13 ms·

Deutsche Bahn’s Meltdown and High-Speed Rail

74 points by imartin2k 4y ago

danans 4y ago
As an American with no high speed rail access (yeah Acela, I know), I can only imagine what its like to debate over the finer points of differences in high speed rail. Instead this was news to me: > France is currently undergoing an energy crisis, because the heat wave is such that river water cannot safely cool down its nuclear power plants Nuclear capacity curtailed due to a heat wave? That's a failure mode I'd not heard of.
- konschubert 4y ago
  The curtailment happens almost every summer now. But my understanding is that this is about environmental regulations that prevent power plants from heating the river water by too much. The plant itself would be able to run totally fine with the current water temperature, but it would raise the temperature beyond what environmental regulations allow. Instead, Europe is now burning Coal and Lignite. Which of course is much worse for the water temperature in the long run…
  - pjc50 4y ago
    France has almost no coal left. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/france-rethinks-coal-power-station-closure-174891 https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/france-rethinks-coal-power... Germany is the one that's closing reactors, over post-Chernobyl/Fukushima fears, and burning coal instead. It also has a surprisingly powerful coal lobby.
    - atdrummond 4y ago
      Isn’t that lobby a remanent of the large East German coal industry? I’m thinking of eg. Lusatia’s coal belt.
      - yayachiken 4y ago
        The big energy suppliers burning coal all sit in Northrhine-Westfalia, the most populous state in Germany. Migrating away from (black) coal (used mostly in the steel industry) has caused big issues in the Ruhr area ("Strukturwandel", structural shift, meaning migration of significant parts of the workforce from coal to other sectors) in the past, which also means that the population is very wary of phasing out lignite as well. Pretty much everyone knows somebody who lost their job in a mine. Some cities like Gelsenkirchen are still structurally weak, like a lite version of Detroit. This means that politicians mow give expensive political gifts to the coal industry to provide retraining opportunities or early pensions, just so they can claim that they do not "forget" the workers this time. While in fact, there is maybe 30k people or so in all of Germany employed by coal and its dependent industries. And nobody cares that the wind and solar industry lost 100k or so workers over the last decade due to avoidable regulatory issues and the resulting low project volume. Anyways, you should not underestimate the amount of respect the coal workers always had in the Ruhr area. Digging coal in a below-ground mine is still the essential definition of "honest work" and sacrifice here. It's probably somewhat comparable to how military service is treated in the US, including the occasional "thank you for your service" and all. There are shrines dedicated to St. Barbara, the patron saint of mining, sprinkled everywhere, because people regularily prayed for their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and friends to come home safely each day. Children learn the Steigerlied in school and sing it before football games. It's even worse than a lobby, the population mostly supports special treatment for the coal workers, as the mining and steel industry is still part of the cultural DNA.
        willyt 4y ago
        Interesting. Parts of Britain were very similar. Things like every mine union chapter had its own brass band and the mine unions took great pride in thier traditions and thier local communities. Basically it’s neglected miners and steelworkers and other closed down heavy industries in the north of England that voted for Brexit just to pull the rug out from under everyone else because they were thrown on the scrap heap by Thatcher in the 1980’s and those areas never recovered. The liberal voting cities told the mining folk they were idiots for voting for brexit and so they switched allegiances from Labour (closely linked to the unions) to the Conservatives who were telling these people they were going to fix things for them, ‘levelling up’ the North of England. This hasn’t happened there is not even a coherent plan for how it could happen and the new candidates for prime minister are all going on about how they’re going to be more like Thatcher than the others, forgetting that the people who just switched to them hated her for destroying thier way of life. So be careful! Don’t disrespect the miners they will cause chaos if you annoy them!!
    - konschubert 4y ago
      Germany is burning more coal and gas to cover for French power shortages. The grids are interconnected. There is a European power market.
      - Glawen 4y ago
        This argument makes no sense, do you have number? The French reactors are shut down in summer because there is less electricity demand and you have an abundance of solar power. Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available. So I don't get how Germany would need to burn coal/gas for the french. If I look here, only 2% are imported from Germany https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?utm_source=electricitymap.org&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=banner https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?utm_source=electrici... The real problem is going to be this winter, where EDF needs to repair its nuclear reactors before the start of winter, in order to provide electricity for France and Germany. And that situation is pretty much due to the lack of vision of Germany and Merkel.
        yayachiken 4y ago
        If you understand German, there is a great explanation how the energy market in Europe works here: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/plusminus/teurer-strom-wieso-kraftwerksbetreiber-gerade-kein-gas-sparen/das-erste/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL3BsdXNtaW51cy81ZWI1NGFlZi1mNTYwLTRhOTYtYTFhZC02ZmJjZjc3ZmY4MWE https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/plusminus/teurer-strom-wie... It explains why currently, even though gas is so prohibitively expensive, we still run gas powered plants at the moment, and also why even with relatively low transmission capacity between countries there is still big impact on energy prices. The tl;dr is: Energy prices are determined by taking the most expensive auction price that is required to cover the load at any given moment. Everyone who offered a cheaper rate may sell the energy, but receives the highest price that was accepted. This means that prices are highly non-linear and susceptible to supply shocks. Even though the changes from import to export with respect to France are small, a rather small reduction in cheap nuclear power immediately makes it a lot more profitable to produce energy, also making coal and gas viable again. Also note that this model explains the cheap price of nuclear and solar: You "only" need to ROI your initial capital eventually to turn a profit. When push comes to shove you would rather sell at any price above 0 (or at least a very low bottom) rather than turning off your plant and getting no income at all. You cannot do that when you still have significant operational expenses for fuel (coal, gas, stored water). On electricitymap you can see this behaviour in action as well. Even with something like 50% solar production, prices remain high, when suddenly, the prices collapse below zero after a certain threshold was reached. Also note that in these cases, the prices in France and Germany decouple. Customers on the German energy exchange might get paid to use energy while in France spot price still is upward of 10-20 ct/kWh. Also: > Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available. Do you have a source for that? I think that guarantee only applies to Germany. And then it only says that the suppliers always get paid for the energy they could produce, wind and solar can and will still get turned off physically. And from what I have written above it pretty much follows that renewables will always be bought if possible, because they have no fuel costs and letting them run is during positive prices always more profitable than shutting them off. Note though that many renewables are not even sold on the energy exchange and rather influence the market indirectly as most energy utilities have fixed delivery contracts with the producers and only buy/sell the excess on the spot market.
    - wewxjfq 4y ago
      > France has almost no coal left And also has to keep it running now. > Germany is the one that's closing reactors Three reactors while France has half of theirs offline. The irony is that if Germany is going to extend their NPP, it will be because the next German stress test runs under the assumption of a major French power plant outage. I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure.
      - Semaphor 4y ago
        > I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure. All the experts on HN and Reddit already switched from "France is amazing, Germany dumb" to "The French are idiots for not having invested into nuclear power. Germany still dumb."
        mgoetzke 4y ago
        The idiocy is not investing into Wind/Solar/Storage
  - b3orn 4y ago
