One theory goes that the decline began in the mid-90s, when the government started its efforts to make Deutsche Bahn fit for sale.

Yep, that'll do it.

has become

🌍👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

TL;DR: Commuting in Germany is terrible und unreliable and the author really liked his idea of comparing Deutsche Bahn to Kafka.

I know someone who works as a conductor for DB, he once showed me the smartphone app they use for organisation and internal communication, it literally had a page listing the officially approved excuses for delays and the possible actual causes they are supposed to be used for.

We can only hope the German people vote to reverse the privatization of this service and restore the trains and their infrastructure to something exemplary.

Since years they've slept on separating people from fright transport. So much money sunk into someone's pocket, instead of adding more railway routes. But there also were a lot of NIMBYs blocking railway expansion, to be fair.

An anecdote of my student life:

For many years I commuted by train, on one of Germany's worst train routes and 90% of the trains had at minimum 5 to 15 minutes delay. Also like 10% right out never arrived, so you had to wait for the train afterwards. The next train is 60 minutes later. If you had to transfer to another train, this often resulted in waiting 60 minutes, miss the transfer train, wait another 60 minutes. Lose additional random amount of minutes, because even if the second train arrived on time, you'd often be later than expected. God help you, if you needed to use a bus afterwards. Guess what, wait more, because you missed the bus you intended to actually use. Same fun on the way back, for a single day. While dealing with the stuff explained in the article. This breaks you inside.

Let's do some simple math if you're still reading:

A simple job, with 8 ½ hours work per day, plus commute time, with time lost from leaving earlier too, plus sleeping, could result in spending all day away from home. Leaving you between 0 and 1 hour remaining time, to do everything, like chores, cooking, friends, family, free time (haha).

I simply couldn't do this and wonder how people have any real life, if they have to endure this every single day. For perspective, that's a distance a lot of people travel for work and you can drive there by car, but there's often slow traffic, but you'd probably save two hours or more every day, if you don't use the train, even if you're stuck in traffic.

Now people might say, you can just move. Yeah good luck with the Quadratmeterpreise for the apartment. Good luck if you're a trainee or start your Berufsausbildung.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

But when 200 musicians had to delay the start of a prestigious concert in Berlin recently because their train was late, I, along with many other longsuffering German rail travellers, reacted by thinking: “Typical, welcome to the club.”

Deutsche Bahn, the state-owned German rail company, is so proud of running on green power that it makes a point of informing passengers that every ticket bought protects the climate.

Once there is a slight delay, the minutes begin adding up, as if any train can lose its slot on the overcrowded tracks and be forced to wait its turn in the system.

It does not always help that Deutsche Bahn thinks its announcements work best when delivered in a jaunty or slightly ironic tone, as staff explain delays, an absence of food in the buffet car (electricity issues), or drinks served in paper cups (broken dishwasher).

Carriages are then full of people discussing travel alternatives with their fellow commuters and, of course, because this is Germany, explaining why and when a system we once considered near-perfect, all went wrong.

Olaf Scholz’s coalition has recently announced plans to repair some mainline tracks and Deutsche Bahn is happy to spread the good news.

The original article contains 1,177 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

During my last trip to Germany I made the mistake of traveling by train. My scheduled train got canceled and the next one would come in 1 hour.

I decided to wait and when the time came, no train showed up, the display said the train would arrive on platform 5, the announcement said it was platform 5, their app said platform 5 but nothing showed up.

About 10 minutes after the scheduled time I went to the ticket office to ask what happened, their answer was a "maybe it went through another platform".

Last weekend, a few friends of mine and I made a trip halfway through Europe. I took the plane because I couldn’t get a ticket on the train any more, the others took the night jet (Austrian train service driving through the night with beds on board).

My 1.5h flight was delayed, and it was a big drama with connecting flights etc. It was by 5 minutes.

My friends' route was through Germany. Besides them needing 14h according to the regular schedule, they had a delay of 3h. There was no special accident or anything, the train just had to stop on the track a few times and in some sections it went at walking speed, probably because the track is in such a bad shape.

This is such a miserable experience. The price was about the same, btw.

I know I've crossed into Germany once there's a delay. The sad part is that there's always a delay for the same train.

What a stupid take…