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I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywher

I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train). But the idea that you go 55 minutes just because of policy; and skip 15 stations is crazy to me. Again with the assumptions that it can safely stop somewhere for 5m and I’m pretty sure the answer is yes. I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.

mothballed 10mo ago
This has been done in USA using slow moving freight inner-city. Just can't do it on passenger service. It is illegal, but there is no one around to enforce it, the vast majority of the time. I can neither confirm nor deny, I may have done it to get to/from the grocery store from near my house when I didn't have money for a car.
rwmj 10mo ago
I wonder if it's not safety but money. In the UK, train operators pay station operators a fixed fee to stop. As a result trains can't just stop somewhere randomly (except I hope in an emergency) even if that would benefit many people. All this is, needless to say, very stupid.
- wolvoleo 10mo ago
  I don't think so as in this case Deutsche Bahnn owns both the station and the train. In the UK they've gone a bit crazy with the whole free market thing. Public transport should not be a market. In Germany there's also the issue that the powerful car makers are always lobbying the government to budget cut public transport.
  - kuschku 10mo ago
    Germany does actually have station fees. And DB isn't the only operator. The RRX trains, one of which OP talked about, are operated by DB and National Express, ordered by the RRX group comprised of VRR, go.Rheinland, NWL, SPNV-Nord and NVV, running on tracks and stations by DB InfraGO.
  - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
    The current UK government is re-nationalising the railways. Several operators are currently nationalised (and the train fares have dropped!), and the plan is for all of them to be, once the contracts run out.
    - nephihaha 10mo ago
      The Welsh government has already nationalised local trains.
      - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
        I'm still not sure why everywhere's devolved except England.
        nephihaha 10mo ago
        London is one of the places that least needed to be devolved (because the UK is run like a city state). It is in England the last time I checked. Bits of Northern England have been offered it and refused it. There has been some popular demand for Cornish devolution, but Whitehall is only prepared to entertain it within some greater south west region. There is also some devo to councils.
  - nephihaha 10mo ago
    Transport for Wales has nationalised its trains. A lot of the infrastructure is paid for by the state as well. By the way, I can remember the state run British Rail and that was bad too. Neither nationalisation nor private operators have done well with British trains over the past fifty years.
- tialaramex 10mo ago
  The arrangement (now gradually coming to an end) in the UK is very silly, ToCs (which run trains) were district from the ultimate station owner (which was various notionally for-profit companies but of course always ultimately the government) and the track owners. Most of that nonsense is being gradually absorbed into a single government owned passenger rail entity. A "one under" (likely suicide) plus signal problems (which can be basically anything) meant I was delayed by over an hour home from Yorkshire on Saturday, but that also means it was effectively free.
  - scotty79 10mo ago
    There was a post on hn by someone who built a model to predict which trains are going to be late to get ticket refunds and travel for free (albeit slower).
- zipy124 10mo ago
  They actually do. I was on a train a month ago from Sheffield to London and a passenger was on the wrong train and they scheduled an extra stop to get them on the right train. Kind of restored my faith in humanity a bit tbh.
  - qingcharles 10mo ago
    They did this for me once on an Intercity or whatever they call them these days. I fell asleep and woke up to my Mum waving at me from the station platform in Lancaster or somewhere wondering why I had not gotten off the train as it pulled out of the station. The conductor was kind enough to stop the train at some random cattle grid barely-even-a-platform in the middle of nowhere and radioed the train coming the other direction to pick me up. Bless.
Zealotux 10mo ago
I worked for a massive German company you heard of, this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility. As a French, the culture shock was brutal and I never really got around that work attitude. I went through a similar issue back when I used to take a regional train in France, and the crew swiftly adapted by bending rules to accommodate a difficult situation caused by bad weather. I'm not sure this could happen today, but it was a thing 10 years ago, we used to trust the operators back then.
- svara 10mo ago
  As far as DB goes, I'm pretty sure it's mostly an issue of systemic technical and consequently social collapse. The system runs beyond its limits and consequently the culture collapses because the people inside learn they have no agency. The German rail network is quite good on paper, with dense and high frequency connections even to relatively remote locations. But keeping that functional (particularly with constantly rising demand) requires far more investment than it receives. All the examples of great rail systems (France, Switzerland, Japan) are both simpler in network structure and invest more relative to their passenger load.
  - sam_lowry_ 10mo ago
    [flagged]
  - wiz21c 10mo ago
    That's the crux: we must invest in trains instead of planes.
    - KronisLV 10mo ago
      I have no idea how planes are the dominant form of transport for relatively short routes (like within the bounds of a large country or to an adjacent one) and how even in Europe the train networks can be a bit of a mess. Like surely it’s easier to run a railway network when compared to the insane complexity to safely operate an airport and all the work that goes into plane maintenance and pilot training and so on.
fabian2k 10mo ago
Anywhere doesn't help you much. You want to stop at a station with sufficiently good connections to continue your travels. This situation seems pretty unusual, even for the DB. A regional express train should have many more stops than that. It sounds a bit like they switched the train to a direct connection to the final stop because they switched to the other side of the rhine (so you can't make any of the other planned stops anyway). The major mistake here was not making the stop in Troisdorf. At the point where they missed that they should have planned the earliest usable stop for the passengers that needed to leave there. I would also assume that there is no safe way for the conductor to halt at any earlier stop. A safe halt would need to be planned at a higher level.
- taneq 10mo ago
  Not if you live near the tracks! Obviously that’s a bit of a safety issue, though, not to mention taking a few minutes time from (potentially) hundreds of people to gain a few tens of minutes for yourself.
  - iso1631 10mo ago
    > bit of a safety issue OK, so you disgorge however many people, at what age, with or without babies in ipushchairs or people in wheelchairs, onto the tracks, and they avoid the passing 100mph trains, they then walk along in the dark and rain for a few miles looking for a gap in the fence? Sure, just a "bit" of an issue.
    - db48x 10mo ago
      No, you let them off at the nearest station or level crossing. Here in America that would generally be within a block of where the train was supposed to stop anyway. There are a few stations with “underground” tracks that would have to let you off a little further away, but every station has some safe place to do so. It’ll be a place the crew knows about ahead of time as well.
      - iso1631 10mo ago
purpleflame1257 10mo ago
Venkatesh Rao offers the following definition of the "Fourth World" Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore. This is what this story reminds me of.
- HPsquared 10mo ago
  Isn't that basically what happened to the USSR? (Yes not technically "first world" but highly industrial and bureaucratic)
  - mothballed 10mo ago
    People in the USSR at least had the good fortune of already living in a world where they were highly adept at recycling and barter and maintenance, and in the case of the chechens also community self defense. I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything but their job plus buy things with money from their job. The top 25% of handy people might be able to change their own oil and that is it (not that they can't learn more, but it takes time).
    - potato3732842 10mo ago
      >I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything Most of America would be substantially less fucked than the slice of mostly officer workers who mostly have enough money that "spend money rather than upskill or barter" is their default mode of operation you see via HN.
  - trelane 10mo ago
    First World was US/NATO aligned. Second World was USSR/Warsaw Pact aligned. Third world was unaffiliated with either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
wasmitnetzen 10mo ago
Note that DB definitely has processes to add stops ad-hoc. It's just that nobody bothered in this case.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
svara 10mo ago
