31 ms·

Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

• cryptica 9mo ago
  I've been kidnapped by my landlord, who is working in cahoots with my employer with the support of the government and the banks. I've been trapped inside my landlord's house and my employer's office and they keep trafficking me between each other using a train. They take turns raping me mentally and financially. S.O.S. Help!
• ajsnigrutin 9mo ago
  Come to slovenia, the buses here stop at every stop. I know you bought a ticket for a train from the main station in ljubljana, and when you come there (and only then and there, not before, not online), you'll be notified that your train is leaving from a track a 10 minute walk away, because the station is being renovated. And sure, you were a responsible traveller, came early, so a 10 minute walk is no problem... there are supposedly dots on the asphalt showing where to go, but they're already wiped off, so some granny or a college student will probably point you in the right direction. So after you walk all that way to the right train tracks, and the train should already be there, you'll be notified that there is no train. Why? Someone jumped infront of the train somewhere. When? A few hours ago. But hey... there's a bus that will take you with your train ticket. Where is the bus? Back at the main station, 10 minutes away. Surely you were very responsible and came not just 10 minutes early but 20 minutes early, because the bus leaves at the same time the train should leave. The only thing worse were the international trains in the early 2000s through the balkans... you'd be in Zagreb, croatia, waiting for a nighttime international train towards ljubljana, slovenia, 5 minutes to departure, and dingdong, announcement, it says it'll be 10 minutes late. Wait 10 minutes, so 5 minutes until the delayed departure... dingdong, 20 minutes late. Ok.. 10 more minutes... the display shows 30 minutes. I mean... you could risk it and go for a coffee or something, but it's not worth walking all the way to a nicer bar and back if you only have 10 minutes until the train. ...and then, when the delay says 50 minutes, you get a phonecall from a friend, who's on that same train (travelling from thessaloniki), and she tells you that the train is ~6 hours late and that they just crossed the serbian->croatian border (5-6 hours away from zagreb).
• bradley13 9mo ago
  Meanwhile, Switzerland has started forcing DB trains to stop at the border. They are late so often that they were throwing our train system out of whack. Even the Italian trains are better.
• bradley13 9mo ago
  Reminds me of my time in Scotland. I commuted by train, and they published stats that showed my route as 95% on time "excepting conditions outside our control". In the year I was there, the train arrived on-time exactly once. Apparently very little was under their control. They did occasionally announce the reasons for delays. Two that I remember: "Leaves on the track" in Autumn, what a surprise. "The wrong kind of snow" um...it's Winter, it snowed, it was nothing special?
  • RadiozRadioz 9mo ago
    The leaves are actually a big deal because they get crushed into a slippery film that stops the wheels making good friction with the rails. Occasionally you will see specialised debris-removal vehicles moving along the tracks and spraying them
    • sdeframond 9mo ago
      Since it is a recurring event, one would assume preventive steps are taken such as frequent cleaning of the tracks in autumn.
    • hexbin010 9mo ago
      > The leaves are actually a big deal because... Because of the substandard, cost-cutting line-side vegetation mismanagement coupled with the NIMBYs and save-the-planet warriors getting up-in-arms. Plus high wages making proactive vegetation management not cost-effective due to the extent. Network Rail is well aware of the issue but due to budget cuts, can't do much. Behind every excuse on the railway, if you peel back just a tiny bit of the layer, you'll see the real reasons. In the UK it's usually "we need to spend that money on the NHS and welfare" and "ROSCO profits are not put back into the railway"
  • starkparker 9mo ago
    On a recent train from London to Bath. it was delayed because the train in front of me had hit a swan and came off worse for the wear. Its passengers had to disembark, and ours had to stop to take them on. On the train back, we were delayed by the train in front of us catching fire.
• ahf8Aithaex7Nai 9mo ago
  DB is a joke and a disgrace to Germany. I have actively avoided traveling by train for many years. The company is customer-unfriendly from start to finish. I find the confusing ticket prices particularly bad: Sparpreise, Super-Sparpreise, Frühbucher-Tarife, Flexpreis, Sparpreis Gruppe, BahnCard, Gutscheine, ... If you don't want to pay extra, you have to book six months in advance and be familiar with the fare system. It's super frustrating. It's just a train ride. I don't want to have to plan and organize it like buying a new car at the best price or trading stocks. And in the end, you can't even count on arriving on schedule. If you're unlucky, you'll be stuck at the train station in some godforsaken village. I prefer to travel by car. The travel costs can be easily calculated based on the price of gas and fuel consumption. The total maintenance costs for a car are transparent. You are much more flexible and autonomous when planning your trip. The probability of arriving more or less on schedule is almost 1. And if you do get stuck in traffic, at least you have a little private, quiet, warm, and dry space around you. If it were reliable, inexpensive, and uncomplicated, I would still find it more sensible to travel by train. But that is far from being the case. Instead, DB manages to combine the disadvantages of administrative bureaucracy and market economy.
  • splittydev 9mo ago
    Yeah, this is the great irony of it all. Germany really wants to discourage taking a car for "environmental reasons" and so on and does everything to encourage public transport. But one thing is clear: I won't be bothered, robbed or even stabbed in my own car, and I also won't arrive in a different village lest I drive there myself. I won't arrive three hours late either, or have to stay overnight in some shitty Hotel because they couldn't find a replacement train. The German public transport, like many other things in Germany, is an absolute fever dream for a "developed country".
  • ciex 9mo ago
    Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs but also because the price of gas is literally political. The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.
• puzzlingcaptcha 9mo ago
  I have my own travel story involving DB. I had a ticket for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt am Main to Warsaw. When I tried to check-in online a day before the flight it told me I had to do it at the airport. I fly a bit, so I knew what that meant - they overbooked the flight. The next day I got my "no aircraft entry guaranteed" boarding card of shame at the airport and learned at the gate that they overbooked the plane by three persons! After explaining my EU passenger rights, I got them to confirm my €250 compensation and since I was in an adventurous mood headed for the Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof train station. The manned DB Travelcenter was still open so I walked in and asked for an international ticket to Warsaw. The gentleman (who spoke fluent English) typed a bit on the computer and told me he cannot sell a ticket for the Berlin-Warsaw leg of the journey due to a "system error on the Polish side". I knew that probably meant the Berlin-Warsaw-Express is at full capacity again and they don't sell tickets with no seat indicated for that route. I asked for a ticket to Berlin instead (€207, 2nd class) and went for a hamburger - still had about an hour until the train. The train was initially supposed to arrive delayed 5 minutes but that was soon to change. The delay kept ticking up to 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour (around this time the DB travelcenter closed for the night) then two hours then cancelled altogether. I wasn't sure if my ticket is valid for the next train (the DB website was a bit vague about that) so I called my friend in Hamburg who confirmed I was good to jump onto the next train which would arrive on schedule in another three hours. I tried getting a Capri-Sun from a vending machine but it got stuck and wouldn't fall out. So I sat at the empty station with noting but rats as company until 3AM when the next Berlin-bound train arrived on time. In Berlin I got out at Sudkreutz and jumped onto a FlixBus to Poznań (€22) and stayed the night over at my friend's place (I badly needed a shower at that point) before taking a train to Warsaw the next day (€16, 2nd class). Now, I technically did eventually use my Frankfurt-Berlin ticket but I was quite annoyed at DB so I applied for a reimbursement due to a cancelled train, which was granted in full. I also applied for reimbursement of the plane ticket from Lufthansa which was also granted. With the additional €250 compensation for denied boarding I actually made money on that little adventure but I probably wouldn't do that again. Gotta check in earlier from now on.
