I think many people who complain about DB simply have no idea what it’s like elsewhere. I recently returned to Toronto, Canada from spending a few weeks in Germany. We relied on the train system for all of our travel within the country, and yes occasionally trains were late/delayed, but we were actually able to get everywhere we needed to without driving. This is with two adults and two kids with a stroller and occasionally luggage.
Coming back to Toronto was a bit of shock. Our municipal train system is adequate but nowhere near the level of, say, Berlin. Our regional train system is fundamentally broken because you still need a car at the end of your journey. There is virtually no train network in any of the destination cities.
Instead you are forced to drive. And our highways are congested. It takes hours of sitting in traffic to get around outside of the city. And this is completey normal here, people do this every day.
Edit: The other thing that was practically magical was the DB pass that we bought. A single pass allowed us unlimited travel on all the regional trains as well as all the municipal transit in every city we visited. This is unheard of back here.
Bit of an uneducated take as well. It’s never been a joke. At least not to the commuters who have to deal with this 2-5 days any week. I mean sure, we say things like “this is a joke”. But that’s sarcasm / a coping strategy. Not a joke.
That is the point. There are commuters, because the rail service is not like this:
Between Badajoz and Entroncamento - currently the only train running into Portugal from Spain at all (because Porto - Vigo is currently a bus between Valença do Minho and Vigo) - there are two trains a day, and they both run in the afternoon, and it is a railbus built in 1955 with lousy air conditioning.
I guess they are on time though, which makes that so much better than DB.
Hmmh. I mean first of all it’s super annoying if it’s the second day in a week you get home an hour late. But also on the way to work, you have to be one of the lucky few with very flexible work time and it doesn’t matter at all if you come in at 7 or 9:30. Otherwise you have to waste many hours each month to start earlier so the boss doesn’t fire you. Bonus points for a combination, like you came in late, that means you have to work till the evening, and then the train home is cancelled as well.
And we just finished most of the construction work during summer holidays which made several people take detours for a few weeks. Which was scheduled maintenance in addition to the occasional thing breaking. It’s not great at all. And we kinda need good infrastructure. I already took the bus for a while. Punctuality is okay-ish, I guess. But there’s not nearly enough of them to replace the trains. I mean it used to be a train with more than a thousand people in it. And now it’s two busses which can accommodate 150 people each. That just doesn’t work during rush hour. Unless half of the people switch to their car instead. Which I guess is what we do.
For the past 7 years using DB. I can probably count on one hand if I was delayed more then 2 hours.
However being delayed between 30 mins to 1 hour is extremely common. Often half my trips.
For every important trips, we do go the night before and then stay local.
Worst I’ve been delayed was 5 hours, that’s because a signal between Frankfurt and Köln failed
On how many of those trips did you have to switch trains?
On the other hand, the amount of times I was delayed by car because of traffic is much higher… but nobody complains about that
delayed by car because of traffic is much higher… but nobody complains about that
Because if you are running into a car delay, it is your fault - you made the decision to take a congested route or not re-route before an obstacle sudenly appeared.
When you travel by train, you give up some control over how that travel goes, thus, if shit goes tits up, people will complain about the operator fucking up.
People might argue “you also made the decision to use DB to travel!”, but it’s only valid a short while, since using a third party to travel, you trust them to hold up their end of the deal, relinquishing control and responsibility.
If I’m in control of a car and making the choice to take a route, this is all on me. Sure, I can “curse” the idiots causing delays, but it still comes down to me.
Yep, exactly
nobody complains about that
Say what now?
Compared to the shit DB nobody complains about streets.
This is a very good quote about the nature of people complaining about german trains:
Passengers do not complain about trains they cannot take, because those trains do not exist.
Solution: Decrease the number of trains /joke
I wish that was a joke as well but they really do do that. That is how we lost so much train infrastructure threwout the 80s and 90s
It was never a joke. It has always been an insult.
Most of the time it is fine, but you can not depend on it.
Perhaps if the price would be ⅓ at least ½ of what you need to pay, there would be less complaints because you be getting the services for adequate price.
You can also not depend on going by car or by plane. You actually can not depend on anything
Local publich Transport in cities is usually fine.
Local public transport I’m villages is usually terrible.
And everyone in Germany has stories about long-travel public transport failing miserably.
Yes, but I also have stories about long-travel car trips failing badly. Still there are no jokes about the German road network being shit.
Okay, so this guy made a single trip through germany and got lucky? Good for him. But who gives a shit?
Heres my personal anecdote:
Two years ago i depended on the DB to get to work and entire months(!) went by without a single day where everything went according to plan. For important days i started my journey an hour earlier and still got fucked by the DB some times.
It’s just a long Facebook style rant…
I was expecting some data like percentage of delay per hour traveled. That would solve every complaint the blog author had and actually change people’s mind.
I booked it on Europe’s best rail website - bahn.de
Definitely not. Just last week it took me over an hour to book a train on bahn.de. I needed multiple tries as I was constantly being flagged as bot - even though I was logged in and I had windows as browser user agent. Linux is being blocked by default. The payment options are Paypal, Card payment with Mastercard or Visa and Open banking by Tink (Visa). No European payment options.
The only reason to book with bahn.de is because they have cheap tickets. The website is garbage.
Wonderful day!