It's a big, systemically failing organization running way beyond its capacity. Failures rippling through and compounding in a tightly coupled rail network. If they weren't able to announce the train would stop at one station, why do you think they'll be able to do that at another? I'm pretty sure train conductors aren't allowed to just stop somewhere unscheduled for good reasons, there's always a train behind and in front of them with no buffer.
- em-bee 10mo ago
  train conductors are not controlling the train. that is done from a central (regional) control center that manages all trains of the region. only there someone decides where trains go or stop
  - svara 10mo ago
    Yes that was my point.
  - michaelt 10mo ago
    Usually the train driver is in radio contact with central control and can request changes to the points, signals etc so they can make unscheduled stops. For example if there's a medical emergency on board and a passenger needs to be transferred to an ambulance. Of course doing this can have ripple effects on other services, and if a common factor has severely delayed dozens of different trains, the central control room might not have enough staff to deal with dozens of unscheduled stop requests.
    - biztos 10mo ago
      Best example of this is when they hit someone. Train has to stop, control center has no say in it. (For longer “technical” delays, keep an eye out for emergency vehicles without their sirens on.)
      - kergonath 10mo ago
        > Train has to stop, control center has no say in it. And then you have cascading delays across a whole region.
bombcar 10mo ago
On a warm summer evening, on a train bound for nowhere, a passenger missed their stop. Conductor radioed ahead and the train heading the other way stopped when we passed it and the passenger was transferred over. They didn’t have to do that, but it was nice. They’ve also hired a cab for a station miss that was their fault.
PaulRobinson 10mo ago
You're touching on points that Ayn Rand touched on in Atlas Shrugged, which as it happens uses the dynamics of the running of a railway as a metaphor for organisational incompetence and which opens on a scene of railway workers refusing to take initiative and following policy blindly. Where she started to go a little weird is she thought anyone who had an idea had the right to just go do that, and society can go hang (she grew up suffering the worst Sovietism could serve up, her concept of community was damaged as a result). Unfortunately, her ideas are now held close to the hearts of some of the most powerful people on Earth, who are also going a little weird. I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe. What I'm not OK with is using the policy as a prop to avoid independent thought or agility. I'd rather that instead of a procedure or a policy, people were taught a way of thinking about the World. "We're not allowed to stop at the next station because we're not registered to do so", is a statement made in deference to a policy regardless of whether it makes sense or not. "We need to spend a few minutes making sure we're registered at the next station before we go any further" complies with the policy, but is a person taking ownership of resolving the problem, and comes from a place of empathy for the passengers on board. We need more of the latter, but unfortunately the Randian version we're now getting is "We'll stop or carry on wherever the driver feels like because he is sat at the controls so there's nothing anybody can do about that".
- elygre 10mo ago
  Your quote is missing a crucial bit. The full quote is «we're not registered to do so, so we are on the wrong tracks». You were supposed to take the last exit, to be on the local road instead of the highway. No, we cannot let you off on the highway. We are not allowed to stop here. There are no stops. We wait for another exit. Sorry.
  - garbagewoman 10mo ago
    Was that the situation?
- _Microft 10mo ago
  Tracks 3, 4 and 7 at the station in question are not adjacent to a platform. It sort of makes sense to route a train over these if there is no stop planned there (intentional or not). Here's the map of the station: https://www.bahnhof.de/troisdorf/karte https://www.bahnhof.de/troisdorf/karte
db48x 10mo ago
Same here. An Amtrak train would just stop at the next convenient road crossing, if there were really something preventing them from stopping at the scheduled station. Most Amtrak stations don't even have staff, or any way to prevent people from coming and going, so this would most likely involve construction on the station platform itself. That’s fairly rare but the last time I took the Zephyr headed east there was exactly that situation. The construction crews had the whole platform blocked off so we boarded at the road crossing a block away.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- gmueckl 10mo ago
  I don't understand ome detail of this story: Amtrak platforms are about 110cm high. That's more than waist high for most people. So how do you let people get on and off at a grade intersection instead of at a platform?
  - tharkun__ 10mo ago
    And now you tell me how those doors function at 110cm height instead of ground level ;) https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Autumn-1-scaled.jpg https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Autumn-1...
    - jdeibele 10mo ago
      I've ridden on Amtrak trains. The door for the passenger compartments is in the middle of the observation cars, the oval on the lower level is the window on the door. You can see 3 of them on the 3 cars. The crew would put out a step at stops which was helpful considering the age of most of the passengers. Up top are seats and maybe a lounge, below are bedrooms, bathrooms, and storage. There's a spiral staircase to change levels. The locomotive has steps right outside the wheels with handrails.
      - 10mo ago
PurpleRamen 10mo ago
Humanity has been codified into rules, and the rule does not allow throwing out people somewhere random, because that would be differently inhuman (and someone would sue you if they have a bigger harm than lost time).
darubedarob 10mo ago
He has a loaded lawyer and is not afraid to use him. The world is filled with economic traps like this. All the economic advantages gained by the commoner, would unravel by one risk of harm coming for the driver and the company.
potato3732842 10mo ago
>I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. When every useful idiot is screeching about statistical optimization you lose any optimization for anything that isn't measured or isn't optimized for. Like it's not hard to imagine the breathless comments on HN about how trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail. It reminds me of letting a child that's too young to not be stupid pick it's own dinner and it picks of candy then to the surprise of nobody with a brain it's cranky later despite being calorically satisfied by the numbers. >The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back. It'll come back if there's something bad enough that happens to kick society back to a point where "lol we ain't got the spare resources for that shut up and go away" becomes an acceptable way to deal with the peddlers of these things. But anything that gets us that far won't be pretty.
- krisoft 10mo ago
  > trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail. Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark. Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    >Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark. This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about. Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement. Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.
low_tech_love 10mo ago
I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing, not the whole world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so much that whenever it doesn’t work, it’s basically ”well bummer”. You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and you’re supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that you have to learn to see the good side of the system and understand that you can’t have the cake and eat it too, unfortunately.
- deaux 10mo ago
  > the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). Curious to hear what strategy you've learned over time.
  - low_tech_love 10mo ago
    The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.
- igsomething 10mo ago
  As another 3rd world citizen living in Northern Europe, I usually describe it as "processes and rules over common sense". They understand your situation, they agree with you, they can solve your problem, but they will not do it because it goes against some obscure rule, or it would not follow a specific mandatory procedure step by step, and who knows what are consequences.
akudha 10mo ago
I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world I feel the same. It is easier to hide behind rules, regulations, bureaucracy etc. Not saying we should stop following rules, but using a bit of common sense and having a bit of compassion would go a long way. I also remember reading about a train that Japanese railways kept running, just for one kid, she took the train to school. They kept it running until she finished school, just for her (I know, someone is going to point out the inefficiency, cost etc about this story, but that is a separate conversation). I suppose stories like these are going to become rarer and rarer as time goes by, as everything has to be "efficient" and everyone has to follow some "rules".
- Kinrany 10mo ago
  The story is a bit suspect in that surely it would be more efficient to just hire her a taxi once a day. Even an expensive Japanese one. I suppose it would be slightly inconvenient to her to change habits, as well as a bad precedent. Still, hard to accept there was no additional factor involved in the decision.