• df0b9f169d54 9mo ago
  The ticket mentioned in the article seems to be a Deutschland ticket, unfortunately compensation is low. For time sensitive trip I often consider other option. The weirdest thing in my city is that the bus driver often forgets 1 or 2 stops. There was a kid bursted into tear when she lost her direction on her way back home from school because the bus driver took a "wrong" path.
• kypro 9mo ago
  As a Brit I find Germans so strange sometimes. I visited the Dachau concentration camp several years ago on one of the hottest days of the year. Me and my GF packed water, but on that day is just wasn't enough and we ran out towards the end of the day. We got around the camp and just before leaving we went into the cafe and asked for a drink, but they said sorry the cafe was closed. Okay, fair enough. In that case we'll just fill our bottles with some tap water then. "No, you can't do that". Huh? We really need a drink... We've been on coaches and walking around all day and we've ran out of water. "Sorry, I can't help". We have our empty bottles here, could you please just pour us some water? "No, sorry I can't". I get she probably wasn't suppose to serve customers after close, but we just wanted her to fill our water bottles with tap water. I may be misremembering now but I'm like 80% sure I asked if I could fill the bottle in the toilet, but she also refused to open to toilets because they were closed. This whole situation would have been absolutely absurd in the UK. Germans really seem to like doing everything as per the rules regardless of how inconvenient and ridiculous it is. Even things like crossing roads where generally most Brits will wait for a green light, but if in a hurry many will look for a gap in traffic and just cross. Germans seem to rarely ever do this and you get the sense you are being judged if you do it. I had lots of weird little experiences like this in Germany but almost passing out from dehydration at a German concentration camp had a certain level of irony to it.
• larusso 9mo ago
  I tried taking the train to Prague this year for my birthday. I’m from Berlin so taking the train made sense on paper. I could have taken the car but I thought that it might be more relaxing to just sit for the 4h or so it takes. In Dresden we were told that they had issues with the power lines on the Czechia side and had to leave the train. It was still an hour to the border but seemed to be the best place to dump all the people and let them go the merry way the rest of the journey. The basic service was a printed paper directly out of the connection lookup system. No info if this connection is actually the best or makes sense since other travelers will be also on route. We had to switch trains 2 more times and arrived in Prague at around Midnight. Let’s say I really don’t want to take the train anywhere at the moment. Sidestory. Check the current state of the S-Bahn Service (run by DB) in Berlin. One wonder why they bother to announce issues with the system day in and out. They could just switch over and announce when stuff is running smoothly instead.
• herunan 9mo ago
  You got Deutsche Bahned. IF anyone watches Jet Lag The Game on YouTube, they play hide and seek games around Europe, and whenever they're on a Deutsche Bahn something almost always goes awry.
• nw05678 9mo ago
  Are you ScotRail in disguise? Are you ScotRail in disguise? Top level bullying from the tartan army.
• mdavid626 9mo ago
  Munich-Mühldorf regional train. Once it forgot to stop at Markt Schwaben (it always stops there). Passangers had to wait 30 min for the train to go back at the next station. Not even an apology.
• ianbooker 9mo ago
  Kidnapper is likely not Deutsche Bahn but a regional subsidairy. This is an effect of privatization gone wrong, with the national service, the infrastructure, the regional services (each), the network (not in infra), cargo and then some (sub)companies split for privatisation and an IPO that never happened. The highly segmented network is not digitalized in to any standard, so regional trains have to operate in policy frameworks and network cells that favor long distance trains. Its utter chaos on a daily basis.
• mensetmanusman 9mo ago
  The population pyramid inversion and an artificially weak currency is destroying Germany.
• tietjens 9mo ago
  The thing that stands out to me about this story and that confuses me the most about German life is the general passive acceptance of realities like this. I think it might be simply European.
• coolThingsFirst 9mo ago
  The picture of the DB station should be the official logo of Germany. I'd rather go through dante's inferno than live in Germany. What a bleak existence.
• dan-bailey 9mo ago
  Yeah, similar experience when I was in Berlin on vacation in 2023. Had a rail transfer to Amsterdam set for 16:30. Canceled without explanation or warning, and the replacement was: Berlin -> Duisberg, with a 13-minute layover Duisberg -> Viersen, with a 6-minute layover Viersen -> Venlo, with a 7-minute layover Venlo -> Eindhoven, with a 38-minute layover Eindhoven -> Amsterdam As you can probably guess, this is not at all what happened. Shit started to disintegrate around Viersen, we did some shuffling and waiting for later trains, and wound up in Aachen around midnight. The hotel across from the train station was closed for the night, we weren't going to stay in the nearby hostel after seeing one too many horror movies, and so we walked over a mile to a nearby hotel. Staff was lovely. We got in to a room by 01:00, showered, plugged in all our devices, and passed out around 02:00. Up at 05:00 and back to the train station to catch a ride to Rotterdam (very full train), and then on to Amsterdam. We hit our hotel about 12 hours behind schedule, changed clothes and got on with it. Germany and France had the worst trains. Italy was insanely efficient/on-time.
• nephihaha 9mo ago
  DB is a lot better run than British trains... My God. Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.
  • bryanhogan 9mo ago
    Competing on which system is more dysfunctional, is .. not a competition we should be in. Especially when there's 0 reason for it to be this way.
  • f6v 9mo ago
    OP mentions "six minutes" as a DB metric. But the thing is that DB doesn't care about trains being late. It's absolutely normal to have an hour delay in Germany. You can be considered lucky if it's under an hour. What will usually happen is that you spend half a day in some village waiting for your connection and travel the rest of the way standing in the doorway with your bags.
    • nephihaha 9mo ago
      I've been on UK trains that were an hour late, others that changed platform at least three times, headed to the wrong destination etc. Many are cancelled without a decent reason being given. I rarely take British trains now they are so expensive and unreliable. Only long distance maybe because buses are unpleasant.
