problem.
|
| I once paid 80 euro for a taxi from Essen to Dusseldorf because
| they cancelled the train that would connect to the last ICE to
| Amsterdam. When I got to Dusseldorf on time, the ICE arrived at
| a different platform than announced. I only noticed that
| because some people were suddenly leaving the platform. I
| warned a few people who still hadn't noticed it. I bet a lot of
| people still managed to miss that train after all the trouble
| making it to Dusseldorf.
| busterarm wrote:
| I've always considered the S-trains to be pretty good -- at
| least in my experience. At least on par with the NYC MTA that
| I'm used to.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > The argument is that travellers don't care why the train
| cannot move or why it is delayed
|
| Deutsche Bahn does not think this is true and neither do I. If
| this was ever the thinking, they've performed or read studies
| and changed their mind
|
| You can very clearly hear the drilled setup "<delay info> grund
| dafur ist <error category>" rigidly being regurgitated every.
| single. time. a delay is announced. The middle words are (per
| my understanding) a formal way to say "because of" and it's not
| something you will hear in daily life, so I presume it's the
| output of a committee and corporate requires them to say this,
| no matter if they know anything more than "the signal is red".
| Whether they know or not, the detail is always at a level that
| sounds like malicious compliance. I'd rather they say "we don't
| know" or say nothing at all. And if they do know, I'd hope they
| make up a new sentence like "someone was spotted on the
| crossing up ahead after the barriers closed. Someone is
| checking the cameras to make sure it won't come to a collision"
| but we instead get the robotic "we have come to a stop on the
| grounds of person on track". It mimics their training samples
| and what colleagues got into the habit of saying so I guess
| they think it's good like this, but is not actually helpful
|
| Idk what creates this useless information culture, but they
| clearly know that passengers do want this information
| peterspath wrote:
| We in the Netherlands often complain about the NS (Dutch
| Railways)... but it had a 93.9% on time rate. That is quite good.
|
| But ooof, the few times I had to cross the border to Germany by
| train were hell.
|
| I appreciated the NS from that moment on more...
| moepstar wrote:
| If you haven't seen the datamining DB talk by David Kriesel, you
| absolutely positively should!
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0rb9CfOvojk
| Farbklex wrote:
| I travel to Cologne about 5 times a year. 2h ride, usually 25
| minutes late in each direction. Just go to the board bistro right
| away, order some food (if available), grab a beer or coffee and
| don't look at the time.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| The DB service described is terrible, but the author's language
| is really hard to get around.
|
| The constant comparison to cows, for example, suggesting it's ok
| and normal to mistreat non humans, instead of making the far more
| obvious connection that if a human who is understanding exactly
| what is happening goes through so much suffering with a slight
| change of schedule, the fear and suffering cows and other animals
| who are constantly being transported in far worse conditions with
| no idea what is happening may be going through.
|
| The comparison to kidnapping is also really bad. I've taken a
| plane that had been diverted to the wrong, unfriendly, country
| and then been unable to leave a tiny terminal, with no to limited
| access to food, water and restroom facilities for hours, and the
| idea that we were being kidnapped never crossed my mind, although
| actual kidnapping by the state we were in was a remote but real
| possibility.
| shevy-java wrote:
| "I had been kidnapped at a loss."
|
| German bureaucracy. They should just learn from the Swiss.
| Because the Swiss actually understand how to be effective in
| bureaucracy.
| BloondAndDoom wrote:
| 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
| answer is yes.
|
| I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for
| various random reasons and I'd just get out so I don't have to
| walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is
| "safety issue" and "someone else's problem" is where we lost our
| ways, and it's never coming back.
| mothballed wrote:
| This has been done in USA using slow moving freight inner-city.
| Just can't do it on passenger service. It is illegal, but there
| is no one around to enforce it, the vast majority of the time.
|
| I can neither confirm nor deny, I may have done it to get
| to/from the grocery store from near my house when I didn't have
| money for a car.
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| I don't think so as in this case Deutsche Bahnn owns both the
| station and the train. In the UK they've gone a bit crazy
| with the whole free market thing. Public transport should not
| be a market.
|
| In Germany there's also the issue that the powerful car
| makers are always lobbying the government to budget cut
| public transport.
| kuschku wrote:
| Germany does actually have station fees. And DB isn't the
| only operator. The RRX trains, one of which OP talked
| about, are operated by DB and National Express, ordered by
| the RRX group comprised of VRR, go.Rheinland, NWL, SPNV-
| Nord and NVV, running on tracks and stations by DB InfraGO.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The current UK government is re-nationalising the railways.
| Several operators are currently nationalised (and the train
| fares have dropped!), and the plan is for _all_ of them to
| be, once the contracts run out.
| nephihaha wrote:
| The Welsh government has already nationalised local
| trains.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I'm still not sure why everywhere's devolved except
| England.
| nephihaha wrote:
| London is one of the places that least needed to be
| devolved (because the UK is run like a city state). It is
| in England the last time I checked. Bits of Northern
| England have been offered it and refused it.
|
| There has been some popular demand for Cornish
| devolution, but Whitehall is only prepared to entertain
| it within some greater south west region.
|
| There is also some devo to councils.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Transport for Wales has nationalised its trains. A lot of
| the infrastructure is paid for by the state as well.
|
| By the way, I can remember the state run British Rail and
| that was bad too. Neither nationalisation nor private
| operators have done well with British trains over the past
| fifty years.
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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 (which
| can be basically anything) meant I was delayed by over an
| hour home from Yorkshire on Saturday, but that also means it
| was effectively free.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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).
| zipy124 wrote:
| They actually do. I was on a train a month ago from Sheffield
| to London and a passenger was on the wrong train and they
| scheduled an extra stop to get them on the right train. Kind
| of restored my faith in humanity a bit tbh.
| qingcharles wrote:
| They did this for me once on an Intercity or whatever they
| call them these days. I fell asleep and woke up to my Mum
| waving at me from the station platform in Lancaster or
| somewhere wondering why I had not gotten off the train as
| it pulled out of the station. The conductor was kind enough
| to stop the train at some random cattle grid barely-even-a-
| platform in the middle of nowhere and radioed the train
| coming the other direction to pick me up. Bless.
| Zealotux wrote:
| 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 regional train in France, and the
| crew swiftly adapted by bending rules to accommodate a
| difficult situation caused by bad weather. I'm not sure this
| could happen today, but it was a thing 10 years ago, we used to
| trust the operators back then.
| svara wrote:
| As far as DB goes, I'm pretty sure it's mostly an issue of
| systemic technical and consequently social collapse.
|
| The system runs beyond its limits and consequently the
| culture collapses because the people inside learn they have
| no agency.
|
| The German rail network is quite good on paper, with dense
| and high frequency connections even to relatively remote
| locations.
|
| But keeping that functional (particularly with constantly
| rising demand) requires far more investment than it receives.
|
| All the examples of great rail systems (France, Switzerland,
| Japan) are both simpler in network structure and invest more
| relative to their passenger load.
| wiz21c wrote:
| That's the crux: we must invest in trains instead of
| planes.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I have no idea how planes are the dominant form of
| transport for relatively short routes (like within the
| bounds of a large country or to an adjacent one) and how
| even in Europe the train networks can be a bit of a mess.
|
| Like surely it's easier to run a railway network when
| compared to the insane complexity to safely operate an
| airport and all the work that goes into plane maintenance
| and pilot training and so on.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| You need a lot of infrastructure for trains (and a lot of
| it isn't even used all that much -- it's not like all
| rails have a train passing by every 5 minutes). You also
| can't get much use out of your rolling stock because the
| speeds are fairly slow. You also don't have the same
| flexibility as planes have regarding routes.
|
| The upshot is that trains are a lot costlier than most
| believe think and most railway routes require state
| subsidies (with goods transport usually being an
| exception), whereas air traffic works so well it can be
| taxed heavily.
| thayne wrote:
| Another factor is that building new rail lines requires
| eminent domain and acquiring land across multiple
| jurisdictions etc.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Why not invest in a vast 24/7 high frequency electric bus
| network instead of the big infrastructure costs of
| trains?
| airspresso wrote:
| Sounds neat but what kind of range limits would that
| impose on each trip? Switching from one means of
| transportation to another, even if both are buses,
| increases the total travel time significantly. Not to
| mention all the hassle involved for passengers.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| trains can be superfast. For example a tgv from
| strassbourg to marseille is 5-6h. Same with car is for me
| 8h. Bus is even slower so I would wildy guess 12h. Plan
| is btw 1 1/2 hour.
| iridium184 wrote:
| Air traffic is not taxed heavily compared to other modes
| of transport - on the contrary, it is _very heavily_
| subsidized (at least in Europe): Regional airports often
| strongly depend on state subsidies, airlines are exempt
| from petroleum taxes, flight tickets are VAT-exempt.
|
| In Germany (and also e.g. Switzerland), long-distance
| trains are expected to run either at cost (or make a
| profit). Short-distance trains (regional transport) are
| usually subsidized.
| cyberax wrote:
| Why?
|
| Planes are faster, and there is actual competition
| keeping prices down. There is no competition on
| railroads, no accountability, no nothing. More
| importantly, railroads have to be managed centrally to
| work. And this makes them overwhelmingly complex,
| resulting in an ever-growing bureaucracy.
|
| Air travel is decentralized, and while individual
| airports (cue: BER) can get screwed up, it doesn't
| cascade through the whole system.
|
| We just need to add a bit of carbon pricing to reflect
| the true price of flights.
| pembrook wrote:
| No amount of money will overcome the fundamental issue:
| monopoly.
|
| Airlines are subject to market competition since any
| competitor around the globe can spot a poorly run route
| and buy their planes into those slots. If they can
| execute more efficiently than you, they can afford to
| lower prices (or increase the level of service) more than
| you, and thus put you out of business.
|
| Trains do not work this way. No amount of investment can
| overcome the cushy institutional-rot, laziness, and
| demotivation that inevitably results from being a
| monopoly, as most train routes are not subject to
| competitive forces due to the real world constraints of
| the infrastructure needed.
| zorked wrote:
| China and Switzerland seem to do fine with trains.
| tonfa wrote:
| France, Italy, Austria (and probably others) don't have
| monopoly on long distance train. For instance, you can
| take a DB/Renfe/Trenitalia train on french high speed
| line, or in Austria take a Westbahn train instead of OBB.
|
| That said personally I much prefer the mostly fixed
| pricing (and no reservation required) of swiss network
| than the dynamic one of other countries.
| carlmr wrote:
| >invest more relative to their passenger load.
|
| For Switzerland does this account for the almost double
| salaries or only absolute spending?
|
| If you spend 1EUR in Switzerland I imagine you get much
| less work output than for 1EUR in Germany.
| hylaride wrote:
| Raw investment numbers don't _necessarily_ matter, but
| the productivity of said number. Even if things are more
| expensive in Switzerland, if they make efficient use of
| said investment, then it can work out ok (or even
| better).
|
| I have no idea if this is actually the case, but you have
| to take that into account or Switzerland would not be as
| successful as it is. Higher incomes have historically
| been a symptom of productivity (and while median incomes
| and productivity have decoupled, especially in the
| angosphere, it is still usually correlated).
| carlmr wrote:
| >Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of
| productivity
|
| If I go to Zurich I get a burger for 30Fr that I can get
| in Southern Germany for 15EUR and in Berlin for 8EUR.
| That is with roughly the same quality.
|
| I'd say _past_ productivity leads to network effects and
| investments in one area that boost local salaries and
| decouples them quite strongly from _current_
| productivity.
|
| My previous company had a per-dollar extremely
| unproductive location in silicon valley. The people there
| weren't at fault. You don't magically become more
| productive because you live next to SF.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| 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 speed is actually lower than previous
| generations.
|
| I have seen this systemic problem in other domains I worked
| in. The problems are very similar, and at the end of the
| day I can somewhat relate to the workers attitude of "why
| should I lean out of the window if I get punished anyway".
| But in some cases the workers are unfireable and oftentimes
| it is exactly that attitude that let the management get
| away with the terrible working conditions (most of the
| times more psychological than physical abuse) so it feeds
| into each other.
| darubedarob wrote:
| Add to that the transport buisness beeing marginal to the
| company who is mainly a immo speculation company trying
| to sell the strips of inner city land they hold.
| biztos wrote:
| Immo being real estate (Immobilien), for the curious.
| mc32 wrote:
| Could be. It used to be that to get phone service in
| Germany could take up to a month after putting in the
| order, that's when it was state controlled. After the
| reforms installations were quicker.
|
| So to me, there doesn't seem to be a panacea except to
| hold the services accountable in some way.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's a different situation / scenario and addressed a
| different problem.
|
| The government is the most efficient and effective at big
| capital spending and with what I would call static
| operations. Competitive private entities are the best at
| delivering value on the front-end.
|
| Monopolist/cartel private entites combine the rapacious
| nature of rent seeking with the lazy inefficiency of
| bureaucracy to great a giant ball of failure. Effective
| privatization requires either creating a framework for a
| robust competitive landscape OR tight, effective
| regulatory control. There's no universal correct answer.
|
| If competition is in place and companies can win or lose,
| they will move mountains to yield marginal gain. If you
| let them get fat & lazy, _you_ will need to move a
| mountain to do anthing -- even make more money!
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > If competition is in place and companies can win or
| lose, they will move mountains to yield marginal gain.
|
| ... in the short term, happily screwing over society at
| large and possibly even themselves in the medium to long
| term. Perverse incentives are everywhere.
| hulitu wrote:
| > After the reforms installations were quicker.
|
| And everybody has the same "market" price.
| linmob wrote:
| 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), and
| IC X (ICE 4), DB management has a tendency to decide
| next-to-last minute, that new vehicles must earn money
| and thus get rebranded ICE, which is both more
| prestigious and (at least in a fictional world without
| "Sparpreis") pricey.
|
| TL;DR: This would be outrageous if ICE-L was to replace
| ICE 3 (neo; 320km/h +) services - but it is not.
| tdullien wrote:
| The privatization of the train system in Germany was a
| particularly insane disaster that is only now, 30 years
| later, being undone/repaired.
|
| If you look at an org chart of the DB these days, the most
| fascinating part is that DB consists of almost 600 separate
| corporate entities that are all supposed to invoice each
| other.
|
| Speaking with insiders, it appears that when the
| privatization happened, the new corporate structure took
| what was essentially every mid-size branch of the org chart
| and created a separate corporate entity, with cross-
| invoicing for what would normally normal intra-company
| cooperation. I think the (misguided) goal was to obtain
| some form of accountability inside a large organisation
| that had been state-funded and not good at internal
| accounting.
|
| This fragmentation lead to insane inflexibility, as each of
| the 600 entities has a separate PnL and is loathe to do
| anything that doesn't look good on their books.
|
| Add to this a history of incompetent leadership (Mehdorn,
| who also ran AirBerlin into the ground, and who was also
| responsible for the disastrous BER airport build-out),
| repeated rounds of cost-cutting that prioritized
| "efficiency" over "resiliency of the network" etc. etc.
|
| DB is currently undergoing a massive corporate
| restructuring to simplify the 600+ entity structure, but
| there has been a massive loss of expertise, underinvestment
| in infrastructure, poor IT (if you see a job ad for a
| Windows NT4 admin, it's likely DB), etc. etc. -- it'll take
| a decade or more to dig the org out of the hole it is in.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| It was a privatization in name only. The German state
| held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it
| might have no longer been subject to the state specific
| demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an
| uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an
| entity that was something between a customer and a
| shareholder.
|
| Which brings up an interesting question: How do you
| structure something with a large piece of infrastructure
| like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the
| market forces of competition and innovation?
