Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

https://www.theocharis.dev/blog/kidnapped-by-deutsche-bahn/

by JeremyTheo • 7 months ago

1187 946 7 months ago

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

DB is a lot better run than British trains... My God. Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.

bryanhogan• 7 months ago

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.

f6v2• 7 months ago

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.

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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).

gadders2• 7 months ago

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.

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

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_klim4• 7 months ago

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-toast3• 7 months ago

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_NL4• 7 months ago

At some point your Regio Express turned into an Intercity. Free upgrade!

huhkerrf2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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!

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

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.

hdgvhicv11• 7 months ago

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.

rwmj3• 7 months ago

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.

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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...

a2fz3• 7 months ago

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.

burnt-resistor4• 7 months ago

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.

gadders2• 7 months ago

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.

hdgvhicv11• 7 months ago

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!”

em5003• 7 months ago

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.

ffsm83• 7 months ago

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.

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

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.

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

UK rail is privatized

50% of operators are now state owned

Not that it's a guarantee for things to get better...

jonp888• 7 months ago

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.

hdgvhicv11• 7 months ago

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.

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

I've used trains in the UK and Germany. The German trains are cleaner and more spacious (two floors in some cases).

graemep2• 7 months ago

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 £20, 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.

boxed2• 7 months ago

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.

a2fz3• 7 months ago

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 £100+ 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)

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

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.

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

If you've never been on a train that stops at the right station, maybe the problem isn't with DB.

trinix9122• 7 months ago

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.

hobofan2• 7 months ago

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.

f6v2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

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.

jimnotgym2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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?

a2fz3• 7 months ago

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 £100+ 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.

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

flexagoon3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

Dutch announcements in the Netherlands. Fancy that. Almost like it's the national language or something.

integralid3• 7 months ago

Since you moved to Netherlands is understandable they speak Dutch. You should consider learning it off you want to get by in the society.

bradley133• 7 months ago

In Switzerland, the major train lines announce in English (as well as German and French). Minor train lines often only announce in the local language.

Honestly, I don't see the problem. As a tourist, you have to be prepared with apps, or you can ask someone for help. Happens all the time, and most people are happy to help.

Someone living here needs to learn the local language.

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

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

graemep2• 7 months ago

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.

pjerem2• 7 months ago

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.

junon4• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Announcements in English aren't done for every station. Usually only for central stations and airports.

reddalo2• 7 months ago

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)

microtonal7• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

raverbashing3• 7 months ago

Talk about a very appropriate domain name lol

jansan• 7 months ago

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).

creichenbach3• 7 months ago

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.

nperson• 7 months ago

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.

flr032• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Canada: 30% on-time

https://media.viarail.ca/en/press-releases/2025/q1-2025-time...

ragall4• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

"Off the rails" hehe

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

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.

matrss6• 7 months ago

In other words: it's going downhill ever since the DB was privatized.

YorickPeterse2• 7 months ago

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.

tonfa4• 7 months ago

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

creichenbach3• 7 months ago

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.

timthorn• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Germany trains (and Switzerland trains)

Other commenters have already set the record straight, pointing out that these are clearly not in the same cluster.

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.

em5003• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

You're really wondering why a state-funded service would consider the needs of tourists?

larnon• 7 months ago

Because the State wants to attract well educated international workers to fix it's failing economy?

RobotToaster• 7 months ago

English is the most common lingua franca.

CaptainZapp3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

ExoticPearTree2• 7 months ago

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.

mcv11• 7 months ago

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.

mcv11• 7 months ago

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.

ludicrousdispla2• 7 months ago

It's not so bad, with luck you'll eventually end up at a station outside of Germany.

lmm5• 7 months ago

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?

How much help does your home country give to German tourists who don't speak English?

symbogra• 7 months ago

Swiss trains are very civilized. On an ordinary intercity train can sit at a table with a white tablecloth and have a beer or wine and a proper dinner. It really makes the time fly by. The SBB also has merch store with their own line of watches.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt• 7 months ago

I am suprised Germany has bad trains. I have only used U Bahn long time ago which was OK iirc.

tomschwiha• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

junon4• 7 months ago

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_klim4• 7 months ago

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-towel6• 7 months ago

On the other hand, Russian trains are absurdly slow when conpared to Europe. The flagship "high-speed" service barely does 200 km/h.

cowl• 7 months ago

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.

manarth2• 7 months ago

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.

microtonal7• 7 months ago

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.

jeroenhd3• 7 months ago

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.

microtonal7• 7 months ago

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 Friesenbrücke 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-towel6• 7 months ago

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?

junon4• 7 months ago

Because I'm an American living in Germany. I think you misread my comment - coming from the US, where train systems suck, it's annoying to hear Germans complain about what is otherwise an unbelievably advanced train system.

I might have missed a comma.

pell3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Nothing here suggests that the author is American beyond his blog post being shared on an American website.

junon4• 7 months ago

I never claimed the author was American.

indiantinker• 7 months ago

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!!

tirant2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

ilyush• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

fxwin• 7 months ago

I think you're reading a bit too much into this

bcye2• 7 months ago

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.

pjmlp6• 7 months ago

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.

trueismywork• 7 months ago

It is still stupid.

addandsubtract• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Are we really living in a world where you need to have the official app - any app! - to ride a train?

vetrom• 7 months ago

If you can read a modicum of German wasn't this sort of thing on the timetables in a standard way pretty much forever?

ben_w2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

xenocratus• 7 months ago

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_NL4• 7 months ago

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?

em-bee5• 7 months ago

germans don't use credit cards. finding an automated ticket machine thst handles credit cards would be extremely rare.

jltsiren3• 7 months ago

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.

cfstras• 7 months ago

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).

faust201• 7 months ago

And don't get me started on the ticketing machines not accepting Visa, Mastercard, or Amex at the central station in Munchen

Wow. You travel to a different part of the world without doing basic research. Hope you did not try stuffing USD on machines.