  • MrOrelliOReilly 9mo ago
    The author makes effectively the same comment that twenty minutes late is normal for Germany (below). I don’t have any statistics, but anecdotally I’ve had worse experiences with DB than in the UK. DB does not just run late, but has a bad habit of teleporting you to random German towns, from which you must quickly route find to your original destination (as is the exact story of the post). > It is twenty minutes late. I consider this early.
    • flohofwoe 9mo ago
      The TL;DR is: regional trains are usually on time, long-distance trains usually are not. If you need to travel between cities, plan with an hour buffer time. Basically, "show some adaptability". The one good thing about frequent long-distance delays is that you might be lucky and catch an earlier delayed train and actually arrive a bit earlier than planned ;) (also JFC, does the author like to whine about nothing - I'm travelling frequently with DB for about 25 years now, and while shit happens from time time, most of it is merely a slight inconvenience).
• Freak_NL 9mo ago
  At some point your Regio Express turned into an Intercity. Free upgrade!
• huhkerrf 9mo ago
  DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train." I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.
  • rjh29 9mo ago
    UK has airline-style pricing that goes up extortionately as seats run out, making it prohibitively expensive to use. It's also frequently late and/or trains randomly cancelled, although you can plan around it, you end up 1hr+ late on most long journeys. On the plus side: local journeys are great. Delay Repay means you get up to 100% of your ticket back if you're delayed. If you cannot make the last train due to delays, they're obligated to get your home by bus or even by taxi. Train stock is (in my area at least) new and very comfortable. Views are good!
  • hexbin010 9mo ago
    When comparing to the UK you have to also factor in how absurdly expensive it is. Eg a monthly ticket to the nearest city ~25km away is 292 EUR (nowhere near London. A city with not very high wages either). And the train is just 2.5 carriages and full every day.
    • hdgvhicv 9mo ago
      A typical season ticket into London is under 20p a mile. Outside of London it’s far more expensive (35p a mile is common), because the railway has not had the investment London has over decades. Platform lengthening (of possible) is not cheap, requires buying new land in crowded towns and cities. Modern train stock isn’t cheap either 25km each way is 680 miles a month.
      • hexbin010 9mo ago
        Most people will commute ~19 days a month, given vacations and sickness. From my example, that's ~794 miles (corrected) a month, £255, £0.32/mile. Not as expensive as some other routes but still can be as as high as 12% of your take-home wage given the low salaries in that city. Moving onto London... /under/ 20p a mile? Which route is that?? Just some random examples I picked: Alton to Waterloo: £529, 1786 miles, £0.29/mile. Guildford to Waterloo: £453/mo - 1140 miles a month, £0.39/mile. Gravesend to London Bridge: £436/mo, 836 miles a month, £0.52/mile. Brentwood to Liverpool St: £336/mo, 706 miles a month, £0.47/mile. St Albans to Thameslink: £440/mo, 756 miles a month, £0.58/mile. (Mileages from https://www.scotrail.co.uk/carbon-calculator https://www.scotrail.co.uk/carbon-calculator )
• f6v 9mo ago
  There're certain kinds of rewards to encourage traveling by rail in Europe. For example, a training course I attended refunded part of your travel expenses if you took a long-distance train. And there're people who believe in not flying for the sake of the planet. But at this point, I'm convinced you should avoid any train in and around Germany. This includes Denmark as well. Just take a plane, but don't have a layover in Germany. The same could probably be said about France. My first train from Paris to Nancy stopped for about 2hrs in the middle of nowhere. As the machinist said: "The train is tired." Other countries like Italy or Spain seem to actually have well-functioning rail though.
  • messe 9mo ago
    > This includes Denmark as well I regularly travel on DSB (2.5hr journeys, 4 times a month minimum), and only very rarely encounter issues. Staff have always been easy to deal with and on the rare occasion I've had to be refunded (the carriage with my reserved seat didn't show up) I've received it within days. Avoid trains run by GoCollective though.
  • askariwa 9mo ago
    Nope, leave Italy off the well-functioning rail. I am a commuter, i use the train here since 2009 and it's terrible. We're going through the same experiences described in the post, but often even much worse. On December 1st, my train took 6 hours to travel 100km instead of 1 hour so we too felt like the post author.
• PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  And here I was annoyed that the train going half the route (as in schedule, not coz of any accident) is named the same so I got on too early one by accident and had to walk a stop away.
• hexbin010 9mo ago
  Deutsche Bahn seems very similar to most of the railway in England. Customer service is non-existent; delays are highly normalised. The UK government hates how expensive it is to operate, so they are reducing subsidies and massively prioritising the most profitable routes and raising prices. Staff got nice condition/pay bumps during COVID and all have the attitude that they are doing us a favour. I don't mean that lightly or that I've had one bad experience with a member of staff on a bad day. They are work-shy, offensive, rude, lacking training and plain bad tempered. I'm very pro car now these days, which is exactly what the Government wants.
  • jimnotgym 9mo ago
    I'm pro car, I would much prefer to relax on a train, but the economics just don't work in the UK. I can't think of anywhere I want to go where taking the train is cheaper than driving
    • orsorna 9mo ago
      After paying for fuel, insurance, property taxes and maintenance (exclude the possibility of a car note in this scenario), is it still cheaper than taking the train?
      • jimnotgym 9mo ago
        Yes. Because the trains don't go from my house, and don't go everywhere I need to go, so I need a car anyway.
  • a2fz 9mo ago
    Customer service on British trains is excellent. It only takes a few minutes to claim Delay Repay if you're delayed more than 15 minutes, and you can even set it up to do it automatically for you. If your last train back home for the night is cancelled at 1am, you can message the company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to sort you out with a taxi for a distance like London to Cambridge. I consistently find railway workers to be some of the most helpful and approachable people I have to interact with, which is remarkable given the sort of people they have to put up with. I think the sort of person you'll be speaking to certainly depends on the part of the country you're in though - in Scotland and Wales, I've seen people who've been let off for having a ticket that expired several days prior, and staff are happy to have a friendly chat if the train isn't too busy.
• 101008 9mo ago
  I know the author mentioned this, but I just got nervous imagining this as a tourist who doesn't speak German at all. This shouldn't be like this. Why they don't help at all? It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc. But I am sure if this happens here it would be on the cover of newspapers.
  • lmm 9mo ago
    > I know the author mentioned this, but I just got nervous imagining this as a tourist who doesn't speak German at all. This shouldn't be like this. Why they don't help at all? How much help does your home country give to German tourists who don't speak English?
