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I fear that the general public in Germany will not be praising this achievement. The once efficient and punctional trains in Germany have deteriorated severely

I fear that the general public in Germany will not be praising this achievement. The once efficient and punctional trains in Germany have deteriorated severely in the past years due to lots of delayed maintenance causing lots of delays and even regular cancelations of trains. Also the road infrastructure is suffering from delayed maintenance.

attendant3446 1y ago
That's exactly it, it's not the new top speed they need, they lack efficiency. And it's not just Deutschebahn. For example BVG, who runs busses and U-bahn in Berlin is even less reliable.
- simianwords 1y ago
  I think higher speeds can help efficiency. For example it can help catch up a train that has been delayed.
  - pixelfarmer 1y ago
    It can, but it requires the track to be free in front of it and being allowed to go at the required speed to catch up.
    - simianwords 1y ago
      Yes but it’s a strictly better situation to be in although your point is valid.
      - eptcyka 1y ago
        Do you imply that trains would normally run slower than what they can safely achieve?
        simianwords 1y ago
        i don't know where i implied that but it is well known that this is the case in order to give buffer time.
        Brian_K_White 1y ago
        Everything always runs at 80% down to even 50% for normal 99% of the time operation. Not just trains, everything.
        Propelloni 1y ago
        What was the old chestnut? A traffic jam is a highway at 100% capacity? Something like that, can't remember who said it. Niels Pfläging perhaps?
        tonfa 1y ago
        With clock face scheduling (like in CH and planned for Germany) they very much do since schedules are optimized to align with periodicity. On some Swiss lines it's fairly common to have trains recover their delay at departure (which also avoids cascading impact). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling
  - microtonal 1y ago
    West European rail is very full, so rail use is carefully coordinated, since trains of vastly different speeds (e.g. ICE vs a regional train) use the same tracks. If an ICE is, say, 15 minutes late, they cannot just drive faster to catch up. The schedule went on, and at that point there may be a much slower regional or intercity train on the same trajectory. This is why ICE delays tend to cascade. It starts with a short delay, the ICE gets stuck behind a slower train, increasing the delay, etc. The solution is better maintenance of tracks and trains, adding more rail capacity, adding redundancy, etc. Of course, these are all much more expensive than an ICE speed experiment for PR.
    - prmoustache 1y ago
      If it is the same as in Switzerland, the solution is in helping people get the health care they need. Most time I got annoying delays when I was living in Switzerland was because of a "personal accident" which 99% of the time meant someone had deliberately jumped in front of a train.
      - detaro 1y ago
        It of course happens in other places too, but the Swiss are somewhat standout in how much they have their other operations in order. It's funny in a sad way that international connections into Switzerland actually get limited because the Swiss don't want other operators fucking up their internal schedule constantly.
      - adev_ 1y ago
        > If it is the same as in Switzerland, the solution is in helping people get the health care they need. [...] Switzerland SBB/CFF and the German DB can not be compared, not even from far. The Swiss trains are amongst the best in the world in term on punctuality. Delays barely exceed few minutes most of the time. Every connection is scheduled to be done < 5min. The usage is smooth like butter and It works like a Swiss clock. At the opposite, German trains in the eastern part are barely on time and give you an almost Soviet experience for the regional one: The trains are old, poorly maintained, like the track itself and the service suffers of it. The only place in Western Europe I experienced train to be worst than in Germany is currently in Hungary where there were actual soviet trains. Even the freaking French SNCF with their legendary strikes tend to be more punctual than the DB.
  - attendant3446 1y ago
    I was late to reply, but as others have noticed, delayed trains can't always "catch up" with the schedule. ICE trains can accelerate to 405 kph, but regional trains using the same rail can't.
  - holowoodman 1y ago
    Higher speeds reduce efficiency. The most efficient use of the tracks would be to limit all trains to the speed of the slowest train that travels a route. Then you can have minimal distances between trains. Also, faster trains are less fuel-efficient, quadratically with speed. So a slowdown would help the environment and the throughput. The only thing it wouldn't improve is passenger happiness ;)
blobbers 1y ago
Interesting; America seems to be suffering the same fate. It takes municipalities years to fix highways. The main highway running through Silicon Valley, 101, has been under construction for more than a decade and is in dire need of improvement. It seems the network of roads built in the 40s, 50s and 60s just can no longer be done efficiently.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > America seems to be suffering the same fate Not uniformly. New York's LIRR (90 to 95% [1]) and Metro-North (99% [2]) feature on-time rates that rival the Swiss (93% [3]). [1] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-9-2025.pdf https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-9-2025.pdf [2] https://wpdh.com/metro-north-on-time-reliability/ https://wpdh.com/metro-north-on-time-reliability/ [3] https://reporting.sbb.ch/punctuality?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&scroll=181&highlighted= https://reporting.sbb.ch/punctuality?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&scrol...