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I believe modern economists are studying how ownership
| should be assigned. The thinking is that contracts and
| rules handle the majority of situations but emergencies
| and edge cases require an owner who has authority and
| whose interests align with the thing they control. And
| you want a mechanism to reassign ownership when the
| previous owner is incompetent.
|
| In the case of a national train system, you may want to
| create a national entity to develop, coordinate, and make
| the physical trains and support technologies. You would
| create regional or metro entities to control the train
| network for their local area including the train
| stations. They coordinate with each other via negotiated
| contracts. Any edge cases or emergency falls under the
| purview of the owning entity. For example, the national
| entity controls the switch from diesel locomotives to the
| newest engine. The local authority is responsible for
| repairing the lines after a natural disaster.
|
| If an entity is egregiously incompetent or failing, the
| national regulatory authority, with support of the
| majority of all the different train entities, takes
| control and reforms it.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| You can't. Every attempt at privatizing rail is a failure
| with worse performance, higher prices, and an inevitable
| level of special treatment by the state due to the
| monopolistic utility-like nature of rail infrastructure.
| Not everything needs to or should be privatized.
| airspresso wrote:
| This 100%. It should be seen as critical infrastructure
| because of everything it can enable when run well.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > It was a privatization in name only.
|
| Not, that "insight" again. Yes it was privatized and yes
| it is still completely owned by the state.
| "Privatization" is a term of art (in German) that refers
| to the corporate structure not the ownership. There are
| also public corporations in Germany, that are fully owned
| by random people: e.V. = registered association.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Which brings up an interesting question: How do you
| structure something with a large piece of infrastructure
| like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the
| market forces of competition and innovation?
|
| A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can
| build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and
| interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually
| offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot
| less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely
| than overlap.
|
| All that to say, you can't really get market forces on
| the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but
| roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by
| market forces either.
|
| Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit
| across modes. You can have multiple transportation
| companies running on the same rails, and have some market
| forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to
| have significant competition.
| solatic wrote:
| > capacity constraints make it difficult to have
| significant competition
|
| Thirty years ago, you would be correct. In the modern
| day, you could tie switch signalling to real-time
| auctions and let private rail's command centers decide
| how much to bid and thus whether or not they win the slot
| for putting their cars onto the shared rails. The public
| rail owner likely needs to set rules allowing passenger
| rail to pay a premium to secure slots in advance (say, a
| week) so that a timetable can be guaranteed to passengers
| during peak rush hour, but off-peak slots can and should
| be auctioned to naturally handle the difference between
| off-peak passenger rail and not-time-sensitive, more-
| cost-averse freight rail.
| riffraff wrote:
| keep the rails as a state-owned monopoly, let different
| train operators run on it. Basically we have that for
| airplanes, and it works well enough.
| p00dles wrote:
| <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>
|
| you summarized my 5+ year experience living in Germany with
| one sentence in a way that I have never found the words for -
| thank you, really, thank you
|
| I feel that in Germany, the original intent of the many
| rules, processes, and procedures has been lost. Employees are
| trained to operate such that every situation is governed by a
| rule/process/procedure, and their job is to look up the
| situation in a massive leather-bound book of branching rules,
| see which rule applies in the given situation, and then...
| apply the rule. But, they will do this only if they assess
| that helping you falls under their job's responsibilities.
| Sometimes your situation is neat and clean, and was what the
| rule-writers thought about when they wrote the rules.
| Sometimes, not.
|
| TLDR: if you have an edge case in the German bureaucratic
| system (forms at the doctor's office, Deutsche Bahn travel
| troubles, closing a bank account), you are f***
| fbcpck wrote:
| It is certainly my biggest dislike factor with my stay in
| Germany, and I'm still struggling to come to terms with it:
| do I dislike it enough to compel me to move away? is this
| something I can accept? How much can I influence and
| improve things that I directly interact with?
|
| It seeps in everywhere too, with almost all aspects.
|
| Day-to-day with restaurants, cafe, shops. Almost all
| interaction feels like it's actively checked if it's in
| their process or job description. Shop staffs are typically
| disengaged and can't really help you with anything outside
| the normal process.
|
| Healthcare, both receptionist and doctors. You can see the
| rushed service because they are only compensated for
| limited amount of time by the state insurance. This took me
| a while to figure out; the process really defines what
| treatment you get, with what equipments, as well as the
| duration, and they have to do their best with the
| constraints put by the process.
|
| An example: with Wurzelkanalbehandlung, the process says
| (at least back then) only 1 hour of Laborkosten can be
| compensated by the state insurance. This means if the
| dentist took more than 1 hour to work on you, that would be
| done at their personal loss, and thus the incentive to rush
| the procedure.
|
| Going private helps (they tend to be more relaxed after the
| mention of of Privatzahler, and gives you access to newer
| equipments not yet acknowledged by the state insurance
| processes), but you still have to research, find, and pick
| the right practice.
|
| Bureaucracy, administrative. You often have to deal with
| clerks that just go "I just work here", the rules says this
| and there's nothing I can do, throws hand in the air.
| Goodbye, next person please!
|
| In day-to-day work, I can also see it. New hires tend to be
| more into the work, and questions things, but the system
| does push everyone to just follow the process and not do
| anything more. I've seen my colleagues slowly shift into
| this mode, delivering what is outlined, nothing more, not
| questioning the intent behind the work (or at least, doing
| it much less than before, because the system does not
| incentivise that).
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Every country is different and you need to learn slightly
| different ways of dealing with them in each. On a bad day
| it can be pretty exhausting.
|
| It turns out, people everywhere want the same things, in
| the end. They just go about them differently.
|
| In Germany, it often helps frame it as both of you trying
| to work with the rules together; as a framework to build
| within and on, rather than a cage to hold you in.
|
| Doesn't always work. Nothing works all the time,
| (especially if the other person is having a bad day
| themselves and just wants it to be over). But if it helps
| even once eh?
| solaire_oa wrote:
| I would summarize Americans (and perhaps most English
| speaking countries) as perceiving this mindset to be
| callous, ineffective, and a dereliction of autonomy.
|
| But I'm interested in how Germans perceive Americans in
| reverse? If shop staff went out of their way to help them
| find a product, shoot the breeze, or recommend a lunch
| spot, would Germans tend to see this as being
| overzealous? Would it cause embarrassment, or be a
| pleasant surprise? Just curious.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I tend to view shop staff having a random talk with
| someone while I'm waiting to purchase or ask something as
| a dereliction of duty. If you want to catch up with a
| friend you can do it on your own time.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| The difference in healthcare between private and public
| insurance is, as far as i know, because if a doctor sends
| you for some test or something that your insurance feels
| was unnecessary then the doctor has to pay for it with
| the public flavour. At least, that's what I heard but
| could be wrong.
| chironjit wrote:
| Yeah, I think people who have not experienced the system have
| no idea how absurd the German process mindset is. If it's not
| part of the process, it's impossible - damned what the
| reality on the ground is
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| The general reason is, the rule exists for a reason, and the
| "low worker" does not understand the bigger picture, so you
| should follow it blindly before doing something harmful you
| can't foresee. It's not always working well, but to be fair,
| also not always bad. Knowing how much you can stretch the
| rules can be an art which takes a long time to acquire.
| hylaride wrote:
| Some cultures are more sticklers for creating and following
| rules and bureaucracy than others, though.
|
| A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without
| a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get
| grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad
| example if you did the same.
|
| Another example: Both France and Germany spend roughly the
| same amount (in raw Euros) on their militaries. France
| (which ALSO spends and develops a lot of their own kit) has
| a functional and effective military, including the only
| non-American nuclear aircraft carriers, and a bunch of
| nuclear attack and ballistic submarines and it's own
| nuclear deterrent. Germany is barely able to maintain their
| much smaller infrastructure because of its ineffective
| bureaucracy (there was a scandal a few years ago where over
| 80% of their euro fighters were combat ineffective due to
| lack of maintenance).
| CalRobert wrote:
| Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to
| remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and
| shift it to the very people being killed, but this
| doesn't seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| These are generally the same boot licking demographics
| who'll sit and wait out a 2min light cycle at 1:45am
| rather than treating it like a 4-way stop. Putting their
| money where their mouth is puts them head and shoulders
| above the types that tend to dominate the discussion on
| such issues.
| wat10000 wrote:
| That's not boot licking, that's "I don't want to get a
| ticket, and just because I don't see a cop doesn't mean
| there isn't one."
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Fine then. They drive the speed limit in the left lane or
| whatever. Point is that the people who advocate for the
| rules in obscenely trivial situations when deviating them
| them is in fine taste tend to be drawn from the pool of
| "robotic rule follower with no extra thought given" type
| people. Which has the side effect of making them
| consistent with what they preach.
| systemtest wrote:
| I was in Germany once at a red light for a pedestrian
| crossing. After the last pedestrian had fully crossed the
| street and the pedestrian light turned red I drove off. I
| did not wait for my own light to turn green which is
| typical in my country.
|
| The person behind me flashed their lights. Cultural
| difference I guess. Why wait when there is nothing to
| wait for.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Risk/cost ratio? A pedestrian acting irresponsibly can of
| course do a lot of damage, but the likelihood of killing
| someone is much lower than if a vehicle is breaking the
| rules.
| ajxs wrote:
| I live in Australia, which is culturally the polar
| opposite of Germany[1], and you'd get a similar response
| here. If the police saw it, you'd be fined at least $500,
| and risk losing your licence.
|
| 1: Australia is very egalitarian, rather than
| hierarchical. Pragmatic, rather than bureaucratic.
| Australians are direct and emotive communicators.
| Spontaneous planners, etc. etc.
| fabian2k wrote:
| Nobody cares if you jaywalk as long as no children are
| around. If there are children around, most people will
| avoid crossing a red light even if they otherwise would
| cross. But that's not a rule-following thing, it's a
| "don't set a bad example to children" thing. It's easier
| to teach children the rules about how to behave in
| traffic if you have fewer adults obviously violating
| them.
| smithkl42 wrote:
| That would make sense, except that one of the universal
| rules of childhood is, "Adults get to do things you don't
| get to do, usually for damn good reasons, so get used to
| it." Every child knows this in their bones, even when
| they don't like it.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Kids are stupid and follow what adults do. If I judge
| that I have the time to cross the street at red light
| without getting hit by the incoming car doesnt mean that
| the kid standing next to me is even seeing the car and
| crossing right after me.....
|
| Showing kids good example is good. What you mean is
| showing them bounderies. Getting shit drunk in front of
| kids and telling them how much fun it is but they cant do
| it is behaving like a child
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Note that what is eschewed and illegal is crossing at a
| traffic light when it is red. Just walking 50m away and
| crossing there is fine.
| tetha wrote:
| > A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk
| without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany,
| you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for
| setting a bad example if you did the same.
|
| This varies wildly in Germany. In Hamburg, at 7 - 9 in
| the morning near schools or kindergartens with kids
| around, many people are following good traffic behavior.
| At 9 on a university campus, or at 9 at night no one
| really cares.
| spankibalt wrote:
| > "In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a
| child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the
| same."
|
| Yeah, some Bavarian villagers can be hylariously weird.
| I, personally, have jaywalked all my life growing up in
| East and West Germany, and I only got "the lecture"
| twice: once in deeply pious Bavaria, and once in...
| Spain. Both involved the rolemodel-shaming routine as
| kids were to be seen, but only one came with a small fine
| attached.
|
| > "Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought
| if there's no traffic."
|
| Most likely not a POC and not from NY or Washington D.C.,
| I see (I'm reporting for a friend). Ah, anecdotes. The
| spice of life!
| Tommix11 wrote:
| The German philosophy is also very much prevalent in Sweden.
| HolyLampshade wrote:
| I worked in the Swedish office of a multinational for a
| couple of years and the one experience I had where Swedes
| were selling a complex multi-million euro project to
| Germans was one of the most bureaucratically filled
| initiatives I've ever experienced in my life. Not sure if
| the project ever really took off, but I'm thankful I was
| able to avoid it beyond the initial week of discussions.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Reminds me of this.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo
|
| What really ought to bother people more than it does is that
| within just about any white western country/culture you can
| run the same comparison with "decently well off" being the
| german side and "everyone else" being the english side.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Reminds me of being en route with Lufthansa to Germany,
| needing an emergency landing in Turin, being shepherded
| onto a new working plane by Italians, then continuing to
| Germany where the whole plane load arrived without tickets
| from Turin...
|
| The gate people tried to tell us it was impossible to be
| there without tickets, as if we were somehow collectively
| hiding them and a bit of persuasion would convince us to
| find the non-existent tickets! Not one person found they
| had a ticket, despite this allegedly being impossible.
| this_user wrote:
| 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 years in the past. So, no one is really at fault or
| can be held accountable.
|
| It's always some magical higher power preventing you from
| doing the sensible thing. One favourite excuse is insurance
| liability. We can't do the sensible thing, because the
| insurance wouldn't pay if something bad were to happen, even
| though the odds of something bad happening are virtually nil.
|
| You can also observe this in German politics. "Oh, we
| absolutely cannot do <common sense thing> because the rules
| won't allow it." Well, you could change the rules, but then
| you would have to take some actual responsibility, and we
| can't have that.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| My favorite part of German work culture is watching an
| excel sheet together and going over the numbers.
|
| My actual favorite part of German work culture is that
| meetings always have an agenda, that part is a delight when
| doing business with German customers.
| TheTxT wrote:
| As a German I envy your meetings with Germans
| sunaookami wrote:
| Your meetings have an agenda? We just debate something
| and are stuck on some minor unimportant point that
| doesn't matter and the meeting goes into overtime and
| then we schedule 2-3 follow-up meetings where everything
| we said is now completely irrelevant because our
| assumptions were incorrect from the start. And then you
| finally get to work and you can't implement it like it
| was specified since everyone forgot that you can't really
| do X so you have to it some other way making everything
| that was discussed completely moot.