MomsAVoxell2• 6 months ago

Hey now, you have to read the details in the train booking, or if you think you need help - go to the Info desk - which is for sure there for you at most of the main train stations - they should have explained to you that you should switch locations on the carriage, because after all, trains can be split up… as any good German knows.

And also about the cards, just use cash, I mean, come on. Visa some local coins at the airport lounge or wherever…

mft_• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

lostlogin8• 7 months ago

Travel Details

Where the train is going being a ’detail’ is completely hilarious.

mrbombastic• 7 months ago

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.

selfmodruntime2• 7 months ago

Ir you download the Deutsche Bahn App, chances are about 50% that it will tell you if your platform changes. Better than nothing.

bad_username• 7 months ago

Your ticket was without assigned seat? Because if there was assigned seat, surely the seat would be in the correct carriage?

alexfoo6• 7 months ago

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.

mtmail2• 7 months ago

There's only local trains to Munich airport. Those don't have seat numbers.

scotty796• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

(Also, the S8 is usually quicker anyway...unless you somehow ended up at Laim, Moosach or Feldmoching.)

mtmail2• 7 months ago

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.

rostigerpudel2• 7 months ago

Completely agree. They even recruited a native BBC level English speaker as the voice actor for the announcements.

hopelite5• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

pm30038• 7 months ago

The Munich S-Bahn is usually a delight compared to the Paris suburbian RER.

hxhebdxbb• 7 months ago

But then you already entered the wrong train. The destination of a train is usually clearly written on the train, unless it's a very old one where it's not visible on every coach

I agree that it's not that intuitive that a line can have multiple end stops (like Stuttgart - Munich ends in both Stuttgart and Munich, depending on the direction you are entering?

stackghost• 7 months ago

DB is infinitely better than Trenitalia. I once took the train equivalent of what airlines call a code-share from Venice to Munich and Trenitalia just straight-up forgot half the train somewhere. It was a total gong show.

selfmodruntime2• 7 months ago

That fucking Sbahn is the bane of the existence of many tourists. It happens so much that there‘s now a bus line from those cow fields to an airport. You will be late.

mbrochh• 7 months ago

I am German and the three times I took an ICE from Cologne to Berlin and then back, EACH TIME I boarded at a wrong wagon. The entire system, their app, the signages at the tracks... it is all complete and utter dogshit.

abigail9513• 7 months ago

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.

manarth2• 7 months ago

    > "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.

abigail9513• 7 months ago

It's not a fake emergency. Acute anxiety causes the same thing. That's for a hospital to decide, not a train company.

abigail9513• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

croes4• 7 months ago

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?

abigail9513• 7 months ago

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.

burnt-resistor4• 7 months ago

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.

j1elo2• 7 months ago

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.

abigail9513• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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-towel6• 7 months ago

I'd agree with you on this, but abusing emergency medical services like this is a step too far.

burnt-resistor4• 7 months ago

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.

saagarjha4• 7 months ago

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.

f1shy• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

microtonal7• 7 months ago

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.

jeroenhd3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

Avamander2• 7 months ago

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?

tapia2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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...

yeputons3• 7 months ago

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.

throw3108222• 7 months ago

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.

tirant2• 7 months ago

Please, don’t go there.

j1elo2• 7 months ago

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.

boxed2• 7 months ago

It's not like this in Sweden I can tell you.

jeroenhd3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

yes the US is laughably corrupt

fkdk• 7 months ago

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

raverbashing3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

I'm not sure if I should be impressed or concerned that none of the passengers pulled the emergency stop.

locallost5• 7 months ago

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.

microtonal7• 7 months ago

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

locallost5• 7 months ago

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.

tsimionescu3• 7 months ago

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.

locallost5• 7 months ago

Yes because after kidnapping you are always allowed to leave the vehicle you were kidnapped with and continue with your day.

Sorry, but no.

djoldman• 7 months ago

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 €1.50 compensation per case.
Amounts under €4 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...

hdgvhicv11• 7 months ago

Planes have never diverted people to the wrong country. It’s always state institutions.

throw-the-towel6• 7 months ago

Here's just one example of planes doing exactly that. https://dailynewshungary.com/wizz-air-tirana-podgorica-fligh...

yeputons3• 7 months ago

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/WZZ4768/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• 7 months ago

Maybe worth mentioning that this „1.50€ 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...

croes4• 7 months ago

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_train2• 7 months ago

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

accountofthaha2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

I thought in Germany you got unlimited train travel for €58?

mschild2• 7 months ago

Yes, but not for the IC and ICE which are long distsnce trains. Those are still separate tickets as usual.

barrkel2• 7 months ago

Local trains, not ICE or IC.

accountofthaha2• 7 months ago

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.

Svip2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

Svip2• 7 months ago

I cannot speak for other countries; but in Denmark, they are always crystal clear when the train has hit someone (»personpåkørsel« 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?

martin-t• 7 months ago

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.

mschild2• 7 months ago

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.

tapia2• 7 months ago

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-toast3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

jrjeksjd8d2• 7 months ago

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.

bluebarbet2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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 Stellwerksstörung? 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.

mcv11• 7 months ago

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.

busterarm3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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 dafür 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• 7 months ago

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...

moepstar2• 7 months ago

If you haven’t seen the datamining DB talk by David Kriesel, you absolutely positively should!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0rb9CfOvojk

Farbklex• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

"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• 7 months ago

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.

mothballed3• 7 months ago

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.

rwmj3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

tialaramex• 7 months ago

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.

zipy124• 7 months ago

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.

