13 ms·

It will take years to get Deutsche Bahn back on track

38 points by rustoo 3y ago

TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
Visiting Germany by train can be cost-effective: there's a good chance your train is delayed by more than an hour and you can reclaim the ticket price.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  The same is true on UK trains (delay repay)
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    No surprise since that's a pre-Brexit EU regulation.
- pixelpoet 3y ago
  Trying to get that money back is like drawing blood from a stone; depending on your hourly rate and capacity for frustration it might not be worth it. I'm genuinely traumatised by a recent DB fuckup which ruined a 6 day holiday after an entire day of frantically trying and failing to get alternate connections and being brushed off by them (you have to physically visit a separate building or send snail mail), to the point where I'm putting off important stuff in another city because I just can't handle dealing with them yet. I realise this is more about me than them, but I sincerely am having mental health problems regularly because of DB and have forgone 100ish euros refund several times in the last months because of it. Words cannot describe my seething hatred for Deutsche Bahn.
  - kiwijamo 3y ago
    In 2017 I was on a late running DB train and was given a form to complete to get a refund. Problem was I live in New Zealand and have my bank account here. I fill out the form using my NZ account details anyway and posted the form from New Zelanad thinking I would never see a cent. I was shocked a few weeks later when I found out DB had managed to process my refund to my bank account on the other side of the world. I can tell you no train operator in New Zealand would do this if it was a German claiming a refund. Refunds for delays is definitely not a thing here.
    - pixelpoet 3y ago
      When I was coming back from visiting family in NZ over xmas, all the ticket machines at one of the platforms were out of order and a DB guy said don't worry about it, get on the train. It was super late, I had all my bags with me and the next train would (hopefully) be in an hour or something. Then on the train he said he would technically need to give me a fine but don't worry, he will write on the fine ticket thing that it is invalid and I can just go to the DB travel centre thing to get a refund. So I go there and they said no, they can't give me a refund, I have to go somewhere else (different building, and obviously closed). So I go another time, obviously losing time and paying extra to get there, and they said sorry it's not valid. 60 euros right there, plus all the wasted time and stress running around with a month's worth of baggage from NZ. I'm still having trouble dealing with my anger about this and several other incidents, and I basically never have mental issues like this. There was this other time where a Brazilian lady was sitting next to me for something like 3 hours while our train was delayed 10 minutes at a time, crying super hard while using Google Translate on her phone to ask me what was going on and saying she's going to miss her flights... they struggle to reliably do my 5 minute daily trip to and from work... Part of what makes this difficult for me to deal with is that I'm staunchly anti-car, and Deutsche Bahn are possibly singlehandedly going to push me to getting a driver's licence at 40, after having resisted it in South Africa, New Zealand, America, England, Poland, Czechia, ... I can't say it emphatically enough: fuck Deutsche Bahn.
PaulHoule 3y ago
I live in Germany in 1999 and was excited as an American to ride the rails everywhere but I found that even then Europeans thought trains were passé and were more inclined to fly, but also that flying in Europe was a much better experience with less BS at the airport, more competition and less of the “let’s make coach as awful as possible so people fly first class” game that domestic U.S. carriers play.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > but also that flying in Europe was a much better experience with less BS at the airport For what it's worth, that's no longer true since 9/11. We have the same security theatre the US has (with the exception that we don't demand TSA locks), our airports have gone all in on upselling you overpriced crap (really, they're better equipped than some malls, it's insane), and Ryanair drove down the bar for "acceptable" behavior to below zero.
  - rippercushions 3y ago
    Hey, at least you can still keep your shoes on.
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    You don't have to take your shoes off at any European airport. Also the security people all seem professional and not on a power trip. This has not been my experience in America.
    - moltar 3y ago
      Yes, totally agree on the security personal. Everyone is shockingly friendly. I stopped flying via US where possible as the experience was always horrific.
    - AdrianB1 3y ago
      I worked in an airport in Europe for several years: it depends on the country, the airport and the flight (some commercial flights had special security requirements, extremely strict).
outside1234 3y ago
https://archive.is/INBuP https://archive.is/INBuP
witchesindublin 3y ago
Considering this is from the Economist, I think it is worth to mention the dire state of British railways. The main reason that Europeans fly (including Brits) is that it's simply the cheapest option, more-so that bus in many cases. Airplanes are pretty much providing services similar or lower than to buses, and trains tend to have better service and also tend to be more comfortable these days. Most airplanes have been reduced to low cost or no-frills status, even the full service ones, and flying is a nightmare in terms of peace-of-mind and comfort. Deutsche Bahn is one of the better railway operators in Europe, especially compared to the railways in Southern Europe or the UK, but obviously there are a lot of improvements that need to be made.
- balaji1 3y ago
  This has to just be a side-effect of the revolving-door grace of government subsidies - Currently/lately, short-haul airlines are being subsidized. Even though those subsidies are costly and least effective.
  - shuckles 3y ago
    Can you be more specific? What are the specific budgets or regulatory advantages you’re referring to?
- lmm 3y ago
  > Deutsche Bahn is one of the better railway operators in Europe, especially compared to the railways in Southern Europe or the UK Are you sure you're not just remembering their old reputation? DB's punctuality and performance has gotten to be terrible lately, I'd say they're well below Trenitalia or Renfe or most of the UK railways at this point. (And complaints about British railways are pretty overstated; prices are bad, but performance is objectively pretty good).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - switch007 3y ago
g_sch 3y ago