| otikik wrote:
| Sorry, the zoom meeting link has changed so now the
| meeting will take 4 hours and you must get the agenda by
| FAX.
|
| (this is what happened to OP)
| scotty79 wrote:
| > you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be
| held accountable
|
| That kind of explains why they tried to pull it of at
| Nuremberg. And why some nazis that weren't sentenced
| internationally got good jobs in post-war Germany. For
| Germans they weren't really at fault if they were just
| following procedures.
| tempest_ wrote:
| They got good jobs because the Allies did not really care
| about punishing the Nazis.
|
| At the end of WW2 a strong West Germany to oppose the
| USSR was more important than punishing some middle
| manager and the quickest way to get the West German state
| together was to use a lot of the existing bureaucracy.
| this_user wrote:
| "I was just following orders," is a bit of a meme, but
| it's also true, and even more so in the context of
| Prussian-style military discipline. Disobeying an order
| was not an option. You carry it out no matter what, but
| the responsibility lies with the commander. It gets more
| murky for the civilians who theoretically could have
| walked away, but a lot of them had a similar mindset that
| they were just doing their jobs. And you have to keep in
| mind that all of the Nazi's racial ideology had been
| codified into law at the time. So you were once again
| just implementing the rules, even if those rules were
| actually harmful.
|
| But what this episode also highlights is the opposite of
| this in the form of the American approach that is much
| more flexible and willing to bend the rules if necessary.
| Rightfully, the Allies could and probably should have
| brought everyone to justice, but they realised that a lot
| of the Nazi scientists were extremely valuable assets
| that they needed to get a leg up on the Soviets. So
| rather than execute them or put them in prison and throw
| away the key, they recruited them.
| pqtyw wrote:
| That's kind of interesting, though considering that the
| German army (and presumably Prussian before that?) was
| know for giving a relatively huge amount of leeway and
| authority to more junior officers.
|
| Supposedly while the French and British officers were
| frozen waiting for new orders to be telegraphed when
| something didn't go according to plan, Germans took the
| initiative based on what's happening on the ground. US
| and other countries adopted this doctrine after the war
| because of how unexpected successful the German army was
| (despite being outgunned by the French and the soviets
| who had better tanks and more trucks just couldn't figure
| out how to use them efficiently)
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| That's not the main reason though. The reason the
| denazification was mostly a sham is because a lot of
| federal positions required good contacts and experience
| in that field and you couldn't find anyone qualified who
| wasn't in the party. Based not just on first hand
| accounts on the family side but also lots of research. A
| lot of higher ups also were well connected so they got an
| already short conviction halved to released early in
| order to get a position in the government.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| yes but there are so many cases where they took the worst
| of the worst and gave them high profile jobs with way way
| way to much power for high ranking nsdap members.
|
| Rheinhard gehlen and everyone around him is a something
| that could have been prevented.
|
| And so many high class nazis where in such good positions
| because they where experts on anticommunism. For the
| americans and brits it was "safer" to give positions to
| exnsdap officiers then people from the SPD(socialists)
|
| Gehlen kicked even the only high ranking spd member in
| secret service out
|
| for god sake they even hired klaus barbie. that guy had
| entertainment partys where the guests could torture jews
| homosexualls etc... and he killed most of french
| opposition. Got hired from the bnd and cia as expert on
| anticommunism
|
| Germany didnt change much..
|
| fuck we even voted a full member of the nsdap as
| chancelor. Kurt kiesinger. Yes we had two Nazi
| chancellors!!
|
| honestly the only reason the denazification was shit was
| because most people at power at that time where kind of
| nazis.
|
| edit:// btw the DDR had somehow solved the problem and
| didnt had as much nazis in high position.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| 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.
| frenchy wrote:
| Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really
| "blame the person who created the process, not the person
| following it". The people with the authority to alter
| faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's
| clearly bad, because then they become "the person who
| created the process".
| ploxiln wrote:
| Theoretically ... in practice, Boeing's most rigorous
| days in the 80s and 90s were directed by empowered
| individuals in the manufacturing org, and when it went
| full "strict process only" in the 2000s and 2010s the
| quality fell.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I don't think that's due to following the process but
| rather systemic cultural issues. The process doesn't
| exist in a vacuum. There's a good faith meta process that
| needs to be followed to incrementally fix issues as they
| arise.
|
| Bad faith actors and cultural dysfunction can break
| pretty much anything no matter how well thought out it
| might be.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997. Timeline
| checks out.
| macintux wrote:
| > Bad faith actors and cultural dysfunction can break
| pretty much anything no matter how well thought out it
| might be.
|
| U.S. politics today in a nutshell.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| It's also leaving out that system only works (worked) for
| building airplanes because it happens (happened) to be an
| industry with a hugely passionate workforce. Switch it to
| contracted out wage slaves and 'the system' doesn't work.
| Because the system never 'worked', many passionate people
| worked via sheer force of will/desire/care/investment
| into the final product. It was about the people all
| along.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| It's also a crap way to run a culture when you scale it.
|
| You need to make the people best positioned to notice
| something is stupid responsible enough to make them say
| no fuck you because otherwise every oversight and edge
| case will be substantially more likely to cause harm
| because they have less skin in the game.
|
| See also: Cops getting "paid vacations" for bad stuff.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Except a lot of the safety in any given process comes
| from the people: if technicians, pilots, and air traffic
| controllers were not empowered to assess the situation
| and make decisions then there would a heck of a lot more
| accidents.
| kqr wrote:
| Industrial safety must (if it is to be effective)
| recognise that people are an important part of the
| process! They're so often forgotten, with disastrous
| results.
|
| People need to be given timely information, communication
| channels, and authority to straighten things out when
| they go awry. That's good for safety!
| belorn wrote:
| The idea in the aerospace industry is that you should not
| blame the pilot, since pilot error became a all-catch
| rule no matter if there was design or system errors. The
| classical example is the button for the landing gear,
| where pilots continued to accidentally press it and
| crashing the plane. The engineers added guardrails to the
| button and the pilot error rate went down.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| That's my dad who worked at NaSA doing aeronautics stuff
| said.
|
| Pilots fuck up all the time so blaming them doesn't
| excuse anything.
|
| And I find myself butting heads with people over that all
| the time. Coworker (smug satisfied voice) well if the end
| user fucks up it's not our fault. Me (trying not to sound
| really annoyed) yeah it's still our problem.
| sshine wrote:
| Although it has far from mainstreamed yet, I like how the
| software industry has the notion of a "UX bug": if the
| user failed at anything, the software is at fault,
| because it wasn't easy enough to use.
| kqr wrote:
| The lever for the landing gear and the lever for the
| flaps were easily confused. After landing the pilots
| intended to retract flaps but accidentally retracted the
| landing gear instead.
|
| At first they assumed their recruitment process
| accidentally favoured stupid people so they made sure to
| only recruit smart pilots. But it kept happening. Then
| they put a little flap on the end of the flap lever and a
| small wheel on the end of the gear lever and the problem
| went away.
|
| I simplify. Read the full story. It is cool!
| cyberpunk wrote:
| ... I had to take out a special insurance when working from
| home as a freelancer, and share evidence I had done so with
| my client as -- if someone slipped outside my house because
| I'd not swept up the snow somehow the company who was
| paying me would be liable for the insurance claim...
|
| ... Yep.
|
| It's for similar reasons why everyone is up at the crack of
| dawn frantically shovelling snow outside their homes.
|
| Rather spoils the fun of towing the kids to school on a
| sled when every 5 meters there's a perfectly swept bit you
| have to drag it across.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Don't worry. You can drag them on the street! Safety
| first and all that.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >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 years in the past.
| So, no one is really at fault or can be held accountable.
|
| Worse. You can't even take responsibility even if you want
| to, that's usually against the rules too.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Didn't the Germans get in trouble for "just following the
| rules" back in the mid-20th century?
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| "I was just following orders." --Any German soldier after
| 1945
| pqtyw wrote:
| It's interesting considering that based on the German
| military doctrine at the time low ranking officers on the
| ground had a huge amount of independence while the French
| ones were stuck doing nothing and waiting for orders to
| be signed and approved..
|
| Of course maybe that didn't apply to committing
| atrocities to the same degree.
| spankibalt wrote:
| > "[...] 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."
|
| Neither absurdity nor "German philosophy", but just stock-
| standard safety and security culture in action. Or more
| specifically in this case: _generelle_ and
| _objektspezifische_ Dienstanweisungen ( _general_ and
| _location-specific_ administrative instructions or
| regulations) [1]. You don 't follow them, it's you who's on
| the hook. :)
|
| And when was the last time anyone here visited a railway
| control centre in a metropolitan area? Yeah.
|
| 1. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dienstanweisung]
| reddalo wrote:
| A German saying "I was just following orders" sounds scary if
| you think of certain olden times.
| nicbou wrote:
| Although Germans are famously methodical, my experience with
| German bureaucracy was that it's quite flexible. They will
| break you, and when you finally give up and seem like you're
| about to cry, they will roll their eyes, and oblige you,
| stressing how exceptional and magnanimous they are for
| letting you get what you want. In reality, they were rooting
| for you the whole time, but did not want their flexibility to
| be taken for granted.
|
| I document German bureaucracy for a living. I cannot stress
| enough how "vibes-based" the entire thing is. Half the job is
| convincing bureaucrats that you're either overprepared or
| litigious to be worth the trouble.
| mothballed wrote:
| The best strategy I've found with such bureaucrats is to
| bike shed them with an obvious but easy problem that you
| fix with much adieu so they can feel like they've found you
| out and feel like they've done something. Meanwhile they
| will ignore all the subtler things that might be much
| harder for you to deal with.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Frenchman here and so true. I was taking the bus and it was
| stuck in traffic and I was like "hey can you let me out I
| life right in that street and shit aint moving" .... no
| fucking way. had to wait 10 minutes and then walk back to my
| place... driver was completly ghostinh me after he said the
| magic german words " I am not allowed to do this".
|
| In france they Busdrivers let me out between stops if I ask
| them before.
|
| Germany is crazy rule obsessed. they also have the crazy
| mentality that if you put it into rule problem is solved xD
| coderatlarge wrote:
| i love that meme which shows three identical paper clips in a
| row but one is upside down relative to the others which is a
| minute difference. the caption reads "chaos German style"
| lynx97 wrote:
| If you don't know german culture, this story might be hard
| for you to imagine. Fact is, germany has a massive stick up
| its ass. If there is a written rule, they will follow it, no
| matter what.
| type0 wrote:
| For anyone who likes trains I can recommend The Train (1964),
| it's a fun little war movie with Burt Lancaster about French
| resistance in 1944
| fabian2k wrote:
| Anywhere doesn't help you much. You want to stop at a station
| with sufficiently good connections to continue your travels.
|
| This situation seems pretty unusual, even for the DB. A
| regional express train should have many more stops than that.
| It sounds a bit like they switched the train to a direct
| connection to the final stop because they switched to the other
| side of the rhine (so you can't make any of the other planned
| stops anyway).
|
| The major mistake here was not making the stop in Troisdorf. At
| the point where they missed that they should have planned the
| earliest usable stop for the passengers that needed to leave
| there.
|
| I would also assume that there is no safe way for the conductor
| to halt at any earlier stop. A safe halt would need to be
| planned at a higher level.
| taneq wrote:
| Not if you live near the tracks! Obviously that's a bit of a
| safety issue, though, not to mention taking a few minutes
| time from (potentially) hundreds of people to gain a few tens
| of minutes for yourself.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > bit of a safety issue
|
| OK, so you disgorge however many people, at what age, with
| or without babies in ipushchairs or people in wheelchairs,
| onto the tracks, and they avoid the passing 100mph trains,
| they then walk along in the dark and rain for a few miles
| looking for a gap in the fence?
|
| Sure, just a "bit" of an issue.
| jtvjan wrote:
| I mean, to an extent... like it would still give passengers
| an earlier opportunity to correct course.
|
| If they got off at the next stop after troisdorf they could
| take the local bus back to Troisdorf (ten minute wait worst-
| case).
|
| At later stations they could get on the train in the opposite
| direction (30 min wait worst-case).
| mk89 wrote:
| My experience with these "fixes" is that they are worse than
| the other worst solution (in this case, step out in Koln Sud
| and get some other train).
|
| There is really A LOT going on through the tracks in NRW and
| Dusseldorf/Koln/Bonn. It's sad people just read an article
| like this and just blame it on the poor guy as if he was a
| monkey.
|
| The guy actually wanted to do something nice (get people
| closer to Bonn, so they could change a train with an easier
| alternative). It didn't work out, but this shows how bad the
| sync with these systems is, and safety is and must be
| prioritized.
|
| People don't understand how many freight trains travel on
| those tracks.
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Isn't that basically what happened to the USSR? (Yes not
| technically "first world" but highly industrial and
| bureaucratic)
| mothballed wrote:
| People in the USSR at least had the good fortune of already
| living in a world where they were highly adept at recycling
| and barter and maintenance, and in the case of the chechens
| also community self defense.
|
| I think most of America would be fucked as most people
| don't know to how to do anything but their job plus buy
| things with money from their job. The top 25% of handy
| people might be able to change their own oil and that is it
| (not that they can't learn more, but it takes time).