Zealotux• 7 months ago

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.

svara3• 7 months ago

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.

p00dles• 7 months ago

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***

chironjit• 7 months ago

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

PurpleRamen2• 7 months ago

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.

Tommix11• 7 months ago

The German philosophy is also very much prevalent in Sweden.

potato373284217• 7 months ago

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.

this_user2• 7 months ago

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.

spankibalt2• 7 months ago

"[...] 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]

reddalo2• 7 months ago

A German saying "I was just following orders" sounds scary if you think of certain olden times.

nicbou2• 7 months ago

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.

bratwurst30004• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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

duxup2• 7 months ago

I worked for a company where we brought in teams from a couple European countries after a merger.

The absolute "I won't do anything more than I explicitly have to." was brutal. It was hard to even talk to them as they seemed terrified / constantly defensive of being asked to do something outside their typical process. They never were asked as long as I was there but man they were on a knifes edge about it at all times.

I'd even be on the phone with folks I met and got along with and I'd ask them about what they saw on a ticket they used to own, and I'd get angry made up rules about "I don't have to tell you anything because that ticket doesn't belong to me anymore!" Like bro ... we had a good time having beers together, I'm not your boss I'm a peer asking, it's still both our work hours ...

They were smart folks, got along with them otherwise, but it was just a horrible experience working with those folks when it came to work. Company eventually just shut down those offices, complied with whatever local laws were required to do so and washed their hands of those locations. I didn't blame them.

fabian2k2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

jtvjan• 7 months ago

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).

mk893• 7 months ago

My experience with these "fixes" is that they are worse than the other worst solution (in this case, step out in Köln Süd and get some other train).

There is really A LOT going on through the tracks in NRW and Düsseldorf/Köln/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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Isn't that basically what happened to the USSR? (Yes not technically "first world" but highly industrial and bureaucratic)

gkoz• 7 months ago

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.

sandblast2• 7 months ago

I am sorry but this is not Rao's but Umair Haque's and he considers the UK and the US Fourth World.

geysersam2• 7 months ago

This is just silly. The German train system has problems. Does that mean total civilizational collapse? No, it doesn't.

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Note that DB definitely has processes to add stops ad-hoc. It's just that nobody bothered in this case.

svara3• 7 months ago

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-bee5• 7 months ago

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

bombcar3• 7 months ago

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.

PaulRobinson2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

_Microft2• 7 months ago

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

psychoslave• 7 months ago

I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe.

That's actually the nub of the topic. Humans can accumulate some expertise in this or that topic, to some limited extend. But they can't integrate all the cases that actual people are going to face in an anticipated manner.

There are different kind of attitude with expertise. Some people will grow humility as they realize how little they know and how tiny their individual contribution actually is in the grand scheme of cosmos. Other will grow a metastased ego and leverage on the little few things they believe firmly to grab as much political power as they can to enforce whatever fantasy come to their mind as they get out of touch from feedback from the rest of humanity (except the yes-man court).

If an expert have meaningful things to share, of course it should be considered. But not as an absolute authority. Experts can also be fake people, or bribed, or missing clues about the specific context, just as well as be perfectly on point with well framed context and best intention to the general public at heart. But taking blindly anything that an expert labeled person for unquestionable certitudes is a receipt for the kind of trouble exposed in this thread.

db48x6• 7 months ago

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.

gmueckl2• 7 months ago

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?

lpribis• 7 months ago

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.

jasonwatkinspdx• 7 months ago

Yeah, I was on Amtrak in North Dakota somewhere and we got stopped for a couple hours waiting for a plow train. So like half the train got off in the middle of this field to play in the snow while we waited.

The Amtrak people I've met over the years pretty clearly want to do a good job in a system that is stacked against them.

PurpleRamen2• 7 months ago

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).

darubedarob2• 7 months ago

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.

potato373284217• 7 months ago

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.

krisoft4• 7 months ago

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.

low_tech_love4• 7 months ago

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.

deaux2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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-shape2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

deaux2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

France, while not perfect, is still balancing it +/- correctly.

Aloha4• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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".

potato373284217• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

And in Germany - it seems - nothing works and nothing is possible?

SonnyTark• 7 months ago

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_peasant2• 7 months ago

Ugh. don’t remind me. my fiancée 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.

SoftTalker4• 7 months ago

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.

skeptic_ai• 7 months ago

Remember the rules are written in blood

mikepurvis• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

potato373284217• 7 months ago

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.

wat100002• 7 months ago

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."

nephihaha27• 7 months ago

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.

potato373284217• 7 months ago

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.

behnamoh• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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)

rayiner3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

arendtio• 7 months ago

Well, for a single person, yes. But for most people on the train?!?

Sadly, this attitude of designing mediocre and over-complicated systems and then sticking to them no matter the cost is very German nowadays. And we hate it. But we can't help ourselves. And this does not affect trains alone; it also affects our tax system, every government process, and often businesses.

We are unable to design better systems; we are unable to design simpler systems, and improvising is a skill we have eradicated from our minds.

iso16313• 7 months ago

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

mk893• 7 months ago

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".

xattt2• 7 months ago

How long would it take for the train to register at a station? What happened to traffic control via semaphores?