  - kelnos 1y ago
    Not sure I understand your point; GP was talking about highway maintenance and you're talking about trains.
  - Svip 1y ago
    You might want to look into what they define as being "late". > A commuter train is considered on-time by the LIRR if it arrives within 5 minutes and 59 seconds of its scheduled arrival time. The second source doesn't say, but let's assume it's the same as for LIRR, i.e. 6 minutes. It's also unfortunate that the SBB doesn't immediately tell us the metric, but I happen to know it's 3 minutes (more specifically 2 minutes and 59 seconds). In other words, the LIRR permits a delay of twice the time as SBB for it to constitute late. The S-trains in Copenhagen now has a punctuality of 97% using a 3 minute metric.[0] [0] https://www.dsb.dk/om-dsb/virksomheden/rettidighed/s-togs-rettidighed/ https://www.dsb.dk/om-dsb/virksomheden/rettidighed/s-togs-re...
    - chgs 1y ago
masklinn 1y ago
It is a pretty limited achievement as-is: ignoring maglevs, a tgv test train reached 575 kph back in 2007, and China had test trains reaching 487 in 2011. China’s next-gen is being deployed with goals of a 400kph service speed.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  If I understand it correct, this was also a 10 year old train.
- morepork 1y ago
  Also a German ICE test train was clocked at over 400 km/h back in 1988
dheera 1y ago
Meanwhile our trains in the USA run at 50-100 km/h and are nonexistent in most places, so it's still an achievement.
kruxigt 1y ago
[dead]
pjmlp 1y ago
Agreed, nowadays I have to schedule train exchanges to have at least 30 m between them, and even so, I managed to miss connections. DB is doing their best work for having people reaching out for cars. While you might get stuck in traffic on the motorway, there are usually workarounds as soon as you get the next exit point, while being stuck on an train stopped in the middle of nowehere with a full train excedding passanger capacity because "pick random excuse", and reservations being optional, isn't really motivating to keep traveling by train.
westpfelia 1y ago
Exactly this. The only people who will care are hardcore train people, and even then everyone is so crushingly disappointed with DB I doubt they mind much. I mean even at 405 km/h the train will STILL be an hour late.
lqet 1y ago
> The once efficient and punctional trains in Germany have deteriorated severely in the past years due to lots of delayed maintenance causing lots of delays and even regular cancelations of trains. The main cause (often somewhat hidden behind the term "decayed infrastructure") is that there are too many trains on too few tracks. There are many reasons for that. I think the main ones are: * Political pressure to have more trains, without an adequate increase in infrastructure capacity (trains are cheaper than tracks and can be delivered faster). For example, political pressure utterly destroyed the reliability of the local rail system in our area, because the number of trains per hour was increased by a factor of 2-3, with only a minimal amount of new tracks (the majority of the network is still single-track). Apparently, the system worked in simulations under near-perfect conditions (no delays, few passengers, no technical problems). So let's build it! The chaos that ensued during the first few months after the network opened again made national headlines. Another example: the highly overloaded Rhine valley line between Mannheim and Basel was proposed to be upgraded to 4 tracks in 1964. In 1970, the project was scheduled to be finished in 1985. Currently the (ambitious) goal is to finish the project in 2041 [0]. The original line (270 km) was finished after 17 years in the 1840ies. * On regional and local lines, a tendency to increase train frequency and to decrease train capacity (more trains, but shorter ones). I suspect this is also because of political pressure ("your station now has 4 trains per hour!!"), but it doesn't make any sense. A short train which can hold 150 passengers occupies exactly the same amount of "space" (blocks) on the tracks as a full-length train with a capacity of 1,200 passengers, and they require exactly the same amount of personnel. * Privatization of DB on the early 90ies, with political pressure to be profitable. Tracks are expensive to maintain, so those parts of the infrastructure that could be classified as "redundant" were dismantled. Now they have a network with little redundancy, which is great from a short-sighted business standpoint, but terrible for reliability. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe%E2%80%93Basel_high-speed_railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe%E2%80%93Basel_high-s...
- eqvinox 1y ago
  > The main cause (often somewhat hidden behind the term "decayed infrastructure") is that there are too many trains on too few tracks. Do you have a citation for this? The people I know from the DB bubble are telling me that while some places have not enough track (e.g. the infamous Frankfurt-Mannheim/Riedbahn), but the everywhere problem is that there's just fault over fault over fault in tracks (often switches, but even tracks themselves) and trackside equipment. > […] the number of trains per hour was increased by a factor of 2-3 […] Even this I'm not quite willing to accept without citation; the railway timetables in the 70ies and 80ies, especially after the oil shock, were quite dense.