  • symbogra 9mo ago
    Swiss trains are very civilized. On an ordinary intercity train can sit at a table with a white tablecloth and have a beer or wine and a proper dinner. It really makes the time fly by. The SBB also has merch store with their own line of watches.
  • flexagoon 9mo ago
    I recently moved to the Netherlands to study, and I experience that a lot. Despite almost all official information everywhere being written in both Dutch and English, in-train announcements are only done in Dutch. I have to constantly listen to the announcements and try to understand based off their vibe if they sound like something critical or not.
    • bradley13 9mo ago
      In Switzerland, the major train lines announce in English (as well as German and French). Minor train lines often only announce in the local language. Honestly, I don't see the problem. As a tourist, you have to be prepared with apps, or you can ask someone for help. Happens all the time, and most people are happy to help. Someone living here needs to learn the local language.
    • 9mo ago
• nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago
  I am suprised Germany has bad trains. I have only used U Bahn long time ago which was OK iirc.
  • tomschwiha 9mo ago
    U-Bahn is a closed circle so not much happens (except accidents). The issue is with shared rails and there is too much traffic. On the road there is also a lot of delay but it's more accepted because oneself is in charge. Using the train gives up control so you've got easier someone to blame.
• doommius 9mo ago
  To some extend I'd like rail operators being forced to follow the same rules as airlines in terms of compensation for delays. As the only thing that seems to work in cases like this is financial motivation.
• junon 9mo ago
  Meh. I have lived here for 7 years, and get a bit tired of these sorts of complaints about DB coming from the US. Germans have exceedingly little, if any, patience for anything going wrong. DB is always painted as this evil, completely broken system when in fact it's been a joy compared to e.g. San Francisco. I've only encountered flexibility and slight discomfort in a few cases where something has happened. I'm not entirely sure what Germans expect DB to do. A car had an interconnecting door problem and had to remove that car from the train. Everyone had to filter in to other cars to compensate for the lack of seating. Should they instead cancel those tickets? Or make them stand? It was a full train, and no answer is the correct one for everyone involved. I ended up giving my seat to an elderly gentleman and sat between cars on the ground. Mild discomfort but literally nobody was to blame for this. I suppose I could have gotten the next train but I didn't want to wait - that's also not DB's problem to fix. Another time, my train was delayed for several hours. Of course I was quite annoyed but found out the reason was that someone had offed themselves in front of one of the trains before it, bringing the line to a standstill while it was dealt with. Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped, and this almost insatiable attitude by some Germans that any inconvenience is an offense to Germany seems always to be directed at an otherwise highly reliable and robust trnasporation system whilst having zero other frame of reference. Seriously, come to the US or, from what I've heard, the UK. Then tell me Germany's is awful with a straight face. This article reads exactly like that. You weren't kidnapped. You were rerouted. Don't dilute words like that, it just undermines your point.
  • ernst_klim 9mo ago
    > Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped Somehow doesn't happen in most other countries I lived. These things are easy to deal with with a bit of redundancy, which as I've heard is lacking in Germany these days. I've had much better experience with trains in Russia despite much harsher weather conditions, much larger distances and much older cars. This problem is absolutely fixable, just let the trains go around problematic sections with redundant routes.
    • 9mo ago
• indiantinker 9mo ago
  DB is weird. They seem to make their own rules and then run the game and “dont tell the rules to anyone”. I was on my way to catch a flight from Munich to my home (Madrid). I didn’t knew that apparently at one point the train splits into two parts and the front part goes to the airport and the other part just goes to the nearby cattle farms and comes back in 3 hours. Google Maps - No idea Citymapper - what? English announcement - nien. Thanks to an old lady, who told me that i needed to switch coaches to go the airport. Madre mia!!
  • hxhebdxbb 9mo ago
    But then you already entered the wrong train. The destination of a train is usually clearly written on the train, unless it's a very old one where it's not visible on every coach I agree that it's not that intuitive that a line can have multiple end stops (like Stuttgart - Munich ends in both Stuttgart and Munich, depending on the direction you are entering?
  • stackghost 9mo ago
    DB is infinitely better than Trenitalia. I once took the train equivalent of what airlines call a code-share from Venice to Munich and Trenitalia just straight-up forgot half the train somewhere. It was a total gong show.
  • selfmodruntime 9mo ago
    That fucking Sbahn is the bane of the existence of many tourists. It happens so much that there‘s now a bus line from those cow fields to an airport. You will be late.
  • mbrochh 9mo ago
    I am German and the three times I took an ICE from Cologne to Berlin and then back, EACH TIME I boarded at a wrong wagon. The entire system, their app, the signages at the tracks... it is all complete and utter dogshit.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • 9mo ago
• abigail95 9mo ago
  I don't tolerate this kind of thing. If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath, and where you are. You may find the train has now "registered" itself at the next station. It will reveal driver to be using intentionally tricky language. "Cannot stop" It's not that the train can't stop, trains can obviously stop wherever and whenever they want. It's not that the doors cannot open - train doors can be opened by the driver or by passengers, trains have emergency egress requirements. The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that train. They wanted to complain about it. Comparing it to a kidnapping is offensive and absurd. That's now how people act when kidnapped.
  • manarth 9mo ago
    > "If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath" Being stuck on a train that's arbitrarily changing stops is irritating and disruptive to passengers. Faking a medical emergency is also disruptive to passengers, and also to the emergency services, who may prioritise the hoax call over genuine emergencies, which risks other peoples' health. > "The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that train." It's pretty clear they did. No-one would prefer complaining about an hour-plus unplanned detour over simply following their plans and getting off the train. > "Comparing it to a kidnapping is offensive and absurd." It's clear they're using the word "kidnapping" as a hyperbolic rhetorical narrative device, and aren't literally comparing it to a kidnapping.
    • abigail95 9mo ago
      It's not a fake emergency. Acute anxiety causes the same thing. That's for a hospital to decide, not a train company.
      • pell 9mo ago
        > If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath, and where you are. It is if you instruct people how to best lie to emergency services because your train was delayed.
• drunx 9mo ago
  I lived 15 years in The Netherlands and 3 years ago moved to Germany. Back in NL I used to complain about trains being late... Boy oh boy was I not ready for Germany and Deutsche Bahn. I heard stories, but it was so absurd at times that I treated them as comical acts. Then I traveled long distance on DB... - trains being late by 15-40 minutes is NORMAL. It's included. At this point I feel like it's even planned. - the "thrown out in the middle of nowhere" happens! Ruthlessly. Operationally. With zero empathy or guidance. One minute you traveled inside the train approaching your destination another minute you are on a station in some village, knowing nothing about "why?" And "what is next?" I still take trains - but I do not plan any appointments on arrival. As arrival is theoretical and not guaranteed. I just take a gamble and sink hours into the journey. Read books. Watch movies. P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for the absolutely shit service they provide.