This situation is an absolutely perverse application of policy.

vadiml2• 7 months ago

Why NOBODY pulled emergency stop

xattt2• 7 months ago

Nobody on the train was registered to do so.

sshine2• 7 months ago

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.

didntknowyou2• 7 months ago

i think most humanity left when corporates began to dominate industries and everyone just had to follow rules and structures

CaptainZapp3• 7 months ago

Obligatory link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/oct/08/...

skrebbel2• 7 months ago

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 fünf 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.

moepstar2• 7 months ago

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…

skrebbel2• 7 months ago

By today's standards I'd consider "15 minutes delayed" to be pretty much equivalent to "on time".

amtamt• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

proof or it didnt happen. this is a meme joke. even osho made a joke exactly like this.

cue_the_strings• 7 months ago

This has certainly happened to someone if not the OP.

I did wait in a single spot for almost 10h, my 5-6h journey became a 15h one, in Serbia in the late 2000s. IIRC, a large part of the railway was down that day, couple hundred km, electricity issue or something. Some people walked off the train, which was in between cities but near the road. I was a student, didn't have an alternative, so I didn't. They didn't organize a replacement bus.

This kind of thing was (maybe not to that extent) common, like once every year or two. They rarely reported on it in media if the cause wasn't notable.

vl• 7 months ago

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.

trinix9122• 7 months ago

“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.

pjmlp6• 7 months ago

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-toast3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

This is the place where AI needs to take over, no more excuses!

For example in country 400k€ 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.

max_aucube• 7 months ago

Average experience with Deutsche Bahn.

I'm french, my first trip in this country was epic. First time going to Köln ( Cologne ), the train back to the airport never arrived, with no explanation. I was literally stranded in another country without money.

sersi• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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

kioleanu2• 7 months ago

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.

JeremyTheo3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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)

sajithdilshan• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

tim3333• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

gregorygoc3• 7 months ago

Swiss trains are run by a national company and they’re great.

tazjin• 7 months ago

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.

adrianN2• 7 months ago

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.

renewiltord4• 7 months ago

That’s pretty strange about this competition thing. I’ve been repeatedly informed that the government is much better at running things like this.

garbagewoman6• 7 months ago

What do you find strange about it?

koyote• 7 months ago

The irony is that OPs train, the RE5, was actually not run by DB but by 'the competition': a private company called National Express.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Express_Germany

on_the_train2• 7 months ago

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).

hopelite5• 7 months ago

I don't really buy that this is the core issue, even though it may very well be one issue. Rail was operated efficiently and on time in the past when competition did not exist even in a contrived manner, and rail is not really an industry in which real intra-industry competition is really possible. Rail competes with flight, and personal and mass surface transportation. It cannot really compete among rail operators in an efficient manner.

It is way more complicated than that, but you could commoditize the rail separate from the transport of goods and people, where they each compete on price for capacity, but it all gets extremely political very fast, i.e., public transport people vs goods transport that primarily pays for the whole network.

slow_typist4• 7 months ago

Before the DB became a public limited company, their services worked remarkably well. I know from first hand experience because I was already a customer then.

The privatisation and the crazy idea that it could somehow not being run on a deficit is what ruined it. Of course the competition thing is artificial, and the internal structures are kaput, but I doubt that more competition would fix it.

Surprisingly, 90% of the train personnel is still pretty good, acting friendly and professionally.

stefanlindbohm5• 7 months ago

The main issue is over-utilisation and under-investment of the rail network. Like in many other EU countries. There is no evidence that a state monopoly would perform any better given today’s state of infrastructure and increased traveler numbers.

zepearl• 7 months ago

The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany

Cannot be - there is no competition in Switzerland, but things run pretty smoothly -> in the case of Germany I'd rather say: "lack of oversight, controls, 'konsequent zu sein'" -> in the case of Germany's DB I think that nobody at all levels gives a *hit about its problems.

tormeh2• 7 months ago

Things work well in Switzerland because the Swiss spend a lot more money on rail. That's unfortunately the secret.

adwelly• 7 months ago

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.

jrjeksjd8d2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Too much drama.

konradha2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

This has been the case since I moved to Germany, 6 years ago. National humiliation is apparently an insufficient detterent.

konradha2• 7 months ago

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.

Zufriedenheit2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

“I don’t know how to say that in English, but this train does not exist”

rcbdev• 7 months ago

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 ÖBB, the Swiss also seem to have it down.

apexalpha8• 7 months ago

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.

Psychoshy_bc1q• 7 months ago

We have a huge carlobby who wants you to use cars.

CurtMonash• 7 months ago

My first thought on seeing the headline was: Charlie on the M. T. A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A

jsnell• 7 months ago

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!

BrenBarn• 7 months ago

Ha, that was my immediate thought as well!

petre• 7 months ago

If this had happened in Eastern Europe, someone would have probably pulled the emergency brake and ran off.

mcv11• 7 months ago

I would not have blamed them.

kwanbix• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

I rode DB many times, all over Germany and from Düsseldorf 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• 7 months ago

When was that? DB has gotten much worse in the past ~5 years

tdiff• 7 months ago

It just destroys the "eco" image of deutsche railways.

Well, I'm all pro public transport, but please make it work first.

drnick1• 7 months ago

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.

giorgioz2• 7 months ago

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.

bytesandbits2• 7 months ago

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.

lorenzhs• 7 months ago

Good news for you! 1.5 is in O(50) since they’re both constants! (It’s 1.50 because the author has the 58€-a-month flat rate ticket for all local and regional services in the entire country. If you buy a regular ticket, you get back 25% of the ticket price for delays over an hour and 50% for delays over two hours)

bytesandbits2• 7 months ago

25% for 1h?? L O L

it should be 100%. A delay of 1h is extremely inadmissible. Try doing this in Japan

bitcurious• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

bombcar3• 7 months ago

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.

mikkupikku2• 7 months ago

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.

dpacmittal• 7 months ago

I don't think it's safe if the track is electrified

sparqlittlestar• 7 months ago

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.