    Coal power plants have the same cooling problem as nuclear power plants. And looking at some rivers in Europe at the moment the problem with power plants using water for cooling isn't just heating up rivers too much, the water levels are dangerously low to the point of some rivers almost disappearing, there are some famous examples of that in Italy this year.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      We'll have on in NL as well, either this year or maybe the next but it is very close to that point.
      - konschubert 4y ago
        A curtailment or a dry river?
        jacquesm 4y ago
        Dry river: https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1550847204671295489/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1550847204671295489/pho...
        konschubert 4y ago
        If the Rhine falling dry doesn't wake up the Germans then nothing will...
        jacquesm 4y ago
        Indeed. It's beyond my level of understanding, as long as I've been alive this has not happened, though I understand that historically it has happened, and whenever it did it was followed by at least one year of famine.
    - yayachiken 4y ago
      At least in Germany, lignite plants are operating on locally mined lignite, which means there is a big open-pit mine directly next to the plant. This means that the water table needs to be drained to keep the mine dry. The pumps in many cases directly feed the excess water into the power plant. An example is the plant Neurath, which is the second biggest coal power plant in Europe, delivering 4 gigawatts of power without use of surface water.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > the heat wave is such that river water cannot safely cool down its nuclear power plants Yes - a risk for all thermal power plants, since they need a cooling loop to re-condense the steam before putting it through another cycle in the turbines. (In general it would be physically possible to still run the plant, but regulatorily impossible because the outlet water would be too hot and people don't take kindly to boiling a river and destroying its ecosystem) The French reactor fleet also has some kind of problem with cracks affecting the longevity. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/concerns-that-cracks-in-edfs-french-reactors-could-also-plague-hinkley-16-06-2022/ https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/concerns-that-cracks...
  - avar 4y ago
    They've got egress cooling water limits of 26-30C (78-86). It's an entirely manufactured problem. There's trivial solutions to this, but they all probably run into other regulatory stupidity. They could easily solve this just by offering giant 38-40C (100-104F) pools open to the public near their plants. Or, just have a parking lot sized winding halfpipe before draining into the river, or otherwise easily make up for the missing cooling tower capacity. In Iceland thermal plants will release boiling temperature water into rivers that didn't have it before, nobody thinks twice about it, as people are used to the natural equivalent. You'll want to make sure to give the fish a way out, but otherwise the only notable side effects are some algea buildup.
    - simonebrunozzi 4y ago
      You're making it too simplistic. There's ecological issues, there's engineering issues, and yes, there's also regulatory issues (in an ideal world, they would be fixed in a single day, but we don't live in one).
    - kybernetikos 4y ago
      I know at least one nuclear power station in France uses the hot water to run a crocodile wildlife exhibit next door. I can confirm that visiting it does feel like the start of a disaster movie.
- Glawen 4y ago
  The article argues that German should stop asserting superiority over France and start building a real high speed rail. The thing is that the German ICE can go fast, but not in Germany as only a few rail line allow it. The best example is Stuttgart Paris where you spend nearly as much time in Germany as in France, except that you only have to cover 170km in Germany and 500km in France. About nuclear reactor, the river can cool down the reactor, but fish will die. Thus the power generation is limited in summer for reactor cooled by rivers.
  - LordHeini 4y ago
    Going really fast makes much less sense in Germany compared to France. Frances population is far more centered in mayor hubs while in Germany the population is dispersed much more homogeneous. In some places the ICE stops every 20km, there are too many curves, or it shares its rails with slower trains. There is no need for high speed rails here because you can not accelerate anyway.
    - Glawen 4y ago
      It is slow because it shares the track with other trains. The point of high speed rail network is to connect big hub together without removing existing network. The stop would be every 150/200km. Imagine a Munich Berlin in 2h, that would kill any flights between the two cities.
    - mudita 4y ago
      On the same blog there’s an article criticising exactly this argument in detail: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/06/26/meme-weeding-polycentricity-and-high-speed-rail/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/06/26/meme-weeding-p... "Looking forward rather than backward, nothing in Germany’s urban geography is an obstacle to a connected high-speed rail network. With central stations and less of the population living in truly isolated rural and small-city communities, Germany can expect to greatly surpass any other Western intercity rail network if it builds high-speed rail, more than reaching DB’s pre-corona 250 million ridership target."
      - 4y ago
- barkingcat 4y ago
  for all their sophistication, all current designes of nuclear power plants are fundamentally steam power generators.
- freeflight 4y ago
  > Nuclear capacity curtailed due to a heat wave? That's a failure mode I'd not heard of. It's not a new problem [0], it's become somewhat of a regular issue in parts of Europe during summer heatwaves [1]. As the heatwaves will become worse, and the water scarcer, this will become an even more regular issue. France is currently affected particularly badly because a big chunk of their reactor fleet is also going trough long-overdue maintenance. [0] https://qz.com/1348969/europes-heatwave-is-forcing-nuclear-power-plants-to-shut-down/ https://qz.com/1348969/europes-heatwave-is-forcing-nuclear-p... [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwave-idUSKCN1UK0HR https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
- imtringued 4y ago
  It is the failure mode that motivated the Japanese to build Fukushima near the tsunami prone coastline.
bowsamic 4y ago
It's actually absurd that it costs me ~£15-25 to fly from London Stansted to Hamburg (1 hr flight), but 145 euros (one way) to get the high speed train to Munich (6 hours). The regional trains are absurd. The platforms are completely congested with human bodies, and even the long double decker trains are often totally full. To me it seems that there simply aren't enough services every day to carry the capacity of people who want to use the trains. Even before the 9 euro ticket it was borderline unusable. I did a midday Monday journey last September from Hamburg -> Lübeck -> Stralsund -> Samtens and each part of the journey apart from the last was totally full. Lübeck -> Stralsund was ran by nah.sh but it was an absolutely tiny train with even barely any standing room, let alone seating. Germans just accept it and groan, in classic German fashion: this is how it is, it's not going to change, just accept it.
- Glawen 4y ago
  When I take the train in Germany, I try to make sure to have a direct train as I have been left stranded several time and missed my connection. When it happens, you are obliged to hop in the next train, where you don't have a seat reserved, and you are forced to look around for a empty seat. Of course you are not alone in this situation and you end up in a totally full train.
  - locallost 4y ago
    Not really true. If you have a full price / flex ticket you can take any train you want, and if you have a discounted ticket you are obliged to go to the info desk and they will give you a connection to take. They will also give you a new reservation. Connections do get missed, and if they do you are entitled to a 25% money back for 1 hour, and 50% for two hour delays.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > It's actually absurd that it costs me ~£15-25 to fly from London Stansted to Hamburg (1 hr flight) This isn't really fair. You're looking at the cheapest possible fare - a loss leader - that few people actually pay. And those that do pay it end up paying significantly more in ancillary fees. You pay ~$30 for a personal item onboard, ~$50 for a checked bag. The right way to figure out more or less what folks are actually paying to get between Stansted and Hamburg is looking at PRASM (passenger revenue per available seat mile) but I can't seem to find a published number for European LCCs.
roboben 4y ago
The 9-Euro-Ticket is not usable for intercity connections, so I am not really getting the point how this is connected to DB is getting worse and worse. This is a development for the last 10-20 years. When you ride a train regularly, I did for a few years 3 times a week 3h Berlin/Leipzig, you see how broken the whole system is. I’d always say if you would run any other company with such a customer experience, you would be out of business in no time. I think the core problem is huge and extremely traditional management.
- meibo 4y ago
  It's not connected at all, it's just a good scapegoat to hide the absolute mismanagement and corruption in the German government and state-owned private companies(boy do we love those)
- ravingraven 4y ago