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >I think most of America would be fucked as most people
| don't know to how to do anything
|
| Most of America would be substantially less fucked than
| the slice of mostly officer workers who mostly have
| enough money that "spend money rather than upskill or
| barter" is their default mode of operation you see via
| HN.
| trelane wrote:
| First World was US/NATO aligned. Second World was
| USSR/Warsaw Pact aligned. Third world was unaffiliated with
| either.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I think this is relevant because the colloquialism of it
| meaning "developed" versus "undeveloped" doesn't work
| when you try to build on top of it
|
| it's impossible to build on what Third World means or add
| lore like Fourth World when the definition is on a shaky
| and now non-existent foundation, while much of the
| unaffiliated world is highly developed now.
| trelane wrote:
| Yes. Also, fitting the USSR into the extended framework,
| by not recognizing that it already was _in the framework
| to begin with_.
|
| IIRC Wikipedia says the term was coined ca. 1950s, so it
| could be argued that the USSR's decline was already
| factored into the term.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| > IIRC Wikipedia says the term was coined ca. 1950s, so
| it could be argued that the USSR's decline was already
| factored into the term.
|
| What? The Soviets got the bomb in 1949 and launched
| Sputnik in 1957. That makes no sense.
| trelane wrote:
| That success was not evenly distributed.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Regardless, the Soviet Union was very far from collapsing
| in the 1950s. Again, what are you talking about?
| gkoz wrote:
| There's no indication of any failures of the industrial layer
| in this story. The train was working, it didn't crash into
| anything, everyone was safe.
| scotty79 wrote:
| The train worked, the railway did not.
| fastball wrote:
| Safety failures are not the only type of failure.
| sandblast2 wrote:
| I am sorry but this is not Rao's but Umair Haque's and he
| considers the UK and the US Fourth World.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall are fourth world stateless
| nations.
| geysersam wrote:
| This is just silly. The German train system has problems.
| Does that mean total civilizational collapse? No, it doesn't.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Someone already assigned "Fourth World" to stateless nations,
| so it's probably fifth world by now.
|
| The developed world does have decaying infrastructure but
| moving it between the private and state sector has caused
| problems. As has lockdown and other international policies.
| Our local government's main interest seems to be in shutting
| streets off and designing bad cycle infrastructure that is
| little use to cyclists (I am one by the way). It is letting
| our streets fall to pieces and spending lots of money
| erecting physical blocks.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Note that DB definitely has processes to add stops ad-hoc. It's
| just that nobody bothered in this case.
| svara wrote:
| It's a big, systemically failing organization running way
| beyond its capacity. Failures rippling through and compounding
| in a tightly coupled rail network.
|
| If they weren't able to announce the train would stop at one
| station, why do you think they'll be able to do that at
| another?
|
| I'm pretty sure train conductors aren't allowed to just stop
| somewhere unscheduled for good reasons, there's always a train
| behind and in front of them with no buffer.
| em-bee wrote:
| train conductors are not controlling the train. that is done
| from a central (regional) control center that manages all
| trains of the region. only there someone decides where trains
| go or stop
| svara wrote:
| Yes that was my point.
| michaelt wrote:
| Usually the train driver is in radio contact with central
| control and can request changes to the points, signals etc
| so they can make unscheduled stops. For example if there's
| a medical emergency on board and a passenger needs to be
| transferred to an ambulance.
|
| Of course doing this can have ripple effects on other
| services, and if a common factor has severely delayed
| dozens of different trains, the central control room might
| not have enough staff to deal with dozens of unscheduled
| stop requests.
| biztos wrote:
| Best example of this is when they hit someone. Train has
| to stop, control center has no say in it.
|
| (For longer "technical" delays, keep an eye out for
| emergency vehicles without their sirens on.)
| kergonath wrote:
| > Train has to stop, control center has no say in it.
|
| And then you have cascading delays across a whole region.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Also everyone complains about punctuality. A train
| stopping "nilly willy" somewhere it's not scheduled can
| very much cause exactly that in such a tightly scheduled
| system. So if you can, you avoid it.
|
| Since we don't know "the other side of the story", we
| can't really tell. All people here see is the "I got
| kidnapped". If the story was written from the control
| room person's perspective, they might write a fascinating
| story about how they single-handedly avoided 17 trains
| being late by sending one train on a detour.
|
| Would be awesome if there was someone on HN that knows if
| DB actually has the capacity to run a scheduling
| algorithm for their network within a few minutes,
| repeatedly, for many different trains at a moments
| notice. What kind of infra do they have for that, what do
| they use? With a large, interconnected, network that's
| tightly scheduled already that can't be easy.
|
| OP was also unlucky in that he was on a regional train.
| They prioritize long distance trains usually as a
| regional train _can_ more easily wait on a lower speed
| limit track somewhere than a fast long distance train on
| a potentially shared single track bottleneck.
| bombcar wrote:
| On a warm summer evening, on a train bound for nowhere, a
| passenger missed their stop.
|
| Conductor radioed ahead and the train heading the other way
| stopped when we passed it and the passenger was transferred
| over.
|
| They didn't _have_ to do that, but it was nice.
|
| They've also hired a cab for a station miss that was their
| fault.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| You're touching on points that Ayn Rand touched on in _Atlas
| Shrugged_ , which as it happens uses the dynamics of the
| running of a railway as a metaphor for organisational
| incompetence and which opens on a scene of railway workers
| refusing to take initiative and following policy blindly.
|
| Where she started to go a little weird is she thought anyone
| who had an idea had the right to just go do that, and society
| can go hang (she grew up suffering the worst Sovietism could
| serve up, her concept of community was damaged as a result).
| Unfortunately, her ideas are now held close to the hearts of
| some of the most powerful people on Earth, who are also going a
| little weird.
|
| I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy
| is the right way to keep people safe. What I'm not OK with is
| using the policy as a prop to avoid independent thought or
| agility. I'd rather that instead of a procedure or a policy,
| people were taught a way of thinking about the World.
|
| "We're not allowed to stop at the next station because we're
| not registered to do so", is a statement made in deference to a
| policy regardless of whether it makes sense or not. "We need to
| spend a few minutes making sure we're registered at the next
| station before we go any further" complies with the policy, but
| is a person taking ownership of resolving the problem, and
| comes from a place of empathy for the passengers on board. We
| need more of the latter, but unfortunately the Randian version
| we're now getting is "We'll stop or carry on wherever the
| driver feels like because he is sat at the controls so there's
| nothing anybody can do about that".
| elygre wrote:
| Your quote is missing a crucial bit. The full quote is
| <<we're not registered to do so, _so we are on the wrong
| tracks_ >>.
|
| You were supposed to take the last exit, to be on the local
| road instead of the highway. No, we cannot let you off on the
| highway. We are not allowed to stop here. There are no stops.
| We wait for another exit. Sorry.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| Was that the situation?
| _Microft wrote:
| Tracks 3, 4 and 7 at the station in question are not adjacent
| to a platform. It sort of makes sense to route a train over
| these if there is no stop planned there (intentional or not).
|
| Here's the map of the station:
|
| https://www.bahnhof.de/troisdorf/karte
| db48x wrote:
| 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
| exactly that situation. The construction crews had the whole
| platform blocked off so we boarded at the road crossing a block
| away.
| gmueckl wrote:
| 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?
| tharkun__ wrote:
| 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...
| jdeibele wrote:
| I've ridden on Amtrak trains. The door for the passenger
| compartments is in the middle of the observation cars,
| the oval on the lower level is the window on the door.
| You can see 3 of them on the 3 cars. The crew would put
| out a step at stops which was helpful considering the age
| of most of the passengers.
|
| Up top are seats and maybe a lounge, below are bedrooms,
| bathrooms, and storage. There's a spiral staircase to
| change levels.
|
| The locomotive has steps right outside the wheels with
| handrails.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to say.
|
| It's pretty obvious where the doors are (middle), which
| have windows. My point, replying to my parent, was that
| they said Amtrak platforms are at 110cm height. The
| lowest part of those doors are not at 110cm height, but
| much lower, almost as if the platform was much much lower
| than my parent claimed ;)
|
| And yes, trains do exist, which either have doors at two
| different heights (these don't seem to) or that either
| automatically fold away so you can get out at ground
| level via the stairs that are revealed/created by the
| mechanism or that simply stay up for platform height
| entry/exit. Used both types. Now, whether or not Amtrak
| has those in specific parts of the US I can't say.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The trains carry a step that can be placed on the ground
| outside the door, so you can step down from the car.
| db48x wrote:
| Lol, most Amtrak platforms are at track level! I think the
| cars are 8" above track level, not waist high.
|
| Every car has a metal step that will be placed in front of
| the door by the attendant.
|
| Edit: Oh, except for a few lines on the East Coast where
| the trains are only single-level. Those are 48" above the
| top of track.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| See "An Excessive Explanation of North American Platform
| Heights": https://youtu.be/duASHyreTRg
| lpribis wrote:
| They can't realistically do this in Germany because the
| tracks are so much more busy than the US. There would more
| than likely be a train coming the other direction within the
| next few minutes, and they cannot guarantee all the people
| have time to vacate the track area.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Humanity has been codified into rules, and the rule does not
| allow throwing out people somewhere random, because that would
| be differently inhuman (and someone would sue you if they have
| a bigger harm than lost time).
| darubedarob wrote:
| He has a loaded lawyer and is not afraid to use him. The world
| is filled with economic traps like this. All the economic
| advantages gained by the commoner, would unravel by one risk of
| harm coming for the driver and the company.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world.
|
| When every useful idiot is screeching about statistical
| optimization you lose any optimization for anything that isn't
| measured or isn't optimized for.
|
| Like it's not hard to imagine the breathless comments on HN
| about how trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if
| they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady
| tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
|
| It reminds me of letting a child that's too young to not be
| stupid pick it's own dinner and it picks of candy then to the
| surprise of nobody with a brain it's cranky later despite being
| calorically satisfied by the numbers.
|
| >The modern world where everything is "safety issue" and
| "someone else's problem" is where we lost our ways, and it's
| never coming back.
|
| It'll come back if there's something bad enough that happens to
| kick society back to a point where "lol we ain't got the spare
| resources for that shut up and go away" becomes an acceptable
| way to deal with the peddlers of these things. But anything
| that gets us that far won't be pretty.
| krisoft wrote:
| > trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd
| have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady
| tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
|
| Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform.
| But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the
| Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there
| are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live
| tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the
| doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those
| people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they
| have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And
| who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here
| is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way,
| can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of
| passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
|
| Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going
| beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe
| in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense,
| that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set
| the points for you to reverse back into the station is the
| solution.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform.
| But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the
| Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and
| there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded
| by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there,
| unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb
| down those people are immediately on a live track. To get
| off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a
| raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on
| that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one
| old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person)
| but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But
| go on with your snark.
|
| This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of
| take I was complaining about.
|
| Just let the people who are actually there and can actually
| see the situation use some judgement.
|
| Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of
| track isn't something the parties involved don't know how
| to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail
| network every day for some reason or another. It's a
| supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Just let the people who are actually there and can
| actually see the situation use some judgement.
|
| Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there
| handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they
| didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they
| should have handled it differently.
|
| Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on
| the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done
| more to get the train next to a platform.
|
| > This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of
| take I was complaining about
|
| Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the
| track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of
| the platforms?
| garbagewoman wrote:
| Wait, are you saying you did?
| krisoft wrote:
| > Wait, are you saying you did?
|
| I'm confused about what are you asking. Are you asking if
| I have looked at the layout of the station and the images
| of the platforms? If so yes. That's how I'm describing it
| in my first post.
|
| You can too. Here is a general layout for passengers:
| https://www.bahnhof.de/en/troisdorf/map
|
| You can look at satellite images of the station via
| google maps, or you can check the track and signalling
| arrangements on https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
|
| On top of that you can see the platforms in question on
| wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
| /8/84/S13_Troi...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You can't be honestly claiming that the people exercised
| poor judgement when their freedom of action is
| constrained by the fact that they are hemmed in by all
| manner of rules in a highly rule following culture and
| that that poor judgement is justification for further
| reduced autonomy?
|
| They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed
| this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their
| defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that
| create obvious failures by following rules to the point
| of absurdity.
|
| The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's
| no control train. If not the train then the absurd and
| trivially avoidable failure will be something else.
| krisoft wrote:
| It sounds like you are an expert on DB rules and how they
| affect the decision making of the various entities in
| this story. So I will leave that part to you. I
| personally don't form opinion on things I don't know
| about.
|
| What I know, and what I'm repeating now in the third
| comment, is that it would not have been safe to let the
| passengers out on the platform-less track there. Not
| because of rules, but because of common sense.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| I'd say it's mostly a North-European thing, not the whole
| world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the
| overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you'll experience in
| the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you
| learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so
| much that whenever it doesn't work, it's basically "well
| bummer". You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and
| you're supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone
| else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that
| you have to learn to see the good side of the system and
| understand that you can't have the cake and eat it too,
| unfortunately.
| deaux wrote:
| > the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you'll
| experience in the healthcare system is borderline
| unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it).
|
| Curious to hear what strategy you've learned over time.
| igsomething wrote:
| As another 3rd world citizen living in Northern Europe, I
| usually describe it as "processes and rules over common
| sense". They understand your situation, they agree with you,
| they can solve your problem, but they will not do it because
| it goes against some obscure rule, or it would not follow a
| specific mandatory procedure step by step, and who knows what
| are consequences.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I'd say it's mostly a North-European thing,
|
| I think it's a "busy tracks" problem in general, which yeah,
| is a problem in Europe in general. You can't just stop a
| train in the middle of some track, there are a bunch of other
| trains coming too, who can't just pass unless you get to a
| place where that is possible, which isn't everywhere.
|
| None the less, the rest of what you say is true of Sweden,
| but I don't think it's the reason a train refuses to stop on
| some train tracks.
| akudha wrote:
| _I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world_
|
| I feel the same. It is easier to hide behind rules,
| regulations, bureaucracy etc. Not saying we should stop
| following rules, but using a bit of common sense and having a
| bit of compassion would go a long way.
|
| I also remember reading about a train that Japanese railways
| kept running, _just for one kid_ , she took the train to
| school. They kept it running until she finished school, just
| for her (I know, someone is going to point out the
| inefficiency, cost etc about this story, but that is a separate
| conversation). I suppose stories like these are going to become
| rarer and rarer as time goes by, as everything has to be
| "efficient" and everyone has to follow some "rules".
| Kinrany wrote:
| The story is a bit suspect in that surely it would be more
| efficient to just hire her a taxi once a day. Even an
| expensive Japanese one.
|
| I suppose it would be slightly inconvenient to her to change
| habits, as well as a bad precedent. Still, hard to accept
| there was no additional factor involved in the decision.
| Kankuro wrote:
| I think you are mentioning a viral but incorrect story: a
| station was scheduled to close at a given date, a student
| mentioned in an interview that it will close after her
| graduation, but then some news sites claimed that the date of
| the closing was related to the graduation. The station was
| also used by a few residents.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%AB-
| Shirataki_Station#In_...
| forinti wrote:
| The Germans follow the rules too strictly and in South America
| we ignore the rules too lightly.
|
| I wonder if there's a country somewhere with the right balance.
| deaux wrote:
| No idea if there still is, but there definitely used to be.
| These things change over time, as culture does. Half a decade
| ago, pretty much everywhere in Europe followed rules less
| strictly. The balance was almost surely better.
| valcker wrote:
| France, while not perfect, is still balancing it +/-
| correctly.
| nephihaha wrote:
| France has a reputation of being permanently on strike, but
| is perhaps the only European country that is simultaneously
| northern European and Mediterranean at the same time.
| Aloha wrote:
| I think for all of our problems, the US does get this right -
| we know when to be formal and when to be informal, and its
| something that is well culturally ingrained - that is the
| spirit and intent of the rules should be considered as
| strongly as the actual words.
| samiv wrote:
| There's a saying
|
| "In a developing country nothing works but everything is
| possible. In a developed country everything works but nothing
| is possible"
|
| In Lord of the Rings, fellowship of the ring when Gandalf
| arrives in Shire and Sam runs to meet him he says, "you're
| late!" to which Gandalf replies, "Deutsche Bahn is never late
| but arrives precisely when it means to".