attendant3446 1y ago

That's exactly it, it's not the new top speed they need, they lack efficiency. And it's not just Deutschebahn. For example BVG, who runs busses and U-bahn in Berlin is even less reliable.

simianwords 1y ago
I think higher speeds can help efficiency. For example it can help catch up a train that has been delayed.
- pixelfarmer 1y ago
  It can, but it requires the track to be free in front of it and being allowed to go at the required speed to catch up.
  - simianwords 1y ago
    Yes but it’s a strictly better situation to be in although your point is valid.
    - eptcyka 1y ago
      Do you imply that trains would normally run slower than what they can safely achieve?
      - simianwords 1y ago
        i don't know where i implied that but it is well known that this is the case in order to give buffer time.
      - Brian_K_White 1y ago
        Everything always runs at 80% down to even 50% for normal 99% of the time operation. Not just trains, everything.
        Propelloni 1y ago
        What was the old chestnut? A traffic jam is a highway at 100% capacity? Something like that, can't remember who said it. Niels Pfläging perhaps?
      - tonfa 1y ago
        With clock face scheduling (like in CH and planned for Germany) they very much do since schedules are optimized to align with periodicity. On some Swiss lines it's fairly common to have trains recover their delay at departure (which also avoids cascading impact). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling
- microtonal 1y ago
  West European rail is very full, so rail use is carefully coordinated, since trains of vastly different speeds (e.g. ICE vs a regional train) use the same tracks. If an ICE is, say, 15 minutes late, they cannot just drive faster to catch up. The schedule went on, and at that point there may be a much slower regional or intercity train on the same trajectory. This is why ICE delays tend to cascade. It starts with a short delay, the ICE gets stuck behind a slower train, increasing the delay, etc. The solution is better maintenance of tracks and trains, adding more rail capacity, adding redundancy, etc. Of course, these are all much more expensive than an ICE speed experiment for PR.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    If it is the same as in Switzerland, the solution is in helping people get the health care they need. Most time I got annoying delays when I was living in Switzerland was because of a "personal accident" which 99% of the time meant someone had deliberately jumped in front of a train.
    - detaro 1y ago
      It of course happens in other places too, but the Swiss are somewhat standout in how much they have their other operations in order. It's funny in a sad way that international connections into Switzerland actually get limited because the Swiss don't want other operators fucking up their internal schedule constantly.
    - adev_ 1y ago
      > If it is the same as in Switzerland, the solution is in helping people get the health care they need. [...] Switzerland SBB/CFF and the German DB can not be compared, not even from far. The Swiss trains are amongst the best in the world in term on punctuality. Delays barely exceed few minutes most of the time. Every connection is scheduled to be done < 5min. The usage is smooth like butter and It works like a Swiss clock. At the opposite, German trains in the eastern part are barely on time and give you an almost Soviet experience for the regional one: The trains are old, poorly maintained, like the track itself and the service suffers of it. The only place in Western Europe I experienced train to be worst than in Germany is currently in Hungary where there were actual soviet trains. Even the freaking French SNCF with their legendary strikes tend to be more punctual than the DB.
- attendant3446 1y ago
  I was late to reply, but as others have noticed, delayed trains can't always "catch up" with the schedule. ICE trains can accelerate to 405 kph, but regional trains using the same rail can't.
- holowoodman 1y ago
  Higher speeds reduce efficiency. The most efficient use of the tracks would be to limit all trains to the speed of the slowest train that travels a route. Then you can have minimal distances between trains. Also, faster trains are less fuel-efficient, quadratically with speed. So a slowdown would help the environment and the throughput. The only thing it wouldn't improve is passenger happiness ;)