  >I think the core problem is huge and extremely traditional management. Not saying that this is not a problem, but bulky management is a constant for DB, even during the years where it was considered world-class. I think it is the budget cuts and the resulting lack of infrastructure.
- schroeding 4y ago
  There's maybe some connection: Due to the 9-Euro-Ticket there were (in my experience) often delays in regional trains (mostly due to trains being too full). Regional trains share the infrastructure with high-speed trains. So I would find it believable that they influence each other. But yeah, it wasn't great beforehand, the trend was already there and it's not the 9-Euro-Tickets fault, IMO. > I think the core problem is huge and extremely traditional management. IMO a big part is also the neglected infrastructure. Many trains are new and old rolling stock is being upgraded, station buildings are being renovated, but the tracks and the signaling is often very old. There is just so much you can do when your (station) signaling still uses relays from the 60s.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > There is just so much you can do when your (station) signaling still uses relays from the 60s. That's modern. About a quarter of the network still uses purely mechanical signalling and switch operations - that technology is literally and in every sense from the era of the German Kaiser Reich days.
schroeding 4y ago
> but there are sensors to ensure the train’s mass does not exceed a maximum level, which can be reached on unusually crowded trains That's the "great" thing about the old Intercity trains from the 80s (some carriages are even from the 60s, being initially used in Trans Europe Express Trains[1]): They don't have this feature. Those trains can and will be filled up until it's physically impossible to push more humans into it. Makes a great Sauna in the summer! :D > The natural response of most German rail advocates is to sneer at the idea of high-speed rail Yeah, seperate stations (edit: platforms, they can share the building) for high-speed trains will probably never happen, sadly. And as long as high speed trains share the platforms with regional trains, disruptions and delays will always affect both. It's nice that you can drive from Munich to Augsburg in 20 minutes on a seperate high-speed track, doesn't help you if a broken down regional train blocks the station and everyone has to wait for hours. :/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Europ_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Europ_Express
- rocqua 4y ago
  Could you not have separate platforms in the same station, with the lines being essentially unbroken?
  - schroeding 4y ago
    You could (I would even say those would be seperate stations then, even if they share the building), but virtually no station is build that way and it would cost quite a lot of money to "untangle" the tracks. Probably too much money. Doesn't help that most high-speed trains drive on a mix of seperate high-speed tracks and normal tracks shared with regional and freight trains, making complete seperation impossible. :/
- ssl232 4y ago
  You don't need separate stations, just enough separate tracks. Berlin Hbf for example has its ICE trains mainly arrive in the basement level, with regional and local trains on physically higher levels (worth seeing for anyone visiting). But most large cities' main stations have 10+ parallel tracks, usually with a large junction a km or so each side to let trains funnel into the correct platform (see e.g. Hannover: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/52.3813/9.7435 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/52.3813/9.7435). Plenty of room for local, regional and ICE trains to be all together.
mkogul 4y ago
Nice article. The German rail is working on modernizing the network with the use of Artificial intelligence based dynamic timetable optimization (a major issue when delays occur is to dynamically readjust the timetable) and Autonomous trains. Additionally making use of 5G based communication and ETCS L3. Unfortunately, due to the mission critical nature, these changes will be slowly rolled out 2027 onwards and major changes are expected only from 2035. https://digitale-schiene-deutschland.de/en/digital-rail https://digitale-schiene-deutschland.de/en/digital-rail
- sschueller 4y ago
  These are all the typical "cool tech" items sold to the manager who do not understand the problems they have are not solved by it alone. All the issues Germany has Switzerland would also suffer under if it ran it's rail network the same way. Money must go to the right places and maintenance is crucial. The Swiss network is not perfect but it doesn't have all the issues the Germans have and we have no autonomous trains, no AI dynamic time tables (not yet) and no ETCS L3 (not yet or very limited).
  - rpadovani 4y ago
    While I am totally down for bashing DB, as you can see from other comments, let's also face reality: Switzerland has 1/10th of the population and 1/9th of the surface, with an entirely different population distribution. Unfortunately, lessons from small countries cannot easily be replicated in bigger countries (as for people that mention Estonia for digitalization: they are great, but there are 3 cities in Germany that have more population that the _entire_ Estonia)
    - sschueller 4y ago
      Germany has 40k km of rail vs 5k km in Switzerland. So the difference is not that big. However for the population size it is too small of a network.
dreen 4y ago
I would like to see someone advance an idea that all rail should be fully subsidised and free to use. Because rail creates massive economic gains by increased mobility, but modern rail companies struggle to maintain a modern infra while trying to make money and competing with coach and planes. If they just focused on running trains things could be much better.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  Offering free train rides should only be used as incentive to use trains more. When the rail infrastructure is alreay overwhelmed as it is in Germany it really doesn't make sense without first massively investing in the infrastructure - which will take decades.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Free runs into the issue of capacity management. Prices, even token prices, serve to limit some consumption. Without it, free transit mostly serves to divert people from walking and cycling, not cars and planes. Guangzhou planned to offer free transit to ease congestion during the 2010 Asian Games. It was cancelled after a few days; metro ridership doubled, causing queues of up to twenty minutes to enter stations, and eight stations turned exit only to relieve emergency levels of overcrowding. Most rail transportation could not handle the crush of additional riders from free rides. https://humantransit.org/2010/11/guangzhou-abandons-free-fare-experiment.html https://humantransit.org/2010/11/guangzhou-abandons-free-far...
  - hjanssen 4y ago
    > free transit mostly serves to divert people from walking and cycling, not cars and planes Source for this claim? I would be surprised if it holds true. > Most rail transportation could not handle the crush of additional riders from free rides This is a problem with the infrastructure, not free rides. Of course capacity planning has to be adapted to keep up with increased usage, but thats literally what we want. We want more people to use public transportation, limiting or capping usage is the wrong approach IMHO.
eunos 4y ago
No major cities outside Frankfurt and Koln were connected by the highest speed rail (300 km/h) ?
- jlangenauer 4y ago
  Significant portions of the Berlin to Munich route run at 300km/h (the section from Halle via Erfurt and then to Bamberg). Of course, you have to be on one of the ICE3's that are actually capable of 300km/h - the others max out at 250km/h...
DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
At Chaos Computer Club a few years back, David Kriesel presented an analysis of the on-time performance of the Deutsche Bahn, based on a systematic scraping of their API.[0] One of the surprising things he explained: if a train never arrives at a station, it's not late, according to the Deutsche Bahn. 0. https://youtu.be/AGCmPLWZKd8 https://youtu.be/AGCmPLWZKd8
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > if a train never arrives at a station, it's not late, according to the Deutsche Bahn. I think most rail systems do this; it would be considered a reliability problem, not a punctuality problem. You definitely have to be careful with the definition of these things, though. For instance, Irish Rail considers intercity rail to be on time if it's within 10 mins of schedule. Commuter is within five minutes of schedule. Given that, at peak times, some commuter services run once every ten minutes, and thus are ~always on time per this definition, it's wise to be a bit skeptical of the punctuality reporting.
  - endless1234 4y ago
    >Given that, at peak times, some commuter services run once every ten minutes, and thus are ~always on time per this definition, it's wise to be a bit skeptical of the punctuality reporting. I think that makes sense. If a commuter train leaves every 10 minutes, but due to some technical problems, the first train of the early morning leaves 20 minutes late which then continues through the day, does that mean every train is late? The users wouldn't know the trains they're using should have actually ran 20 minutes ago, they just know a train is to go every 10 minutes.
    - iggldiggl 4y ago