I think it's not fair to fault DB or EVG for failing to run 100% service after a nationwide strike was called off just a few hours before it was supposed to start. An orderly temporary shutdown of a major rail network is going to require plenty of ramp-down and ramp-up as trains and people get in position. Some of that was undoubtedly already underway when the tentative agreement was reached, and you can't just turn it around on a dime.
- hutattedonmyarm 3y ago
  To be fair, DB dragged EVG to court over the strike trying to get them to cancel it. DB wasn’t surprised by the cancellation. [0] Nonetheless, a last minute reschedule of train and worker’s shift plans at that scale is a huge task and I’m impressed that they managed to get a big chunk running again [https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/bahn-evg-streik-abgewendet-vergleich-100.html https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/bahn-evg-streik-ab...]
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    They couldn6ne sure about winning the court case (well, the didn't win, but settle the case technically) and not preparing for strike and then losing the case would have lead to a longer period of issues as the no train and no personal end up where they are needed
- wunderland 3y ago
  If they were serious about even their lame 80% on-time rate, they should try paying their workers more and giving them good benefits and comfortable and safe working conditions. But the management of DB has been taken over by the same people who want to privatize rail like the British have done with disastrous consequence.
  - Georgelemental 3y ago
    If German rail is anything like France's public railways (genuinely don't know whether it is), the workers are overpaid and the unions too powerful. On the other hand, if it's anything like US private railways, then the unions are right to complain about unethical working conditions.
thriftwy 3y ago
Meanwhile Russian Railways are chugging just fine, and make up for closed airports in the south of Russia. You can also take a suburban train from Rostov-on-Don, change train at Uspenskaya and ride all the way to Makeevka, DPR.
- phatfish 3y ago
  You would get a nice view of all military equipment going to the front lines as well I bet. Trains must be critical for the war effort. Oops, SMO.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    Not that much, but we've got to see one military convoy with a few vehicles on platforms followed by two passenger cars with a crowd of people near them, half-dressed in camouflage, smoking.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  The funnier thing may be the fact that Ukrainian railway at the moment may be better functioning than that of Germany or UK, despite decades of financial neglect of the former and the fact that nobody actually tried to bomb electric infrastructure of the latters'.
wunderland 3y ago
Compare DB vs neighboring SBB (Switzerland‘a trains, possibly the best in Europe or the world). Germany has been ravaged by neoliberalism. underfunding publicly owned services, failing to maintain the infrastructure that is collectively used. This leads to degraded service, which liberals and other right-wingers hold up as an example of the need for privatization because the free market will of course fix these inefficiencies, only to rapidly accelerate the decline of the service. If you want nice things you have to pay for them. Deutsche Bahn has instead been stripped for parts by the capitalists.
- tbrownaw 3y ago
  > liberals and other right-wingers ... Is this a case of "words to describe politics mean different things in different countries"?
  - wunderland 3y ago
    Yes.
  - Georgelemental 3y ago
    "Liberal" has a long history as an insult used by Communists against non-Communist democrats.
  - caput770 3y ago
    Liberal means the same thing in the U.S. in more left-wing / academic circles => neoliberal capitalists. It depends on if this is left or right of center in your country
  - italia_em 3y ago
    I think it’s more a case of Americans not realizing that their liberal party is rather right-wing, possibly because there’s nothing to the left of it and the US media falsely conflates “liberal” and “left”.
  - witchesindublin 3y ago
    Liberalism is right wing in most of the world.
parshimers 3y ago
I always hear a lot of grousing about DB, but I took it a lot the two times I visited, and I liked it. Even when there was a horrible windstorm that blew trees all over the tracks and stopped the ICE from coming down to Ingolstadt, I was able to hop onto regional alternates to where the ICE was, and get back to Berlin without too much insanity. The trains are pleasant and clean, and the stations are massive and have lots of nice convenience stores. Contrast this with Metrolink or Amtrak, and it's night and day. If your train gets cancelled, at least in SoCal, you're likely hosed. You will wait hours upon hours, and some stations that are in the middle of the biggest metro area in the US get 2 trains a day. You can't just hop on something going the right way. Furthermore they are often isolated and have no stores near them. I also really disagree with the article's implicit assumption that passenger railways somehow, have to make a profit. At least here in the US, that's often implied too, yet the interstates are completely free and funded by the state and no one bats an eye. Why?
ofrzeta 3y ago
It's not wideley known that part of the problem is Siemens with their abysmal quality of trains, for instance the Desiro models. I found an older article about this in connection with the Belgian rail https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2014/08/14/desiro_trains_leavemuchtobedesired-1-2059947/ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2014/08/14/desiro_trains_leavem... The situation hasn't improved, though. Recently a local provider of train services has acquired a new fleet of Desiro and Mireo that were broken right out of the factory. The quality was so bad that Siemens was forced to send people to the train provider for weeks to fix the most urgent problems. Also the introduction of the "Deutschlandtakt" was delayed not for years but for decades, so won't happen in my lifetime: https://www-tagesschau-de.translate.goog/wirtschaft/unternehmen/bahn-deutschlandtakt-101.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-tagesschau-de.translate.goog/wirtschaft/unterneh...
- kioleanu 3y ago
  I don't understand Siemens as a company, to be honest. We wanted to buy an expensive piece of software from them and they delivered it with all essential libraries at versions from 2014. We asked them to update the libraries, they spent a few weeks before replying and then said it's not possible to be done. We do such updates on a weekly basis for our internal software, here incidentally on the exact same libraries, so the response flabbergasts me. They preferred to lose hundreds of thousands of euro rather than spend a few weeks (I'm stretching it) doing the updates.
  - 1238127386 3y ago
    Having worked for Siemens in the past, I can say I don't understand how they are still in business. Riduculous ration of managers to workers, no real processes - it was insane. Of course that was just one small part of a large company. However, the management issue seems to be endemic there.

