German trains are less punctual than Britain’s ‘broken’ railways
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I have extensive experience of both being a British person living in Germany. British trains are much worse, or at least used to be. German trains are often late, but at least they are clean and modern. How can you compare ICEs when the UK doesn't even have high-speed rail (no, the short stretch to the channel tunnel doesn't count).
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Let's not use the quality of other rail networks to act as if ours isn't so bad
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German rail network fucking sucks. The Swiss won’t even allow German trails on their tracks if they are more than a few minutes late because it messes up everything.
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Hasn't german rail been extremely defunded like britain did to British rail in order to get it privatized? (which worked) and Germany has some of the most powerful car lobbies in the world which have a huge vested interest in making sure that the trains run horribly in order to sell more cars and make more profit right?
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Agreed. Additionally, the article does not provide information on the ticket price or cost for the end user. Furthermore, even if the ICE (high-speed train) is delayed by 10 minutes, it remains faster than a regular train so consumer experience is still better than UK.
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The investment backlog that needs to be dealt with grew by €2bn in 2023 to €92bn, according to Deutsche Bahn estimates.
What is maybe also interesting for others is, that for everything Germany has an investment backlog of about 600b €.
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Everything you said is right.
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It will have been interesting to see a simple customer oriented approach:
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TrainA takes 3 hours to do 100 KM, costs 50$, arrives on time sometimes cancelled, 500 passengers (i.e. UK)
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TrainB takes 1 hour to do 100 KM, costs 5$, arrives usually 10 minutes late, almost never cancelled, 1500 passengers (i.e. DE)
Still doesn’t excuse the lack of investment and punctuality problem but the final outcome for the user is different and less rage bait
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Probably more intressting is that the investment backlog grew so quickly, due to the current transport minister actually asking Deutsche Bahn to look into it. That really shows the main problem.
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It's funny, I was ranting about-it in another thread,
In like 10 years Germany went from My train is 10 minutes late, the DB ist immer lät das ist nicht akzeptable too Actually, mein trip went quite well Der Zug war only 30 minutes late
Not sure what happened.
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The first thing was unification, which meant a lot of railroad spending was used to rebuild the lines cut by the wall. Then around 2000 they tried to privatize it, but never did, but cut funding. Then decades of conservative car lobbiest as transport ministers, which ignored that freight and passenger rail demand was going up, which obviously means more infrastructure is needed. They also increased red tape to make new railways very hard to built. The current government actually started to look at the problem, which is already great, and then approved shutting down major lines for large scale maintanence work.
However what is really needed are additional high speed rail lines to take those trains of the other mainlines and increase capacity. There are still some gaps in the network in desperate need of hsr in general. Also many of the large train stations need increased capacity to deal with more passengers. It is going to cost billions and a lot of laws to get this fixed and even then it will take decades.
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It'd be cool to have some source.
All I found was:
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/german-parties-car-policies-in-february-national-election
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About 72 per cent of Deutsche Bahn’s intercity trains arrived within 10 minutes of their scheduled arrival time in the year to January 2025,[...]
Fun fact! I'm not sure if it was done here, but almost any time DB calculates a statistic like that, they don't count the trains that didn't arrive at all as unpunctual. So if a train is completely cancelled, it's technically "on time" because the predicted time is "never"
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The free market and austerity happened. They transformed the DB from a government service into a (still state owned) private company and split it up into several different entities in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Then greedy MBA suits broke everything in order to enhance their salaries and bonuses. Their greed and stupidity at one point led to a high speed train derailing and crashing, killing over 100 people. Also the infrastructure was left to rot, as pretty much all of German infrastructure, thanks to all major parties making austerity into a state religion. Now the infrastructure is sufficiently rotten to cause a whole trainload of delays, and attempts at repairing it, of course lead to more delays, because in order to do a wholesale replacement of a large section of track, you need to close down that section of track for quite some time, leading to more traffic on other routes leading to more delays.
Turns out that purported German efficiency isn't that efficient after all, but even back when that wholesale theft of public property that is the privatisation started, there were people who already called this out.
The moral of the story: Don't become like Germany, don't let free market cleptocrats take over your entire political system.
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Ticket prices in Britain aren’t due to privatisation. They were a side-effect of the unexpected success of British Rail in its final years at attracting more passengers. As demand went up, the ailing infrastructure struggled to cope. Upgrades can take decades to plan and execute correctly, so the answer was to raise prices to ease off demand.
This also fulfilled the longstanding policy of both parties for rail users to carry the financial burden of rail operation and maintenance. So, under privatisation, 40% of tickets were priced directly by the Department for Transport. The rest were priced by the train operators, who often engaged in price wars that lowered prices compared to the controlled fares.
Now of course privatisation is effectively over and 100% of tickets are priced by government. Prices will still be maintained high because of the desire to make passengers pay for the system, and to keep demand manageable. Already some routes have reached saturation.
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What German train costs $5 for 100km?
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This is just to illustrate my point on the cost difference between uk and de for the cost of the ticket. Value are arbitrary and not correct. But cost is definitely significantly higher in uk.
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Is, is that possible? Did the Germans invent time travel?
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It's not really time travel, it's more like time and money being stolen by greedy corporate suits.
But in terms of actual time travel, they are indeed working on something that's going to catapult the entire country back into the 1930s. (Without restoring railway punctuality to the proverbially high standard of that time, though)
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€58/m for all non-ice is hard to beat.