      The ideal measurement would be to get as good a model of day-to-day passenger flows as possible, then simulate the journey times based on both the nominal timetable, and the "actually-ran" timetable in order to also quantify the effects of missed connections. I think the Swiss actually do something like this, whereas in Germany they've only comparatively recently started doing it, too, and even then I think they're currently only looking at long distance trains, so connections to/from regional trains don't count (and never mind local public transport).
rpadovani 4y ago
The problem is also the local transportation: in Munich we desperately need investments on the S-Bahn, which has been neglected in the past twenty years, as the majority of public transportations in the city. There is a project for doubling the tracks in the city center, that is on a good way to become more notorious than the Berlin airport: they are talking about it since the '70, they started working in 2017, with planned opening in 2028 for ~3B euros, and now they are talking about opening it in the late '30 with an estimated cost of more than 7B euros. 1B for each km of tunnel, that's madness. Without it, we cannot have fast connections to the airport (currently 40 minutes away from the city center), and cannot increase the number of trains, currently running in a 20-minute cadence because 7 lines meet in the city center, so 7 lines on 1 track. Another thing I don't understand; why Italy and Germany aren't to start building the access tracks to the Brenner Base Tunnel (BBT)? BBT is incredibly on track with all the deadlines, so if they really open it in 10 years, we will be able to do Fortezza - Innsbruck at 250km/h, and then Munich - Innsbruck at <200 km/h, as Fortezza - Verona. That's simply ridiculous. I don't own a car and try to fly as little as possible, but it is quite difficult for distances that, frankly, should be a no-brainer.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Unfortunately doubling rail in cities means you have to demolish whole swaths of the city. Even the Japanese have these problems with their Shinkansen. There is no space unless you go underground.
  - rpadovani 4y ago
    Yeah, they want to do everything underground, but they really miscalculated completion time and costs.
- ho_schi 4y ago
  Let us name the actual good things :) The ICE-Terminal at the airport Frankfurt am Main (FRA) is a bless! I live in the middle of southern Germany. Sitting into the ICE and wait for FRA is joyful. It is more comfortable to reach than Stuttgart and Munich. The only annoying part is the old Stuttgart "Kopfbahnhof" but luckily this will be fixed soon. I'm thankful that the peopledecided to go for this effort, despite Germans fear changes. Sadly ICE tickets are very expensive. When you travel with more than one person using the car is often better. If I could wish for some things: * Affordable inter-city tickets, instead of very cheap local tickets * An ICE every 30 Minutes (high frequency, not just high speed) * Therefore Deutsche Lufthansa can focus more on mid- and long range flights. They prefer that and complement with the Deutsche Bahn. * As rpadovani I hope for a connection Brenner Base Tunnel * Munich should also become through station "Durchgangsbahnhof". These "Kopfbahnhof" thing is a weird concept from the old kingdoms and doesn't make sense. Even in Paris this concept is questionable. * Please Germans. Get more courage and appreciate useful changes. From windmills, airport runways or train lines. It is not about ruining the landscape. For entertainment, the (in)famous speech of Edmund Stoiber about the Transrapid. It is weird for native speakers, too. https://youtu.be/f7TboWvVERU https://youtu.be/f7TboWvVERU I remember as kid that some people dreamed about the Transrapid (a high speed train, hovering with magnets). The politician above wanted to connect Munich Central-Station with Munich Airport (FJS) with it because the local trains are a pitty.
tinus_hn 4y ago
You only need to look at a German rail road crossing to immediately see they are either extremely lazy or completely incompetent. The bars close, then there’s a 5 minutes wait, then a tiny train passes at about 75km/h, then they open. If there is a station next to the crossing, the bars close before the train is even at the station and remain closed while the train is stopped. If the track would be used at anywhere near capacity the crossing would simply never open.
- vinay427 4y ago
  This appears to be the case in Switzerland as well, or at least various intersections in multiple cities that I would be repeatedly stuck at while living there, so I'm not sure this is a fundamental problem. Level crossings aren't ideal for at-capacity tracks anyway, which is why they're usually avoided in urban environments.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    Coming from the Netherlands I know that this is a solvable problem if there are limits to the delays caused by the bars being shut. It’s just that if the company that sets this up doesn’t need to care, they don’t care.
crocal 4y ago
There is something very wrong going on in Germany AND France where, despite the nice speeches, investment in railway infrastructure is being run into the ground. If nothing changes, expect disaster-level quality of service within a 5 years time.
sschueller 4y ago
Germany desperately needs to electrify more. The trip from Zürich to Munich took an extra 30 minutes because locomotives had to be switched for the non-electrified part of the track in Germany.[1] Also they finally need finish the access to the Alpentransversalen[2] which because of NIMBY and other things is extremely delayed. [1] https://company.sbb.ch/de/medien/medienstelle/medienmitteilungen/detail.html/2020/12/1112-2 https://company.sbb.ch/de/medien/medienstelle/medienmitteilu... [2] https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/europaeischer-bahn-gueterkorridor_deutschland-mit-neat-zubringer-im-verzug/42111740 https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/europaeischer-bahn-gueterkorrid...
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  Genuinly curious - can locomotive run on batteries (which it drags behind it, in a form of a train car) for the tracks which are not electrified? Or is the cost (or sth. else) prohibitive?
  - nuodag 4y ago
    Yes, they are doing exactly that, having a normal electric train which has batteries under the cars (no extra waggon) for 40-200km of not electrified track. It’s for regional trains though with lower energy needs (and because non electrified long distance tracks really make no sense). Linking German Wikipedia because it has long history of them and current projects, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkumulatortriebwagen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkumulatortriebwagen
    - bornfreddy 4y ago
      Thank you!
- lynguist 4y ago
  Fun fact: The Zurich-Munich electrification was paid by an interest-free loan by the Swiss confederacy, in order to finally saturate the North-South line from Germany to Italy that was heavily expanded in Switzerland. The trains are still always delayed by 30 min because it’s single track on long stretches and delays always happen in the German and Austrian part of this line. And the Basel-Karlsruhe line is still not finished.
xvilka 4y ago
If they don't want to learn from France, they always can learn from Japan and China - two countries best in HSR.
- muro 4y ago
  Italy is often mocked as incompetent, but wow, their HSR is nice! DB is such a joke by comparison. If Austria increases their train speeds, it will be the worst railway around.
dominicl 4y ago
There is something fundamentally flawed in the maintenance cost of the Deutsche Bahn. According to the Deutschen Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW) it's costing the Deutsche Bahn 312,000€ per year to maintain a single kilometer of rail tracks. Given that and the already high subsidies of 10 billion € just to keep DB running, any kilometer additional track built is just increasing that hole. I feel we are in a shit triangle here. Ticket prices are too high <-> quality is too low <-> overall cost is too high. There have been ongoing attempts to fix this by increasing rider amounts but at Germanys population density it's impossible to ever get even near to Japanese levels [2] of low total kilometers built with high usages. After my interpretation of things there is some innovation necessary to bring the per KM cost down before the Deutsche Bahn can play a more important role in the transportation. On the same coin the cost of public transport for families vs. car ownership is just ridiculous. I've got a family of 5 - For every German intercity route going by car is significantly cheaper than going by train - usually 5x cheaper but often more. Same is true for traveling within a city that isn't your hometown (where you might have a monthly ticket). At this point I'm not even sure whether this is a problem that can be solved socioeconomicly. I feel electric cars, robotaxis and in the future electric planes are much more likely to solve the larger part of of transportation than that railway is going to do it. Especially given that building another set of rails now in Germany is going to take from planning to delivery 15 years. The change of technology should be planned in. [1] https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.344573.de/diwkompakt_2009-053.pdf https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.34457... [2] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/141066/1/vjh_v63_i03_pp245-275.pdf https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/141066/1/vjh_v63_i03...