- Kankuro 10mo ago
  I think you are mentioning a viral but incorrect story: a station was scheduled to close at a given date, a student mentioned in an interview that it will close after her graduation, but then some news sites claimed that the date of the closing was related to the graduation. The station was also used by a few residents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%AB-Shirataki_Station#In_viral_news https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%AB-Shirataki_Station#In_...
forinti 10mo ago
The Germans follow the rules too strictly and in South America we ignore the rules too lightly. I wonder if there's a country somewhere with the right balance.
- deaux 10mo ago
  No idea if there still is, but there definitely used to be. These things change over time, as culture does. Half a decade ago, pretty much everywhere in Europe followed rules less strictly. The balance was almost surely better.
- valcker 10mo ago
  France, while not perfect, is still balancing it +/- correctly.
  - nephihaha 10mo ago
    France has a reputation of being permanently on strike, but is perhaps the only European country that is simultaneously northern European and Mediterranean at the same time.
- Aloha 10mo ago
  I think for all of our problems, the US does get this right - we know when to be formal and when to be informal, and its something that is well culturally ingrained - that is the spirit and intent of the rules should be considered as strongly as the actual words.
samiv 10mo ago
There's a saying "In a developing country nothing works but everything is possible. In a developed country everything works but nothing is possible" In Lord of the Rings, fellowship of the ring when Gandalf arrives in Shire and Sam runs to meet him he says, "you're late!" to which Gandalf replies, "Deutsche Bahn is never late but arrives precisely when it means to".
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  The quality of culture and people you're dealing with has a huge multiplicative factor as well. "I'm going to manufacture precision optics at competitive prices, right here, and I'm gonna tool up a factory to do it" is bold but believable in Houston or Dallas. It's a fucking joke in Trenton or Newark. Likewise there's a whole bunch of ex-soviet 'stans and random east asian countries where such a statement is far more believable than middle easter, african and latin american ones that are of comparable GDP.
- cameronh90 10mo ago
  And in Germany - it seems - nothing works and nothing is possible?
SonnyTark 10mo ago
I feel the same. I was in Kuwait city a few days ago and decided to learn their public transport system which is buses only but was pretty extensive and abundant with good google maps integration. When you get on the bus there's a big sign stating the rules of riding the bus which include strictly stopping at designated bus stops ONLY and threatening fines. For the rest of the day I watched every bus driver stop anywhere they like if a person hailed the bus, allowing people to get in while waiting in red traffic lights, and if you talked to the driver he'd drop you off anywhere you wanted as long it's possible. Those drivers make nothing from this so they are doing it because this is life and also because there's no real enforcement against it. Also you can get in through the exit doors and leave through the entry doors, whatever you like. I decided I feel ok about this and don't want it to change
i_am_a_peasant 10mo ago
Ugh. don’t remind me. my fiancée and I live in different cities in Germany. the train ride is 5 hours. but it has been 15h in the past just because DB is DB. and the only thing we got for it was like a 10 eur discount voucher. 10 hours of my life partner’s time is worth a lot more than 10 eur. i have cussed them and their mothers countless times, DB is a garbage transportation company owned and ran by garbage people.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
  Sounds like Amtrak in the US, except here you get no compensation at all. And I've always been told how great the European railroads are.
  - nephihaha 10mo ago
    In some places, European trains are decent. I don't have much experience with US trains other than them having very high steps to get onto.
  - garbagewoman 10mo ago
    Europe is a big place
  - i_am_a_peasant 10mo ago
    in switzerland it’s amazing. france is way more efficient too because the low and high speed rails are largely physically separated. in germany everything shares everything and they rely on proper scheduling to make it work. which is never proper
skeptic_ai 10mo ago
Remember the rules are written in blood
mikepurvis 10mo ago
Not with trains, but I have a GO Transit (regional) bus that passes within a block of my house, whereas the actual official stop is about a fifteen minute walk away. I have taken that bus home many times, and the drivers are always willing to pull over at the stoplight and let me hop off.
postepowanieadm 10mo ago
Used to work for a bus company: lady had asked driver to drop her off 10 meters from the next bus stop. Then fell into a hole, broke her leg. Then sued us.
wslh 10mo ago
> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. In many places without rigid rule enforcement, that kind of flexibility can actually feel more humane in practice, even if the overall system is worse. What frustrates me in the US (and sometimes in Europe) isn't rules themselves, but how aggressively and impersonally they're enforced in very ordinary situations. For example, a friend of mine in New York casually crossed a line at a small PlayStation event and was stopped by a bodyguard as if he were bypassing airport immigration. I had a similar experience at a small event, maybe 300 people, where I tried to cross a line to get coffee and was abruptly blocked by security (they were just preparing the snacks). Compared to more informal cultures, this kind of hyper enforcement can feel oddly hostile, especially when it's disconnected from any real safety concern.
alex_young 10mo ago
Lost humanity is right, and it stems from lost community. During the Great Financial Crisis astute observers pointed to the loss of local bankers for most transactions as a component of the multifaceted structural causes. When you have your mortgage through the bank down the street, you're much less likely to mail them the keys instead of paying your bill, especially if you have to see the banker in the grocery store etc. What did we do about this? Of course we didn't learn anything - we actually further consolidated banking. The same is true of train service, traffic etiquette, and political discourse. The tragedy of the commons is exacerbated by moving away from local community.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  During the 30yr prior to the GFC the kinds of Americans who don't work in downtown offices, don't get compensated partly in RSUs and who aren't represented well in internet discussions and mainstream media complained fairly unanimously about the same things. Regulation forced their main street economies to either consolidate or pack up for China. The industrial employers got scooped up by the conglomerates and turned into poorly paying meat grinders with no "good" jobs or left entirely. The grocery store and hardware store became a Walmart. But nobody listened to them when they complained.
- wat10000 10mo ago
  It’s been boiling for a long time. Steinbeck wrote this nearly a century ago: "I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down — I'll be in the window with a rifle. You even come to close and I'll pot you like a rabbit." "It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look — suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but long before your hung there will be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy." "That's so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill." "You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: "Clear those people out or it's your job." "Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a Board of Directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank." The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: "Make the land show profit or we'll close you up." "But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me." "I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't man at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders."
nephihaha 10mo ago
We live in a society where complaining is considered "verbal abuse" or "harassment", but where we have to put up and shut up about everything going on. The message out of 2020 and 2021, is that the big people know what they're doing and we don't.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  We live in a society where being the victim of verbal abuse or harassment or various isms and all sorts of other petty things confers legitimacy and power upon one's opinion. There's a subtle difference. Thankfully it seems to be waning slightly.
  - nephihaha 10mo ago
    No, I don't mean that at all. I've had to complain about things before and they accuse you of shouting (when you're not). They almost want people to swear, and rile them up, because that gives them the excuse to do nothing.
    - potato3732842 10mo ago
      You're reading way too much into my use of the word "opinion". It's just whatever side of whatever the issue is be it customer service ad Burger King or some arcane discussion about compilers.
      - nephihaha 10mo ago
        Yes, I'm aware of identity politics, but that is not what I'm talking about. I'm a member of a couple of minorities myself, and it confers little privilege on me with or without the abuse.
