Okay, so this guy made a single trip through germany and got lucky? Good for him. But who gives a shit?

Heres my personal anecdote:

Two years ago i depended on the DB to get to work and entire months(!) went by without a single day where everything went according to plan. For important days i started my journey an hour earlier and still got fucked by the DB some times.

I booked it on Europe’s best rail website - bahn.de

Definitely not. Just last week it took me over an hour to book a train on bahn.de. I needed multiple tries as I was constantly being flagged as bot - even though I was logged in and I had windows as browser user agent. Linux is being blocked by default. The payment options are Paypal, Card payment with Mastercard or Visa and Open banking by Tink (Visa). No European payment options.

The only reason to book with bahn.de is because they have cheap tickets. The website is garbage.

For the past 7 years using DB. I can probably count on one hand if I was delayed more then 2 hours.

However being delayed between 30 mins to 1 hour is extremely common. Often half my trips.

For every important trips, we do go the night before and then stay local.

Worst I’ve been delayed was 5 hours, that’s because a signal between Frankfurt and Köln failed

I think there really are two loud groups at work here. The first being people that know how the DB used to be (always on time whatever the weather, though this is also heavily influenced by rose-tinted glasses, survivor bias and nostalgia) and secondly people that like to hate on Germany (Germans that mostly hate modern Germany as they themselves are from 1933 and those that see the DB as an opportunity to smear some dirt on the label of German efficiency). Now I presume that, like with everything nowadays that is happening online, there’s a lot of propaganda and lobbying involved.

But to be fair, it is frustrating to be late when you have no influence on it. In the car at least you get the idea that you have some influence on your delay, false as that feeling may be.

The problem with the high workload of the train infrastructure is also one of the reasons for the amount of roadworks in Germany. Germany simply has the highest traffic in Europe overall. Partly because it is the largest economy, but also because it is located right the center of the EU. A lot of cross border traffic will cross Germany.

I commute by train in Austria. The only time the trains are late are when they start in Germany. As I have a valid ticket for any train this sometimes works in my favor, as I can take the ICE that has been late two hours straight from the platform because it fits when I leave work.

Most of the time it is fine, but you can not depend on it.

Perhaps if the price would be ⅓ at least ½ of what you need to pay, there would be less complaints because you be getting the services for adequate price.

This is a very good quote about the nature of people complaining about german trains:

Passengers do not complain about trains they cannot take, because those trains do not exist.

Solution: Decrease the number of trains /joke

I think many people who complain about DB simply have no idea what it’s like elsewhere. I recently returned to Toronto, Canada from spending a few weeks in Germany. We relied on the train system for all of our travel within the country, and yes occasionally trains were late/delayed, but we were actually able to get everywhere we needed to without driving. This is with two adults and two kids with a stroller and occasionally luggage.

Coming back to Toronto was a bit of shock. Our municipal train system is adequate but nowhere near the level of, say, Berlin. Our regional train system is fundamentally broken because you still need a car at the end of your journey. There is virtually no train network in any of the destination cities.

Instead you are forced to drive. And our highways are congested. It takes hours of sitting in traffic to get around outside of the city. And this is completey normal here, people do this every day.

Edit: The other thing that was practically magical was the DB pass that we bought. A single pass allowed us unlimited travel on all the regional trains as well as all the municipal transit in every city we visited. This is unheard of back here.

It was never a joke. It has always been an insult.

So… it’s fine for German trains to break down constantly and have knock on effects because there are many of them?

I agree: it’s great that there are that many trains in Germany and that overall they are reasonably priced. On the other hand,I hate that their high speed is so much lower than their neighboring countries’, 200km/h versus 300km/h. It makes crossing Germany an incredible slog. So much that I would like the source on the article statement that a lot of passenger traffic in Germany is through traffic. That seems like a dreadful idea to me.

And the likelihood of something going amiss is so high all the time. There were supposed to be works on the tracks, but I haven’t been following the matter the last couple of years so I don’t know the status. I doubt it has yet completely changed the situation.

I use interrail a lot to travel across Europe. In France the TGV is great; but it is hard to get to places that are not close to TGV, the regional trains are overfilled and feel old-fashioned. I was impressed with the train system in Italy, all the way down to Messina… but on Sicily the trains are slow and far in between; like in France , Italy seems to have decoupled its provinces…Netherlands is surprisingly good for such a densely populated country. I like the German system too, it always gets me where I want to go, in many cases with some delay, but in a system so complex, I have no big issue with it. I only know one country that complains as much about the railway system as Germany: the UK.

Local publich Transport in cities is usually fine.

Local public transport I’m villages is usually terrible.

And everyone in Germany has stories about long-travel public transport failing miserably.

Couple of years ago a friend of mine was planning a trip to Germany and wanted to move between two cities. I’ve check the prices quickly and a trip on a normal train going maybe 100-200km cost ~60€. At the same time similar trip on a high speed train in Spain was about 20€. No idea if it changed but Deutsche Bahn seemed like a joke back then.

It’s frankly hilarious that the author specifically calls out everyone but Green voters as the problem and in the next sentence identifies Schröder as the root (the infection vector in Germany for neoliberal shitfuckery was actually Kohl, but close enough):

Ultimately any German who has ever voted for any party other than the Grüne also deserves what they get. The Third Way / Die neue Mitte of Gerhard Schröder from the late 1990s is at the root of all of this […]

Who, again, were the coalition partners of Schröder’s SPD and whose voters are thus just as responsible for Germany’s catrastrophic neoliberal course? Toot, toot, it’s the Greens.

The only major party we can (as of yet) count on the make-things-better-for-normal-people side of this is Die Linke; as usual, unfortunately, 'cause they have their own issues.

https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped

This ranks Germany #7 on train punctuality out of seven listed, at 58.5% on-time, though there may be more that didn’t make a top-seven list, as it says that it deals with data from 11 countries.