74 points by imartin2k 4y ago

As an American with no high speed rail access (yeah Acela, I know), I can only imagine what its like to debate over the finer points of differences in high speed rail. Instead this was news to me: > France is currently undergoing an energy crisis, because the heat wave is such that river water cannot safely cool down its nuclear power plants Nuclear capacity curtailed due to a heat wave? That's a failure mode I'd not heard of.

konschubert 4y ago
The curtailment happens almost every summer now. But my understanding is that this is about environmental regulations that prevent power plants from heating the river water by too much. The plant itself would be able to run totally fine with the current water temperature, but it would raise the temperature beyond what environmental regulations allow. Instead, Europe is now burning Coal and Lignite. Which of course is much worse for the water temperature in the long run…
- pjc50 4y ago
  France has almost no coal left. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/france-rethinks-coal-power-station-closure-174891 https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/france-rethinks-coal-power... Germany is the one that's closing reactors, over post-Chernobyl/Fukushima fears, and burning coal instead. It also has a surprisingly powerful coal lobby.
  - atdrummond 4y ago
    Isn’t that lobby a remanent of the large East German coal industry? I’m thinking of eg. Lusatia’s coal belt.
    - yayachiken 4y ago
      The big energy suppliers burning coal all sit in Northrhine-Westfalia, the most populous state in Germany. Migrating away from (black) coal (used mostly in the steel industry) has caused big issues in the Ruhr area ("Strukturwandel", structural shift, meaning migration of significant parts of the workforce from coal to other sectors) in the past, which also means that the population is very wary of phasing out lignite as well. Pretty much everyone knows somebody who lost their job in a mine. Some cities like Gelsenkirchen are still structurally weak, like a lite version of Detroit. This means that politicians mow give expensive political gifts to the coal industry to provide retraining opportunities or early pensions, just so they can claim that they do not "forget" the workers this time. While in fact, there is maybe 30k people or so in all of Germany employed by coal and its dependent industries. And nobody cares that the wind and solar industry lost 100k or so workers over the last decade due to avoidable regulatory issues and the resulting low project volume. Anyways, you should not underestimate the amount of respect the coal workers always had in the Ruhr area. Digging coal in a below-ground mine is still the essential definition of "honest work" and sacrifice here. It's probably somewhat comparable to how military service is treated in the US, including the occasional "thank you for your service" and all. There are shrines dedicated to St. Barbara, the patron saint of mining, sprinkled everywhere, because people regularily prayed for their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and friends to come home safely each day. Children learn the Steigerlied in school and sing it before football games. It's even worse than a lobby, the population mostly supports special treatment for the coal workers, as the mining and steel industry is still part of the cultural DNA.
      - willyt 4y ago
        Interesting. Parts of Britain were very similar. Things like every mine union chapter had its own brass band and the mine unions took great pride in thier traditions and thier local communities. Basically it’s neglected miners and steelworkers and other closed down heavy industries in the north of England that voted for Brexit just to pull the rug out from under everyone else because they were thrown on the scrap heap by Thatcher in the 1980’s and those areas never recovered. The liberal voting cities told the mining folk they were idiots for voting for brexit and so they switched allegiances from Labour (closely linked to the unions) to the Conservatives who were telling these people they were going to fix things for them, ‘levelling up’ the North of England. This hasn’t happened there is not even a coherent plan for how it could happen and the new candidates for prime minister are all going on about how they’re going to be more like Thatcher than the others, forgetting that the people who just switched to them hated her for destroying thier way of life. So be careful! Don’t disrespect the miners they will cause chaos if you annoy them!!
  - konschubert 4y ago
    Germany is burning more coal and gas to cover for French power shortages. The grids are interconnected. There is a European power market.
    - Glawen 4y ago
      This argument makes no sense, do you have number? The French reactors are shut down in summer because there is less electricity demand and you have an abundance of solar power. Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available. So I don't get how Germany would need to burn coal/gas for the french. If I look here, only 2% are imported from Germany https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?utm_source=electricitymap.org&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=banner https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?utm_source=electrici... The real problem is going to be this winter, where EDF needs to repair its nuclear reactors before the start of winter, in order to provide electricity for France and Germany. And that situation is pretty much due to the lack of vision of Germany and Merkel.
      - yayachiken 4y ago
        If you understand German, there is a great explanation how the energy market in Europe works here: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/plusminus/teurer-strom-wieso-kraftwerksbetreiber-gerade-kein-gas-sparen/das-erste/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL3BsdXNtaW51cy81ZWI1NGFlZi1mNTYwLTRhOTYtYTFhZC02ZmJjZjc3ZmY4MWE https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/plusminus/teurer-strom-wie... It explains why currently, even though gas is so prohibitively expensive, we still run gas powered plants at the moment, and also why even with relatively low transmission capacity between countries there is still big impact on energy prices. The tl;dr is: Energy prices are determined by taking the most expensive auction price that is required to cover the load at any given moment. Everyone who offered a cheaper rate may sell the energy, but receives the highest price that was accepted. This means that prices are highly non-linear and susceptible to supply shocks. Even though the changes from import to export with respect to France are small, a rather small reduction in cheap nuclear power immediately makes it a lot more profitable to produce energy, also making coal and gas viable again. Also note that this model explains the cheap price of nuclear and solar: You "only" need to ROI your initial capital eventually to turn a profit. When push comes to shove you would rather sell at any price above 0 (or at least a very low bottom) rather than turning off your plant and getting no income at all. You cannot do that when you still have significant operational expenses for fuel (coal, gas, stored water). On electricitymap you can see this behaviour in action as well. Even with something like 50% solar production, prices remain high, when suddenly, the prices collapse below zero after a certain threshold was reached. Also note that in these cases, the prices in France and Germany decouple. Customers on the German energy exchange might get paid to use energy while in France spot price still is upward of 10-20 ct/kWh. Also: > Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available. Do you have a source for that? I think that guarantee only applies to Germany. And then it only says that the suppliers always get paid for the energy they could produce, wind and solar can and will still get turned off physically. And from what I have written above it pretty much follows that renewables will always be bought if possible, because they have no fuel costs and letting them run is during positive prices always more profitable than shutting them off. Note though that many renewables are not even sold on the energy exchange and rather influence the market indirectly as most energy utilities have fixed delivery contracts with the producers and only buy/sell the excess on the spot market.
  - wewxjfq 4y ago
    > France has almost no coal left And also has to keep it running now. > Germany is the one that's closing reactors Three reactors while France has half of theirs offline. The irony is that if Germany is going to extend their NPP, it will be because the next German stress test runs under the assumption of a major French power plant outage. I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      > I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure. All the experts on HN and Reddit already switched from "France is amazing, Germany dumb" to "The French are idiots for not having invested into nuclear power. Germany still dumb."
      - mgoetzke 4y ago
        The idiocy is not investing into Wind/Solar/Storage
- b3orn 4y ago
  Coal power plants have the same cooling problem as nuclear power plants. And looking at some rivers in Europe at the moment the problem with power plants using water for cooling isn't just heating up rivers too much, the water levels are dangerously low to the point of some rivers almost disappearing, there are some famous examples of that in Italy this year.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    We'll have on in NL as well, either this year or maybe the next but it is very close to that point.
    - konschubert 4y ago
      A curtailment or a dry river?
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Dry river: https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1550847204671295489/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1550847204671295489/pho...
        konschubert 4y ago
        If the Rhine falling dry doesn't wake up the Germans then nothing will...
        jacquesm 4y ago
        Indeed. It's beyond my level of understanding, as long as I've been alive this has not happened, though I understand that historically it has happened, and whenever it did it was followed by at least one year of famine.
  - yayachiken 4y ago
    At least in Germany, lignite plants are operating on locally mined lignite, which means there is a big open-pit mine directly next to the plant. This means that the water table needs to be drained to keep the mine dry. The pumps in many cases directly feed the excess water into the power plant. An example is the plant Neurath, which is the second biggest coal power plant in Europe, delivering 4 gigawatts of power without use of surface water.
pjc50 4y ago
> the heat wave is such that river water cannot safely cool down its nuclear power plants Yes - a risk for all thermal power plants, since they need a cooling loop to re-condense the steam before putting it through another cycle in the turbines. (In general it would be physically possible to still run the plant, but regulatorily impossible because the outlet water would be too hot and people don't take kindly to boiling a river and destroying its ecosystem) The French reactor fleet also has some kind of problem with cracks affecting the longevity. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/concerns-that-cracks-in-edfs-french-reactors-could-also-plague-hinkley-16-06-2022/ https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/concerns-that-cracks...
- avar 4y ago
  They've got egress cooling water limits of 26-30C (78-86). It's an entirely manufactured problem. There's trivial solutions to this, but they all probably run into other regulatory stupidity. They could easily solve this just by offering giant 38-40C (100-104F) pools open to the public near their plants. Or, just have a parking lot sized winding halfpipe before draining into the river, or otherwise easily make up for the missing cooling tower capacity. In Iceland thermal plants will release boiling temperature water into rivers that didn't have it before, nobody thinks twice about it, as people are used to the natural equivalent. You'll want to make sure to give the fish a way out, but otherwise the only notable side effects are some algea buildup.
  - simonebrunozzi 4y ago
    You're making it too simplistic. There's ecological issues, there's engineering issues, and yes, there's also regulatory issues (in an ideal world, they would be fixed in a single day, but we don't live in one).
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    I know at least one nuclear power station in France uses the hot water to run a crocodile wildlife exhibit next door. I can confirm that visiting it does feel like the start of a disaster movie.
Glawen 4y ago
The article argues that German should stop asserting superiority over France and start building a real high speed rail. The thing is that the German ICE can go fast, but not in Germany as only a few rail line allow it. The best example is Stuttgart Paris where you spend nearly as much time in Germany as in France, except that you only have to cover 170km in Germany and 500km in France. About nuclear reactor, the river can cool down the reactor, but fish will die. Thus the power generation is limited in summer for reactor cooled by rivers.
- LordHeini 4y ago
  Going really fast makes much less sense in Germany compared to France. Frances population is far more centered in mayor hubs while in Germany the population is dispersed much more homogeneous. In some places the ICE stops every 20km, there are too many curves, or it shares its rails with slower trains. There is no need for high speed rails here because you can not accelerate anyway.
  - Glawen 4y ago
    It is slow because it shares the track with other trains. The point of high speed rail network is to connect big hub together without removing existing network. The stop would be every 150/200km. Imagine a Munich Berlin in 2h, that would kill any flights between the two cities.
  - mudita 4y ago
    On the same blog there’s an article criticising exactly this argument in detail: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/06/26/meme-weeding-polycentricity-and-high-speed-rail/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/06/26/meme-weeding-p... "Looking forward rather than backward, nothing in Germany’s urban geography is an obstacle to a connected high-speed rail network. With central stations and less of the population living in truly isolated rural and small-city communities, Germany can expect to greatly surpass any other Western intercity rail network if it builds high-speed rail, more than reaching DB’s pre-corona 250 million ridership target."
    - 4y ago
barkingcat 4y ago
for all their sophistication, all current designes of nuclear power plants are fundamentally steam power generators.
freeflight 4y ago
> Nuclear capacity curtailed due to a heat wave? That's a failure mode I'd not heard of. It's not a new problem [0], it's become somewhat of a regular issue in parts of Europe during summer heatwaves [1]. As the heatwaves will become worse, and the water scarcer, this will become an even more regular issue. France is currently affected particularly badly because a big chunk of their reactor fleet is also going trough long-overdue maintenance. [0] https://qz.com/1348969/europes-heatwave-is-forcing-nuclear-power-plants-to-shut-down/ https://qz.com/1348969/europes-heatwave-is-forcing-nuclear-p... [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwave-idUSKCN1UK0HR https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
imtringued 4y ago
It is the failure mode that motivated the Japanese to build Fukushima near the tsunami prone coastline.