  • microtonal 9mo ago
    And being delayed for 15-40 minutes, getting thrown out in the middle of nowhere, or having to continue by bus is an inconvenience for most people, but a nightmare for people with disabilities. Imagine being in a wheelchair, having a digestive condition (Crohn, IBS, etc.), or some sort of anxiety. I imagine that there are groups of people in Germany that simply do not travel anymore. It is an area where proper governance is failing. I don't know about Germany, but in The Netherlands, Dutch law requires at least 90% of the trains to be on time (less than 5 minutes delay). If national train company do not reach those numbers, they are fined and I think in an extreme case they can lose their concession.
    • jeroenhd 9mo ago
      > Dutch law requires at least 90% of the trains to be on time (less than 5 minutes delay Yes, however, any train delayed more than 30 minutes gets canceled entirely and doesn't get counted in the statistics. The train this article is talking about would not be registered late under Dutch terms (though it probably wouldn't have traveled comically far without stopping). Not saying Dutch trains are as bad as German trains, but applying the same laws won't fix DB's problems.
    • 9mo ago
• harddrivereque 9mo ago
  Deutsche Bahn has gone from not perfect to straight up disastrous and antisocial in the past years. They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie. It's rightfully headed for insolvency despite billions of wasteful and wrongful state funding. I hope that company goes under as soon as possible. Any other solution to the railway system management is better than DB. DB is not going to make it
  • IlikeKitties 9mo ago
    After privatization, the Deutsche Bahn became private enterprise and is now 100% owned by the German state. As such, insolvency isn't going to happen. Though it would be funny.
  • cedilla 9mo ago
    Deutsche Bahn ist anything but wasteful, it's underfunded to the tune of tens of billions per year. Cleaning out trees more up to ten meters away from railways was seen as to expensive, now 6m tall trees fall in them all the time during storms. Having two railways next to each other was seen as unnecessary, now we have no backups when one fails. Swiss railway is seen as the ideal DB should strive for, but fact is that Switzerland invests more than double per capita into its rail infrastructure. German stinginess now compounded over decades, and that's not the fault of management.
    • SirHumphrey 9mo ago
      Underfunded and wasteful are not opposites. When there is not enough money to do things properly there is often a lot of duct tapping going on which waste available resources without fixing anything. There is scarcely anything more expensive in government than saving money.
  • ACCount37 9mo ago
    If a company fails this hard, the solution isn't to feed it more government money to prop it up. It's to let it fail and rebuild from scratch. Blacklist everyone who was involved above a certain rank. Put together an entirely new structure. The only real way to get rid of this kind of rot is to make the consequences of dysfunction hit.
• throw310822 9mo ago
  There is some dark joke to be made about being locked inside a German train, kept against your will and running towards who-knows-where.
  • tirant 9mo ago
    Please, don’t go there.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• j1elo 9mo ago
  This story, countless other stories. The fellow comments here. But then Europe wants us to drop our cars and rely more in public transport? Laughable.
  • boxed 9mo ago
    It's not like this in Sweden I can tell you.
  • jeroenhd 9mo ago
    Deutsche Bahn has a reputation even inside of Europe. It's not like this in other countries. Your country would have to be laughably corrupt if it couldn't build out a public transit system that beats DB.
    • andbberger 9mo ago
      yes the US is laughably corrupt
• fkdk 9mo ago
  historically german railway had a track record of treating people like cattle, but one would expect that not even institutional culture changes would take that long
• raverbashing 9mo ago
  I wonder if people think they will be taken seriously with so much hyperbole and drama > Only then I notice: the driver has been speaking German only. Oh wow a German conductor in a German train speaking German oh how awkward... No you were not "kidnapped" your train just stopped at a different station. > “That’s a different federal state.” Yes and if you go to many cities in Europe and the US you can walk from one country to another. Oh wow shocking I know /s Of course this is Deutsche Bahn at its best (in getting hand and feet mixed up) and that compensation is ridiculous. It should at least get your ticket back to the place you intended to go. Neuwied to Troisdorf is 1h by car or train (in a good day of course)
• baobun 9mo ago
  I'm not sure if I should be impressed or concerned that none of the passengers pulled the emergency stop.
• locallost 9mo ago
  I don't know what to make of this. Of course everyone has a right to be pissed off for losing time because of someone else's mistake, but at the same time the language is... I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out I am not sure how you'd feel if you were really kidnapped. Was my family kidnapped when they were sitting for two hours in the airplane before takeoff because of xyz? No, it was just an unfortunate turn of events that happen from time to time when you fly. German railways could be better, but at the same time it's nowhere near the level of complaining the average person makes, as in this article. I think it says more about the author than the company. "It's twenty minutes late, I consider this early". Despite the problems that exist, I wouldn't say I ever had the feeling of being relieved the train is only 20 minutes late. Especially not with local trains.
  • microtonal 9mo ago
    Still, in Germany only 58.8% of the trains were on time in 2025 [1]. Maybe it's not as bad as the author states, but it's certainly valid complaining about it. I lived in Germany for five years and for longer stretches it was certainly very common to have a 30-60 minutes delay. A lot of my colleagues would even do trips like Stuttgart <-> Leipzig by plane because they hated traveling with DB so much. [1] https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
    • locallost 9mo ago
      I live in Germany and take the train all the time. There were always kind of clusters of issues, but lately I haven't had many problems, especially not major, don't really remember what the last time was I got any compensation for over an hour delay. The last time was maybe two years ago. I wonder sometimes how these things develop because if you're objectively pissed off that your train was delayed, I cannot imagine enjoying taking the plane, or even worse a car. Like I haven't had a plane take off on time in my life. I took only a few business trips with the car and was stuck in traffic every single time. So objectively despite experiencing issues with DB myself, it's a lot better than my experience with alternatives. Stuttgart - Leipzig has a direct connection, and in my experience the biggest reason for a delay is when you miss a connecting train. E.g. your train is 15 minutes late but you had only 10 minutes to change trains. So other than the train going out of service I honestly can't imagine what the issue would be. You sit for 4h, can work comfortably, it's quieter than anything else, you can have a coffee or a beer, a meal etc. etc. And then maybe you'll have a half hour delay, but you can get that with anything else also.
• djoldman 9mo ago
  > I was trying to travel 35 kilometers. I was now 63 kilometers from my grandmother’s house. Further away than when I started. Oh boy. There's something deeply human about the frustrations of state institutions and bureaucracy. From the linked article: > How are train cancellations and delays compensated when traveling with the Deutschland-Ticket? > In the event of a delay of at least 60 minutes at the destination station due to a delay or train cancellation in local transport, you will receive €1.50 compensation per case. > Amounts under €4 will not be paid out due to a legal de minimis threshold. However, you can accumulate multiple late payment claims. https://www.bahn.de/faq/deutschlandticket-verspaetung-erstattung https://www.bahn.de/faq/deutschlandticket-verspaetung-erstat...