Etheryte4• 7 months ago

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.

avidiax• 7 months ago

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 €3.75 compensation.

pm30038• 7 months ago

Almost had this somewhere in Northern Germany in early december.

The train stopped at "Kuhdorf", as the author says, at 10:30pm. The driver told us he couldn't continue because "the track was wet" (in Northern Germany in december, how unlucky!) and to wait for "replacement circulation" (usually buses or trains).

The driver then left the train. In fact he had reached his hometown and exceeded his work quota because of the delays.

Like the fabled German roadworker and the (more frequently observed) Krampus, the DB replacement bus is a fairy tale creature.

The passengers got out and forced the driver back into the train and he drove us to the terminus then took a taxi back to said Kuhdorf.

On the nightbus home a class of French highschool girls elected me the best-looking man in the bus (they thought I didn't understand) so I went back home with a smile.

jstanley2• 7 months ago

The term "kidnapped" is kinda over the top

If you got in a taxi to take you 35km away and he drove you 60km away to a random other town instead, would you consider "kidnapped" to be over the top?

Does it only count as "kidnap" if you are not eventually released? Or is it just that it's not kidnap when a corporation does it?

Valakas_• 7 months ago

From the Cambridge dictionary:

kidnap: to take a person away illegally by force, usually in order to demand money in exchange for releasing them.

The "usually" refers to the money, but the part that is "always" is the existence of an intent.

There was no intent here. This was a mistake, not on purpose. Nobody would say, unless to make a joke, "i was kidnapped by an elevator" Because the elevator works automatically, it has no intent to take the person by force and hold them hostage.

Can't believe i had to type this down.

NVHacker• 7 months ago

Why exactly you cannot get out and walk ? Just curious whether that's impossible or just not allowed ?

apexalpha8• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Sounds extremely reasonable to me. Not all people want to work extra hours for free.

xenonite• 7 months ago

Indeed, but I guess that the seller got compensated anyways for the extra two hours of delayed arrival.

giorgioz2• 7 months ago

Your 2025 Train Delay Wrapped https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped

snr243• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

I guess a brave soul would have pulled the alarm at Troisdorf.

stockresearcher• 7 months ago

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.

Atlas6672• 7 months ago

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".

abigail9513• 7 months ago

Why is DB worse than other operators of similar legal structure and funding, in terms of free markets and democracy, from your perspective?

Atlas6672• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

tartoran2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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!

Etheryte4• 7 months ago

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.

hobofan2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

zelphirkalt• 7 months ago

The money for that is corrupted away as soon as provided by the state. If there is constructions going on, you won't be taking any regional train any time soon around here.

Taek• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Sounds like an average day on UK trains, particularly Northern Rail.

filmor• 7 months ago

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.

amai2• 7 months ago

So there are actually train companies in Germany that are worse than Deutsche Bahn?

https://nationalexpress.de/de/

csmpltn• 7 months ago

Are we green enough yet? Would’ve been nice to take the car instead of this, eh?

pranavm27• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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: €18,80 to get from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back, 50 kilometers.

helloguillecl• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

It's wild how in 30 years DB went from national pride to national embarrassment.

rramon• 7 months ago

No accessible emergency brakes?

tomesch1982• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

[flagged]

aspect0545• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

JeremyTheo3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

otikik2• 7 months ago

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!

renewiltord4• 7 months ago

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.

jasonvorhe5• 7 months ago

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.

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

Did you really just blame immigration for the German railway's issues...?

jasonvorhe5• 7 months ago

wtf? No.

canada_dry• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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 €70 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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

lmfao sorry to say that to both of you: were you lobotomized?

DiogenesKynikos3• 7 months ago

It's fantastic compared to Amtrak. It's terrible compared to the Swiss, Chinese or Japanese rail systems, or even just the Deutsche Bahn 20 years ago.

ivan_gammel4• 7 months ago

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.

stefanlindbohm5• 7 months ago

DB does not decide how much to invest in infrastructure, that’s decided by politicians.

user34283• 7 months ago

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).

lostlogin8• 7 months ago

Where are you getting those numbers? Thats impressively terrible.

lucianbr• 7 months ago

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".

DiogenesKynikos3• 7 months ago

According to the Deutsche Bahn, 61.9% of passengers arrived at their destinations with less than 15 minutes of delay in November 2025.

You can decide whether a 38.1% chance of being delayed by more than 15 minutes is bad. I think it is.

Source: https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...

DiogenesKynikos3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Want to be at airport at time? Go with DB a day before and sleep at hotel near airport

dnrvs• 7 months ago

Scheduled arrival in Bonn see that was your second mistake (first mistake was trying to use DB)

N19PEDL22• 7 months ago

Couldn't he just use the passenger brakes to stop the train while it was passing in Troisdorf?

integralid3• 7 months ago

He could, but that would be a very expensive stop.

Havoc• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

I'll take Deutsche Bahn over Amtrack anyday. They should expand here.

kunley• 7 months ago

"Kidnapped", c'mon

paxys• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

3 hours!! Unbelievable. In the UK we would smash the doors/windows open these days after an hour or two. We got sick of the railway having no contingency plans for getting people off stuck trains in bad conditions

qingcharles2• 7 months ago

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 40°F 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)

driverdan• 7 months ago

How does this relate to the post?

oxag3n• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

should've just pulled the emergency brake and ran...

LargoLasskhyfv• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Things like these happen _all the time_ with DB.

vadiml2• 7 months ago

What is strange that NOBODY pulled emergency stop

amai2• 7 months ago

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

hopelite5• 7 months ago

Would you happen to know if they would be using their own branded/livery trains, or would they be using DB trains, or maybe just DB cars pulled by a British locomotive?