        potato3732842 10mo ago
        You're missing the point. Some people are quick to claim that the other person is being unreasonable in a way that's socially agreed upon to be bad as a justification for whatever their thing is, whether that's being a lazy worker at a min-wage job or anything else. And of course sometimes these people don't even wait for unreasonable behavior. They will characterize "hey can you please do your job" that way because it suits them. This is a figment of living in a culture where being right but distasteful in a variety of poorly defined but broadly similar ways effectively makes you wrong. Toward the other end of the spectrum is stuff like "I don't care if he's a card carrying nazi he builds good rockets" and other stuff like that.
behnamoh 10mo ago
> I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train). While Iran is not a third-world country per se, you'd be surprised how many times the bus driver would stop at random locations closer to passengers' destinations as well as bus stations. There's more flexibility in day-to-day life of Iranians; people are expected to follow the rules but there's also this ancient concept of "morovvat" in the culture which encourages self-sacrifice for the betterment of others. Ask any tourist who's traveled to Iran and they tell you about the hospitality of Iranian people; e.g., you ask someone how to get to a place and they literally pause whatever they were doing and walk you to that place so you don't get lost! It's strange how the image of Iran has been stained by the theocratic government (which Iranians protest against many times...).
crossroadsguy 10mo ago
So true. Another third worlder and it's still the same. On the interesting side, if they didn't stop we would make sure a coach or two (empty of course) experiences some arson or fractures. From major to minor depending upon how pissed the locals were. No, I am not condoning it course. Trains should not be burnt. Buses are a different story though. (That included not stopping even after the "chain pulls" :P)
rayiner 10mo ago
> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. I'm from Bangladesh, and the attitude you're describing is one reason why the country is poor and a mess! Deviating from the schedule for the sake of a single person is completely insane and maddeningly inefficient. It's classic third-world mentality. In a good country, the system would never tolerate such deviations. In a really good country, someone wouldn't even ask for such accommodation for themselves, because it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake.
- majormajor 10mo ago
  That seems pretty wildly orthogonal to me. Did the individuals and industries that truly drove fabulous innovation and development in the first world REALLY do it from a mindset of "it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake"? There are an awful lot of stories of rulebreaking out there... "The Wild Wild West" turned into some of the richest parts of the world, that name doesn't suggest that a society needs to follow the rules to the point of extreme shame to avoid staying poor.
  - rayiner 10mo ago
    It's not orthogonal. If you look at societies that industrialized early, their social development diverged hundreds of years before industrialization actually happened. When my dad was born in 1951, 90% of the population of Bangladesh lived in villages in extended kinship networks and multi-generational households. In such an environment, the informal rules of families dominate society. Bangladeshis have a very relaxed attitude towards time and rules. It's not a big deal if you're late in my dad's village, because everyone knows you and that you'll arrive an hour or two after the official time and will plan accordingly. If you inconvenience someone, it's not a big deal, because you're all family and you'll reciprocate the accommodation another time. (That's a key point! Kinship bonds form a kind of collateral that ensures that accommodations will be reciprocated in the future.) Plus, the country is blessed with three growing seasons, so nobody is in a hurry anyway! And if you're persistently causing problems, it will percolate to higher ups within the families and they'll set you straight through informal processes. Contrast somewhere like England, where, for whatever reason, extended family networks began breaking down as far back as the middle ages. People in England were living in small nuclear family units back in the 14th century. When your neighbors aren't related to you, that forces people to rely on formal rules and procedures. You can't count on future reciprocity backed by the collateral of kinship ties. And if someone is causing problems, you need formal systems, based on rules and procedures, to deal with them. These formalized systems are, in turn, far more scalable! You can plan and organize civilization building when everyone is socialized to follow formal timetables in a way that you cannot when people are socialized to follow the informal timing consensus. And the lack of individual accommodation is a feature when you scale from small networks of a dozen or so related individual to millions of people moving through the London Tube every day. A small amount of rule breaking is tolerable, even beneficial, within a society where everyone otherwise rigidly adheres to rules.[1] But there is no developed society that isn't rule-based at the baseline level. In some places, like England, this rule-focused culture developed organically. In other places, like Japan, there was a deliberate effort to destroy extended family networks and clan structures and replace those frameworks with systems of formal rules and procedures. [1] America is a good example of a society that is less rules-oriented than say Japan, and arguably derives some benefits from that. But even in America, we pay a price for that. Americans just aren't as good at large scale social organization as the Japanese or Taiwanese, and we compensate by structuring our society in a more decentralized way where less such organization is required in the first place. Ronny Chieng has a funny bit about how New Yorkers try to force open subway doors that have already closed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX0oafDe3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX0oafDe3Q. This behavior, multiplied by thousands of occurrences per day, slows down the whole system.
iso1631 10mo ago
Or maybe the tracks the train was routed onto didn't have platforms at the station. In 3rd world countries it might be acceptable for people to jump out of 5-foot high carriages onto live tracks with trains running at 100mph for convenience, but not in Germany
mk89 10mo ago
This has nothing to do with lost humanity. In my experience, this doesn't always happen, and I say this as someone who traveled very often on that same RE5. The situation is what it is (poor maintenance, etc), but the main issue is that the tracks are shared with freight trains impossible to stop given their weight, so to avoid collisions and have a nice (albeit late) Christmas, they made that call to play it safe, rather than have a freight train crash into a train full of people. I wouldn't blame it on the person, I would rather blame it on the shitty system the train driver has to rely on - apparently so unreliable they had to do what they did. Keep in mind, that's a delay also for that person who very likely doesn't want to work on that day either - the same person that has to deal with that level of BS every day now. Of course, just to be clear, there is always the German ready to save the world by following an idiotic nonsense procedure, but that's everywhere in the world. > I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back. You got lucky many times. All it takes is that one time someone makes the wrong call and you get smashed by a train. In Europe this is very rarely the case, because exactly of these "nonsense" rules. The main issue is the shitty maintenance/sync with other trains etc. "Digitalization".
- xattt 10mo ago
  How long would it take for the train to register at a station? What happened to traffic control via semaphores? This situation is an absolutely perverse application of policy.
  - mk89 10mo ago
    I have no idea, but don't you think that the driver would have rather stopped at that station, instead of traveling an additional 50km or whatever? The situation is rather an indicator of how bad public transportation has become due to lack of investments, maintenance, expansion, etc. For years they didn't care a bit about this. Why should a driver risk his life and/or job to save the day, when the issue is bigger than him/her?
vadiml 10mo ago
Why NOBODY pulled emergency stop
- xattt 10mo ago
  Nobody on the train was registered to do so.
sshine 10mo ago
At one university in Denmark that opened in 1972 there used to not be a train stop. Instead of going to the nearby city central station and walk for half an hour, you’d pull the emergency break in the middle of a field, traverse the field and reach the university. Pulling the emergency break was of course not allowed, but it was very common. Today, pulling the emergency break to get off in a field would quickly end you on surveillance videos and with a large fine for obstructing operations, possibly with a detour to the police station for a stern conversation. I miss the “yeah, whatever” attitude.
didntknowyou 10mo ago
i think most humanity left when corporates began to dominate industries and everyone just had to follow rules and structures

