> Do you have a citation for this? I don't, this is just my personal experience with passenger rail in southwestern Germany. The smaller lines with 1-2 trains

> Do you have a citation for this? I don't, this is just my personal experience with passenger rail in southwestern Germany. The smaller lines with 1-2 trains per hour are usually extremely reliable, while the lines on crowded tracks are usually delayed, or cancelled completely. Note that many of the reliable lines I regularly used over the past 10-15 years ran on track equipment from the 19th century, some still with wing signals and switches operated via pulleys. (Anecdotally, I never experienced any technical problems with this old equipment as a passenger, the technical problems usually started after modernization). > 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. The factor of 2-3 was for my local network (which was converted to an S-Bahn network a few years ago, and a 30 minute frequency was introduced, with 15 minute frequency during peak hours). Some parts of that network only had 1-2 trains per day from the 70ies to the mid-90ies.