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German travel chaos blamed on lack of investment in railways
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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I'm sorry, what? It may feel like they suck when there is a 10 minute delay on the train you wanted to take, but the Dutch railway system is one of the most reliable in Europe.
There is this one YT Series "Jet Lag" where three guys play catch in Europe using Trains. It's a lot of planning, checking what the travel options of the hunted one are, which trains he might take etc. It's a game of strategy, until they arrive in Germany at which point it litteraly becomes a clusterfuck of random trains.
We're not talking ten minute delays ๐ if only it was that good!
No. Ever since COVID came around things have gone down hill. And as a Dutch man who travels by train a lot, i can say in al honesty, reliable is not what i would call it.
And as i am typing this im in a train thats filled from top to bottom because the train before this one failed. So we're having twice as many people in the train. And oh, there's a whole bunch of trains that can't move because power failures someone down the line.
10 minutes you say.. ๐๐๐ well at least you made me smile :)
Dude. We had a friend on holiday in northern Germany who wanted to visit us in Maastricht. Even though she was in fucking Germany, it was twice as fast to get to the border, take a bus to Groningen and then cross the Netherlands than to use the DB to Aachen.
Another thing. The Dutch trains that are known to have many transfer passengers stop on the same platform, so you only need to cross the platform. In Germany your train arrives on Gleis 5, your next train on Gleis 16. Oh no, 13. Woops we changed it again haha.
You are right it went downhill, but DB is on another level of skullfuckery.
As a fellow dutch person that also travels by trains a lot, I get really irritated when people only complain. Sure, there are definitely fuck ups at NS. But I feel people completely write off the system because of them. I can't remember the last time a train got outright cancelled (outside of extreme weather conditions in which I also wouldn't be comfortable driving). There are issues with the system, those should be fixed, but that does not mean that everything is terrible.
But maybe it's way worse in your part of the country, there definitely have been issues with getting enough personnel (as do all other sectors). So maybe we are both making our arguments from two different experiences.
Meanwhile last time I did NL to Austria, DB made us wait randomly for a grand total of 3 extra hours.
I travel across the country. And trains Do get outright cancelled, especially if they are late.
But i feel mostly our government is to blame. With their half assed rules and regulations.