bowsamic 4y ago

It's actually absurd that it costs me ~£15-25 to fly from London Stansted to Hamburg (1 hr flight), but 145 euros (one way) to get the high speed train to Munich (6 hours). The regional trains are absurd. The platforms are completely congested with human bodies, and even the long double decker trains are often totally full. To me it seems that there simply aren't enough services every day to carry the capacity of people who want to use the trains. Even before the 9 euro ticket it was borderline unusable. I did a midday Monday journey last September from Hamburg -> Lübeck -> Stralsund -> Samtens and each part of the journey apart from the last was totally full. Lübeck -> Stralsund was ran by nah.sh but it was an absolutely tiny train with even barely any standing room, let alone seating. Germans just accept it and groan, in classic German fashion: this is how it is, it's not going to change, just accept it.

Glawen 4y ago
When I take the train in Germany, I try to make sure to have a direct train as I have been left stranded several time and missed my connection. When it happens, you are obliged to hop in the next train, where you don't have a seat reserved, and you are forced to look around for a empty seat. Of course you are not alone in this situation and you end up in a totally full train.
- locallost 4y ago
  Not really true. If you have a full price / flex ticket you can take any train you want, and if you have a discounted ticket you are obliged to go to the info desk and they will give you a connection to take. They will also give you a new reservation. Connections do get missed, and if they do you are entitled to a 25% money back for 1 hour, and 50% for two hour delays.
arcticbull 4y ago
> It's actually absurd that it costs me ~£15-25 to fly from London Stansted to Hamburg (1 hr flight) This isn't really fair. You're looking at the cheapest possible fare - a loss leader - that few people actually pay. And those that do pay it end up paying significantly more in ancillary fees. You pay ~$30 for a personal item onboard, ~$50 for a checked bag. The right way to figure out more or less what folks are actually paying to get between Stansted and Hamburg is looking at PRASM (passenger revenue per available seat mile) but I can't seem to find a published number for European LCCs.

roboben 4y ago

The 9-Euro-Ticket is not usable for intercity connections, so I am not really getting the point how this is connected to DB is getting worse and worse. This is a development for the last 10-20 years. When you ride a train regularly, I did for a few years 3 times a week 3h Berlin/Leipzig, you see how broken the whole system is. I’d always say if you would run any other company with such a customer experience, you would be out of business in no time. I think the core problem is huge and extremely traditional management.