It just raises so many questions in my mind that of all entities, a British train operator would be operating a train that is bounded within the German rail system.

My first thought is that it's some kind of counter-union effort through fake "competition" by bringing in foreign, private operators into the network.

tEem212• 7 months ago

They are running their own trains and their own liveries. What happens a lot of the time in German regional services is that private operators run routes for DB, because they are required to offer them. There is some actual competition forming in German long-distance trains (Flixtrain), but the important bottleneck in Germain train travel is the rail network, which is owned and (at least supposedly) maintained by the recently formed DB InfraGo

stefanlindbohm5• 7 months ago

Competition on the railways is mandated through EU law.

Most regional services are tendered to the (in theory) best operator. The details on how, both which governing body organises the tender and whether the trains are branded by the region or the operator, varies across Europe. In Germany, these contracts are operated by a mix of DB, foreign state-owned operators and private operators. DB sells tickets for all region-organised trains regardless of who is the current operator.

Most countries have decided to have no or limited tenders on long-distance trains. In Germany, government support is prohibited for long-distance.

constantcrying• 7 months ago

No. The problem with DB are not the trains or the personnel on the trains. The problem is that the tracks are in miserable condition and that they are operated in a terrible way. The fault in this case is 100% with DB. Nobody else is to blame.

Shifting the blame away from DB, who is responsible for creating the terrible track conditions and is responsible for the operations, to the train operator, who zero ability to influence what DB is doing is just totally unfair.

DB is at fault here, they lead the train onto the wrong tracks and they also caused the previous delays. Regional trains in Germany have many different kinds of operators. Taking any of them is always miserable in exactly the same way, which is in almost every case caused by DB, because they can not operate the train network.

What is worse is that these operators also get into conflict with the DB trains. E.g. they prioritize a DB train, which is already late, over a regional train, causing delays for regional trains.

jen729w• 7 months ago

I’d have pushed the red emergency button.

_Microft2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

pm30038• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

didntknowyou2• 7 months ago

At that point I wonder if it's reasonable to pull the alarm so they have an emergency stop?

vidarh• 7 months ago

I like the Norwegian model: The train company is obliged to put up alternative transport to your destination. If they don't provide an alternative within reasonable time, you can demand refunds for documented costs for alternative transport up to fairly reasonable limits.

I've been bundled into taxis by the train operator in Norway because it was expected, but also likely cheaper for them to ensure full taxis than have people arrange it themselves and end up with everyone able to demand the maximum refund.

The costs are low enough that it's not a problem if it happens occasionally, but does create some real pressure to actually fix issues if it happens often enough.

tEem212• 7 months ago

This has been EU-wide legislation for quite some time, see https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...

srcreigh• 7 months ago

EU countries can decide to exempt some rail services. These exceptions may apply to urban, suburban, regional, long-distance domestic trains

cryptica• 7 months ago

I've been kidnapped by my landlord, who is working in cahoots with my employer with the support of the government and the banks.

I've been trapped inside my landlord's house and my employer's office and they keep trafficking me between each other using a train.

They take turns raping me mentally and financially. S.O.S. Help!

ajsnigrutin• 7 months ago

Come to slovenia, the buses here stop at every stop.

I know you bought a ticket for a train from the main station in ljubljana, and when you come there (and only then and there, not before, not online), you'll be notified that your train is leaving from a track a 10 minute walk away, because the station is being renovated.

And sure, you were a responsible traveller, came early, so a 10 minute walk is no problem... there are supposedly dots on the asphalt showing where to go, but they're already wiped off, so some granny or a college student will probably point you in the right direction.

So after you walk all that way to the right train tracks, and the train should already be there, you'll be notified that there is no train. Why? Someone jumped infront of the train somewhere. When? A few hours ago. But hey... there's a bus that will take you with your train ticket.

Where is the bus? Back at the main station, 10 minutes away. Surely you were very responsible and came not just 10 minutes early but 20 minutes early, because the bus leaves at the same time the train should leave.

The only thing worse were the international trains in the early 2000s through the balkans... you'd be in Zagreb, croatia, waiting for a nighttime international train towards ljubljana, slovenia, 5 minutes to departure, and dingdong, announcement, it says it'll be 10 minutes late. Wait 10 minutes, so 5 minutes until the delayed departure... dingdong, 20 minutes late. Ok.. 10 more minutes... the display shows 30 minutes. I mean... you could risk it and go for a coffee or something, but it's not worth walking all the way to a nicer bar and back if you only have 10 minutes until the train.

...and then, when the delay says 50 minutes, you get a phonecall from a friend, who's on that same train (travelling from thessaloniki), and she tells you that the train is ~6 hours late and that they just crossed the serbian->croatian border (5-6 hours away from zagreb).

bradley133• 7 months ago

Meanwhile, Switzerland has started forcing DB trains to stop at the border. They are late so often that they were throwing our train system out of whack. Even the Italian trains are better.

bradley133• 7 months ago

Reminds me of my time in Scotland. I commuted by train, and they published stats that showed my route as 95% on time "excepting conditions outside our control". In the year I was there, the train arrived on-time exactly once. Apparently very little was under their control.

They did occasionally announce the reasons for delays. Two that I remember: "Leaves on the track" in Autumn, what a surprise. "The wrong kind of snow" um...it's Winter, it snowed, it was nothing special?

RadiozRadioz• 7 months ago

The leaves are actually a big deal because they get crushed into a slippery film that stops the wheels making good friction with the rails. Occasionally you will see specialised debris-removal vehicles moving along the tracks and spraying them

sdeframond3• 7 months ago

Since it is a recurring event, one would assume preventive steps are taken such as frequent cleaning of the tracks in autumn.

hexbin01015• 7 months ago

The leaves are actually a big deal because...

