A friend visited Germany recently and told a story how a delayed train caused him to miss the flight home.
I was shocked since you could set your watch by the Deutsche Bahn when I was living in Germany back in 1997.
I was doing an internship at Mercedes Benz in Stuttgart in those days. I could time my walk from the apartment to the bus stop, then connect with a train to the office with less than 5 minutes in total waiting time.
The bus and train schedules were synced so perfectly that you could count on a two-minutes’ walk and exactly 2 minutes wait in between. Both buses and trains were on time to a fault.
I had a particular fondness for DB since I traveled around Germany almost every weekend with its 35 Mark Schones-Wochenende Ticket (happy weekend ticket). Unfortunately that service was discontinued in 2019.
In the winter of 1997, I got lost on a hike with several friends in the Black Forest near Baden-Baden.
We were only able to walk out of the cold night after stumbling upon a rail track that led us to a small rural train stop. I can still remember the warm platform light to this day.
I’ve held German rail in high regard ever since.
So you can imagine how incredulous I was about the delay and bad service my friend complained about.
This prompted me to read about what happened to Deutsche Bahn over the last 30 years. In a nutshell, things certainly have changed for the worse.
Deutsche Bahn today defines an on-time train as one arriving less than 6 minutes behind schedule – a long cry from the clock-setting punctuality of the late 90s.
Even by such a low bar, punctuality hovers around 50 to 60%, well below DB’s own target of 70%.
The official explanation is aging infrastructure, heavy construction, and overloaded tracks.
However, as I dig a bit deeper, the decline of the German rail efficiency seems to stem from a deeply flawed privatization in 1994 which led to decades of extreme infrastructure underinvestment.
The 1994 Bahnreform merged the old East and West state railways with a clear mandate: DB was supposed to operate as a profit-seeking private corporation to prepare for an eventual stock market IPO.
To attract investors, DB prioritized extreme cost-cutting over public service.
They aggressively cut staff, outsourced maintenance, and began divesting into global logistics companies (like DB Schenker) rather than focusing on domestic rail.
Under the guise of maximizing efficiency, DB severely downsized its physical network to save money......
Full text:
https://www.unz.com/bhua/deutsche-bahn-and-china-rail/#comment-7795932