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The quality of culture and people you're dealing with has a
| huge multiplicative factor as well.
|
| "I'm going to manufacture precision optics at competitive
| prices, right here, and I'm gonna tool up a factory to do it"
| is bold but believable in Houston or Dallas. It's a fucking
| joke in Trenton or Newark.
|
| Likewise there's a whole bunch of ex-soviet 'stans and random
| east asian countries where such a statement is far more
| believable than middle easter, african and latin american
| ones that are of comparable GDP.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| And in Germany - it seems - nothing works and nothing is
| possible?
| SonnyTark wrote:
| I feel the same. I was in Kuwait city a few days ago and
| decided to learn their public transport system which is buses
| only but was pretty extensive and abundant with good google
| maps integration.
|
| When you get on the bus there's a big sign stating the rules of
| riding the bus which include strictly stopping at designated
| bus stops ONLY and threatening fines. For the rest of the day I
| watched every bus driver stop anywhere they like if a person
| hailed the bus, allowing people to get in while waiting in red
| traffic lights, and if you talked to the driver he'd drop you
| off anywhere you wanted as long it's possible. Those drivers
| make nothing from this so they are doing it because this is
| life and also because there's no real enforcement against it.
| Also you can get in through the exit doors and leave through
| the entry doors, whatever you like.
|
| I decided I feel ok about this and don't want it to change
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| Ugh. don't remind me. my fiancee 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| In some places, European trains are decent. I don't have
| much experience with US trains other than them having very
| high steps to get onto.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| Europe is a big place
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| Remember the rules are written in blood
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Not with trains, but I have a GO Transit (regional) bus that
| passes within a block of my house, whereas the actual official
| stop is about a fifteen minute walk away. I have taken that bus
| home many times, and the drivers are always willing to pull
| over at the stoplight and let me hop off.
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Used to work for a bus company: lady had asked driver to drop
| her off 10 meters from the next bus stop. Then fell into a
| hole, broke her leg. Then sued us.
| wslh wrote:
| > I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen,
| train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere.
|
| In many places without rigid rule enforcement, that kind of
| flexibility can actually feel more humane in practice, even if
| the overall system is worse. What frustrates me in the US (and
| sometimes in Europe) isn't rules themselves, but how
| aggressively and impersonally they're enforced in very ordinary
| situations.
|
| For example, a friend of mine in New York casually crossed a
| line at a small PlayStation event and was stopped by a
| bodyguard as if he were bypassing airport immigration. I had a
| similar experience at a small event, maybe 300 people, where I
| tried to cross a line to get coffee and was abruptly blocked by
| security (they were just preparing the snacks).
|
| Compared to more informal cultures, this kind of hyper
| enforcement can feel oddly hostile, especially when it's
| disconnected from any real safety concern.
| alex_young wrote:
| Lost humanity is right, and it stems from lost community.
|
| During the Great Financial Crisis astute observers pointed to
| the loss of local bankers for most transactions as a component
| of the multifaceted structural causes. When you have your
| mortgage through the bank down the street, you're much less
| likely to mail them the keys instead of paying your bill,
| especially if you have to see the banker in the grocery store
| etc.
|
| What did we do about this? Of course we didn't learn anything -
| we actually further consolidated banking.
|
| The same is true of train service, traffic etiquette, and
| political discourse. The tragedy of the commons is exacerbated
| by moving away from local community.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| During the 30yr prior to the GFC the kinds of Americans who
| don't work in downtown offices, don't get compensated partly
| in RSUs and who aren't represented well in internet
| discussions and mainstream media complained fairly
| unanimously about the same things. Regulation forced their
| main street economies to either consolidate or pack up for
| China. The industrial employers got scooped up by the
| conglomerates and turned into poorly paying meat grinders
| with no "good" jobs or left entirely. The grocery store and
| hardware store became a Walmart. But nobody listened to them
| when they complained.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's been boiling for a long time. Steinbeck wrote this
| nearly a century ago:
|
| "I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the
| sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling
| wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down -- I'll be in
| the window with a rifle. You even come to close and I'll pot
| you like a rabbit."
|
| "It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I
| don't do it. And look -- suppose you kill me? They'll just
| hang you, but long before your hung there will be another guy
| on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not
| killing the right guy."
|
| "That's so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I'll go
| after him. He's the one to kill."
|
| "You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told
| them: "Clear those people out or it's your job."
|
| "Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a Board of
| Directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into
| the bank."
|
| The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders
| from the East. The orders were: "Make the land show profit or
| we'll close you up."
|
| "But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to
| starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me."
|
| "I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing
| isn't man at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing
| it. Anyway I told you my orders."
| potato3732842 wrote:
| At the end of the day you have to actually shoot someone
| from time to time to keep everyone in line.
|
| It's way cheaper to not wrong people or to not walk up so
| close to that line than it is to secure the full stack and
| pay everyone what you'd need to pay them to compensate them
| for the risk of being the unlucky guy who gets scalped on
| livestream or whatever form sloppy retribution takes.
| nephihaha wrote:
| We live in a society where complaining is considered "verbal
| abuse" or "harassment", but where we have to put up and shut up
| about everything going on.
|
| The message out of 2020 and 2021, is that the big people know
| what they're doing and we don't.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| We live in a society where being the victim of verbal abuse
| or harassment or various isms and all sorts of other petty
| things confers legitimacy and power upon one's opinion.
| There's a subtle difference.
|
| Thankfully it seems to be waning slightly.
| nephihaha wrote:
| No, I don't mean that at all. I've had to complain about
| things before and they accuse you of shouting (when you're
| not). They almost want people to swear, and rile them up,
| because that gives them the excuse to do nothing.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You're reading way too much into my use of the word
| "opinion". It's just whatever side of whatever the issue
| is be it customer service ad Burger King or some arcane
| discussion about compilers.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Yes, I'm aware of identity politics, but that is not what
| I'm talking about. I'm a member of a couple of minorities
| myself, and it confers little privilege on me with or
| without the abuse.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You're missing the point. Some people are quick to claim
| that the other person is being unreasonable in a way
| that's socially agreed upon to be bad as a justification
| for whatever their thing is, whether that's being a lazy
| worker at a min-wage job or anything else. And of course
| sometimes these people don't even wait for unreasonable
| behavior. They will characterize "hey can you please do
| your job" that way because it suits them.
|
| This is a figment of living in a culture where being
| right but distasteful in a variety of poorly defined but
| broadly similar ways effectively makes you wrong. Toward
| the other end of the spectrum is stuff like "I don't care
| if he's a card carrying nazi he builds good rockets" and
| other stuff like that.
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| >They almost want people to swear
|
| that is sadly exactly how most people operate now.
| Somebody gives legitimate critique to an issue? simply
| tone police them and you can claim all they say is [ism]
| or hate speech and therefore not even worth engaging
| with.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > 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).
|
| While Iran is not a third-world country per se, you'd be
| surprised how many times the bus driver would stop at random
| locations closer to passengers' destinations as well as bus
| stations.
|
| There's more flexibility in day-to-day life of Iranians; people
| are expected to follow the rules but there's also this ancient
| concept of "morovvat" in the culture which encourages self-
| sacrifice for the betterment of others. Ask any tourist who's
| traveled to Iran and they tell you about the hospitality of
| Iranian people; e.g., you ask someone how to get to a place and
| they literally pause whatever they were doing and walk you to
| that place so you don't get lost!
|
| It's strange how the image of Iran has been stained by the
| theocratic government (which Iranians protest against many
| times...).
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| So true. Another third worlder and it's still the same. On the
| interesting side, if they didn't stop we would make sure a
| coach or two (empty of course) experiences some arson or
| fractures. From major to minor depending upon how pissed the
| locals were. No, I am not condoning it course. Trains should
| not be burnt. Buses are a different story though. (That
| included not stopping even after the "chain pulls" :P)
| rayiner wrote:
| > I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen,
| train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere.
|
| I'm from Bangladesh, and the attitude you're describing is one
| reason why the country is poor and a mess! Deviating from the
| schedule for the sake of a single person is completely insane
| and maddeningly inefficient. It's classic third-world
| mentality. In a good country, the system would never tolerate
| such deviations. In a _really good_ country, someone wouldn 't
| even ask for such accommodation for themselves, because it
| would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for
| one's own sake.
| majormajor wrote:
| That seems pretty wildly orthogonal to me.
|
| Did the individuals and industries that truly drove fabulous
| innovation and development in the first world REALLY do it
| from a mindset of "it would be shameful to inconvenience
| others even slightly for one's own sake"? There are an awful
| lot of stories of rulebreaking out there... "The Wild Wild
| West" turned into some of the richest parts of the world,
| that name doesn't suggest that a society needs to follow the
| rules to the point of extreme shame to avoid staying poor.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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 relaxed attitude towards
| time and rules. It's not a big deal if you're late in my
| dad's village, because everyone knows you and that you'll
| arrive an hour or two after the official time and will plan
| accordingly. If you inconvenience someone, it's not a big
| deal, because you're all family and you'll reciprocate the
| accommodation another time. (That's a key point! Kinship
| bonds form a kind of collateral that ensures that
| accommodations will be reciprocated in the future.) Plus,
| the country is blessed with three growing seasons, so
| nobody is in a hurry anyway! And if you're persistently
| causing problems, it will percolate to higher ups within
| the families and they'll set you straight through informal
| processes.
|
| Contrast somewhere like England, where, for whatever
| reason, extended family networks began breaking down as far
| back as the middle ages. People in England were living in
| small nuclear family units back in the 14th century. When
| your neighbors aren't related to you, that forces people to
| rely on formal rules and procedures. You can't count on
| future reciprocity backed by the collateral of kinship
| ties. And if someone is causing problems, you need formal
| systems, based on rules and procedures, to deal with them.
|
| These formalized systems are, in turn, far more scalable!
| You can plan and organize civilization building when
| everyone is socialized to follow formal timetables in a way
| that you cannot when people are socialized to follow the
| informal timing consensus. And the lack of individual
| accommodation is a feature when you scale from small
| networks of a dozen or so related individual to millions of
| people moving through the London Tube every day.
|
| A small amount of rule breaking is tolerable, even
| beneficial, within a society where everyone otherwise
| rigidly adheres to rules.[1] But there is no developed
| society that isn't rule-based at the baseline level. In
| some places, like England, this rule-focused culture
| developed organically. In other places, like Japan, there
| was a deliberate effort to destroy extended family networks
| and clan structures and replace those frameworks with
| systems of formal rules and procedures.
|
| [1] America is a good example of a society that is less
| rules-oriented than say Japan, and arguably derives some
| benefits from that. But even in America, we pay a price for
| that. Americans just aren't as good at large scale social
| organization as the Japanese or Taiwanese, and we
| compensate by structuring our society in a more
| decentralized way where less such organization is required
| in the first place. Ronny Chieng has a funny bit about how
| New Yorkers try to force open subway doors that have
| already closed:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX0oafDe3Q. This behavior,
| multiplied by thousands of occurrences per day, slows down
| the whole system.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Or maybe the tracks the train was routed onto didn't have
| platforms at the station.
|
| In 3rd world countries it might be acceptable for people to
| jump out of 5-foot high carriages onto live tracks with trains
| running at 100mph for convenience, but not in Germany
| mk89 wrote:
| This has nothing to do with lost humanity.
|
| In my experience, this doesn't always happen, and I say this as
| someone who traveled very often on that same RE5. The situation
| is what it is (poor maintenance, etc), but the main issue is
| that the tracks are shared with freight trains impossible to
| stop given their weight, so to avoid collisions and have a nice
| (albeit late) Christmas, they made that call to play it safe,
| rather than have a freight train crash into a train full of
| people.
|
| I wouldn't blame it on the person, I would rather blame it on
| the shitty system the train driver has to rely on - apparently
| so unreliable they had to do what they did. Keep in mind,
| that's a delay also for that person who very likely doesn't
| want to work on that day either - the same person that has to
| deal with that level of BS every day now.
|
| Of course, just to be clear, there is always the German ready
| to save the world by following an idiotic nonsense procedure,
| but that's everywhere in the world.
|
| > I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for
| various random reasons and I'd just get out so I don't have to
| walk back from the station. The modern world where everything
| is "safety issue" and "someone else's problem" is where we lost
| our ways, and it's never coming back.
|
| You got lucky many times. All it takes is that one time someone
| makes the wrong call and you get smashed by a train. In Europe
| this is very rarely the case, because exactly of these
| "nonsense" rules.
|
| The main issue is the shitty maintenance/sync with other trains
| etc. "Digitalization".
| vadiml wrote:
| Why NOBODY pulled emergency stop
| sshine wrote:
| At one university in Denmark that opened in 1972 there used to
| not be a train stop. Instead of going to the nearby city
| central station and walk for half an hour, you'd pull the
| emergency break in the middle of a field, traverse the field
| and reach the university. Pulling the emergency break was of
| course not allowed, but it was very common.
|
| Today, pulling the emergency break to get off in a field would
| quickly end you on surveillance videos and with a large fine
| for obstructing operations, possibly with a detour to the
| police station for a stern conversation.
|
| I miss the "yeah, whatever" attitude.
| didntknowyou wrote:
| i think most humanity left when corporates began to dominate
| industries and everyone just had to follow rules and structures
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| Obligatory link:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/oct/08/...
| skrebbel wrote:
| As a Dutchman, I've come to love German trains. The joy of a
| first class ICE seat to with table service as the empty middle of
| Germany swooshes by at 250km/h is hard to describe. Those trains
| are _very good_. Super comfortable, super fast, and did anyone
| say "restaurant car"? Seriously, the little bottle holes in the
| tray in front of you seems perfectly designed to fit a .5L glass
| of Erdinger and I don't believe it's a coincidence. Freshly
| tapped Erdinger! On a _train_! I generally travel for the
| destination, but in Germany, I travel for the travel.
|
| So as a fanboy, I am saddened by how bad DB has become. Once
| you're on the train, and it actually goes, and it goes all the
| way to the destination, it's still fantastic. All of the above
| generally still holds. But the many hours I've spent in the dark
| in cold windy places like Duisburg Hbf gleis funf are
| uncountable, and it really does discount from the experience. I
| don't remember the German trains being this late, this often, a
| ~decade ago. I really hope DB will get its shit together because
| there's a _lot_ worth saving.
