When I lived in Germany I just purchased myself a DB card, which cost at the time about 200Eu and gave me so many discounts on train-rides it paid for itself in a month. I was very happy to see Germany by train - very comfortable, fast, efficient, clean trains with a beautiful country rolling by outside .. not so in England, where I have had the worst rides in my life on crappy, unmaintained, overcrowded trains run by rude conductors and full of unhappy people. Was really shocking, to be honest ..
German trains are pretty much excellent. Prices go from reasonable to good. Bahn card is super. The only problem is delays which can happen regularly for many different reasons, some outside the control of DB (suicides for example). Compare this to UK trains - holy moly....
My experience is at UK trains are a bit more reliable at turning up on time than DB. German trains tend to be cheaper though and you sometimes have to do stupid ticket-splitting stuff in the UK.
As someone who has lived in Germany for many years and experienced the pros and cons of Deutsche Bahn and now lives in the UK, all I can say is you have no idea how good things are in Germany.
Not true. Rail card makes German trains a total value for money proposition. Rolling stock is 10 times better. Comfortable, warm with many seating options. This is across the board. Want to experience time travel? Take a regional UK train and go back to 1950...
I think this is more of a statement to how bad DB is. In Germany traveling with blablacar or mitfahrtgelegenheit is still very very popular, because trains are slow and incredibly expensive. Even if in my own country (Italy) people love to say that everything in Germany is better, but it's incredible to see how much worse trains are, and for 3x the price!
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).
Imho DB is the best means of transportation in Germany, in my experience only people travelling with DB once every one or two years are complaining about it, because they don't understand how it works.
You cannot compare the standard DB fares with anything competitors offer, because they include an amount of flexibility no one else offers by a long shot.
Even if you only take 2-3 trips per year it already makes sense to get the 25% or 50% discount cards. A massive amount of germans have these cards (see https://infographic.statista.com/normal/infografik_3025_Besi..., over 3 million BC25, 1.4 million BC50 owners).
If you know when exactly you want to travel, which exact train and hour, then you can easily get a 62.5% discount and you are only at ~45 instead of 125€ for the trip, which given the comfort of DB vs all other means of transportation is well worth the price.
I myself prefer to be flexible and have a BC50 which includes 50% discount on every trip. But that means I can take any train on the date of my ticket or even up to 5 days later, leave at any station in between for as long as I want.
My sister had an accident with car share service, which kind of turns me off these services. She now often takes the bus that is much cheaper than DB. But then you have to have someone bring you with a car to the off site locations that bus often stop and it still takes several hours longer than DB for most destinations.
I particularly enjoyed the German Rail Pass when I was there recently. Something like 240€ got me 3 days of unlimited travel within a month on the ICE trains (and S-Bahn) around Germany and to Brussels, which worked out fantastic for my travel plans - from Frankfurt to Hamburg, Hamburg to Brussels, and then Brussels to München. Worked out a lot cheaper than flying and the time cost was about comparable. Mostly it was far more comfortable too - apart from the bit where I caught the train from Köln to Brussels at the end of the weekend and ended up sitting on my bags by the toilets because it was so crammed.
You're kidding, right? Two years ago I visited Germany and was able to find and buy train tickets with options including various connections of long-distance trains, local transit, and walking (with statable preferences on how much walking and waiting was allowable), which included connections in random cities as short as five minutes (but which worked!), store it all on my phone, and show it to a conductor, who took it all in stride. (Although some apologetically asked to see the credit card I'd used to buy it because the shitty US credit system hadn't caught up with European state of the art.)
It was a substantially better experience than I could get in most of the US at the time, although Amtrak has gotten better about not looking surprised when my ticket is on my phone, and some cities have moved in good directions there too.
From what I see here in Germany, 5h train rides are not an issue for many people. It's just that on major routes, flying is very competitive.
I don't like the fact, but flying is cheaper in many cases, and inside the EU security is (in my experience) not that annoying. I mean, I have a 50% rebate card and even inside Germany, there are quite a scenarios where trains are only cheaper than flying if I take regional trains, at which point the time advantage of flying suddenly is quite large, and coaches become an agressivly priced alternative. And that despite the fact that I have a 50% rebate card for trains.
Start to cross borders and it gets worse.
EDIT: not to say that trains are not used, but especially among young people coaches, ride shares or flying are strong alternatives. Trains are great for short distances and if you want to go somewhere that is hard to reach otherwise.
This is a fairly big issue. Trains just feel like a worse deal in Germany.
I want to choose the train more often, but I don't want to stand up for a whole leg of the journey. I also struggle to justify paying the same price as if I drove there myself, and significantly more than if I flew, yet lose either the flexibility or the time savings.
German here. I have a Bahncard 100, which allows me unlimited train travel (plus unlimited local public transport in many cities) in Germany with most trains for one year. Fast or slow. I don't care. I usually pick the faster one.
Although it's been a few years since I lived in Germany I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I never had a bad train trip and I took them semi-often for work via Berlin-Munich and many times for pleasure around the country and continent. They far surpassed those in Eastern Europe for instance (although the train from Romania to Moldova was fun partially because it felt like time travel into the Soviet era)
Not sure whether you're sarcastic or doing some PRs but trains in Germany are from my experience definitely not awesome. Flying is usually much more reliable in Germany as long as it doesn't snow (but trains are stopped too when it snows anyway). Trains in Germany are:
1- constantly delayed (ironically I already missed my flight because of that)
2- very expensive (unless you've hours to waste on regional trains)
3- slow in average (yes it can clock at 300kmh+ for 20 minutes just to get stuck behind a freight train using the same network..)
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