  • hdgvhicv 9mo ago
    Planes have never diverted people to the wrong country. It’s always state institutions.
    • throw-the-towel 9mo ago
      Here's just one example of planes doing exactly that. https://dailynewshungary.com/wizz-air-tirana-podgorica-flight/ https://dailynewshungary.com/wizz-air-tirana-podgorica-fligh...
    • yeputons 9mo ago
      Happens regularly. And if you don't have a visa for the new destination, well, too bad. E.g. on December 20 a WizzAir flight 4768 was diverted to Thessaloniki (Greece) instead of its destination Skopje (North Macedonia): https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/WZZ4768/history/20251220/1625Z/LCLK/LWSK https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/WZZ4768/history/2025... . Those with Schengen visas (or appropriate passports) got a bus to Skopje. The rest allegedly waited for three hours and then got returned to Cyprus (EU, but not Schengen), but to a different airport (Paphos instead of Larnaca). So if someone had a car left on Larnaca's parking, too bad.
      • hdgvhicv 9mo ago
• croes 9mo ago
  That’s what you get when you stop seeing train service as a service and try to make into a business. They stopped caring about their main customers and tried to compete with planes. On top of that everything traffic related seems to be reserved for the least competent politicians.
• on_the_train 9mo ago
  DB is a typical German moloch. Insane wages, a culture of anti performance. And being eaten alive by consultants. I know someone working there. It's a tragedy how they change once good people
• accountofthaha 9mo ago
  I am never taking the train in Germany or through Germany again (or through Belgium, for that matter). The experience is consistently bad. NS, DB, and NMBS all perform poorly. Train travel itself has become unreliable and frustrating. Ever since I got my car, the difference in freedom is obvious. I do support having basic public transport and solid bike infrastructure for young people, but once you’re 25 or older, there’s little justification for relying on such low-quality public transport. I’ll be going to Prague next year, and I’m fully willing to drive for hours rather than sit on a train that keeps getting delayed, is unpleasant to be on, and costs far too much.
  • adammarples 9mo ago
    I thought in Germany you got unlimited train travel for €58?
    • mschild 9mo ago
      Yes, but not for the IC and ICE which are long distsnce trains. Those are still separate tickets as usual.
    • barrkel 9mo ago
      Local trains, not ICE or IC.
    • accountofthaha 9mo ago
      Not for ICE, the only train worth getting for me. Also I don't live in Germany, in the Netherlands. Trains are expensive. Even though I live in the Randstad, near big cities, I don't have any good public transport here. It's just not worth it for me.
• Svip 9mo ago
  > The train starts moving. The driver announces there are “issues around Bonn.” He does not specify what kind. No one asks. We have learned not to ask. This is one of those issues I keep mulling about; it seems train operators (and airliners for that matter) tend to avoid being technically specific about operation problems, and just say "problems" and - if they are kind - where the problem is. And I cannot decide whether this is the wrong or right approach: how much information is too much? The argument is that travellers don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed, they just want to know when the next train is. The problem - however - is that train operators come off looking like idiots, when they really aren't. As an example, the S-trains around Copenhagen have recently switched to a CBTC signal system, which has increased punctuality to 97% (below 3 minutes, cancelled trains counted). At cold temperatures, railway points (or switches, if you will) might become inoperable, as their mechanism freeze (of course, there are systems to prevent this, but can occur anyway). This happened this November on the S-train lines, but the announcement was "signal failure"; which meant the train operator (DSB) (and the railway owner (Banedanmark)) kind of looked a bit stupid, since the whole point of CBTC was to eliminate signal failures entirely (in fact, if you're being pedantic, since CBTC has _no_ signals, there technically cannot be any signal failures), and had promised as much. But - then again - travellers really just wanted to know what the next train was, but I still think train operators are doing themselves a disservice by being oblique about the actual problem. Particularly when a problem lasts for several days, "technical problems" just makes people think their engineers are incompetent, when in reality they have no idea about the severity of the problem (because it is not communicated). I may of course be biased here, since I have a high interest in how trains operate, but friends of mine - whose interest is far lessen compared to mine - are also frustrated by these opaque messages; and I think the reason is a strong sense of lack of control - since (assuming one made it to the station on time) up until this point, the passenger have done everything right, and yet the system failed, and now they are not privy as to why.
  • forgingahead 9mo ago
    My sense is that this has happened over the last 20-30 years as overall competence has just dropped in many of these key positions. COVID was a good example of this - lots of humming and hawing about why decisions were being made, and garbled messaging about the reasons. Basically they get angry and defensive about blaming the "peanut gallery" or "armchair experts" while not being specific, because they themselves don't know why or how something is being done, and therefore being unable to defend their own positions from solid ground.
• peterspath 9mo ago
  We in the Netherlands often complain about the NS (Dutch Railways)... but it had a 93.9% on time rate. That is quite good. But ooof, the few times I had to cross the border to Germany by train were hell. I appreciated the NS from that moment on more...
• moepstar 9mo ago
  If you haven’t seen the datamining DB talk by David Kriesel, you absolutely positively should! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0rb9CfOvojk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0rb9CfOvojk
• YouAreWRONGtoo 9mo ago
  [dead]
• Farbklex 9mo ago
  I travel to Cologne about 5 times a year. 2h ride, usually 25 minutes late in each direction. Just go to the board bistro right away, order some food (if available), grab a beer or coffee and don't look at the time.
• hshdhdhj4444 9mo ago
  The DB service described is terrible, but the author’s language is really hard to get around. The constant comparison to cows, for example, suggesting it’s ok and normal to mistreat non humans, instead of making the far more obvious connection that if a human who is understanding exactly what is happening goes through so much suffering with a slight change of schedule, the fear and suffering cows and other animals who are constantly being transported in far worse conditions with no idea what is happening may be going through. The comparison to kidnapping is also really bad. I’ve taken a plane that had been diverted to the wrong, unfriendly, country and then been unable to leave a tiny terminal, with no to limited access to food, water and restroom facilities for hours, and the idea that we were being kidnapped never crossed my mind, although actual kidnapping by the state we were in was a remote but real possibility.