38 points by rustoo 3y ago

Visiting Germany by train can be cost-effective: there's a good chance your train is delayed by more than an hour and you can reclaim the ticket price.

HPsquared 3y ago
The same is true on UK trains (delay repay)
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  No surprise since that's a pre-Brexit EU regulation.
pixelpoet 3y ago
Trying to get that money back is like drawing blood from a stone; depending on your hourly rate and capacity for frustration it might not be worth it. I'm genuinely traumatised by a recent DB fuckup which ruined a 6 day holiday after an entire day of frantically trying and failing to get alternate connections and being brushed off by them (you have to physically visit a separate building or send snail mail), to the point where I'm putting off important stuff in another city because I just can't handle dealing with them yet. I realise this is more about me than them, but I sincerely am having mental health problems regularly because of DB and have forgone 100ish euros refund several times in the last months because of it. Words cannot describe my seething hatred for Deutsche Bahn.
- kiwijamo 3y ago
  In 2017 I was on a late running DB train and was given a form to complete to get a refund. Problem was I live in New Zealand and have my bank account here. I fill out the form using my NZ account details anyway and posted the form from New Zelanad thinking I would never see a cent. I was shocked a few weeks later when I found out DB had managed to process my refund to my bank account on the other side of the world. I can tell you no train operator in New Zealand would do this if it was a German claiming a refund. Refunds for delays is definitely not a thing here.
  - pixelpoet 3y ago
    When I was coming back from visiting family in NZ over xmas, all the ticket machines at one of the platforms were out of order and a DB guy said don't worry about it, get on the train. It was super late, I had all my bags with me and the next train would (hopefully) be in an hour or something. Then on the train he said he would technically need to give me a fine but don't worry, he will write on the fine ticket thing that it is invalid and I can just go to the DB travel centre thing to get a refund. So I go there and they said no, they can't give me a refund, I have to go somewhere else (different building, and obviously closed). So I go another time, obviously losing time and paying extra to get there, and they said sorry it's not valid. 60 euros right there, plus all the wasted time and stress running around with a month's worth of baggage from NZ. I'm still having trouble dealing with my anger about this and several other incidents, and I basically never have mental issues like this. There was this other time where a Brazilian lady was sitting next to me for something like 3 hours while our train was delayed 10 minutes at a time, crying super hard while using Google Translate on her phone to ask me what was going on and saying she's going to miss her flights... they struggle to reliably do my 5 minute daily trip to and from work... Part of what makes this difficult for me to deal with is that I'm staunchly anti-car, and Deutsche Bahn are possibly singlehandedly going to push me to getting a driver's licence at 40, after having resisted it in South Africa, New Zealand, America, England, Poland, Czechia, ... I can't say it emphatically enough: fuck Deutsche Bahn.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I live in Germany in 1999 and was excited as an American to ride the rails everywhere but I found that even then Europeans thought trains were passé and were more inclined to fly, but also that flying in Europe was a much better experience with less BS at the airport, more competition and less of the “let’s make coach as awful as possible so people fly first class” game that domestic U.S. carriers play.