meibo 4y ago
It's not connected at all, it's just a good scapegoat to hide the absolute mismanagement and corruption in the German government and state-owned private companies(boy do we love those)
ravingraven 4y ago
>I think the core problem is huge and extremely traditional management. Not saying that this is not a problem, but bulky management is a constant for DB, even during the years where it was considered world-class. I think it is the budget cuts and the resulting lack of infrastructure.
schroeding 4y ago
There's maybe some connection: Due to the 9-Euro-Ticket there were (in my experience) often delays in regional trains (mostly due to trains being too full). Regional trains share the infrastructure with high-speed trains. So I would find it believable that they influence each other. But yeah, it wasn't great beforehand, the trend was already there and it's not the 9-Euro-Tickets fault, IMO. > I think the core problem is huge and extremely traditional management. IMO a big part is also the neglected infrastructure. Many trains are new and old rolling stock is being upgraded, station buildings are being renovated, but the tracks and the signaling is often very old. There is just so much you can do when your (station) signaling still uses relays from the 60s.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > There is just so much you can do when your (station) signaling still uses relays from the 60s. That's modern. About a quarter of the network still uses purely mechanical signalling and switch operations - that technology is literally and in every sense from the era of the German Kaiser Reich days.

schroeding 4y ago

> but there are sensors to ensure the train’s mass does not exceed a maximum level, which can be reached on unusually crowded trains That's the "great" thing about the old Intercity trains from the 80s (some carriages are even from the 60s, being initially used in Trans Europe Express Trains[1]): They don't have this feature. Those trains can and will be filled up until it's physically impossible to push more humans into it. Makes a great Sauna in the summer! :D > The natural response of most German rail advocates is to sneer at the idea of high-speed rail Yeah, seperate stations (edit: platforms, they can share the building) for high-speed trains will probably never happen, sadly. And as long as high speed trains share the platforms with regional trains, disruptions and delays will always affect both. It's nice that you can drive from Munich to Augsburg in 20 minutes on a seperate high-speed track, doesn't help you if a broken down regional train blocks the station and everyone has to wait for hours. :/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Europ_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Europ_Express

rocqua 4y ago
Could you not have separate platforms in the same station, with the lines being essentially unbroken?
- schroeding 4y ago
  You could (I would even say those would be seperate stations then, even if they share the building), but virtually no station is build that way and it would cost quite a lot of money to "untangle" the tracks. Probably too much money. Doesn't help that most high-speed trains drive on a mix of seperate high-speed tracks and normal tracks shared with regional and freight trains, making complete seperation impossible. :/
ssl232 4y ago
You don't need separate stations, just enough separate tracks. Berlin Hbf for example has its ICE trains mainly arrive in the basement level, with regional and local trains on physically higher levels (worth seeing for anyone visiting). But most large cities' main stations have 10+ parallel tracks, usually with a large junction a km or so each side to let trains funnel into the correct platform (see e.g. Hannover: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/52.3813/9.7435 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/52.3813/9.7435). Plenty of room for local, regional and ICE trains to be all together.

mkogul 4y ago

Nice article. The German rail is working on modernizing the network with the use of Artificial intelligence based dynamic timetable optimization (a major issue when delays occur is to dynamically readjust the timetable) and Autonomous trains. Additionally making use of 5G based communication and ETCS L3. Unfortunately, due to the mission critical nature, these changes will be slowly rolled out 2027 onwards and major changes are expected only from 2035. https://digitale-schiene-deutschland.de/en/digital-rail https://digitale-schiene-deutschland.de/en/digital-rail

sschueller 4y ago
These are all the typical "cool tech" items sold to the manager who do not understand the problems they have are not solved by it alone. All the issues Germany has Switzerland would also suffer under if it ran it's rail network the same way. Money must go to the right places and maintenance is crucial. The Swiss network is not perfect but it doesn't have all the issues the Germans have and we have no autonomous trains, no AI dynamic time tables (not yet) and no ETCS L3 (not yet or very limited).
- rpadovani 4y ago
  While I am totally down for bashing DB, as you can see from other comments, let's also face reality: Switzerland has 1/10th of the population and 1/9th of the surface, with an entirely different population distribution. Unfortunately, lessons from small countries cannot easily be replicated in bigger countries (as for people that mention Estonia for digitalization: they are great, but there are 3 cities in Germany that have more population that the _entire_ Estonia)
  - sschueller 4y ago
    Germany has 40k km of rail vs 5k km in Switzerland. So the difference is not that big. However for the population size it is too small of a network.

dreen 4y ago

I would like to see someone advance an idea that all rail should be fully subsidised and free to use. Because rail creates massive economic gains by increased mobility, but modern rail companies struggle to maintain a modern infra while trying to make money and competing with coach and planes. If they just focused on running trains things could be much better.

flohofwoe 4y ago
Offering free train rides should only be used as incentive to use trains more. When the rail infrastructure is alreay overwhelmed as it is in Germany it really doesn't make sense without first massively investing in the infrastructure - which will take decades.
bobthepanda 4y ago
Free runs into the issue of capacity management. Prices, even token prices, serve to limit some consumption. Without it, free transit mostly serves to divert people from walking and cycling, not cars and planes. Guangzhou planned to offer free transit to ease congestion during the 2010 Asian Games. It was cancelled after a few days; metro ridership doubled, causing queues of up to twenty minutes to enter stations, and eight stations turned exit only to relieve emergency levels of overcrowding. Most rail transportation could not handle the crush of additional riders from free rides. https://humantransit.org/2010/11/guangzhou-abandons-free-fare-experiment.html https://humantransit.org/2010/11/guangzhou-abandons-free-far...
- hjanssen 4y ago
  > free transit mostly serves to divert people from walking and cycling, not cars and planes Source for this claim? I would be surprised if it holds true. > Most rail transportation could not handle the crush of additional riders from free rides This is a problem with the infrastructure, not free rides. Of course capacity planning has to be adapted to keep up with increased usage, but thats literally what we want. We want more people to use public transportation, limiting or capping usage is the wrong approach IMHO.

eunos 4y ago

No major cities outside Frankfurt and Koln were connected by the highest speed rail (300 km/h) ?

jlangenauer 4y ago
Significant portions of the Berlin to Munich route run at 300km/h (the section from Halle via Erfurt and then to Bamberg). Of course, you have to be on one of the ICE3's that are actually capable of 300km/h - the others max out at 250km/h...

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago

At Chaos Computer Club a few years back, David Kriesel presented an analysis of the on-time performance of the Deutsche Bahn, based on a systematic scraping of their API.[0] One of the surprising things he explained: if a train never arrives at a station, it's not late, according to the Deutsche Bahn. 0. https://youtu.be/AGCmPLWZKd8 https://youtu.be/AGCmPLWZKd8

rsynnott 4y ago
> if a train never arrives at a station, it's not late, according to the Deutsche Bahn. I think most rail systems do this; it would be considered a reliability problem, not a punctuality problem. You definitely have to be careful with the definition of these things, though. For instance, Irish Rail considers intercity rail to be on time if it's within 10 mins of schedule. Commuter is within five minutes of schedule. Given that, at peak times, some commuter services run once every ten minutes, and thus are ~always on time per this definition, it's wise to be a bit skeptical of the punctuality reporting.
- endless1234 4y ago
  >Given that, at peak times, some commuter services run once every ten minutes, and thus are ~always on time per this definition, it's wise to be a bit skeptical of the punctuality reporting. I think that makes sense. If a commuter train leaves every 10 minutes, but due to some technical problems, the first train of the early morning leaves 20 minutes late which then continues through the day, does that mean every train is late? The users wouldn't know the trains they're using should have actually ran 20 minutes ago, they just know a train is to go every 10 minutes.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    The ideal measurement would be to get as good a model of day-to-day passenger flows as possible, then simulate the journey times based on both the nominal timetable, and the "actually-ran" timetable in order to also quantify the effects of missed connections. I think the Swiss actually do something like this, whereas in Germany they've only comparatively recently started doing it, too, and even then I think they're currently only looking at long distance trains, so connections to/from regional trains don't count (and never mind local public transport).

