Germany's identity crisis: The trains no longer run on time

The problem in Germany is that due to the structure of the railway network, there are much more interdependencies between connections, so one disruption tends to be harder to contain. It spreads out and affects many more connections.

The problem in Munich is that everything must go through a single two-track part underneath the city center, which is at absolute capacity. If anything breaks down there (and it does, often, very often), even a small delay in a single train, all trains get delayed or skip stops.

In my experience, you have to take at least one train early if you do not want to come late regularly. Even e.g. the main airport train line, used by tourists, often turns around before the actual airport due to delays.

If you live in the city itself, it's fine, you also have other options. If you live further away, it's barely acceptable to very bad, IMO.

It is reliable-ish, but more "Amtrak Capital Corridor"-reliable than "JR Yamanote Line"-reliable.

I live in Berlin and while there are sometimes disruptions, it's hard to complain when the interval between trains is 4-5 minutes. Just get on the next one. Actually, if the train is 2-3 minutes late, it makes sense to wait another 3-2 minutes after that because it's guaranteed the late train will be crowded, and the next one will be undercrowded, because most people don't follow this principle.

Sibling comment says all traffic in Munich is funneled through the same central section; that's also true for several Berlin lines, but I've never heard of it becoming a problem. Maybe one time. Berlin's network[1] is complex enough that you have plenty of alternate routes available if something like that happens.

Note to future urban planners: a ring railway is a great idea as it provides redundancy of any possible route through the city center. (Very large cities might even need two. The Soviets actually built a second ring to avoid West Berlin, but it doesn't run as a continuous service. You can see various regional services running around the very outside of the network map.)

I've also traveled fairly long distances by regional train (yay Deutschlandticket) and by ICE (absolutely worth it if you're not penny-pinching). It's always disrupted; trains are always late. But I always get to my destination, so I don't mind that much. If you're on a nice and relaxed schedule, like traveling the day before, you'll be fine. It seems an acceptable, despite not ideal, way to run a railway network.

I think that unlike plane travel, where you normally get there exactly on time but there's a small chance you might be seriously delayed, with German train travel you're quite often a few hours delayed (for a cross-country trip) but it's never worse than that. You never have to stay the night in a hotel, you never have to pay extra money to get rebooked, and you never have to sue them afterwards. IIRC, if you're estimated to arrive more than 20 minutes late, you're allowed to just hop on any train towards your destination - the DB app will tell you this - and you don't need a new ticket, though it's recommended to get a note from a customer service desk to prove it occurred.

Note that the German network runs a lot of trains on a lot of tracks - unlike, say, the French TGV network, which has dedicated tracks for TGVs. The German approach allows for more services with less reliability and the French approach provides the opposite. AFAIK, there are a lot more ICE routes than TGV routes because the routes can be pieced together from existing local track segments and incrementally upgraded.

Side note: I've been on a regional train that was delayed 10 minutes, then sat on a siding for another hour to let more important traffic such as ICEs run on schedule past it. There is a tradeoff between resource utilization, and slack which allows for quick return to equilibrium. The more timeslots are occupied, the longer it takes before a delayed train can find a normally empty timeslot to fit into. This also applies to computers.

And people have been complaining about train delays since long before I got here.

[1] https://sbahn.berlin/liniennetz/

Wouldn't you need the delay even if everyone drove perfectly? Isn't the point of it to give time for cars that have already entered the intersection to exit it, since the light turning red just means you're no longer allowed to enter?

Around here the power goes out to the lights now and then. Interestingly, the traffic flows smoother and faster without the lights! Even the arterials! It's amazing! Drivers simply politely cooperate with each other.

(The same thing happens when a traffic cop handles the intersection.)

I'm always assured that the city traffic light engineers know what they're doing and design the lights for maximum flow. They do no such thing. They are either incompetent or deliberately set things up to impede the flow of traffic.

Most of the lights now have cameras on them. Would it be so hard to connect them up to AI with the goal of "maximize throughput"? Imagine how much gas would be saved. It would be tremendous!

I've also done this. Back when I used to teach, all I had to do to get students to be on time was to start on time myself, and close the classroom door. (I think they locked automatically, so students had to knock to be let in, but that wasn't the point. I never gave them any grief, just let them in with as small an interruption as I could manage.)

I have never had a more punctual group of people that large. It works.

If I'm going to be late for a social occasion, I'll text the host.

Maybe the DB staff went soft during the lockdowns. Maybe some employees left and institutional knowledge suffered. The same thing happened with the truck driver shortage.

Maybe train personnel out sick?

COVID harmed most industries that rely on manual labor. Suggested reasons vary, one is that people discovered they could do mental-work, and preferred it (and apparently it never occurred to them before). Another reason is many retirements and a gap in knowledge transfer to the next generation. Another is a huge increase in demand for non-physical work during COVID that never went away, leaving other industries short handed (and it's not a pay thing, there's not enough people for all demand in all industries, someone must run short).

The way neoliberalism dealt with the public sector including rail service and infrastructure and then come up with "COVID killed Deutsche Bahn" is like saying that poor old sucker who was pushed down the staircase succumbed to his running nose. The problems run much deeper and were already visible in the 70s and 80s, but because it's only the public sector and rail traffic, not about more highways and more cars and then even more cars it never got fixed. Because who needs rails and trains, right.

I am just opposed to "big auto" idea being responsible for lack of investments in train network.