mothballed 10mo ago

This has been done in USA using slow moving freight inner-city. Just can't do it on passenger service. It is illegal, but there is no one around to enforce it, the vast majority of the time. I can neither confirm nor deny, I may have done it to get to/from the grocery store from near my house when I didn't have money for a car.

rwmj 10mo ago

I wonder if it's not safety but money. In the UK, train operators pay station operators a fixed fee to stop. As a result trains can't just stop somewhere randomly (except I hope in an emergency) even if that would benefit many people. All this is, needless to say, very stupid.

wolvoleo 10mo ago
I don't think so as in this case Deutsche Bahnn owns both the station and the train. In the UK they've gone a bit crazy with the whole free market thing. Public transport should not be a market. In Germany there's also the issue that the powerful car makers are always lobbying the government to budget cut public transport.
- kuschku 10mo ago
  Germany does actually have station fees. And DB isn't the only operator. The RRX trains, one of which OP talked about, are operated by DB and National Express, ordered by the RRX group comprised of VRR, go.Rheinland, NWL, SPNV-Nord and NVV, running on tracks and stations by DB InfraGO.
- wizzwizz4 10mo ago
  The current UK government is re-nationalising the railways. Several operators are currently nationalised (and the train fares have dropped!), and the plan is for all of them to be, once the contracts run out.
  - nephihaha 10mo ago
    The Welsh government has already nationalised local trains.
    - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
      I'm still not sure why everywhere's devolved except England.
      - nephihaha 10mo ago
        London is one of the places that least needed to be devolved (because the UK is run like a city state). It is in England the last time I checked. Bits of Northern England have been offered it and refused it. There has been some popular demand for Cornish devolution, but Whitehall is only prepared to entertain it within some greater south west region. There is also some devo to councils.
- nephihaha 10mo ago
  Transport for Wales has nationalised its trains. A lot of the infrastructure is paid for by the state as well. By the way, I can remember the state run British Rail and that was bad too. Neither nationalisation nor private operators have done well with British trains over the past fifty years.
tialaramex 10mo ago
The arrangement (now gradually coming to an end) in the UK is very silly, ToCs (which run trains) were district from the ultimate station owner (which was various notionally for-profit companies but of course always ultimately the government) and the track owners. Most of that nonsense is being gradually absorbed into a single government owned passenger rail entity. A "one under" (likely suicide) plus signal problems (which can be basically anything) meant I was delayed by over an hour home from Yorkshire on Saturday, but that also means it was effectively free.
- scotty79 10mo ago
  There was a post on hn by someone who built a model to predict which trains are going to be late to get ticket refunds and travel for free (albeit slower).
zipy124 10mo ago
They actually do. I was on a train a month ago from Sheffield to London and a passenger was on the wrong train and they scheduled an extra stop to get them on the right train. Kind of restored my faith in humanity a bit tbh.
- qingcharles 10mo ago
  They did this for me once on an Intercity or whatever they call them these days. I fell asleep and woke up to my Mum waving at me from the station platform in Lancaster or somewhere wondering why I had not gotten off the train as it pulled out of the station. The conductor was kind enough to stop the train at some random cattle grid barely-even-a-platform in the middle of nowhere and radioed the train coming the other direction to pick me up. Bless.

Zealotux 10mo ago

I worked for a massive German company you heard of, this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility. As a French, the culture shock was brutal and I never really got around that work attitude. I went through a similar issue back when I used to take a regional train in France, and the crew swiftly adapted by bending rules to accommodate a difficult situation caused by bad weather. I'm not sure this could happen today, but it was a thing 10 years ago, we used to trust the operators back then.

svara 10mo ago
As far as DB goes, I'm pretty sure it's mostly an issue of systemic technical and consequently social collapse. The system runs beyond its limits and consequently the culture collapses because the people inside learn they have no agency. The German rail network is quite good on paper, with dense and high frequency connections even to relatively remote locations. But keeping that functional (particularly with constantly rising demand) requires far more investment than it receives. All the examples of great rail systems (France, Switzerland, Japan) are both simpler in network structure and invest more relative to their passenger load.
- sam_lowry_ 10mo ago
  [flagged]
- wiz21c 10mo ago
  That's the crux: we must invest in trains instead of planes.
  - KronisLV 10mo ago
    I have no idea how planes are the dominant form of transport for relatively short routes (like within the bounds of a large country or to an adjacent one) and how even in Europe the train networks can be a bit of a mess. Like surely it’s easier to run a railway network when compared to the insane complexity to safely operate an airport and all the work that goes into plane maintenance and pilot training and so on.

fabian2k 10mo ago

Anywhere doesn't help you much. You want to stop at a station with sufficiently good connections to continue your travels. This situation seems pretty unusual, even for the DB. A regional express train should have many more stops than that. It sounds a bit like they switched the train to a direct connection to the final stop because they switched to the other side of the rhine (so you can't make any of the other planned stops anyway). The major mistake here was not making the stop in Troisdorf. At the point where they missed that they should have planned the earliest usable stop for the passengers that needed to leave there. I would also assume that there is no safe way for the conductor to halt at any earlier stop. A safe halt would need to be planned at a higher level.

taneq 10mo ago
Not if you live near the tracks! Obviously that’s a bit of a safety issue, though, not to mention taking a few minutes time from (potentially) hundreds of people to gain a few tens of minutes for yourself.
- iso1631 10mo ago
  > bit of a safety issue OK, so you disgorge however many people, at what age, with or without babies in ipushchairs or people in wheelchairs, onto the tracks, and they avoid the passing 100mph trains, they then walk along in the dark and rain for a few miles looking for a gap in the fence? Sure, just a "bit" of an issue.
  - db48x 10mo ago
    No, you let them off at the nearest station or level crossing. Here in America that would generally be within a block of where the train was supposed to stop anyway. There are a few stations with “underground” tracks that would have to let you off a little further away, but every station has some safe place to do so. It’ll be a place the crew knows about ahead of time as well.
    - iso1631 10mo ago

purpleflame1257 10mo ago

Venkatesh Rao offers the following definition of the "Fourth World" Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore. This is what this story reminds me of.