  • fleroviumna 9mo ago
    [dead]
• shevy-java 9mo ago
  "I had been kidnapped at a loss." German bureaucracy. They should just learn from the Swiss. Because the Swiss actually understand how to be effective in bureaucracy.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• BloondAndDoom 9mo ago
  I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train). But the idea that you go 55 minutes just because of policy; and skip 15 stations is crazy to me. Again with the assumptions that it can safely stop somewhere for 5m and I’m pretty sure the answer is yes. I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
  • mothballed 9mo ago
    This has been done in USA using slow moving freight inner-city. Just can't do it on passenger service. It is illegal, but there is no one around to enforce it, the vast majority of the time. I can neither confirm nor deny, I may have done it to get to/from the grocery store from near my house when I didn't have money for a car.
  • rwmj 9mo ago
    I wonder if it's not safety but money. In the UK, train operators pay station operators a fixed fee to stop. As a result trains can't just stop somewhere randomly (except I hope in an emergency) even if that would benefit many people. All this is, needless to say, very stupid.
    • wolvoleo 9mo ago
      I don't think so as in this case Deutsche Bahnn owns both the station and the train. In the UK they've gone a bit crazy with the whole free market thing. Public transport should not be a market. In Germany there's also the issue that the powerful car makers are always lobbying the government to budget cut public transport.
      • kuschku 9mo ago
        Germany does actually have station fees. And DB isn't the only operator. The RRX trains, one of which OP talked about, are operated by DB and National Express, ordered by the RRX group comprised of VRR, go.Rheinland, NWL, SPNV-Nord and NVV, running on tracks and stations by DB InfraGO.
• CaptainZapp 9mo ago
  Obligatory link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/oct/08/german-train-travel-deutsche-bahn-kafka https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/oct/08/...
• skrebbel 9mo ago
  As a Dutchman, I’ve come to love German trains. The joy of a first class ICE seat to with table service as the empty middle of Germany swooshes by at 250km/h is hard to describe. Those trains are very good. Super comfortable, super fast, and did anyone say “restaurant car”? Seriously, the little bottle holes in the tray in front of you seems perfectly designed to fit a .5L glass of Erdinger and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence. Freshly tapped Erdinger! On a train! I generally travel for the destination, but in Germany, I travel for the travel. So as a fanboy, I am saddened by how bad DB has become. Once you’re on the train, and it actually goes, and it goes all the way to the destination, it’s still fantastic. All of the above generally still holds. But the many hours I’ve spent in the dark in cold windy places like Duisburg Hbf gleis fünf are uncountable, and it really does discount from the experience. I don’t remember the German trains being this late, this often, a ~decade ago. I really hope DB will get its shit together because there’s a lot worth saving.
  • moepstar 9mo ago
    > I don’t remember the German trains being this late, this often, a ~decade ago. Except: they were - over 20 years ago, I did my „Grundwehrdienst“ in the German army, travel with DB from Nuremberg to Munich and back every weekend for 8 months. The number of times the ICE was on time I can count on one hand. 15 minutes delayed regularly, sometimes more. After a while we planned to use the last train to arrive in Munich, and having to go a bit further with S-Bahn, we most of the time missed the last one (on purpose). We then went to the DB counter and got free coupons to head our final destination by Taxi. Also already happening back then: broken aircon, often in comical ways - I.e. totally non working in one wagon, with everyone sweating at some 45 degrees Celsius or more, next wagon: freezing at 16 degrees…
    • skrebbel 9mo ago
      By today's standards I'd consider "15 minutes delayed" to be pretty much equivalent to "on time".
• amtamt 9mo ago
  Way back in 90's, when I arrived on an Indian Railway station about 10 minutes before the train's scheduled time, I was pleasantly surprised to find the train at the platform. Only when I checked the passenger reservation list, I found this was train from yesterday, late by 23:50 hours. (for the curious... No, I could not get my reserved birth and had to travel on unreserved ticket, but at least I reached destination on my planned time.)
  • attendant3446 9mo ago
    I was in a similar situation in Egypt once. At the specified time a train arrives, I board it. Only to see that my seat is occupied. We started to discuss the situation and the other passenger showed me his ticket - it was one of the previous delayed trains. We figured it just in time for me to jump out of the wrong train before it left the station :)
  • uwagar 9mo ago
    proof or it didnt happen. this is a meme joke. even osho made a joke exactly like this.
    • cue_the_strings 9mo ago
      This has certainly happened to someone if not the OP. I did wait in a single spot for almost 10h, my 5-6h journey became a 15h one, in Serbia in the late 2000s. IIRC, a large part of the railway was down that day, couple hundred km, electricity issue or something. Some people walked off the train, which was in between cities but near the road. I was a student, didn't have an alternative, so I didn't. They didn't organize a replacement bus. This kind of thing was (maybe not to that extent) common, like once every year or two. They rarely reported on it in media if the cause wasn't notable.
  • vl 9mo ago
    DB last year: I took train last year from Frankfurt airport to Bonn only to see Bonn sail past the window and train to go to Cologne. I asked locals what is going on, turns out that all trains were late, and this train departed from the platform already marked for Bonn! “You should watch what train number you board on DB, not trust sign on platform!” locals helpfully advised me.
• pjmlp 9mo ago
  Unfortunately travelling in Germany by train has become a mess, hence why so many reach out for car or inland flights. Delays are to be expected, trains cancelled without reasoning, train stations skipped in similar ways as described on the article, and if using connections, better plan for at least 30m interval, while taking into account a plan B for every connection that might be missed.
• globular-toast 9mo ago
  I have my own DB story. About 15 years ago I was supposed to take an overnight sleeper train from Copenhagen to Cologne. We had beds booked. It's about 22:00 and we're on the platform ready for bed. The train arrived on time, we checked our tickets to see which coach we were on and walked down the train looking for it. We get to the end of the train, odd, we must have missed our carriage so we turn around for another pass. Then we start to notice other confused expressions. We eventually figured out the problem: they had accidentally left the sleeper coaches in Hamburg, a full 180 miles away as the crow flies, or almost half our entire journey. After waiting on the platform for about an hour, busses arrived to take us to Hamburg. We're now quite tired and our bed on a train is now a seat on a bus. We finally get to Hamburg at about 3:00 the next day, walk to our beds and we're ready to collapse. Surely they're not going to come and inspect our tickets at this time? They came and inspected our tickets at around 3:30. Two and a half hours later we were in Cologne. Yay.
• dz0ny 9mo ago
  This is the place where AI needs to take over, no more excuses! For example in country 400k€ was spend on executives (200 hundred people) Christmas dinner for publicly owned company. While the scheduling and company management is similar issues as DB. I think we ned a new word for this kind of clusterfuck!! They are "rulesfull", rules that hinder the system and make the user scream in pain and agony.
• max_aucube 9mo ago
  Average experience with Deutsche Bahn. I'm french, my first trip in this country was epic. First time going to Köln ( Cologne ), the train back to the airport never arrived, with no explanation. I was literally stranded in another country without money.