| moepstar wrote:
| > I don't remember the German trains being this late, this
| often, a ~decade ago.
|
| Except: they were - over 20 years ago, I did my
| ,,Grundwehrdienst" in the German army, travel with DB from
| Nuremberg to Munich and back every weekend for 8 months.
|
| The number of times the ICE was on time I can count on one
| hand. 15 minutes delayed regularly, sometimes more.
|
| After a while we planned to use the last train to arrive in
| Munich, and having to go a bit further with S-Bahn, we most of
| the time missed the last one (on purpose).
|
| We then went to the DB counter and got free coupons to head our
| final destination by Taxi.
|
| Also already happening back then: broken aircon, often in
| comical ways - I.e. totally non working in one wagon, with
| everyone sweating at some 45 degrees Celsius or more, next
| wagon: freezing at 16 degrees...
| amtamt wrote:
| Way back in 90's, when I arrived on an Indian Railway station
| about 10 minutes before the train's scheduled time, I was
| pleasantly surprised to find the train at the platform.
|
| Only when I checked the passenger reservation list, I found this
| was train from yesterday, late by 23:50 hours.
|
| (for the curious... No, I could not get my reserved birth and had
| to travel on unreserved ticket, but at least I reached
| destination on my planned time.)
| attendant3446 wrote:
| I was in a similar situation in Egypt once. At the specified
| time a train arrives, I board it. Only to see that my seat is
| occupied. We started to discuss the situation and the other
| passenger showed me his ticket - it was one of the previous
| delayed trains. We figured it just in time for me to jump out
| of the wrong train before it left the station :)
| uwagar wrote:
| proof or it didnt happen. this is a meme joke. even osho made a
| joke exactly like this.
| vl wrote:
| DB last year: I took train last year from Frankfurt airport to
| Bonn only to see Bonn sail past the window and train to go to
| Cologne.
|
| I asked locals what is going on, turns out that all trains were
| late, and this train departed from the platform already marked
| for Bonn! "You should watch what train number you board on DB,
| not trust sign on platform!" locals helpfully advised me.
| trinix912 wrote:
| > "You should watch what train number you board on DB, not
| trust sign on platform!"
|
| Not to blame the victim but that's always a good idea
| regardless of how punctual your local trains and busses are.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Unfortunately travelling in Germany by train has become a mess,
| hence why so many reach out for car or inland flights.
|
| Delays are to be expected, trains cancelled without reasoning,
| train stations skipped in similar ways as described on the
| article, and if using connections, better plan for at least 30m
| interval, while taking into account a plan B for every connection
| that might be missed.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I have my own DB story. About 15 years ago I was supposed to take
| an overnight sleeper train from Copenhagen to Cologne. We had
| beds booked. It's about 22:00 and we're on the platform ready for
| bed.
|
| The train arrived on time, we checked our tickets to see which
| coach we were on and walked down the train looking for it. We get
| to the end of the train, odd, we must have missed our carriage so
| we turn around for another pass. Then we start to notice other
| confused expressions.
|
| We eventually figured out the problem: they had accidentally left
| the sleeper coaches in Hamburg, a full 180 miles away as the crow
| flies, or almost half our entire journey.
|
| After waiting on the platform for about an hour, busses arrived
| to take us to Hamburg. We're now quite tired and our bed on a
| train is now a seat on a bus.
|
| We finally get to Hamburg at about 3:00 the next day, walk to our
| beds and we're ready to collapse. Surely they're not going to
| come and inspect our tickets at this time?
|
| They came and inspected our tickets at around 3:30. Two and a
| half hours later we were in Cologne. Yay.
| dz0ny wrote:
| This is the place where AI needs to take over, no more excuses!
|
| For example in country 400kEUR was spend on executives (200
| hundred people) Christmas dinner for publicly owned company.
|
| While the scheduling and company management is similar issues as
| DB. I think we ned a new word for this kind of clusterfuck!! They
| are "rulesfull", rules that hinder the system and make the user
| scream in pain and agony.
| sersi wrote:
| When I was a child in France people were quick to say that trains
| ran on time in Germany... Well, in my experience there is no
| developed country with a worse train company than DB. Even
| Amtrack is still slightly better. In France people complain about
| the SNCF (especially strikes) but at least outside of strikes the
| TGV are mostly on time.
| denysvitali wrote:
| > no developed country with a worse train company than DB
|
| Italy is pretty similar, and I would say even worse, but after
| reading / hearing more about DB I think they're just competing
| for being the worst train company ever
| kioleanu wrote:
| As I live around the area where this happened and I am well aware
| of how DB is on this route, this story sounds extremely sketchy -
| why would the train change lines to the other side of the Rhine
| and not stop at any of the 17 (!!!) stops along the way to
| Neuwied? Especially with people in it?
|
| The problem was a broken relay, no trains were able to run for a
| few hours through Bonn. The official statement said that the
| trains have stopped and were replaced by buses.
| JeremyTheo wrote:
| I know how sketchy it sounds, and it was even documented in DB
| Navigator. But DB makes this information inaccessible a couple
| of days later in the app, so there is no way to ,,proof" it
| except asking DB itself.
| raphman wrote:
| Just to be sure: your blog post mentions 24.12. _2024_ - did
| you mean 2025?
|
| Is this the right connection?:
|
| https://bahn.expert/details/NX%2028521/j/20251224-a0049123-9.
| ..
|
| The RE5 seems to be operated by National Express, not
| Deutsche Bahn, right? (but DB InfraGo is most probably
| responsible for the routing)
| kioleanu wrote:
| Well I'll be damned, I've really seen it all, OP sorry for
| doubting w
| JeremyTheo wrote:
| Yes it is! And yes it was a typo! Thank you for finding the
| link to it. I was trying to find it before but couldn't
| find it in official sources, DB deleted it from the
| official app. It did not stop at Troisdorf though.
|
| It is operated by National Express, but I guess the routing
| comes from some other company (likely InfraGo)
| sajithdilshan wrote:
| 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 inefficient
| and massively complicated DB is. They have internal departments
| which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each
| department has to place bids among each other to get contracts
| (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT department and no
| matter how cheap or good outside IT providers are they must get
| the service from internal IT department (so much for
| competition).
|
| At this point DB needs a complete overhaul and let go of so much
| dead weight to make it working again and unfortunately German
| politicians are just throwing more money at every problem hoping
| they would magically solve themselves rather than fixing the
| actual structural problems.
| ngruhn wrote:
| > If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead
| of time
|
| I can't recall that this happened to me. The "lucky" scenario
| is when the connecting train is even more late so you can still
| catch it.
| tim333 wrote:
| In the UK the railways used to be kind of bad in the
| nationalised British Rail days. People moan about the current
| privatised rail but it mostly works.
| vintagedave wrote:
| It is also extraordinarily expensive, and since the cuts in
| the 1960s you have a fraction of the railway lines. It is
| absolutely terrible.
|
| Who knows if it was better in the nationalised days, but it
| sure needs some unification and central governance without a
| profit motive today.
| dash2 wrote:
| > Who knows if it was better in the nationalised days
|
| I do. I was there. It wasn't.
| tim333 wrote:
| Also if you look at the usage numbers they dropped off in
| the nationalised days and picked back up after https://en
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_G...
|
| I was around but not a heavy rail user in the
| nationalised days though the stories back then were quite
| reminiscent of the current DB stories.
| gregorygoc wrote:
| Swiss trains are run by a national company and they're great.
| tazjin wrote:
| > Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of
| Russian roulette.
|
| Ironically, Russian trains (even over distances of thousands of
| kilometres) are usually almost perfectly on time.
|
| Germany's DB seems to fill the same niche as other companies
| there, like Telekom: semi-private companies living off old
| state-built infrastructure that they're now incapable of (or
| unwilling to?) maintain.
| adrianN wrote:
| Being on time over thousands of kilometers is a lot easier
| than being on time over dozens of kilometers. Especially if
| you share the same tracks with cargo trains, regional trains,
| and high speed trains and stop at every other village because
| that was the condition the nimbys required for allowing you
| to build the track in the first place.
| yeputons wrote:
| Local trains in Moscow and Saint Petersburg ("elektrichka"
| with all local stops) may get delayed by a few minutes
| sometimes, true. But e.g. several trains being delayed by
| ten minutes because of an ice rain is newsworthy. At least
| that was the case on several directions I knew about.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's pretty strange about this competition thing. I've been
| repeatedly informed that the government is much better at
| running things like this.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| What do you find strange about it?
| on_the_train wrote:
| > internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic
| competition and each department has to place bids among each
| other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an
| IT
|
| Same here, with a big German semiconductor player you all know.
| The IT department has to battle the non-it departments and
| external contractors for internal software dev jobs. It's a
| made up game, costing 70% of our work time (just the
| beurocracy).
| adwelly wrote:
| It is a remarkable change in attitude. Back in the day DB was one
| of the best train services in Europe. It had British Rail of the
| same era on the ropes.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| As a North American it's fun to read a story about trains "being
| bad". The light rail in my city routinely just breaks in the
| winter. Everybody is afraid to use it and drives instead. A 20-60
| minute delay would be unexceptional, and it wouldn't even take
| you close to where you're actually going.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Too much drama.
| konradha wrote:
| I do hope that sufficient humiliation will suffice for DB
| leadership to enact harsh measures. German precision and
| punctuality are still there in its people. It's not lost yet.
| r9295 wrote:
| This has been the case since I moved to Germany, 6 years ago.
| National humiliation is apparently an insufficient detterent.
| konradha wrote:
| The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind well.
| It depends where you're from -- there is always potential for
| dramatic change in a people as obedient as the German.
| Zufriedenheit wrote:
| DB is well known to be used as a "golden parachute" by german
| politicians. When they loose popularity in politics they escape
| by giving themselves a high payed position at state owned DB
| company. Problem is they have no knowledge in managing a
| railroad.
| codesections wrote:
| > At some point you stop being a passenger and start being cargo.
|
| It's much worse than that - FedEx would never treat cargo like
| that. If they took cargo further away from its destination than
| it started and then left it there for the customer to sort out,
| that would break _so many_ SLAs ...
| postit wrote:
| "I don't know how to say that in English, but this train does not
| exist"
| rcbdev wrote:
| I never understood why the Germans cannot get their shit together
| on commercial train travel. Austria manages to coordinate a
| wonderful federal train system across nine federal states without
| issues via the OBB, the Swiss also seem to have it down.
| apexalpha wrote:
| Fundamentally, the Germans tried to cheap out on high speed
| trains by trying to engineer them to run on normal tracks so
| they didn't have to build new, expensive high-speed tracks like
| France and Japan did.
|
| This is the fundamental mistake underpinning their train
| service since the long distance trains frequently have to wait
| for other trains to pass, cascading delays through the system.
|
| That and an almost criminal level of underinvestment in the
| past 20 years or so.
| CurtMonash wrote:
| My first thought on seeing the headline was: Charlie on the M. T.
| A.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A
| jsnell wrote:
| So _that_ is what the classic "Cheney on MTA" Lisp
| implementation paper was named after. It felt like a reference,
| but I never had an idea about what it was referring to. Thanks!
| petre wrote:
| If this had happened in Eastern Europe, someone would have
| probably pulled the emergency brake and ran off.
| mcv wrote:
| I would not have blamed them.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I lived in Berlin for 10 years. In my experience, people complain
| too much about German public transport. But comming from a south
| american country with reasonably good public transport, I found
| German's one very good.
|
| The only thing I can agree is the "speaking only in german as if
| it was the lingua franca of the world". Germany is part of the
| EU. The EU has 24 langueages. You should at least speak in
| English. And no, my mother language is not english but spanish.
| hackandthink wrote:
| There are also pleasant experiences when traveling by train, but
| rarely in Germany.
|
| The Swiss railways are excellent and friendly. In Milan, I was
| unable to catch the reserved train to Zurich, but the conductors
| on the Swiss train that was just departing even accepted my
| ticket for the Italian railway.
| tedggh wrote:
| I rode DB many times, all over Germany and from Dusseldorf to
| Cologne weekly for months. Luckily, never had an issue. By far my
| worst experience has been Trenitalia. I lost a couple of
| connections during the same vacation because the train was late
| and in both opportunities no one could tell me what to do, let
| alone give me a refund. In one trip the teller while exhaling
| cigarette smoke on my face shrugged then suggested I took a bus
| from Campiglia to Piombino, which ended up been one of the
| scariest rides of my life (I have crossed the Andes in South
| America by speeding buses racing each other with 200 ft exposed
| cliff drops on the side, so I'm not strange to scary rides)
| pflenker wrote:
| When was that? DB has gotten much worse in the past ~5 years
| tdiff wrote:
| It just destroys the "eco" image of deutsche railways.
|
| Well, I'm all pro public transport, but please make it work
| first.
| drnick1 wrote:
| And this is precisely why I don't use public transit when
| traveling on vacation and rent cars instead. I also don't fly
| unless the drive is longer than 7 to 8 hours. Driving in Germany
| is also reasonably fun.
| giorgioz wrote:
| On the other end Germany has a great used-cars markets. So if you
| feel the train service is consuming too much of your time that
| you can allocate better, evaluate if buying a used car is an
| improvement.
| bytesandbits wrote:
| The issue there is the comp. 1.5 euro doesn't make sense. should
| be O(50). If the compensation (which for DB is a fine in a way)
| is not high, DB has no incentives to do better.
| bitcurious wrote:
| My most recent Deutsche Bahn train was announced as being 3 hours
| late. I watched a few passengers leave the station to grab coffee
| nearby. The train arrived 10 minutes later, and left 5 minutes
| after that. The whole system seems broken.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| The term "kidnapped" is kinda over the top, but I can understand
| the author. I've travelled with Polish trains a lot when
| studying, and there were a few situations like this. Especially
| frustrating, if the train stops because of "some issue" while you
| can literally see the platform 200m away. No, you can't get out
| and walk the track (which will be guaranteed to be empty, because
| well, the train is broken) and take a bus or something, no, you
| have to sit there for ~2h until a replacement engine gets there.
| bombcar wrote:
| We had similar occurrences on Amtrak but there was a trick -
| the conductor could let people out of a stopped train to
| "smoke" on their own reconnaissance and risk.
|
| And if you went to smoke with your bag and disappeared, well,
| they never saw it.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I was in this sort of circumstance on a SEPTA train (using
| the same rails and stations as Amtrak fwiw) and they let us
| walk to the next station with no pretext. It was just the
| common sense thing to do and the SEPTA personnel running that
| train felt empowered to exercise common sense.
|
| The more bureaucratic an organization becomes, the more
| inhuman it becomes. An unwillingness to bend rules when the
| circumstance rationally calls for it is extremely dangerous.