HPsquared 10mo ago
Isn't that basically what happened to the USSR? (Yes not technically "first world" but highly industrial and bureaucratic)
- mothballed 10mo ago
  People in the USSR at least had the good fortune of already living in a world where they were highly adept at recycling and barter and maintenance, and in the case of the chechens also community self defense. I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything but their job plus buy things with money from their job. The top 25% of handy people might be able to change their own oil and that is it (not that they can't learn more, but it takes time).
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    >I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything Most of America would be substantially less fucked than the slice of mostly officer workers who mostly have enough money that "spend money rather than upskill or barter" is their default mode of operation you see via HN.
- trelane 10mo ago
  First World was US/NATO aligned. Second World was USSR/Warsaw Pact aligned. Third world was unaffiliated with either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

wasmitnetzen 10mo ago

Note that DB definitely has processes to add stops ad-hoc. It's just that nobody bothered in this case.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

svara 10mo ago

It's a big, systemically failing organization running way beyond its capacity. Failures rippling through and compounding in a tightly coupled rail network. If they weren't able to announce the train would stop at one station, why do you think they'll be able to do that at another? I'm pretty sure train conductors aren't allowed to just stop somewhere unscheduled for good reasons, there's always a train behind and in front of them with no buffer.

em-bee 10mo ago
train conductors are not controlling the train. that is done from a central (regional) control center that manages all trains of the region. only there someone decides where trains go or stop
- svara 10mo ago
  Yes that was my point.
- michaelt 10mo ago
  Usually the train driver is in radio contact with central control and can request changes to the points, signals etc so they can make unscheduled stops. For example if there's a medical emergency on board and a passenger needs to be transferred to an ambulance. Of course doing this can have ripple effects on other services, and if a common factor has severely delayed dozens of different trains, the central control room might not have enough staff to deal with dozens of unscheduled stop requests.
  - biztos 10mo ago
    Best example of this is when they hit someone. Train has to stop, control center has no say in it. (For longer “technical” delays, keep an eye out for emergency vehicles without their sirens on.)
    - kergonath 10mo ago
      > Train has to stop, control center has no say in it. And then you have cascading delays across a whole region.

bombcar 10mo ago

On a warm summer evening, on a train bound for nowhere, a passenger missed their stop. Conductor radioed ahead and the train heading the other way stopped when we passed it and the passenger was transferred over. They didn’t have to do that, but it was nice. They’ve also hired a cab for a station miss that was their fault.

PaulRobinson 10mo ago

You're touching on points that Ayn Rand touched on in Atlas Shrugged, which as it happens uses the dynamics of the running of a railway as a metaphor for organisational incompetence and which opens on a scene of railway workers refusing to take initiative and following policy blindly. Where she started to go a little weird is she thought anyone who had an idea had the right to just go do that, and society can go hang (she grew up suffering the worst Sovietism could serve up, her concept of community was damaged as a result). Unfortunately, her ideas are now held close to the hearts of some of the most powerful people on Earth, who are also going a little weird. I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe. What I'm not OK with is using the policy as a prop to avoid independent thought or agility. I'd rather that instead of a procedure or a policy, people were taught a way of thinking about the World. "We're not allowed to stop at the next station because we're not registered to do so", is a statement made in deference to a policy regardless of whether it makes sense or not. "We need to spend a few minutes making sure we're registered at the next station before we go any further" complies with the policy, but is a person taking ownership of resolving the problem, and comes from a place of empathy for the passengers on board. We need more of the latter, but unfortunately the Randian version we're now getting is "We'll stop or carry on wherever the driver feels like because he is sat at the controls so there's nothing anybody can do about that".

elygre 10mo ago
Your quote is missing a crucial bit. The full quote is «we're not registered to do so, so we are on the wrong tracks». You were supposed to take the last exit, to be on the local road instead of the highway. No, we cannot let you off on the highway. We are not allowed to stop here. There are no stops. We wait for another exit. Sorry.
- garbagewoman 10mo ago
  Was that the situation?
_Microft 10mo ago
Tracks 3, 4 and 7 at the station in question are not adjacent to a platform. It sort of makes sense to route a train over these if there is no stop planned there (intentional or not). Here's the map of the station: https://www.bahnhof.de/troisdorf/karte https://www.bahnhof.de/troisdorf/karte

db48x 10mo ago

Same here. An Amtrak train would just stop at the next convenient road crossing, if there were really something preventing them from stopping at the scheduled station. Most Amtrak stations don't even have staff, or any way to prevent people from coming and going, so this would most likely involve construction on the station platform itself. That’s fairly rare but the last time I took the Zephyr headed east there was exactly that situation. The construction crews had the whole platform blocked off so we boarded at the road crossing a block away.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
gmueckl 10mo ago
I don't understand ome detail of this story: Amtrak platforms are about 110cm high. That's more than waist high for most people. So how do you let people get on and off at a grade intersection instead of at a platform?
- tharkun__ 10mo ago
  And now you tell me how those doors function at 110cm height instead of ground level ;) https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Autumn-1-scaled.jpg https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Autumn-1...
  - jdeibele 10mo ago
    I've ridden on Amtrak trains. The door for the passenger compartments is in the middle of the observation cars, the oval on the lower level is the window on the door. You can see 3 of them on the 3 cars. The crew would put out a step at stops which was helpful considering the age of most of the passengers. Up top are seats and maybe a lounge, below are bedrooms, bathrooms, and storage. There's a spiral staircase to change levels. The locomotive has steps right outside the wheels with handrails.
    - 10mo ago

PurpleRamen 10mo ago

Humanity has been codified into rules, and the rule does not allow throwing out people somewhere random, because that would be differently inhuman (and someone would sue you if they have a bigger harm than lost time).

darubedarob 10mo ago

He has a loaded lawyer and is not afraid to use him. The world is filled with economic traps like this. All the economic advantages gained by the commoner, would unravel by one risk of harm coming for the driver and the company.

potato3732842 10mo ago

>I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. When every useful idiot is screeching about statistical optimization you lose any optimization for anything that isn't measured or isn't optimized for. Like it's not hard to imagine the breathless comments on HN about how trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail. It reminds me of letting a child that's too young to not be stupid pick it's own dinner and it picks of candy then to the surprise of nobody with a brain it's cranky later despite being calorically satisfied by the numbers. >The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back. It'll come back if there's something bad enough that happens to kick society back to a point where "lol we ain't got the spare resources for that shut up and go away" becomes an acceptable way to deal with the peddlers of these things. But anything that gets us that far won't be pretty.

krisoft 10mo ago
> trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail. Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark. Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  >Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark. This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about. Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement. Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.

low_tech_love 10mo ago

I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing, not the whole world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so much that whenever it doesn’t work, it’s basically ”well bummer”. You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and you’re supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that you have to learn to see the good side of the system and understand that you can’t have the cake and eat it too, unfortunately.

deaux 10mo ago
> the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). Curious to hear what strategy you've learned over time.
- low_tech_love 10mo ago
  The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.
igsomething 10mo ago
As another 3rd world citizen living in Northern Europe, I usually describe it as "processes and rules over common sense". They understand your situation, they agree with you, they can solve your problem, but they will not do it because it goes against some obscure rule, or it would not follow a specific mandatory procedure step by step, and who knows what are consequences.

akudha 10mo ago

I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world I feel the same. It is easier to hide behind rules, regulations, bureaucracy etc. Not saying we should stop following rules, but using a bit of common sense and having a bit of compassion would go a long way. I also remember reading about a train that Japanese railways kept running, just for one kid, she took the train to school. They kept it running until she finished school, just for her (I know, someone is going to point out the inefficiency, cost etc about this story, but that is a separate conversation). I suppose stories like these are going to become rarer and rarer as time goes by, as everything has to be "efficient" and everyone has to follow some "rules".