Because of the substandard, cost-cutting line-side vegetation mismanagement coupled with the NIMBYs and save-the-planet warriors getting up-in-arms. Plus high wages making proactive vegetation management not cost-effective due to the extent. Network Rail is well aware of the issue but due to budget cuts, can't do much.

Behind every excuse on the railway, if you peel back just a tiny bit of the layer, you'll see the real reasons. In the UK it's usually "we need to spend that money on the NHS and welfare" and "ROSCO profits are not put back into the railway"

starkparker• 7 months ago

On a recent train from London to Bath. it was delayed because the train in front of me had hit a swan and came off worse for the wear. Its passengers had to disembark, and ours had to stop to take them on.

On the train back, we were delayed by the train in front of us catching fire.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai2• 7 months ago

DB is a joke and a disgrace to Germany. I have actively avoided traveling by train for many years. The company is customer-unfriendly from start to finish. I find the confusing ticket prices particularly bad: Sparpreise, Super-Sparpreise, Frühbucher-Tarife, Flexpreis, Sparpreis Gruppe, BahnCard, Gutscheine, ...

If you don't want to pay extra, you have to book six months in advance and be familiar with the fare system. It's super frustrating. It's just a train ride. I don't want to have to plan and organize it like buying a new car at the best price or trading stocks. And in the end, you can't even count on arriving on schedule. If you're unlucky, you'll be stuck at the train station in some godforsaken village.

I prefer to travel by car. The travel costs can be easily calculated based on the price of gas and fuel consumption. The total maintenance costs for a car are transparent. You are much more flexible and autonomous when planning your trip. The probability of arriving more or less on schedule is almost 1. And if you do get stuck in traffic, at least you have a little private, quiet, warm, and dry space around you.

If it were reliable, inexpensive, and uncomplicated, I would still find it more sensible to travel by train. But that is far from being the case. Instead, DB manages to combine the disadvantages of administrative bureaucracy and market economy.

splittydev• 7 months ago

Yeah, this is the great irony of it all. Germany really wants to discourage taking a car for "environmental reasons" and so on and does everything to encourage public transport.

But one thing is clear: I won't be bothered, robbed or even stabbed in my own car, and I also won't arrive in a different village lest I drive there myself. I won't arrive three hours late either, or have to stay overnight in some shitty Hotel because they couldn't find a replacement train.

The German public transport, like many other things in Germany, is an absolute fever dream for a "developed country".

ciex• 7 months ago

Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs but also because the price of gas is literally political.

The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai2• 7 months ago

Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs

Cars aren't complicated. Make the right choice (buy cheap, buy japanese or french, avoid wet V-belts, prefer timing chains). Change oil and oil filter often. Keep an eye on the brake pads, shock absorbers, brake discs, tires, brake fluid, rust on the bodywork. Taking care of all this is surprisingly inexpensive. Of course, you can also have a car mechanic do all of this. Then you pay for their labor. But I really don't see any nasty surprises that might be lurking there. Of course, it depends on how well informed you are. If you've never looked under your car, then it's obviously a surprise when the floor panel is rusted through.

I understand that this is unreasonable for most people. But there is scope for ensuring that costs can be planned very well. However, I must admit at this point that you might as well deal with the complicated DB tariffs if you want to.

but also because the price of gas is literally political.

Super 95 currently costs between €1.60 and €1.80. I still find that pretty easy to budget for.

The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of ...

I agree with all your points. I'm just totally disappointed that we as a society can't manage to make public long-distance transport appealing. I would love to live in a world where I would feel like a complete idiot if I drove from Leipzig to Stuttgart and back instead of just taking the train.

puzzlingcaptcha• 7 months ago

I have my own travel story involving DB. I had a ticket for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt am Main to Warsaw. When I tried to check-in online a day before the flight it told me I had to do it at the airport. I fly a bit, so I knew what that meant - they overbooked the flight. The next day I got my "no aircraft entry guaranteed" boarding card of shame at the airport and learned at the gate that they overbooked the plane by three persons! After explaining my EU passenger rights, I got them to confirm my €250 compensation and since I was in an adventurous mood headed for the Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof train station.

The manned DB Travelcenter was still open so I walked in and asked for an international ticket to Warsaw. The gentleman (who spoke fluent English) typed a bit on the computer and told me he cannot sell a ticket for the Berlin-Warsaw leg of the journey due to a "system error on the Polish side". I knew that probably meant the Berlin-Warsaw-Express is at full capacity again and they don't sell tickets with no seat indicated for that route. I asked for a ticket to Berlin instead (€207, 2nd class) and went for a hamburger - still had about an hour until the train.

The train was initially supposed to arrive delayed 5 minutes but that was soon to change. The delay kept ticking up to 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour (around this time the DB travelcenter closed for the night) then two hours then cancelled altogether. I wasn't sure if my ticket is valid for the next train (the DB website was a bit vague about that) so I called my friend in Hamburg who confirmed I was good to jump onto the next train which would arrive on schedule in another three hours. I tried getting a Capri-Sun from a vending machine but it got stuck and wouldn't fall out. So I sat at the empty station with noting but rats as company until 3AM when the next Berlin-bound train arrived on time. In Berlin I got out at Sudkreutz and jumped onto a FlixBus to Poznań (€22) and stayed the night over at my friend's place (I badly needed a shower at that point) before taking a train to Warsaw the next day (€16, 2nd class).