| One might think that Germans in particular would be highly
| tuned to this problem, but no. They still put following
| orders first. Typical.
| adrianN wrote:
| I would expect a litigious country like the US makes common
| sense very expensive if somebody happens to get hurt. Train
| tracks are quite dangerous.
| dpacmittal wrote:
| I don't think it's safe if the track is electrified
| sparqlittlestar wrote:
| Metros may have electrified third rail, but the ones next to
| DB train tracks are all with a top covered third rail. Usualy
| power deliviery is via catenaries.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Electric trains don't get power via the tracks like that,
| they use power lines. Metros are a different matter, but
| that's not what the article is about.
| alexfoo wrote:
| Many UK long distance trains still take power from a third
| rail for some of all of their journey.
|
| Overhead electrification is a long term goal for the non-
| Metro UK rail network but it is a long way off.
|
| The other method is an electric train with a diesel
| generator car.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Interesting, TIL. Trains don't do that where I'm from for
| obvious safety reasons, but I understand infrastructure
| everywhere comes with different baggage.
| alexfoo wrote:
| Anywhere with third rail (which is predominantly London
| and the South-East of England) tends to be fenced off
| along the sides of the tracks or other things in place to
| strongly discourage you from walking onto the tracks.
|
| Given that a considerable amount of the UK rail routes
| date from the late 1800s there are a lot of places where
| tracks cross roads and therefore mix with other forms of
| transport (including pedestrians). It's surprising just
| how little there is in between a pedestrian and a live
| rail in these situations, here's an example 5 miles or so
| away from central London:
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/nPcJM1YxBexaDDKY6
|
| One of those live third rails start less than 5 yards
| away from where pedestrians regularly walk, with just
| some angled planks of wood to stop you walking towards
| them.
| avidiax wrote:
| I was imagining something more Kafkaesque. There are some
| transit systems that have transfer only stations. If DB dropped
| you off at such a station, and then cancelled the only trains
| leaving that station (due to weather, holidays), I'm sure you
| could end up spending Christmas there, and you'd be entitled to
| EUR3.75 compensation.
| apexalpha wrote:
| I once took the train from Berlin to Netherlands.
|
| Just after Hannover but before Dusseldorf and such the train
| stopped: fire next to the tracks. Honestly, not DB fault this
| time.
|
| Luckily DB trains have a restaurant/cafe in them. I went to get
| some food but the man behind the counter told me it was closed.
|
| I asked him how since he was the seller, he stood there, there
| was power and internet. What's the problem?
|
| Well, he said. And I shit you not: my shift is up. I have worked
| 8 hours. I am done.
|
| And he was serious. Never mind that he was stuck on the train,
| just like us. Never mind that the replacement obviously wasn't
| there yet since they were stuck waiting on the next platform.
|
| Nope. He works 8 hours. 8 hours done. He done. A thousand thirsty
| and hungry (and annoyed) on his train. He has food, drinks and
| time. But he just didn't give a shit.
|
| He just stood there, for 2 hours, waiting to get off.
|
| To Dutch people German civil servants are like NPCs following a
| very narrow script. It's baffling.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Sounds extremely reasonable to me. Not all people want to work
| extra hours for free.
| xenonite wrote:
| Indeed, but I guess that the seller got compensated anyways
| for the extra two hours of delayed arrival.
| giorgioz wrote:
| Your 2025 Train Delay Wrapped https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
| snr243 wrote:
| Tbh this is just another average trip using DB. I was on a RB
| from Munich to Kochel and the driver decided to stop in the
| middle of a field for reasons best known to them, the other time
| I took an ICE from Stuttgart we were marooned at Augsburg.
| xxmarkuski wrote:
| When you have a simple journey and no interruptions DB in long
| distance is pretty good, not excellent but solid. But with more
| complicated things traveling with DB is not well thought out and
| they don't see what could be possible. Changing a platform should
| show you in-station navigation door to door. DB navigator should
| not show you impossible journeys, it presents you with train
| switches where the second train already left once you arrive or
| displays the stop is canceled entirely. DB Navigator and bahn.de
| have a monopoly over german train routing and ticketing, but are
| not subject to anti-trust regulation enough or run by the
| government directly (dataquality issues, etc). DB is very much
| against grassroots movements trying to improve customer
| experience and quality, like community built ticket stores or
| wallet and calendar integration. I also think the ministry of
| transportation and politicians are at fault for not getting DB to
| step up their game. Trying to privatize DB, rigid regulations for
| how DB has to run and not enough attention to rail as a whole for
| example. I would consider the "ampel" (21-24) to be one of the
| better ones. After some reforms, the government is still not in a
| position to control the monopolist enough.
| tipsysquid wrote:
| The most maddening part about this experience is the
| helplessness. Its inconvenient, sure. Ive been late because of
| traffic, etc. Being carried along well beyond my will without a
| breakglass: Fine, I'll just walk! option makes my skin crawl.
|
| Events like this seem to only be explained by accountability
| sink[0]. Naming it gives me some brief sense of sanity.
|
| I appreciate that there is a safety concern; where's the humanity
| in large systems, especially as we trend towards more automation?
|
| [0] https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
| grishka wrote:
| As a Russian, this is such a bonkers idea to me. I only took a
| Deutsche Bahn train once so far. It got delayed 20 minutes. When
| I complained about it on social media, I was told something like
| "what do you mean, it arrived and took you where you wanted to
| go".
|
| Russian trains only get delayed if there's something _seriously
| wrong_. Like an accident or an act of sabotage because of the
| war. A month or so ago, a Sapsan train from St Petersburg to
| Moscow broke down en route. People had to wait for hours to get
| out. It made big news. As far as I can tell, this is a weekly
| occurrence in Germany.
| torcete wrote:
| I guess a brave soul would have pulled the alarm at Troisdorf.
| stockresearcher wrote:
| I used DB quite a few times last month and all of the delays and
| problems were listed on the trip planner website (in German and
| in English) despite there being no notifications at the departure
| station and the train driver speaking in German only when
| communicating.
|
| We had a trip planned in which we needed a specific train. The
| website said "there has been an incident on the tracks. There
| will be a delay of 20-50 minutes waiting for a platform. Not all
| connections will be made," and that is exactly what happened.
| This worked for our time window so we took the train. But there
| were a lot of confused and upset passengers who had absolutely no
| idea what was going on.
|
| I'm sure DB has many problems, but one of them appears to be
| communication that surely isn't too difficult to fix.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Watch the neoliberals feed off of rigid bureaucratic incompetence
| to pander for privatization and create for-profit bureaucratic
| incompetence. All with massive subsidies that citizens will pay
| through taxes or cutting of public services elsewhere.
|
| Gotta love the "free" market and "democracy".
| abigail95 wrote:
| Why is DB worse than other operators of similar legal structure
| and funding, in terms of free markets and democracy, from your
| perspective?
| Atlas667 wrote:
| I'm not gonna pretend I know about the specifics of DB, but
| tales of crappy public services are plenty around the world
| and a lot of the critique is aimed at enabling privatization.
|
| My anecdotal evidence is that these public entities usually
| suffer from lack of funding or incompetence fueled by
| corruption, that usually takes a few forms: - the contracting
| of work to a third party with kickback (incentives to
| continously do sloppy work) - inaction due to lack of
| corrupting opportunities (leaders try but cant set up a good
| fraud scheme) - nepotism that leads to incompetence
|
| And lack of funding can and has been weaponized to cause a
| shitty service to then set the pretext for privatization.
| Usually there are private interests behind this public policy
| decision.
|
| The more menial reason for lack of funding is sometimes
| massive spending or subsidies for capitalists elsewhere which
| skews the budget.
|
| And of course also the intense bureacracy needed due to lack
| of democratic control. Yes, im saying people dont actually
| have a say and they could have a say. IE delegate democracy.
|
| These are just universal problems of modern capitalist
| economies and their bourgeois politics.
|
| Quite possibly DB suffers from these more intensely than
| others.
| Bewelge wrote:
| To all non-Germans who might get scared by this blogpost:
|
| While there's valid issues to complain about, this blogpost is
| really hyperbole. And frankly, to someone who has lived in the
| area, it reads purposefully disingenuous.
|
| Just enter the places he mentions on Google Maps. Everything in
| NRW is so close together that to travel between cities you can
| often choose between international trains, regional trains or
| even just public transport.
|
| The connection he needed, is serviced several times per hour by
| several different train lines.
|
| Why did he stay on that specific train when he heard his stop
| would be skipped? The only reason I can think of is to write this
| blogpost. Since he's local to the area he should have known
| better.
|
| Also it's worth noting that driving that same route by car, at
| that time, just a couple of hours before everyone starts their
| Christmas dinner, might've taken even longer.
|
| I'm not trying to deny common issues with the DB but the author
| tried to travel through the densest urban area in the whole of
| Europe during the busiest 2-hour window of the whole year. AND he
| made a bad judgement call. To leave the transportation hub,
| staying on a long distance train which was already being re-
| routed.
|
| Funnily enough, the fact that every "Kuhdorf" needs to be
| connected by train is one of the difficulties the DB faces for
| which there is no easy solution. And if a long-distance train
| needs to decide between dropping some stops which can also be
| reached by short-distance trains or delaying the whole train, I
| think that dropping those short-distance stops is absolutely the
| correct choice.
| tartoran wrote:
| > Why did he stay on that specific train when he heard his stop
| would be skipped? The only reason I can think of is to write
| this blogpost. Since he's local to the area he should have
| known better.
|
| Because the train didn't stop?
| niemandhier wrote:
| It's a system run at the absolute border of what is possible and
| that was designed with the "just enough" philosophy in mind.
|
| You cannot add a stop if the rails are single track and the next
| train is just behind you.
|
| If you do said train will be delayed, will not be able to switch
| tracks at its final destination ( since it has a hard slot for
| that) and errors cascade.
|
| It's the best possible train system, given how little was
| invested ...
| 3ds wrote:
| 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
| completed and cut the time by two hours. Wonderful!
| Etheryte wrote:
| Things do not work well in general. DB is internationally
| infamous for its garbage service because everyone who has
| ever taken DB has a horror story. I lived in Germany some
| years ago and not once did I manage to catch a train that was
| on time for both arrival and departure. And this doesn't even
| touch on the topic of being stranded in the middle of nowhere
| as a regular occurrence.
| britzsquad wrote:
| absoluter grutzkacke die du da redest
| hobofan wrote:
| 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 up the majority of the DB
| network.
| deepsun wrote:
| As someone said during COVID supply chain disruptions: when a
| system is very optimal it becomes fragile.
|
| So probably they need to add more parallel tracks, unused most
| of the time.
| Taek wrote:
| Oh man, DB has one of the worst experiences in my well traveled
| history.
|
| If you don't buy a seat, you don't get a seat. I was taking the
| 4am train 8 hours from Brussels to Berlin, and I bought seats for
| both legs of the trip. To sleep, of course.
|
| The first leg of the trip was delayed, so they gave me a free
| ticket on the next train, 40 minutes later, but with no seat.
|
| So, exhausted as all hell and wanting nothing more than a little
| nap, I was forced to stand in one of the hallways between the
| carriages, unable to rest much even vertically because people had
| to push past me to get to the bathroom.
|
| Absolutely horrid experience.
| WA wrote:
| Deutsche Bahn is a joke among Germans by now. It is THAT bad.
| It's utterly unreliable. We pretend everything is fine, that we
| have some functioning infrastructure, but it just pretends.
|
| They have some policy that they need to give you a reason for a
| delay and they'd happily announce something like " _we 're late
| because of another train in front of us_" and the irony is, of
| course, the train in front of us is probably late, too, and you
| never get to know the real reason. No, strike that. The real
| reason is because the entire system is completely messed up.
| Train time tables are fantasy by now.
|
| > In DB's official statistics, a train counts as "on time" if
| it's less than six minutes late.1 Cancelled trains are not
| counted at all.2 If a train doesn't exist, it cannot be late.
|
| This is true and it is ridiculous.
| eviks wrote:
| > 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)?
| zb3 wrote:
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| Hyper-ventilate some, scream "Its too hot in here, I think
| I'm dying!" and presto-bango your very first panic attack and
| mental breakdown.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Sounds like an average day on UK trains, particularly Northern
| Rail.
| filmor wrote:
| The RE5 is operated by National Express. You have not been
| kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn.
|
| The connection in question is probably
| https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494....
|
| According to this page, it actually did stop at Troisdorf
| (though, that doesn't have to be correct). I don't see why they
| should have been able to stop at Neuwied but not any of the
| stations in between. Most of them are possibly too small, as the
| RE5 is quite long for a regional train, about 200m. The usual
| "RE" on this track, the RE8, is only about 110m max. Bonn-Beuel
| should have worked, though.
| amai wrote:
| So there are actually train companies in Germany that are worse
| than Deutsche Bahn?
|
| https://nationalexpress.de/de/
| csmpltn wrote:
| Are we green enough yet? Would've been nice to take the car
| instead of this, eh?
| pranavm27 wrote:
| There is one part of the world where nothing movies without
| rules. And then there's another where rules are joke and everyone
| optimises for personal efficiency.
|
| What should be the sweet spot?
| nickdothutton wrote:
| We have this sickness in the UK too. I think it may be terminal.
| It is some combination of regulation, not trusting anyone's
| initiative, mindless rule-following, "safetyism", never
| empowering front-line staff to make decisions, managerial tier
| expansion, and a few other things besides like infrastructure
| neglect, "financialisation", and general ignorance of the world
| of things, of the real, and over-reliance on the world of words,
| of laws, of construct on paper and not in steel and stone.
| tiku wrote:
| And I thought the Dutch Railways (NS, Nationale Spoorwegen) where
| weird.. We mostly have issues with trains not showing up, but
| then the next one arrives in 20 minutes so it usually isn't a big
| problem (unless you are cutting it close).
|
| We had a lot of issues in the past with the first leaves falling
| on the track or a bit of snow. And they ordered trains without
| toilets. So also cattle trucks.
|
| And have I mentioned that you pay a lot for this "service"?
| second class, normal costs: EUR18,80 to get from Utrecht to
| Amsterdam and back, 50 kilometers.
| helloguillecl wrote:
| Something similar happened to me between Essen and Dortmund while
| trying to get to the airport. The train stoped around 50 minutes
| between stations without a chance of getting off the train. I
| lost my flight as a result.
|
| I have also been left in remote villages when the last train of
| the day broke for some reason at 12:30 am. All travellers and
| myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to
| suppress.
|
| I agree with some comenters that German companies seem to prefer
| to stuck with Bureaucracy other than finding what could be
| confortable or even human solutions.