Kinrany 10mo ago
The story is a bit suspect in that surely it would be more efficient to just hire her a taxi once a day. Even an expensive Japanese one. I suppose it would be slightly inconvenient to her to change habits, as well as a bad precedent. Still, hard to accept there was no additional factor involved in the decision.
Kankuro 10mo ago
I think you are mentioning a viral but incorrect story: a station was scheduled to close at a given date, a student mentioned in an interview that it will close after her graduation, but then some news sites claimed that the date of the closing was related to the graduation. The station was also used by a few residents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%AB-Shirataki_Station#In_viral_news https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%AB-Shirataki_Station#In_...

forinti 10mo ago

The Germans follow the rules too strictly and in South America we ignore the rules too lightly. I wonder if there's a country somewhere with the right balance.

deaux 10mo ago
No idea if there still is, but there definitely used to be. These things change over time, as culture does. Half a decade ago, pretty much everywhere in Europe followed rules less strictly. The balance was almost surely better.
valcker 10mo ago
France, while not perfect, is still balancing it +/- correctly.
- nephihaha 10mo ago
  France has a reputation of being permanently on strike, but is perhaps the only European country that is simultaneously northern European and Mediterranean at the same time.
Aloha 10mo ago
I think for all of our problems, the US does get this right - we know when to be formal and when to be informal, and its something that is well culturally ingrained - that is the spirit and intent of the rules should be considered as strongly as the actual words.

samiv 10mo ago

There's a saying "In a developing country nothing works but everything is possible. In a developed country everything works but nothing is possible" In Lord of the Rings, fellowship of the ring when Gandalf arrives in Shire and Sam runs to meet him he says, "you're late!" to which Gandalf replies, "Deutsche Bahn is never late but arrives precisely when it means to".

potato3732842 10mo ago
The quality of culture and people you're dealing with has a huge multiplicative factor as well. "I'm going to manufacture precision optics at competitive prices, right here, and I'm gonna tool up a factory to do it" is bold but believable in Houston or Dallas. It's a fucking joke in Trenton or Newark. Likewise there's a whole bunch of ex-soviet 'stans and random east asian countries where such a statement is far more believable than middle easter, african and latin american ones that are of comparable GDP.
cameronh90 10mo ago
And in Germany - it seems - nothing works and nothing is possible?

SonnyTark 10mo ago

I feel the same. I was in Kuwait city a few days ago and decided to learn their public transport system which is buses only but was pretty extensive and abundant with good google maps integration. When you get on the bus there's a big sign stating the rules of riding the bus which include strictly stopping at designated bus stops ONLY and threatening fines. For the rest of the day I watched every bus driver stop anywhere they like if a person hailed the bus, allowing people to get in while waiting in red traffic lights, and if you talked to the driver he'd drop you off anywhere you wanted as long it's possible. Those drivers make nothing from this so they are doing it because this is life and also because there's no real enforcement against it. Also you can get in through the exit doors and leave through the entry doors, whatever you like. I decided I feel ok about this and don't want it to change

i_am_a_peasant 10mo ago

Ugh. don’t remind me. my fiancée and I live in different cities in Germany. the train ride is 5 hours. but it has been 15h in the past just because DB is DB. and the only thing we got for it was like a 10 eur discount voucher. 10 hours of my life partner’s time is worth a lot more than 10 eur. i have cussed them and their mothers countless times, DB is a garbage transportation company owned and ran by garbage people.

SoftTalker 10mo ago
Sounds like Amtrak in the US, except here you get no compensation at all. And I've always been told how great the European railroads are.
- nephihaha 10mo ago
  In some places, European trains are decent. I don't have much experience with US trains other than them having very high steps to get onto.
- garbagewoman 10mo ago
  Europe is a big place
- i_am_a_peasant 10mo ago
  in switzerland it’s amazing. france is way more efficient too because the low and high speed rails are largely physically separated. in germany everything shares everything and they rely on proper scheduling to make it work. which is never proper

skeptic_ai 10mo ago

Remember the rules are written in blood

mikepurvis 10mo ago

Not with trains, but I have a GO Transit (regional) bus that passes within a block of my house, whereas the actual official stop is about a fifteen minute walk away. I have taken that bus home many times, and the drivers are always willing to pull over at the stoplight and let me hop off.

postepowanieadm 10mo ago

Used to work for a bus company: lady had asked driver to drop her off 10 meters from the next bus stop. Then fell into a hole, broke her leg. Then sued us.

wslh 10mo ago

> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. In many places without rigid rule enforcement, that kind of flexibility can actually feel more humane in practice, even if the overall system is worse. What frustrates me in the US (and sometimes in Europe) isn't rules themselves, but how aggressively and impersonally they're enforced in very ordinary situations. For example, a friend of mine in New York casually crossed a line at a small PlayStation event and was stopped by a bodyguard as if he were bypassing airport immigration. I had a similar experience at a small event, maybe 300 people, where I tried to cross a line to get coffee and was abruptly blocked by security (they were just preparing the snacks). Compared to more informal cultures, this kind of hyper enforcement can feel oddly hostile, especially when it's disconnected from any real safety concern.

alex_young 10mo ago

Lost humanity is right, and it stems from lost community. During the Great Financial Crisis astute observers pointed to the loss of local bankers for most transactions as a component of the multifaceted structural causes. When you have your mortgage through the bank down the street, you're much less likely to mail them the keys instead of paying your bill, especially if you have to see the banker in the grocery store etc. What did we do about this? Of course we didn't learn anything - we actually further consolidated banking. The same is true of train service, traffic etiquette, and political discourse. The tragedy of the commons is exacerbated by moving away from local community.

potato3732842 10mo ago
During the 30yr prior to the GFC the kinds of Americans who don't work in downtown offices, don't get compensated partly in RSUs and who aren't represented well in internet discussions and mainstream media complained fairly unanimously about the same things. Regulation forced their main street economies to either consolidate or pack up for China. The industrial employers got scooped up by the conglomerates and turned into poorly paying meat grinders with no "good" jobs or left entirely. The grocery store and hardware store became a Walmart. But nobody listened to them when they complained.
wat10000 10mo ago
It’s been boiling for a long time. Steinbeck wrote this nearly a century ago: "I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down — I'll be in the window with a rifle. You even come to close and I'll pot you like a rabbit." "It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look — suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but long before your hung there will be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy." "That's so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill." "You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: "Clear those people out or it's your job." "Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a Board of Directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank." The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: "Make the land show profit or we'll close you up." "But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me." "I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't man at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders."

nephihaha 10mo ago

We live in a society where complaining is considered "verbal abuse" or "harassment", but where we have to put up and shut up about everything going on. The message out of 2020 and 2021, is that the big people know what they're doing and we don't.

potato3732842 10mo ago
We live in a society where being the victim of verbal abuse or harassment or various isms and all sorts of other petty things confers legitimacy and power upon one's opinion. There's a subtle difference. Thankfully it seems to be waning slightly.
- nephihaha 10mo ago
  No, I don't mean that at all. I've had to complain about things before and they accuse you of shouting (when you're not). They almost want people to swear, and rile them up, because that gives them the excuse to do nothing.
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    You're reading way too much into my use of the word "opinion". It's just whatever side of whatever the issue is be it customer service ad Burger King or some arcane discussion about compilers.
    - nephihaha 10mo ago
      Yes, I'm aware of identity politics, but that is not what I'm talking about. I'm a member of a couple of minorities myself, and it confers little privilege on me with or without the abuse.
      - potato3732842 10mo ago
        You're missing the point. Some people are quick to claim that the other person is being unreasonable in a way that's socially agreed upon to be bad as a justification for whatever their thing is, whether that's being a lazy worker at a min-wage job or anything else. And of course sometimes these people don't even wait for unreasonable behavior. They will characterize "hey can you please do your job" that way because it suits them. This is a figment of living in a culture where being right but distasteful in a variety of poorly defined but broadly similar ways effectively makes you wrong. Toward the other end of the spectrum is stuff like "I don't care if he's a card carrying nazi he builds good rockets" and other stuff like that.