Now, I technically did eventually use my Frankfurt-Berlin ticket but I was quite annoyed at DB so I applied for a reimbursement due to a cancelled train, which was granted in full. I also applied for reimbursement of the plane ticket from Lufthansa which was also granted. With the additional €250 compensation for denied boarding I actually made money on that little adventure but I probably wouldn't do that again. Gotta check in earlier from now on.

df0b9f169d54• 7 months ago

The ticket mentioned in the article seems to be a Deutschland ticket, unfortunately compensation is low. For time sensitive trip I often consider other option.

The weirdest thing in my city is that the bus driver often forgets 1 or 2 stops. There was a kid bursted into tear when she lost her direction on her way back home from school because the bus driver took a "wrong" path.

kypro• 7 months ago

As a Brit I find Germans so strange sometimes.

I visited the Dachau concentration camp several years ago on one of the hottest days of the year. Me and my GF packed water, but on that day is just wasn't enough and we ran out towards the end of the day.

We got around the camp and just before leaving we went into the cafe and asked for a drink, but they said sorry the cafe was closed.

Okay, fair enough. In that case we'll just fill our bottles with some tap water then.

"No, you can't do that".

Huh? We really need a drink... We've been on coaches and walking around all day and we've ran out of water.

"Sorry, I can't help".

We have our empty bottles here, could you please just pour us some water?

"No, sorry I can't".

I get she probably wasn't suppose to serve customers after close, but we just wanted her to fill our water bottles with tap water. I may be misremembering now but I'm like 80% sure I asked if I could fill the bottle in the toilet, but she also refused to open to toilets because they were closed.

This whole situation would have been absolutely absurd in the UK.

Germans really seem to like doing everything as per the rules regardless of how inconvenient and ridiculous it is. Even things like crossing roads where generally most Brits will wait for a green light, but if in a hurry many will look for a gap in traffic and just cross. Germans seem to rarely ever do this and you get the sense you are being judged if you do it.

I had lots of weird little experiences like this in Germany but almost passing out from dehydration at a German concentration camp had a certain level of irony to it.

larusso• 7 months ago

I tried taking the train to Prague this year for my birthday. I’m from Berlin so taking the train made sense on paper. I could have taken the car but I thought that it might be more relaxing to just sit for the 4h or so it takes.

In Dresden we were told that they had issues with the power lines on the Czechia side and had to leave the train. It was still an hour to the border but seemed to be the best place to dump all the people and let them go the merry way the rest of the journey. The basic service was a printed paper directly out of the connection lookup system. No info if this connection is actually the best or makes sense since other travelers will be also on route. We had to switch trains 2 more times and arrived in Prague at around Midnight. Let’s say I really don’t want to take the train anywhere at the moment. Sidestory. Check the current state of the S-Bahn Service (run by DB) in Berlin. One wonder why they bother to announce issues with the system day in and out. They could just switch over and announce when stuff is running smoothly instead.

herunan• 7 months ago

You got Deutsche Bahned. IF anyone watches Jet Lag The Game on YouTube, they play hide and seek games around Europe, and whenever they're on a Deutsche Bahn something almost always goes awry.

nw05678• 7 months ago

Are you ScotRail in disguise? Are you ScotRail in disguise? Top level bullying from the tartan army.

mdavid626• 7 months ago

Munich-Mühldorf regional train. Once it forgot to stop at Markt Schwaben (it always stops there). Passangers had to wait 30 min for the train to go back at the next station. Not even an apology.

ianbooker• 7 months ago

Kidnapper is likely not Deutsche Bahn but a regional subsidairy.

This is an effect of privatization gone wrong, with the national service, the infrastructure, the regional services (each), the network (not in infra), cargo and then some (sub)companies split for privatisation and an IPO that never happened. The highly segmented network is not digitalized in to any standard, so regional trains have to operate in policy frameworks and network cells that favor long distance trains. Its utter chaos on a daily basis.

mensetmanusman• 7 months ago

The population pyramid inversion and an artificially weak currency is destroying Germany.

tietjens• 7 months ago

The thing that stands out to me about this story and that confuses me the most about German life is the general passive acceptance of realities like this. I think it might be simply European.

coolThingsFirst• 7 months ago

The picture of the DB station should be the official logo of Germany.

I'd rather go through dante's inferno than live in Germany. What a bleak existence.

dan-bailey• 7 months ago

Yeah, similar experience when I was in Berlin on vacation in 2023. Had a rail transfer to Amsterdam set for 16:30. Canceled without explanation or warning, and the replacement was: Berlin -> Duisberg, with a 13-minute layover Duisberg -> Viersen, with a 6-minute layover Viersen -> Venlo, with a 7-minute layover Venlo -> Eindhoven, with a 38-minute layover Eindhoven -> Amsterdam

As you can probably guess, this is not at all what happened. Shit started to disintegrate around Viersen, we did some shuffling and waiting for later trains, and wound up in Aachen around midnight. The hotel across from the train station was closed for the night, we weren't going to stay in the nearby hostel after seeing one too many horror movies, and so we walked over a mile to a nearby hotel. Staff was lovely. We got in to a room by 01:00, showered, plugged in all our devices, and passed out around 02:00. Up at 05:00 and back to the train station to catch a ride to Rotterdam (very full train), and then on to Amsterdam. We hit our hotel about 12 hours behind schedule, changed clothes and got on with it.

Germany and France had the worst trains. Italy was insanely efficient/on-time.

MomsAVoxell2• 6 months ago

I lived in Germany for a while, and thus had a DB card, which allowed me to get discount tickets and stuff to go anywhere I needed in the Deutsch region.

It was pretty fun, I used it a lot, those beer/disco clubs on the train between Düsseldorf and Bonn and Frankfurt, whoa, just .. really used to be fun.

So its real sad to hear of, what was once a great institutions’, demise ..

Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

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