blobbers 1y ago

Interesting; America seems to be suffering the same fate. It takes municipalities years to fix highways. The main highway running through Silicon Valley, 101, has been under construction for more than a decade and is in dire need of improvement. It seems the network of roads built in the 40s, 50s and 60s just can no longer be done efficiently.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> America seems to be suffering the same fate Not uniformly. New York's LIRR (90 to 95% [1]) and Metro-North (99% [2]) feature on-time rates that rival the Swiss (93% [3]). [1] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-9-2025.pdf https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-9-2025.pdf [2] https://wpdh.com/metro-north-on-time-reliability/ https://wpdh.com/metro-north-on-time-reliability/ [3] https://reporting.sbb.ch/punctuality?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&scroll=181&highlighted= https://reporting.sbb.ch/punctuality?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&scrol...
- kelnos 1y ago
  Not sure I understand your point; GP was talking about highway maintenance and you're talking about trains.
- Svip 1y ago
  You might want to look into what they define as being "late". > A commuter train is considered on-time by the LIRR if it arrives within 5 minutes and 59 seconds of its scheduled arrival time. The second source doesn't say, but let's assume it's the same as for LIRR, i.e. 6 minutes. It's also unfortunate that the SBB doesn't immediately tell us the metric, but I happen to know it's 3 minutes (more specifically 2 minutes and 59 seconds). In other words, the LIRR permits a delay of twice the time as SBB for it to constitute late. The S-trains in Copenhagen now has a punctuality of 97% using a 3 minute metric.[0] [0] https://www.dsb.dk/om-dsb/virksomheden/rettidighed/s-togs-rettidighed/ https://www.dsb.dk/om-dsb/virksomheden/rettidighed/s-togs-re...
  - chgs 1y ago

masklinn 1y ago

It is a pretty limited achievement as-is: ignoring maglevs, a tgv test train reached 575 kph back in 2007, and China had test trains reaching 487 in 2011. China’s next-gen is being deployed with goals of a 400kph service speed.

Mashimo 1y ago
If I understand it correct, this was also a 10 year old train.
morepork 1y ago
Also a German ICE test train was clocked at over 400 km/h back in 1988

dheera 1y ago

Meanwhile our trains in the USA run at 50-100 km/h and are nonexistent in most places, so it's still an achievement.

kruxigt 1y ago

[dead]

pjmlp 1y ago

Agreed, nowadays I have to schedule train exchanges to have at least 30 m between them, and even so, I managed to miss connections. DB is doing their best work for having people reaching out for cars. While you might get stuck in traffic on the motorway, there are usually workarounds as soon as you get the next exit point, while being stuck on an train stopped in the middle of nowehere with a full train excedding passanger capacity because "pick random excuse", and reservations being optional, isn't really motivating to keep traveling by train.

westpfelia 1y ago

Exactly this. The only people who will care are hardcore train people, and even then everyone is so crushingly disappointed with DB I doubt they mind much. I mean even at 405 km/h the train will STILL be an hour late.

lqet 1y ago

> The once efficient and punctional trains in Germany have deteriorated severely in the past years due to lots of delayed maintenance causing lots of delays and even regular cancelations of trains. The main cause (often somewhat hidden behind the term "decayed infrastructure") is that there are too many trains on too few tracks. There are many reasons for that. I think the main ones are: * Political pressure to have more trains, without an adequate increase in infrastructure capacity (trains are cheaper than tracks and can be delivered faster). For example, political pressure utterly destroyed the reliability of the local rail system in our area, because the number of trains per hour was increased by a factor of 2-3, with only a minimal amount of new tracks (the majority of the network is still single-track). Apparently, the system worked in simulations under near-perfect conditions (no delays, few passengers, no technical problems). So let's build it! The chaos that ensued during the first few months after the network opened again made national headlines. Another example: the highly overloaded Rhine valley line between Mannheim and Basel was proposed to be upgraded to 4 tracks in 1964. In 1970, the project was scheduled to be finished in 1985. Currently the (ambitious) goal is to finish the project in 2041 [0]. The original line (270 km) was finished after 17 years in the 1840ies. * On regional and local lines, a tendency to increase train frequency and to decrease train capacity (more trains, but shorter ones). I suspect this is also because of political pressure ("your station now has 4 trains per hour!!"), but it doesn't make any sense. A short train which can hold 150 passengers occupies exactly the same amount of "space" (blocks) on the tracks as a full-length train with a capacity of 1,200 passengers, and they require exactly the same amount of personnel. * Privatization of DB on the early 90ies, with political pressure to be profitable. Tracks are expensive to maintain, so those parts of the infrastructure that could be classified as "redundant" were dismantled. Now they have a network with little redundancy, which is great from a short-sighted business standpoint, but terrible for reliability. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe%E2%80%93Basel_high-speed_railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe%E2%80%93Basel_high-s...

eqvinox 1y ago
> The main cause (often somewhat hidden behind the term "decayed infrastructure") is that there are too many trains on too few tracks. Do you have a citation for this? The people I know from the DB bubble are telling me that while some places have not enough track (e.g. the infamous Frankfurt-Mannheim/Riedbahn), but the everywhere problem is that there's just fault over fault over fault in tracks (often switches, but even tracks themselves) and trackside equipment. > […] the number of trains per hour was increased by a factor of 2-3 […] Even this I'm not quite willing to accept without citation; the railway timetables in the 70ies and 80ies, especially after the oil shock, were quite dense.