| cbmuser wrote:
| > All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the
| government also tries to suppress.
|
| No one is trying to suppress Uber. They are just obligated to
| adhere to the law like anyone else in this business.
| pama wrote:
| Totally reminds me of Manhattan subways deciding to skip 6 stops
| after making some static noise on the speakers that nobody
| understands, and leaving you on a station that you have to pay
| reentry fee to go back the five stops you overrun (or run the
| lottery of staying for longer in case the next stop has an easy
| transfer.) Hopefully some day these absurdities of modern life
| will be fixed.
| rendall wrote:
| That reminds me in turn of a joke we used to have, that the
| afterlife is being on a subway car with constant, unclear, but
| important announcements. Maybe this stop is heaven, maybe hell,
| maybe nirvana, maybe oblivion. There's no way to tell. Getting
| off at the wrong stop would be catastrophic. So, you remain,
| forever, riding in this afterlife subway car.
| stodor89 wrote:
| It's wild how in 30 years DB went from national pride to national
| embarrassment.
| rramon wrote:
| No accessible emergency brakes?
| tomesch1982 wrote:
| Clickbait.
|
| The opening paragraph contains some factual errors (you can only
| get kicked off a train when you do something illegal) and the
| whole story lives by exaggeration and missing facts.
|
| It is as moronic as saying people were kidnapped when a plane had
| to divert because of the weather. Also he would have been
| entitled to get a paid cab ride to his destination when that
| happens. But that is just one of the facts he did not mention.
|
| This story should be ignored and tossed into the local legends
| garbage.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Found the Deutsche Bahn PR employee.
| aspect0545 wrote:
| Of course there's exaggeration. Nobody really believes this
| person was kidnapped by the German train company.
|
| People do get kicked off trains, usually it's the entire train
| that is being emptied. Happened to me in NRW. Happened to me in
| Brandenburg. When there's a problem with the train, then
| sometimes it has to be evacuated.
|
| He would have not been entitled to a cab ride by the way, he
| was travelling with Deutschlandticket. Your entire comment is
| not only pedantic, it's also completely wrong lol.
| meta-level wrote:
| Yes, you get kicked off. If the train is too full. I got kicked
| off myself and friends also told me they had to leave the train
| for the same reason.
| JeremyTheo wrote:
| Kicked Off = we have to stop for some technical reasons that
| are further unspecified, and everyone has to leave the train
| because we are driving now in the opposite direction. a
| replacement bus is coming. Once every hour. With a capacity of
| 8 people. In some cow village 50km far away from the next city.
| With no cab service available. Thats was what i meant
|
| What facts are missing in your opinion?
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Entitled to what?
|
| He could try to do it on his own accord - they have leverage to
| decline and he'd have to take it through several other over
| burdened agencies.
|
| He could also try getting into contact with DB, and good luck
| with that.
|
| My own DB story was from Hamburg hbf where 3 huge DB employers
| was standing guard in front of reisenzentrum (the customer
| service counter) and yelling at every own being incredibly
| rude.
|
| DB is a joke, and it is imploding on itself. Staff seems so
| stressed and embarrassed by being a part of it.
| otikik wrote:
| > Hello everyone. Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf
| station, so we are on the wrong tracks. We cannot stop.
|
| Of course the train could not stop. It was not registered!
| renewiltord wrote:
| To think that, once we complete CA HSR, we too could have
| experiences like this. In fact, one of the best reasons to get
| trains in the US is so that we too can end up farther from our
| destination than when we started.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| I guess that's what happens if you live in a failed state. It's
| like watching an accident happen in super slow motion. I live
| rather remotely and 90% of bus drivers don't even speak German so
| when they skip a station despite you pushing the button to signal
| wanting to exit, you basically can't even communicate, leading to
| having to walk up to 2km with all your grocery bags.
| canada_dry wrote:
| > A journey of 35 kilometers, or, in DB units, somewhere between
| forty-five minutes and the heat death of the universe.
|
| A bit like "no frills" airlines in the west.
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| I can't wait for Italo and Trenitalia to enter the German market,
| it can only get better. It's already at rock bottom for long
| distance. Short distance with foreign train companies is bearable
| (Westbahn, transdev, RXX...)
| britzsquad wrote:
| For my job, I travel all over Germany very often. I take the car,
| train, bus, or sometimes even the plane. The train is the most
| comfortable means of transportation in Germany. Of course, there
| are delays, and sometimes mistakes happen that result in very
| long delays. But where doesn't that happen? I find traveling by
| car to be the worst. How many times this year have I been stuck
| in traffic jams for several hours without being able to go
| forward or backward? No one pays me compensation for being late.
| With the train, I even get some of my money back if we are late.
| I find this blog post ridiculous. The rail system in Germany is
| extremely complex and tightly scheduled. We have regional, long-
| distance, and freight traffic on the same tracks. Of course, the
| train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem. Grow up.
| For those who are interested: I traveled from Berlin to Konstanz
| for the Christmas holidays, and both trips were on time. I paid
| EUR70 per trip and didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads,
| or snow. I worked on my laptop for 6 hours on both trips. It
| couldn't have been more relaxed.
| eigenspace wrote:
| I'm glad at least someone has a sense of proportion here.
| German trains have problems for sure, but the train system in
| Germany is nonetheless fantastic.
| AmazingTurtle wrote:
| lmfao sorry to say that to both of you: were you lobotomized?
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| I don't think it's ridiculous. A complex system that delivers
| customer further from destination than they were originally
| from, is flawed by design. And we all know what the problem is
| exactly: it is the design for capabilities that the company
| could not afford based on its budget/planning/KPIs. DB did not
| invest enough in infrastructure to support the big dream, and
| now they also have huge aging and retiring workforce problem.
| So let's not pretend it's normal and business as usual:
| complexity is not an excuse for mismanagement.
| user34283 wrote:
| Where doesn't that happen?
|
| In any neighboring country, where punctuality is at like
| 74-99%, depending on the country.
|
| The DB is at 48.5% (Oct 2025) to 60% (2024 avg).
| lucianbr wrote:
| > the train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem.
| Grow up
|
| > didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow
|
| Aren't these statements contradictory? I think "grow up" means
| problems are unavoidable and the adult thing to do is expect
| them and accept them, and then you say you didn't have to
| worry, as if problems never happen.
|
| To me it sounds like you just got lucky on your Christmas
| trips. Two trips on time hardly prove a rule that there's never
| trouble, and in any case you directly state there's trouble
| sometimes and that's something to accept.
|
| Now I don't know the stats on problem frequency, which of
| course matters. But that's different from "don't have to
| worry". Opposite really. "Here's how much you should worry".
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The train is indeed the most comfortable means of
| transportation in Germany, but it's so unreliable nowadays that
| it's practically unusable if you need to get somewhere on a
| schedule.
|
| Want to get to the airport 2 hours before your flight? Sorry,
| you have to plan in at least an extra hour, because there's a
| 40% chance your train will be severely delayed or canceled.
|
| This unreliability drives people who need to get places on time
| to other modes of transportation. But if you don't mind being
| randomly delayed by an hour, the train is great. It's sad, and
| it didn't use to be this way.
| alexott wrote:
| Want to be at airport at time? Go with DB a day before and
| sleep at hotel near airport
| dnrvs wrote:
| > Scheduled arrival in Bonn see that was your second mistake
| (first mistake was trying to use DB)
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| Couldn't he just use the passenger brakes to stop the train while
| it was passing in Troisdorf?
| integralid wrote:
| He could, but that would be a very expensive stop.
| Havoc wrote:
| Need to fly to Germany and take DB tomorrow to/from airport and
| dreading it despite speaking German.
|
| Right out the gate 1st class tickets being half the price of
| standard tickets on same train does not fill me with confidence
| that this is organized in coherent fashion
| uliuscaesarjr wrote:
| I'll take Deutsche Bahn over Amtrack anyday. They should expand
| here.
| kunley wrote:
| "Kidnapped", c'mon
| paxys wrote:
| Didn't realize I should file a kidnapping charge every time the
| train I'm on randomly decides to go express and skip my stop. The
| MTA is apparently the largest kidnapper and human trafficker in
| history!
| kenanfyi wrote:
| I read the story and I felt like the mentioned background
| characters in it, saying "Deutsche Bahn..." to myself at the end
| of every paragraph.
|
| Once I was travelling back to home from Munich and the train
| stopped somewhere in Frankfurt in the middle of nowhere.
| Literally stopped on the tracks and it was completely dark
| outside except some far away lights from the houses around.
|
| We waited for 3 hours, with 2-3 explanations which did not make
| any sense. After 3 hours the train started riding again and I
| arrived in Cologne, which is ~1h away from home still, and they
| said this is the last station. I needed to spend the night in
| Cologne in a hotel, because it was 3 o'clock in the morning and
| there was no other train to my hometown.
|
| Fortunately I was able to get a refund plus the hotel cost for
| that night back.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I often think about people in the USA, they might have some
| misdemeanor warrant for some traffic infraction they didn't know
| about on the other side of the country.
|
| They get stopped for speeding near their home in Florida, the
| police arrest them, take them to the county jail where they are
| stuck without bond waiting for extradition to the county where
| the warrant was issued. You might wait a few weeks in a cell,
| then you can spend another five weeks stuck in the back of a van,
| pissing into a cup while they drive you 3000 miles to Seattle,
| stopping at 25 other jails on the way. Only for Seattle to give
| you a court date and kick you out of the door with nothing except
| the clothes on your back. Except it's 40degF and you were
| arrested in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. The cops in Florida
| have your phone and wallet. You have no phone numbers. You have
| no money. You're 3000 miles from home. Good luck, champ!
|
| (this is a real thing that happens regularly in the USA)
| oxag3n wrote:
| Following inflexible procedures to the letters and not to the
| spirit reminded me Swissair Flight 111, any aircraft fire today
| would result in quicker decision to land nowadays. I think Swiss
| are even more strict than Germans (at least when I lived there
| and frequently traveled to Germany), it's a blessing and a curse.
| MrDresden wrote:
| I've attempted to take two DB trains this year, while travelling
| both through Germany and with Berlin as a destination. In the end
| there were seven trains, and 8 hours extra lost travelling with
| DB. My compensation was pitiful.
|
| Living in the Netherlands (not native Dutch) I will now rather
| fly than take a train if it means that I can avoid using DB.
|
| For contrast, tomorrow morning I am heading from the Netherlands
| to Paris with a train (non DB), and don't really expect anything
| but a pleasant and smooth journey.
| mvk666 wrote:
| should've just pulled the emergency brake and ran...
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Should have taken the KVB/SWB line 16 from Cologne HBF to Bonn
| Bad Godesberg Rheinalle/BF instead, and the bus line 855 from
| there to Meckenheim BF, or so :)
|
| ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnwagen_B#/media/File:K...
| / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinuferbahn /
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnstrecke_Bonn%E2%80%93... )
| aswegs8 wrote:
| Things like these happen _all the time_ with DB.
| vadiml wrote:
| What is strange that NOBODY pulled emergency stop
| amai wrote:
| The title should be changed. It should be: "Kidnapped by National
| Express".
|
| Because the train mentioned in the article is not operated by
| Deutsche Bahn, but by National Express, see
| https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494...
|
| National Express is actually a subsidiary of the British train
| operator Mobico Group:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Express_Germany
| jen729w wrote:
| I'd have pushed the red emergency button.
| _Microft wrote:
| This train (RE5 (RRX) 28521) is _not_ operated by Deutsche Bahn.
|
| The operator is called National Express. Their trains look
| completely different than the ones of Deutsche Bahn.
|
| https://nationalexpress.de/de/re5
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Ahh... Chesterton's Fence anyone?
|
| Is it possible that running a railway at a national scale is
| harder than people who merely travel on it reckon?
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| Plenty of people here will probably focus on the Deutsche Bahn
| debacle but the problem is larger.
|
| You have to understand that Germany is currently led by a mix of
| trauma and economy as religion rather than reason to get a sense
| of what is happening.
|
| To simplify, Germany is somehow convinced that any inflation and
| rules deviation is an unstoppable slippery slope towards a return
| to the 20s and paving the way to some kind of nazi apocalypse.
| They therefore follow a rigid economic system, ordoliberalism,
| which to put it nicely, doesn't have a strong academic following.
|
| As a result, they have implemented a mercantilist economy using
| internal devaluation while shielded by the euro and stubbornly
| refuse to recycle their surplus in the union or even in the
| country. You get this absurd situation where they have enshrined
| a balanced budget in their constitution while their median
| household wealth is bellow Italy, their infrastructures is
| crumbling, a significant portion of their savings finance foreign
| debts - especially bad foreign debts judging by what they lost
| with the Lehman bankruptcy - their industry fails to invest and
| the country is basically non ironically saving itself to
| irrelevance.
|
| Honestly, if it wasn't for the beggar thy neighbors policies and
| them mostly refusing transfers despite benefiting hugely from the
| currency at the expense of the poorer members, it would be
| amongst the funniest quirk of history.
| pm3003 wrote:
| I've seen this in the same region, possibly on this exact line
| last year. I was going from Paris to Copenhagen, managed to have
| only 5 hours of delay. The return journey took 30 hours more and
| I could only get one hotel night reimbursed.
|
| I changed my ticket to get a French train as soon as possible.
|
| Other survival story: I lived in Northern Germany in the late
| 2000s as a young exchange student. Almost all the DB lines in the
| region would go through a particular railway node where, almost
| every Friday, someone (probably an evil reincarnator) would
| commit suicide, blocking the whole region.
|
| My reflex: so as soon as the train would stop, I'd get out, get a
| taxi, then convince 4 other people to go to Hamburg or even
| Hannover with me, sharing the cost.
|
| Never regretted.
| exabrial wrote:
| I had a 10am international flight to the US out of Munich. I
| boarded the train at the central station at 7am.
|
| At 8:15 they dropped us off several stops away from the airport,
| claiming this train could not continue because it was so delayed.
| So we hung out in the country...
|
| I finally go to the airport at 9am, rushed to the gate, but they
| people manning the counter had left (it's usually the flight
| attendants that man the counters I guess). I called the airline
| to try to get someone up there, but after waiting 45min on hold
| the flight had boarded and it was too late.
|
| also, whatever jackass put ellipsis "..." substitution on the
| Munich flight board because "H32" or whatever was too long to fit
| into to their div and they couldn't bear messing out their UI,
| needs a flogging. The UI on the flight board is completely
| useless, but OH does it it look pretty
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Can someone explain why, with Germany's reputation of being so
| well organized, great engineering, great manufacturing, they
| can't get the trains to run on time? It should be like
| Switzerland and instead it's like Italy. Doesn't compute for me.
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