[winkelwagen]

As someone using the German railway for a large distance destination couple a weeks ago it was a total disaster, we got stranded in a unfamiliar German city. Deutsche bahn told us they didn’t have any of their (partner) hotel rooms left. Just arrange something yourself. That was very nice because all the hotels were full anyway. It took us another 2 hours of calling to find something. I was exhausted when I finally checked in somewhere at 1 am.

I try to avoid flying, but the German railway is giving me nightmares. I frequently travel through Germany and it is the exception if there aren’t any large issues.

The article itself is very thin when giving its reasons. I’m sure it’s oké for people without the money to spend, but I would rather pay more for increased reliability. If the German summers are similar to how the Dutch maintains their railways, I’m sure they will plan a ton of construction while the masses of people that usually take the trains for work are on holiday. So I’m inclined to see this promotional as compensation for bad summer train service.

[ThePhysicist]

That's really unlucky. Before the Covid thing I took a long-distance train at least once per month for two decades, and I never managed to get stranded anywhere even when I chose late connections. Normally DB knows the connections passengers have, and it seems that if the last train of the day gets delayed the other trains wait for it to make sure no one gets stranded. I would really have enjoyed staying in one of those Intercity hotels at DB's expense.

The worst thing that happened to me was that the ICE train broke down in the middle of nowhere and the DB had to send another train and evacuate everyone from the original one over a gangway (it's not allowed to let passengers deboard in the middle of nowhere). Took more than four hours of waiting in an overheated train during summer. They sent me a box of really good chocolates as a "We're sorry" gift.

[rad_gruchalski]

Lucky you. I was taking Koblenz to Utrecht some years ago and every week there was something going wrong in Germany on the way back. Once they just dropped me off in Bonn, no further service to Koblenz at midnight „sleep on the bench, we aplogize but can’t do anything”.

[alexott]

DB is nightmare. I had so many cases of missing trains when they had 1 hour delay on 1.5h track, connecting trains no waiting even for 5 minutes, cancelling train in last minute, etc.

[rjzzleep]

The mess of DB isn't that much different from how the oligarchs in a lot of eastern European countries came to be. Privatization without real plan. Privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

The rails near Hamburg Altona are rotting, but the Bahn didn't want to foot the bill. So they came up with a horrible new station somewhere else. As a result the city chipped in to make a better one and pay of it from tax money.

I'm the last person to favour the government institutions in Germany. They're slow, lazy and full of old lazy hierarchies that must have been productive 30 years ago, but what is the point of privatizing something when the structure itself doesn't change and the privatization does nothing but siphon money out of the system and pump tax money in anyway? Half the ICE fleet is out of commission nowadays.

[tpmx]

So, echoing what eisstrom wrote: Deutsche Bahn is fully state owned. That phrase about "privatizing the profits and socializing the losses" is a common but still mindless form of dross in this case. I do understand why it gets a particular group of uninformed people to upvote your comment out of reflex though. You use it as click-bait, sort of, while building a convoluted argument that presumably very few of those upvoters actually grok.

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

Deutsche Bahn AG is the national railway company of Germany. Headquartered in the Bahntower in Berlin, it is a private joint-stock company (AG), with the Federal Republic of Germany being its single shareholder.

[eisstrom]

DB is not privatized, it is 100% state-owned. As far as I know, all ICE power cars are still in use today, except for the one destroyed in the Eschede accident.

[serial_dev]

> what is the point of privatizing something when the structure itself doesn't change and the privatization does nothing but siphon money out of the system and pump tax money in anyway?

That is the point.

Gigantic projects like nuclear reactors, stadiums, high ways, bridges, airports (hallo Berlin) trains (and big software projects and wars, too) are just different ways of funneling a significant percentage of the tax payer money funding the project into the politicians' and decision makers' circle's wallet.

[f6v]

You book a train from Aachen to Berlin. The first leg in your connection is late, you miss the ICE in the middle of nowhere. The next one is in four hours. You get in, the DB staff looks at you like you shit in their coffee. Booked a bike place and reserved a seat? The best they can do is to offer to stand between the carriages.

[Tainnor]

I've definitely had my "I hate DB" moments in my life and experiences similar to the one you describe, but for me, most of the time, I don't experience major issues (I don't count "train is half an hour late" to be a major issue, although I agree that it's kind of laughable that this happens so often - but I got used to it). It's definitely easier if you don't have to change trains or you don't take a super late train or anything.

Then there's also things that are consistently bad, like regional trains in NRW. They're never on time.

[chrisandchris]

That's an interesting viewpoint and as someone living in the south of you, I have a hard time to understand why 30min is not a major issue. I feel more like after 5min, it's way to late :D ...

[jotaen]

Maybe worth noting that the 9-euro ticket is only for local public transport, such as buses, subways, or regional trains. Only the latter (RE) are operated by Deutsche Bahn, whereas buses and subways are mostly ran by local companies.

[chromanoid]

I do not share your experience. I used to commute weekly for 1,75 hours in one direction with ICE. I had rarely problems that lasted more than 5 minutes. There was no change of trains required which might help here.

[jotaen]

Same here: I regularly take long-distance train rides throughout all Germany, both with ICE (the fast one) as well as RE (the regional one), and for me it works smoothly for the most part.

[DocTomoe]

Let me guess: Your commute was in East Germany? Reliability is a lot better there [1]

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit...

[geff82]

If you beed to be on time, national flights with Lufthansa for me are close to 100% reliable whereas Deutsche Bahn turned out to be a catastrophe in about 50% of the cases. I still don’t get it: they own the complete network, they control every train on it and arriving on time at a place is like playing roulette. Neither air travel nor traveling by car gives those headaches (especially when you listen to your dynamic GPS that routes around traffic jams). You can reduce the bad luck a bit by planning longer stops when changing trains, still making pauses longer reduces the attractiveness of trains even more. Personally, I love taking trains when it works. It is comfortable, fast and you arrive in city centers. Even first class tickets have acceptable prices. But as I usually don’t travel for pleasure, but for business and don’t want to waste my time, German trains have become a no-go for me.

[_Microft]

Lufthansa rarely gets "Personenschaden" ("injury to persons", an euphemism for "suicide") on their flight paths while Deutsche Bahn has frequently to deal with that. A delayed intercity express train definitely delays departure of other trains that are considered Anschluss(züge) ("connecting trains"). It then ripples through the network.

[BonoboIO]

I like the „nightjets“ where you can sleep and wakeup in another city. Used that a few times.

I have to say, that if I have to be on time somewhere I take the car. DB is too much risk to miss the connecting train and the employees just look at you „well, bad luck. Next train 2h“

When I m on vacation i would file that under „experience“ and would just sit somewhere and sip coffee.

[guerrilla]

Okay, but when you compare to the US, it's still amazing.

[88840-8855]

Okay, but the US is 50x larger.

[pftburger]

Ive had a Bahncard 100 (yearly pass for all fast trains in the country) for six years now and while there are problems, its about once a year, working out to about 1% of my train trips.

For air travel, Id guesstimate I get delays about 10-20% of the time.

[dmd]

What does large/long distance mean here? Do german railways extend outside of Germany proper? I'm confused because the longest distance I can find between two major cities is Munich to Hamburg, and that's only about 400 miles!