That's because German rail is an absolute disaster. They used to have +90% on time schedules which is now below 60%. Compare that to Switzerland where the "Chancellors" do travel via rail and the on time rate in 2022 was 92,5% for the entire network (Connections where made at 98.9%!). [1]
German rail is no longer what it was 20 years ago.
The previous admin underfunded it and basically destroyed it. It requires over 80 Billion in rapiers and the current government is only promised to spend maybe half over the next few years.
Current spending on German rail is around EUR 100 per capita per year while in Switzerland it is EUR 400+.
German rail infrastructure is...in need of help. Here, in Switzerland, many trains come from Germany. Well, they did. They are so often late that some routes now stop at the border, so that the Swiss schedule isn't impacted by German problems.
Germany is also years behind on putting cargo onto trains for transit through the Alps. Even Italy was faster.
first, Germany has had a high level of sefvice quality with trains for the last 15 years, compared to much of the world, there's little to improve
and second, DB had become a HUGE holding company of many kinds of business endeavours and rail service is not in the states hand anymore, while the company "optimizes" for profit which makes travel aside of high traffic routes become worse and worse and coverage deteriorates.
There are many international routes where the same train continues from Germany into Switzerland, and then possibly into other countries. Germany has gotten so unreliable that Switzerland is stopping this practice on some routes, because late German trains have a knock-on effect throughout the system.
So now, the German trains stop at the first Swiss station, when they finally arrive, and people gave to switch trains.
Germany is also years behind on their commitment to getting cargo on trains. Switzerland built a rail tunnel especially for trans-European traffic, but Germany is apparently incapable of getting cargo onto trains.
It ought to be mortally embarrassing for the supposed industrial powerhouse of Europe. But that's OK, they are building more autobahn.
I don't think the problems with German rail apply universally. The prevalence of low-speed tracks and frequency of delays comes from a period of missing reinvestment following the (semi-)privatization of Deutsche Bahn. Not every network will have this issue.
Great move, but as someone using it, it's also one of the most unreliable for its size. DB/German railway is infamous for large delays and breakdowns. There was an effort to make the lines more punctual within a decade or so, which was then, almost satirically, moved to 2070[1]. Suburban lines often come to standstill on rain or snow. Germany has a huge network of quality free highways, car ownership is cheap, so public transport has little respect even within cities.
Don't expect German "Pünktlichkeit" on German railways, though.[0]
The Austrian and especially the Swiss railroad systems are far superior.
Since the "Bahnreform" of 1994 the infrastructure progressively deteriorated from the passenger's perspective. One hard fact: about 20% of the railroad network has been dismantled since 1994 (44.600km to 33.400km [1]). Way too much. Reasons for this are a confluence of excessive bureaucracy, brutal management style, powerful industry interests (think e.g. "Autobahn"), lobbying.
Today's "Deutsche Bahn" as an entity is split into eight distinct divisions [2]; DB Schenker (global logistics and freight transport company) is by far the most profitable of the bunch and single-handedly lifts the whole DB group out of the red on the regular basis, it accounts for about 50% of the total revenue.[3]
Compare DB vs neighboring SBB (Switzerland‘a trains, possibly the best in Europe or the world). Germany has been ravaged by neoliberalism. underfunding publicly owned services, failing to maintain the infrastructure that is collectively used. This leads to degraded service, which liberals and other right-wingers hold up as an example of the need for privatization because the free market will of course fix these inefficiencies, only to rapidly accelerate the decline of the service.
If you want nice things you have to pay for them. Deutsche Bahn has instead been stripped for parts by the capitalists.
Switzerland no longer accepts some DB (German Rail) trains crossing the border, they are forced to terminate early, and passengers have to change trains. Reason: DB delays are so frequent that if they did not do this the Swiss rail network would also collapse.
Germany's Liebling has always been the Autobahn, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Germany's long distance trains are comfortable but the reliability of the Deutsche Bahn is abysmal. In 2023, more than one third of their long distance train were delayed, a metric that has been going down for quite a while. My own experience is much worse, with three out of five long distance trips canceled without notice and a fourth one replaced by a voucher for a 450km taxi ride.
In a country the size of Germany clamoring to have an environmentally oriented politic, train should be a convenient alternative to both car and airplane but unfortunately the train network is a joke.
There is only one (big) problem: Germany didn't start building some of the essentials train tracks between Austria and Scandinavia, France, Belgium and the Netherlands yet. They are going to be delayed at least 10-20 years, not finished before 2040 or 2050.
Thanks to the strong German car and truck industry, politicians are still delaying rail track constructions. Germany's strategy for the last 25 years was to move a lot of transit and also passenger traffic from the rail to the road (car industry again). Now they have mostly traffic jams and not a lot of working train infrastructure left.
70% of German trains that arrive at their destination are “delayed” (30 min or more).
A train that never arrives is not counted as delayed. About 30% of German trains do not arrive at their destination.
In Switzerland, the stats are single low percentage digits.
After multiple ultimatums, Switzerland stopped allowing German trains into Switzerland. The most popular connection between Switzerland and Germany (Zurich-Munich) has been kept but is now operated by Switzerland even though most of the ride is in Germany.
This is shameful and a lose-lose for all parties, but necessary.
It perhaps not much of a consolation, but it is just as well that railway infrastructure itself ages slowly. Public transport is considerably less expensive in Germany compared to my country (Britain, specifically England): a German Deutschlandticket costs €49 per month and provides unlimited rail travel on non-express lines, and unlimited local bus travel. A typical 5 hour rail journey - one off, one way - booked months in advance currently costs about €200 in Britain. It's a high-quality service, but not in any way affordable for the majority of workers to commute with.
The reason I bring this up is to say that Germany is still doing a great job at making rail public transport available, despite the crumbling infrastructure. As long as it can still get you from A to B reliably and safely, it is making a positive contribution to reducing the carbon footprint of travel. Hopefully, by the time that the infrastructure has degraded to the point where the service is dangerous or out of capacity, various components will have become slightly cheaper as well (rail crimping, for instance).
As Swiss (just southern country of Germany fyi), the push for cheaper train is always interesting. However I expect the same level of punctuality and reliability when I would be ready to use train vs my car for work or business trips.
I did regularly go to Germany for work (Stuttgart, Karlsruhe and Frankfurt) and regularly had issues with either people causing trouble and police needed to board, suicide (sad but a reality) and most often technical problems. These often lead to missing important connecting trains.
So all in all for me the first step is not to reduce price but to ensure reliable infrastructure…
Austria and Switzerland definitely have better train service than Germany. In fact the Austrian federal railways (ÖBB) even bought up the majority of DB's night train routes after DB considered decommissioning them ^^
Indeed, my limited experience with German trains is awful.
There are lines in Switzerland where some of the trains doing it are DB trains transiting through CH and going from or to Germany. These trains also pickup and drop off passengers in CH, doing the same stops as the national trains.
I’ve learnt to avoid these German trains like the plague: they’re often late, crowded, dirty, or even canceled at the last minute.
Even if they (in theory) offer a shorter travel time, I know by now it’s mostly fictional because of the issues above. I prefer to take the SBB train that I’m sure will show up even if it means the trip will be 30 min longer.
German rail is no longer what it was 20 years ago.
The previous admin underfunded it and basically destroyed it. It requires over 80 Billion in rapiers and the current government is only promised to spend maybe half over the next few years.
Current spending on German rail is around EUR 100 per capita per year while in Switzerland it is EUR 400+.
[1] https://reporting.sbb.ch/puenktlichkeit?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&sc...
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