German trains are less punctual than Britain’s ‘broken’ railways
Olaf Scholz mocked UK trains. FT analysis of 1.9bn data points shows they are more reliable than Germany’s network
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?
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.
Everything you said is right.
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
It was "privatized" by turning it into a publicly traded company. But it was never sold, so the German state still owns 100% of it.
That is why I said that privatization is the goal (not what is currently in effect) and made the comparison that the UK did the same thing. Degrade, Defund, Dismantle. It is the SOP for right wing movements trying to privatize everything.
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"
Similar to the UK last time I checked a train isn't considered late until it's about an hour late. Try explaining that to your boss.
Don't privatise. Railway lines are a monopoly. People who rely on trains get screwed over week after week but don't have any competitors to use instead.
I don't know how Germany's trains could actually be worse. It costs £100 to travel 50 miles on a train that has a fairly high chance of not even making it to the destination at all.
I hope the bleeding has stopped 😬
When I travelled to the UK with Interrail, I expected the rail network to be a total shitshow based on reputation, but was surprised to find it adequate. In some aspects even pretty great (free food in 1st class). I guess as a German, my standards are quite low now...
had a similar experience, but don't forget that interrail makes you forget about the real price of tickets which iirc are quite the issue
Yeah the UK prices are often insane, even compared to DB (which is also insane)
German rail network fucking sucks. The Swiss won’t even allow German trains on their tracks if they are more than a few minutes late because it messes up everything.
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.
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 by cutting back maintenance. Their greed and stupidity at one point led to a high speed train derailing and crashing, killing over 100 people. This didn't wake up anyone, a lowly scapegoat was convicted, some minor changes were made, everything else went on as if nothing had happened. 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 the famous 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. Just nobody listened.
The moral of the story: Don't become like Germany, don't let free market cleptocrats take over your entire political system.
It has been pretty bad for way more than 10 years TBH.
At least my perception is that when i was using regularly the DB network in the the early 10's it was expensive but fine, large delay did happened but weren't uncommon. Nowadays I feel like that every-time I take the DB network, I should expect at least 30 minutes delay, and plan at least one hour for a connection.
I thought when people referred to the brokenness of UK rail they mostly meant how much more expensive tickets became after privatisation?
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).
Agreed. Moreover, the article fails to mention the ticket prices or costs for the end user, which tend to be higher in the UK. Additionally, even if the ICE (high-speed train) is delayed by 10 minutes, it still outpaces a regular train, resulting in a better overall consumer experience compared to the UK.
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.
Wait, so you're saying that it's the DfT that caused the high prices, and not to cover costs but to control demand? Ie. that privatisation wasn't actually to blame? (Do you have a source, I'd like to read up on this)
It will have been interesting to see a simple customer oriented approach:
Still doesn’t excuse the lack of investment and punctuality problem but the final outcome for the user is different and less rage bait
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 €.
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.
Friedrich Merz, the centre-right leader likely to be Germany’s next chancellor, has said he wants to split the operation of the network from the operation of the trains — a move reminiscent to UK rail privatisation in the 1990s.
This has happened here in Czechia and it's worked fine. The state owned railway operator that used to own both the trains and the track was split into one company that cares for the tracks and another that runs trains on it. Iirc it was a move prompted by the EU to open the sector to competition and some regions have indeed procured other, private providers (Arriva) for their local train services because their offer was cheaper than the state-owned rail company's. All in all it seems to be working so far though.
(Edit: isn't this what the UK did!? Why hasn't it gone to shit here?)
What happened in the UK in the 90s was that the govt actually privatised the track-operating company (I think they retained ownership of the actual physical tracks though). But it predictably turned out to be a shitshow so they bought it back in 2002.
Let's not use the quality of other rail networks to act as if ours isn't so bad
Is, is that possible? Did the Germans invent time travel?
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 the times before the 2000s, though)