mschuster91 3y ago
> but also that flying in Europe was a much better experience with less BS at the airport For what it's worth, that's no longer true since 9/11. We have the same security theatre the US has (with the exception that we don't demand TSA locks), our airports have gone all in on upselling you overpriced crap (really, they're better equipped than some malls, it's insane), and Ryanair drove down the bar for "acceptable" behavior to below zero.
- rippercushions 3y ago
  Hey, at least you can still keep your shoes on.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  You don't have to take your shoes off at any European airport. Also the security people all seem professional and not on a power trip. This has not been my experience in America.
  - moltar 3y ago
    Yes, totally agree on the security personal. Everyone is shockingly friendly. I stopped flying via US where possible as the experience was always horrific.
  - AdrianB1 3y ago
    I worked in an airport in Europe for several years: it depends on the country, the airport and the flight (some commercial flights had special security requirements, extremely strict).

outside1234 3y ago

https://archive.is/INBuP https://archive.is/INBuP

witchesindublin 3y ago

Considering this is from the Economist, I think it is worth to mention the dire state of British railways. The main reason that Europeans fly (including Brits) is that it's simply the cheapest option, more-so that bus in many cases. Airplanes are pretty much providing services similar or lower than to buses, and trains tend to have better service and also tend to be more comfortable these days. Most airplanes have been reduced to low cost or no-frills status, even the full service ones, and flying is a nightmare in terms of peace-of-mind and comfort. Deutsche Bahn is one of the better railway operators in Europe, especially compared to the railways in Southern Europe or the UK, but obviously there are a lot of improvements that need to be made.

balaji1 3y ago
This has to just be a side-effect of the revolving-door grace of government subsidies - Currently/lately, short-haul airlines are being subsidized. Even though those subsidies are costly and least effective.
- shuckles 3y ago
  Can you be more specific? What are the specific budgets or regulatory advantages you’re referring to?
lmm 3y ago
> Deutsche Bahn is one of the better railway operators in Europe, especially compared to the railways in Southern Europe or the UK Are you sure you're not just remembering their old reputation? DB's punctuality and performance has gotten to be terrible lately, I'd say they're well below Trenitalia or Renfe or most of the UK railways at this point. (And complaints about British railways are pretty overstated; prices are bad, but performance is objectively pretty good).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- switch007 3y ago

g_sch 3y ago

I think it's not fair to fault DB or EVG for failing to run 100% service after a nationwide strike was called off just a few hours before it was supposed to start. An orderly temporary shutdown of a major rail network is going to require plenty of ramp-down and ramp-up as trains and people get in position. Some of that was undoubtedly already underway when the tentative agreement was reached, and you can't just turn it around on a dime.

hutattedonmyarm 3y ago
To be fair, DB dragged EVG to court over the strike trying to get them to cancel it. DB wasn’t surprised by the cancellation. [0] Nonetheless, a last minute reschedule of train and worker’s shift plans at that scale is a huge task and I’m impressed that they managed to get a big chunk running again [https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/bahn-evg-streik-abgewendet-vergleich-100.html https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/bahn-evg-streik-ab...]
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  They couldn6ne sure about winning the court case (well, the didn't win, but settle the case technically) and not preparing for strike and then losing the case would have lead to a longer period of issues as the no train and no personal end up where they are needed
wunderland 3y ago
If they were serious about even their lame 80% on-time rate, they should try paying their workers more and giving them good benefits and comfortable and safe working conditions. But the management of DB has been taken over by the same people who want to privatize rail like the British have done with disastrous consequence.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  If German rail is anything like France's public railways (genuinely don't know whether it is), the workers are overpaid and the unions too powerful. On the other hand, if it's anything like US private railways, then the unions are right to complain about unethical working conditions.

