The punctuality of trains in Europe

I would say the root cause of the DB issues is rather the failed attempt to privatise it, which caused years decades of infrastructure underinvestment to cook the books to make it look more attractive to private investors.

But of course the strong car lobby also played a role in that.

Additionally, the number presented is most likely too high, since it's more important to tune the numbers than to provide good service.

Example: a late train can be taken out of service and replaced, or even not. Voila! Not late anymore.

I wish this wasn't the reality.

I spent nearly a quarter century working for a German company.

The Germans think about the Swiss the same way we think about the Germans.

I mean you are still building massive highways. Most european countries aren’t building highways anymore.

It’s super funny because at swiss train station they always say

“Train X is delayed by Y minutes, this is due to delays in France/Germany and not the Swiss railways” on the megaphone LOL

The infamous Scheuer-Wende.

For the non germans: say a train is supposed to go from Munich over Hamburg to Kiel, and then return back to Munich. If that train accumulates so much delay that it could not even start the return trip on time, it might just stop in Hamburg, dump all the passengers, and turn around heading to Munich.

Now the skipped stops don't count as delayed, since the train never stopped there, the train is on time again for the return trip, and hundreds of passengers are pissed off and stranded somewhere they never wanted to be.

Yeah Is Slovenia the worst in europe or 12th best? Most probably it's just random which countries are in the graph.

I'm pretty sure Germany uses the exact same logic.

I just read that every 10th train voming from Germany into Switzerland is late, and they don't wait anymore, because they mess up the rest of the route.

People really underappreciate trains in the Netherlands. Not only are they relatively punctual (even in a worldwide ranking), but having that in addition to having a dense schedule is really pretty impressive. In that sense, only Japan truly has us beat, I think.

From my experience, their problems are just of a different nature. Dutch trains are punctual, but the carriages are often in a filthy state.

And yes, you read that right, the vast majority of Amtrak’s alignments are shared with freight rail.

Isn't that kinda normal, though?

Where the hell are you getting room temperature beer Certainly not in a pub.

Zugfinder seems to use a consistent definition of anything below 5 minutes being punctual. So those are in fact comparable values.

In Belgium it's 6 minutes and only the arrival at the final destination is checked. Cancelled trains are also not included in the statistics, which has lead to trains being cancelled to increase punctuality: instead of starting it's journey 10 minutes late, the train starts "on time" 1 hour later. Travellers missing connections is also not included in the statistics.

So put these 3 together and the actual delays of travellers are much larger than the statistics would like us to believe.

And to add insult to injury, to increase their "punctuality", the train operator seems to increase journey times with every schedule revision. So not only are trains less punctual than they were a few decades ago, journey times are also often significantly longer.

So according to the statistics, Belgian trains are doing fine, but the actual travellers disagree.

Last time I was in geography class, it was located in Asia, not Europe. Things have changed in the world since then, but I do not think this has. Hope that helps.

Is a train late if it still hasn't arrived?

how did germany come to this

Neoliberal policies: austerity fetish, privatization of public infrastructure and the expectation that rail has to be 'profitable' led to massive under-investment.

Germany has an extremely strong automobile lobby. They're very dependent on the car industry. So politicians taking the money from these companies, which is a lot of them, sabotage infrastructure programs, and instead pump more money into cars. Similar issue to America really, and it's an issue caused by America having a massive presence in Germany and playing a big role in West German law & reconstruction.

Former East Germany generally has significantly better urban design & public transit infrastructure than former West Germany, but the government neglects the east part of the country as well as implementing the car-ification I mentioned before, plus the AfD (basically the modern Nazi party) is becoming in-charge there, so it's getting worse over time.

A bunch of stuff. First of all the merger between east and west german railways happened in 1994 that was due to a lot or rail connections having to be rebuilt and a number of high speed lines were built or improved to Berlin. That however cost a lot. Then the German government was thinking about privatizing the railways. To do that a stock company was formed with the goal of turning a profit. So they stopped maintaining tracks and avoided new investment as much as possible for quite some time. In the meantime both passenger and freight railway demand in Germany increased a lot, while very little to no new track was opened. Also the ICE service was increased and unlike most everywhere else, it is run for the most part on improved old track and not new lines. Regional rail and freight run at roughly the same speed, if you consider the regular stops of regional rail. HSR runs faster, so other trains are either in the way or they have to move to the site.

As a result most of the German mainlines are at capacity or above it. As in there is demand for more trains, but the tracks do not have the capacity for it. So if anything goes wrong on any train, it results in a traffic jam, which causes delays for everybody else on those sections. However since long distance trains go through the entire country, nearly all of them do have to cross those sections.

The obvious solution is to built more railway and especially add high speed rail lines in parallel to the current lines. However NIMBYism is strong in Germany and when combined with a strong car lobby, it makes building new lines nearly impossible. Every single project ends up in a decades long planing stage, with mulitple law suits and even with construction you end up with stops, due to legal problems. For the most part the construction work is doing just fine, it is really just politicans being corrupt.

I live in Luxembourg and I have the same question!

I suspect it is trains going outside of the country but it's funny to see nonetheless. I think most trains originate from Luxembourg (when travelling to other countries over anything that would be considered a long distance which I suspect gives them a scheduling advantage).

The worst one?

Except they don't do that. And just expanding the schedule does not work when you need to juggle passenger trains as well as freight trains. Planning for more time between the trains means less throughput and therefore less money. But as a dispatcher, @ZonenRanslite@feddit.org is surely more qualified to argue than any of us.

A train service with a lot of slack isn’t a successful one though, as it would make them not that competitive in comparison to other means of transportation, by A- the journey looking longer than otherwise and B- the extra slack means that trains are circulating less, and are less profitable

You say that like it's a bad thing, but being honest about the schedule sounds like an absolute plus - for some reason, organizations within some countries have schedules they cannot meet, and I doubt they aren't well aware already. It might be because realistic schedules make them look bad, so they just fudge the numbers to make themselves look better?