rpadovani 4y ago

The problem is also the local transportation: in Munich we desperately need investments on the S-Bahn, which has been neglected in the past twenty years, as the majority of public transportations in the city. There is a project for doubling the tracks in the city center, that is on a good way to become more notorious than the Berlin airport: they are talking about it since the '70, they started working in 2017, with planned opening in 2028 for ~3B euros, and now they are talking about opening it in the late '30 with an estimated cost of more than 7B euros. 1B for each km of tunnel, that's madness. Without it, we cannot have fast connections to the airport (currently 40 minutes away from the city center), and cannot increase the number of trains, currently running in a 20-minute cadence because 7 lines meet in the city center, so 7 lines on 1 track. Another thing I don't understand; why Italy and Germany aren't to start building the access tracks to the Brenner Base Tunnel (BBT)? BBT is incredibly on track with all the deadlines, so if they really open it in 10 years, we will be able to do Fortezza - Innsbruck at 250km/h, and then Munich - Innsbruck at <200 km/h, as Fortezza - Verona. That's simply ridiculous. I don't own a car and try to fly as little as possible, but it is quite difficult for distances that, frankly, should be a no-brainer.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Unfortunately doubling rail in cities means you have to demolish whole swaths of the city. Even the Japanese have these problems with their Shinkansen. There is no space unless you go underground.
- rpadovani 4y ago
  Yeah, they want to do everything underground, but they really miscalculated completion time and costs.
ho_schi 4y ago
Let us name the actual good things :) The ICE-Terminal at the airport Frankfurt am Main (FRA) is a bless! I live in the middle of southern Germany. Sitting into the ICE and wait for FRA is joyful. It is more comfortable to reach than Stuttgart and Munich. The only annoying part is the old Stuttgart "Kopfbahnhof" but luckily this will be fixed soon. I'm thankful that the peopledecided to go for this effort, despite Germans fear changes. Sadly ICE tickets are very expensive. When you travel with more than one person using the car is often better. If I could wish for some things: * Affordable inter-city tickets, instead of very cheap local tickets * An ICE every 30 Minutes (high frequency, not just high speed) * Therefore Deutsche Lufthansa can focus more on mid- and long range flights. They prefer that and complement with the Deutsche Bahn. * As rpadovani I hope for a connection Brenner Base Tunnel * Munich should also become through station "Durchgangsbahnhof". These "Kopfbahnhof" thing is a weird concept from the old kingdoms and doesn't make sense. Even in Paris this concept is questionable. * Please Germans. Get more courage and appreciate useful changes. From windmills, airport runways or train lines. It is not about ruining the landscape. For entertainment, the (in)famous speech of Edmund Stoiber about the Transrapid. It is weird for native speakers, too. https://youtu.be/f7TboWvVERU https://youtu.be/f7TboWvVERU I remember as kid that some people dreamed about the Transrapid (a high speed train, hovering with magnets). The politician above wanted to connect Munich Central-Station with Munich Airport (FJS) with it because the local trains are a pitty.

tinus_hn 4y ago

You only need to look at a German rail road crossing to immediately see they are either extremely lazy or completely incompetent. The bars close, then there’s a 5 minutes wait, then a tiny train passes at about 75km/h, then they open. If there is a station next to the crossing, the bars close before the train is even at the station and remain closed while the train is stopped. If the track would be used at anywhere near capacity the crossing would simply never open.

vinay427 4y ago
This appears to be the case in Switzerland as well, or at least various intersections in multiple cities that I would be repeatedly stuck at while living there, so I'm not sure this is a fundamental problem. Level crossings aren't ideal for at-capacity tracks anyway, which is why they're usually avoided in urban environments.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Coming from the Netherlands I know that this is a solvable problem if there are limits to the delays caused by the bars being shut. It’s just that if the company that sets this up doesn’t need to care, they don’t care.

crocal 4y ago

There is something very wrong going on in Germany AND France where, despite the nice speeches, investment in railway infrastructure is being run into the ground. If nothing changes, expect disaster-level quality of service within a 5 years time.

sschueller 4y ago

Germany desperately needs to electrify more. The trip from Zürich to Munich took an extra 30 minutes because locomotives had to be switched for the non-electrified part of the track in Germany.[1] Also they finally need finish the access to the Alpentransversalen[2] which because of NIMBY and other things is extremely delayed. [1] https://company.sbb.ch/de/medien/medienstelle/medienmitteilungen/detail.html/2020/12/1112-2 https://company.sbb.ch/de/medien/medienstelle/medienmitteilu... [2] https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/europaeischer-bahn-gueterkorridor_deutschland-mit-neat-zubringer-im-verzug/42111740 https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/europaeischer-bahn-gueterkorrid...

bornfreddy 4y ago
Genuinly curious - can locomotive run on batteries (which it drags behind it, in a form of a train car) for the tracks which are not electrified? Or is the cost (or sth. else) prohibitive?
- nuodag 4y ago
  Yes, they are doing exactly that, having a normal electric train which has batteries under the cars (no extra waggon) for 40-200km of not electrified track. It’s for regional trains though with lower energy needs (and because non electrified long distance tracks really make no sense). Linking German Wikipedia because it has long history of them and current projects, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkumulatortriebwagen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkumulatortriebwagen
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    Thank you!
lynguist 4y ago
Fun fact: The Zurich-Munich electrification was paid by an interest-free loan by the Swiss confederacy, in order to finally saturate the North-South line from Germany to Italy that was heavily expanded in Switzerland. The trains are still always delayed by 30 min because it’s single track on long stretches and delays always happen in the German and Austrian part of this line. And the Basel-Karlsruhe line is still not finished.

xvilka 4y ago

If they don't want to learn from France, they always can learn from Japan and China - two countries best in HSR.

muro 4y ago
Italy is often mocked as incompetent, but wow, their HSR is nice! DB is such a joke by comparison. If Austria increases their train speeds, it will be the worst railway around.

dominicl 4y ago

There is something fundamentally flawed in the maintenance cost of the Deutsche Bahn. According to the Deutschen Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW) it's costing the Deutsche Bahn 312,000€ per year to maintain a single kilometer of rail tracks. Given that and the already high subsidies of 10 billion € just to keep DB running, any kilometer additional track built is just increasing that hole. I feel we are in a shit triangle here. Ticket prices are too high <-> quality is too low <-> overall cost is too high. There have been ongoing attempts to fix this by increasing rider amounts but at Germanys population density it's impossible to ever get even near to Japanese levels [2] of low total kilometers built with high usages. After my interpretation of things there is some innovation necessary to bring the per KM cost down before the Deutsche Bahn can play a more important role in the transportation. On the same coin the cost of public transport for families vs. car ownership is just ridiculous. I've got a family of 5 - For every German intercity route going by car is significantly cheaper than going by train - usually 5x cheaper but often more. Same is true for traveling within a city that isn't your hometown (where you might have a monthly ticket). At this point I'm not even sure whether this is a problem that can be solved socioeconomicly. I feel electric cars, robotaxis and in the future electric planes are much more likely to solve the larger part of of transportation than that railway is going to do it. Especially given that building another set of rails now in Germany is going to take from planning to delivery 15 years. The change of technology should be planned in. [1] https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.344573.de/diwkompakt_2009-053.pdf https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.34457... [2] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/141066/1/vjh_v63_i03_pp245-275.pdf https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/141066/1/vjh_v63_i03...