I am sorry, but I just cannot believe the website blocks requests if the browser/client headers as
sec-ch-ua-platformoruser-agentcontain “linux” or not contain “windows”…More to that, I’ve just easily surfed the website via Firefox and Google Chrome browser on a Linux distribution.
May I ask, how did you actually confirm it’s OS related?
Journalists researched it:
German: https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Bahn-Keine-Auskunft-unter-Linux-11300742.html
English: https://itsfoss.com/news/deutsche-bahn-blocking-linux-users/
I tried their route planner a week ago and had the same problem.
Roger that. Thank you for the references!
It indeed seems to be header related.
In such case, it must be a bug/mistake, where an incorrect security configuration might have used a dictionary with a list of known suspicious User-Agent values, like the following:
- https://github.com/BryanMorgan/isbot/blob/main/fixtures/bots.txtLet’s hope this case was not caused by something vibe-coded (LLM/“AI” generated)… or else, that would damage the trust I have to them much permanently…
I wish you safe, successful, and peaceful roads!
That was an actual issue somewhat recently. It’s solved for now since even DB knew that blocking Linux users like that was not intended behaviour.
My linux still gets blocked if the query is not for a travel on the same day, but in future
Quite agree! Best website is ns.nl or nsinternational.nl even worth it for trains not passing through the Netherlands.
I use interrail a lot to travel across Europe. In France the TGV is great; but it is hard to get to places that are not close to TGV, the regional trains are overfilled and feel old-fashioned. I was impressed with the train system in Italy, all the way down to Messina… but on Sicily the trains are slow and far in between; like in France , Italy seems to have decoupled its provinces…Netherlands is surprisingly good for such a densely populated country. I like the German system too, it always gets me where I want to go, in many cases with some delay, but in a system so complex, I have no big issue with it. I only know one country that complains as much about the railway system as Germany: the UK.
I commute by train in Austria. The only time the trains are late are when they start in Germany. As I have a valid ticket for any train this sometimes works in my favor, as I can take the ICE that has been late two hours straight from the platform because it fits when I leave work.
I think there really are two loud groups at work here. The first being people that know how the DB used to be (always on time whatever the weather, though this is also heavily influenced by rose-tinted glasses, survivor bias and nostalgia) and secondly people that like to hate on Germany (Germans that mostly hate modern Germany as they themselves are from 1933 and those that see the DB as an opportunity to smear some dirt on the label of German efficiency). Now I presume that, like with everything nowadays that is happening online, there’s a lot of propaganda and lobbying involved.
But to be fair, it is frustrating to be late when you have no influence on it. In the car at least you get the idea that you have some influence on your delay, false as that feeling may be.
The problem with the high workload of the train infrastructure is also one of the reasons for the amount of roadworks in Germany. Germany simply has the highest traffic in Europe overall. Partly because it is the largest economy, but also because it is located right the center of the EU. A lot of cross border traffic will cross Germany.
It is unfair to just dismiss criticism of Deutsche Bahn as being either naive or some kind of excuse to hate on Germany. I really like most things about Germany, so much that I migrated here 10 years ago. But Deutsche Bahn is absolutely awful. So, so many times I’ve ended up stranded after missing my connection. At least twice I was left behind because the train had only a single carriage and was so packed full that literally not a single person more could fit inside. Many times trains were simply cancelled, with no prior notice and with no replacement (not even bus). I hate car travel, but even so the only way I travel with DB now is if I have absolutely no deadline that day.
And on top of that all, DB has the audacity to charge the prices of a top tier rail provider, especially if you don’t know 6 months in advance that you will need to travel. Oh and if a train is cancelled / overpacked / inexcusably late, you think you will get a refund on your expensive ticket? Of course not! Just suck it up and wait for a different train, no matter how long the wait and no matter how much it messes up your plans.
and you still use DB rather than driving.
Couple of years ago a friend of mine was planning a trip to Germany and wanted to move between two cities. I’ve check the prices quickly and a trip on a normal train going maybe 100-200km cost ~60€. At the same time similar trip on a high speed train in Spain was about 20€. No idea if it changed but Deutsche Bahn seemed like a joke back then.
So… it’s fine for German trains to break down constantly and have knock on effects because there are many of them?
I agree: it’s great that there are that many trains in Germany and that overall they are reasonably priced. On the other hand,I hate that their high speed is so much lower than their neighboring countries’, 200km/h versus 300km/h. It makes crossing Germany an incredible slog. So much that I would like the source on the article statement that a lot of passenger traffic in Germany is through traffic. That seems like a dreadful idea to me.
And the likelihood of something going amiss is so high all the time. There were supposed to be works on the tracks, but I haven’t been following the matter the last couple of years so I don’t know the status. I doubt it has yet completely changed the situation.
The rail upgrades in Germany are ongoing and extensive. The problem is the sheer scale of the work. Germany has a massive rail network, and they’re about 70 years behind on rail maintenance.
It’ll just take time, and fixing sections doesn’t make those sections all fixed if other sections still have breakdowns that cascade over.
The stations are also undersized for the scale of passengers and trains. Those take even longer to fix, often because they decide to go for awesome architecture and non-disruptive tunneling instead of quick and disruptive options.
Germany will sort it out someday, but it’s a 20 year fix, not a two year one.