behnamoh 10mo ago

> I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train). While Iran is not a third-world country per se, you'd be surprised how many times the bus driver would stop at random locations closer to passengers' destinations as well as bus stations. There's more flexibility in day-to-day life of Iranians; people are expected to follow the rules but there's also this ancient concept of "morovvat" in the culture which encourages self-sacrifice for the betterment of others. Ask any tourist who's traveled to Iran and they tell you about the hospitality of Iranian people; e.g., you ask someone how to get to a place and they literally pause whatever they were doing and walk you to that place so you don't get lost! It's strange how the image of Iran has been stained by the theocratic government (which Iranians protest against many times...).

crossroadsguy 10mo ago

So true. Another third worlder and it's still the same. On the interesting side, if they didn't stop we would make sure a coach or two (empty of course) experiences some arson or fractures. From major to minor depending upon how pissed the locals were. No, I am not condoning it course. Trains should not be burnt. Buses are a different story though. (That included not stopping even after the "chain pulls" :P)

rayiner 10mo ago

> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. I'm from Bangladesh, and the attitude you're describing is one reason why the country is poor and a mess! Deviating from the schedule for the sake of a single person is completely insane and maddeningly inefficient. It's classic third-world mentality. In a good country, the system would never tolerate such deviations. In a really good country, someone wouldn't even ask for such accommodation for themselves, because it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake.

majormajor 10mo ago
That seems pretty wildly orthogonal to me. Did the individuals and industries that truly drove fabulous innovation and development in the first world REALLY do it from a mindset of "it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake"? There are an awful lot of stories of rulebreaking out there... "The Wild Wild West" turned into some of the richest parts of the world, that name doesn't suggest that a society needs to follow the rules to the point of extreme shame to avoid staying poor.
- rayiner 10mo ago
  It's not orthogonal. If you look at societies that industrialized early, their social development diverged hundreds of years before industrialization actually happened. When my dad was born in 1951, 90% of the population of Bangladesh lived in villages in extended kinship networks and multi-generational households. In such an environment, the informal rules of families dominate society. Bangladeshis have a very relaxed attitude towards time and rules. It's not a big deal if you're late in my dad's village, because everyone knows you and that you'll arrive an hour or two after the official time and will plan accordingly. If you inconvenience someone, it's not a big deal, because you're all family and you'll reciprocate the accommodation another time. (That's a key point! Kinship bonds form a kind of collateral that ensures that accommodations will be reciprocated in the future.) Plus, the country is blessed with three growing seasons, so nobody is in a hurry anyway! And if you're persistently causing problems, it will percolate to higher ups within the families and they'll set you straight through informal processes. Contrast somewhere like England, where, for whatever reason, extended family networks began breaking down as far back as the middle ages. People in England were living in small nuclear family units back in the 14th century. When your neighbors aren't related to you, that forces people to rely on formal rules and procedures. You can't count on future reciprocity backed by the collateral of kinship ties. And if someone is causing problems, you need formal systems, based on rules and procedures, to deal with them. These formalized systems are, in turn, far more scalable! You can plan and organize civilization building when everyone is socialized to follow formal timetables in a way that you cannot when people are socialized to follow the informal timing consensus. And the lack of individual accommodation is a feature when you scale from small networks of a dozen or so related individual to millions of people moving through the London Tube every day. A small amount of rule breaking is tolerable, even beneficial, within a society where everyone otherwise rigidly adheres to rules.[1] But there is no developed society that isn't rule-based at the baseline level. In some places, like England, this rule-focused culture developed organically. In other places, like Japan, there was a deliberate effort to destroy extended family networks and clan structures and replace those frameworks with systems of formal rules and procedures. [1] America is a good example of a society that is less rules-oriented than say Japan, and arguably derives some benefits from that. But even in America, we pay a price for that. Americans just aren't as good at large scale social organization as the Japanese or Taiwanese, and we compensate by structuring our society in a more decentralized way where less such organization is required in the first place. Ronny Chieng has a funny bit about how New Yorkers try to force open subway doors that have already closed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX0oafDe3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX0oafDe3Q. This behavior, multiplied by thousands of occurrences per day, slows down the whole system.

iso1631 10mo ago

Or maybe the tracks the train was routed onto didn't have platforms at the station. In 3rd world countries it might be acceptable for people to jump out of 5-foot high carriages onto live tracks with trains running at 100mph for convenience, but not in Germany

mk89 10mo ago

This has nothing to do with lost humanity. In my experience, this doesn't always happen, and I say this as someone who traveled very often on that same RE5. The situation is what it is (poor maintenance, etc), but the main issue is that the tracks are shared with freight trains impossible to stop given their weight, so to avoid collisions and have a nice (albeit late) Christmas, they made that call to play it safe, rather than have a freight train crash into a train full of people. I wouldn't blame it on the person, I would rather blame it on the shitty system the train driver has to rely on - apparently so unreliable they had to do what they did. Keep in mind, that's a delay also for that person who very likely doesn't want to work on that day either - the same person that has to deal with that level of BS every day now. Of course, just to be clear, there is always the German ready to save the world by following an idiotic nonsense procedure, but that's everywhere in the world. > I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back. You got lucky many times. All it takes is that one time someone makes the wrong call and you get smashed by a train. In Europe this is very rarely the case, because exactly of these "nonsense" rules. The main issue is the shitty maintenance/sync with other trains etc. "Digitalization".

xattt 10mo ago
How long would it take for the train to register at a station? What happened to traffic control via semaphores? This situation is an absolutely perverse application of policy.
- mk89 10mo ago
  I have no idea, but don't you think that the driver would have rather stopped at that station, instead of traveling an additional 50km or whatever? The situation is rather an indicator of how bad public transportation has become due to lack of investments, maintenance, expansion, etc. For years they didn't care a bit about this. Why should a driver risk his life and/or job to save the day, when the issue is bigger than him/her?

vadiml 10mo ago

Why NOBODY pulled emergency stop

xattt 10mo ago
Nobody on the train was registered to do so.

sshine 10mo ago

At one university in Denmark that opened in 1972 there used to not be a train stop. Instead of going to the nearby city central station and walk for half an hour, you’d pull the emergency break in the middle of a field, traverse the field and reach the university. Pulling the emergency break was of course not allowed, but it was very common. Today, pulling the emergency break to get off in a field would quickly end you on surveillance videos and with a large fine for obstructing operations, possibly with a detour to the police station for a stern conversation. I miss the “yeah, whatever” attitude.

didntknowyou 10mo ago

i think most humanity left when corporates began to dominate industries and everyone just had to follow rules and structures