thriftwy 3y ago

Meanwhile Russian Railways are chugging just fine, and make up for closed airports in the south of Russia. You can also take a suburban train from Rostov-on-Don, change train at Uspenskaya and ride all the way to Makeevka, DPR.

phatfish 3y ago
You would get a nice view of all military equipment going to the front lines as well I bet. Trains must be critical for the war effort. Oops, SMO.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Not that much, but we've got to see one military convoy with a few vehicles on platforms followed by two passenger cars with a crowd of people near them, half-dressed in camouflage, smoking.
thriftwy 3y ago
The funnier thing may be the fact that Ukrainian railway at the moment may be better functioning than that of Germany or UK, despite decades of financial neglect of the former and the fact that nobody actually tried to bomb electric infrastructure of the latters'.

wunderland 3y ago

Compare DB vs neighboring SBB (Switzerland‘a trains, possibly the best in Europe or the world). Germany has been ravaged by neoliberalism. underfunding publicly owned services, failing to maintain the infrastructure that is collectively used. This leads to degraded service, which liberals and other right-wingers hold up as an example of the need for privatization because the free market will of course fix these inefficiencies, only to rapidly accelerate the decline of the service. If you want nice things you have to pay for them. Deutsche Bahn has instead been stripped for parts by the capitalists.

tbrownaw 3y ago
> liberals and other right-wingers ... Is this a case of "words to describe politics mean different things in different countries"?
- wunderland 3y ago
  Yes.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  "Liberal" has a long history as an insult used by Communists against non-Communist democrats.
- caput770 3y ago
  Liberal means the same thing in the U.S. in more left-wing / academic circles => neoliberal capitalists. It depends on if this is left or right of center in your country
- italia_em 3y ago
  I think it’s more a case of Americans not realizing that their liberal party is rather right-wing, possibly because there’s nothing to the left of it and the US media falsely conflates “liberal” and “left”.
- witchesindublin 3y ago
  Liberalism is right wing in most of the world.

parshimers 3y ago

I always hear a lot of grousing about DB, but I took it a lot the two times I visited, and I liked it. Even when there was a horrible windstorm that blew trees all over the tracks and stopped the ICE from coming down to Ingolstadt, I was able to hop onto regional alternates to where the ICE was, and get back to Berlin without too much insanity. The trains are pleasant and clean, and the stations are massive and have lots of nice convenience stores. Contrast this with Metrolink or Amtrak, and it's night and day. If your train gets cancelled, at least in SoCal, you're likely hosed. You will wait hours upon hours, and some stations that are in the middle of the biggest metro area in the US get 2 trains a day. You can't just hop on something going the right way. Furthermore they are often isolated and have no stores near them. I also really disagree with the article's implicit assumption that passenger railways somehow, have to make a profit. At least here in the US, that's often implied too, yet the interstates are completely free and funded by the state and no one bats an eye. Why?

ofrzeta 3y ago

It's not wideley known that part of the problem is Siemens with their abysmal quality of trains, for instance the Desiro models. I found an older article about this in connection with the Belgian rail https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2014/08/14/desiro_trains_leavemuchtobedesired-1-2059947/ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2014/08/14/desiro_trains_leavem... The situation hasn't improved, though. Recently a local provider of train services has acquired a new fleet of Desiro and Mireo that were broken right out of the factory. The quality was so bad that Siemens was forced to send people to the train provider for weeks to fix the most urgent problems. Also the introduction of the "Deutschlandtakt" was delayed not for years but for decades, so won't happen in my lifetime: https://www-tagesschau-de.translate.goog/wirtschaft/unternehmen/bahn-deutschlandtakt-101.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-tagesschau-de.translate.goog/wirtschaft/unterneh...

kioleanu 3y ago
I don't understand Siemens as a company, to be honest. We wanted to buy an expensive piece of software from them and they delivered it with all essential libraries at versions from 2014. We asked them to update the libraries, they spent a few weeks before replying and then said it's not possible to be done. We do such updates on a weekly basis for our internal software, here incidentally on the exact same libraries, so the response flabbergasts me. They preferred to lose hundreds of thousands of euro rather than spend a few weeks (I'm stretching it) doing the updates.
- 1238127386 3y ago
  Having worked for Siemens in the past, I can say I don't understand how they are still in business. Riduculous ration of managers to workers, no real processes - it was insane. Of course that was just one small part of a large company. However, the management issue seems to be endemic there.