[sajithdilshan]

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.

[slow_typist]

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.

[stefanlindbohm]

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]

> 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.

[tormeh]

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

[ngruhn]

> 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.

[tazjin]

> 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.

[adrianN]

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.

[hopelite]

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.

[tim333]

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]

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.

[gregorygoc]

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

[on_the_train]

> 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).

[renewiltord]

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

[koyote]

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

[garbagewoman]

What do you find strange about it?