• sersi 9mo ago
  When I was a child in France people were quick to say that trains ran on time in Germany... Well, in my experience there is no developed country with a worse train company than DB. Even Amtrack is still slightly better. In France people complain about the SNCF (especially strikes) but at least outside of strikes the TGV are mostly on time.
  • denysvitali 9mo ago
    > no developed country with a worse train company than DB Italy is pretty similar, and I would say even worse, but after reading / hearing more about DB I think they're just competing for being the worst train company ever
• kioleanu 9mo ago
  As I live around the area where this happened and I am well aware of how DB is on this route, this story sounds extremely sketchy - why would the train change lines to the other side of the Rhine and not stop at any of the 17 (!!!) stops along the way to Neuwied? Especially with people in it? The problem was a broken relay, no trains were able to run for a few hours through Bonn. The official statement said that the trains have stopped and were replaced by buses.
  • JeremyTheo 9mo ago
    I know how sketchy it sounds, and it was even documented in DB Navigator. But DB makes this information inaccessible a couple of days later in the app, so there is no way to „proof“ it except asking DB itself.
    • raphman 9mo ago
      Just to be sure: your blog post mentions 24.12.2024 - did you mean 2025? Is this the right connection?: https://bahn.expert/details/NX%2028521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494-3e9d-803b-114b8e01ab0a https://bahn.expert/details/NX%2028521/j/20251224-a0049123-9... The RE5 seems to be operated by National Express, not Deutsche Bahn, right? (but DB InfraGo is most probably responsible for the routing)
      • kioleanu 9mo ago
        Well I’ll be damned, I’ve really seen it all, OP sorry for doubting w
      • JeremyTheo 9mo ago
        Yes it is! And yes it was a typo! Thank you for finding the link to it. I was trying to find it before but couldn’t find it in official sources, DB deleted it from the official app. It did not stop at Troisdorf though. It is operated by National Express, but I guess the routing comes from some other company (likely InfraGo)
• sajithdilshan 9mo ago
  Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time and if you're unlucky most probably a delay of 4+ hours and missing your connecting train. The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany. I used to date a guy who works at infra department in DB and based on what he told me, I couldn't believe how inefficient and massively complicated DB is. They have internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT department and no matter how cheap or good outside IT providers are they must get the service from internal IT department (so much for competition). At this point DB needs a complete overhaul and let go of so much dead weight to make it working again and unfortunately German politicians are just throwing more money at every problem hoping they would magically solve themselves rather than fixing the actual structural problems.
  • ngruhn 9mo ago
    > If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time I can't recall that this happened to me. The "lucky" scenario is when the connecting train is even more late so you can still catch it.
  • tim333 9mo ago
    In the UK the railways used to be kind of bad in the nationalised British Rail days. People moan about the current privatised rail but it mostly works.
    • vintagedave 9mo ago
      It is also extraordinarily expensive, and since the cuts in the 1960s you have a fraction of the railway lines. It is absolutely terrible. Who knows if it was better in the nationalised days, but it sure needs some unification and central governance without a profit motive today.
      • dash2 9mo ago
• adwelly 9mo ago
  It is a remarkable change in attitude. Back in the day DB was one of the best train services in Europe. It had British Rail of the same era on the ropes.
• jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago
  As a North American it's fun to read a story about trains "being bad". The light rail in my city routinely just breaks in the winter. Everybody is afraid to use it and drives instead. A 20-60 minute delay would be unexceptional, and it wouldn't even take you close to where you're actually going.
• cynicalsecurity 9mo ago
  Too much drama.
• konradha 9mo ago
  I do hope that sufficient humiliation will suffice for DB leadership to enact harsh measures. German precision and punctuality are still there in its people. It's not lost yet.
  • r9295 9mo ago
    This has been the case since I moved to Germany, 6 years ago. National humiliation is apparently an insufficient detterent.
    • konradha 9mo ago
      The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind well. It depends where you're from -- there is always potential for dramatic change in a people as obedient as the German.
• Zufriedenheit 9mo ago
  DB is well known to be used as a "golden parachute" by german politicians. When they loose popularity in politics they escape by giving themselves a high payed position at state owned DB company. Problem is they have no knowledge in managing a railroad.
• codesections 9mo ago
  > At some point you stop being a passenger and start being cargo. It’s much worse than that – FedEx would never treat cargo like that. If they took cargo further away from its destination than it started and then left it there for the customer to sort out, that would break so many SLAs …
• postit 9mo ago
  “I don’t know how to say that in English, but this train does not exist”
• rcbdev 9mo ago
  I never understood why the Germans cannot get their shit together on commercial train travel. Austria manages to coordinate a wonderful federal train system across nine federal states without issues via the ÖBB, the Swiss also seem to have it down.
  • Psychoshy_bc1q 9mo ago
    We have a huge carlobby who wants you to use cars.
  • apexalpha 9mo ago
    Fundamentally, the Germans tried to cheap out on high speed trains by trying to engineer them to run on normal tracks so they didn't have to build new, expensive high-speed tracks like France and Japan did. This is the fundamental mistake underpinning their train service since the long distance trains frequently have to wait for other trains to pass, cascading delays through the system. That and an almost criminal level of underinvestment in the past 20 years or so.
• CurtMonash 9mo ago
  My first thought on seeing the headline was: Charlie on the M. T. A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A
  • BrenBarn 9mo ago
    Ha, that was my immediate thought as well!
  • jsnell 9mo ago
    So that is what the classic "Cheney on MTA" Lisp implementation paper was named after. It felt like a reference, but I never had an idea about what it was referring to. Thanks!
• petre 9mo ago
  If this had happened in Eastern Europe, someone would have probably pulled the emergency brake and ran off.
  • mcv 9mo ago
    I would not have blamed them.
• hackandthink 9mo ago
  There are also pleasant experiences when traveling by train, but rarely in Germany. The Swiss railways are excellent and friendly. In Milan, I was unable to catch the reserved train to Zurich, but the conductors on the Swiss train that was just departing even accepted my ticket for the Italian railway.
• kwanbix 9mo ago
  I lived in Berlin for 10 years. In my experience, people complain too much about German public transport. But comming from a south american country with reasonably good public transport, I found German's one very good. The only thing I can agree is the "speaking only in german as if it was the lingua franca of the world". Germany is part of the EU. The EU has 24 langueages. You should at least speak in English. And no, my mother language is not english but spanish.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• tedggh 9mo ago
  I rode DB many times, all over Germany and from Düsseldorf to Cologne weekly for months. Luckily, never had an issue. By far my worst experience has been Trenitalia. I lost a couple of connections during the same vacation because the train was late and in both opportunities no one could tell me what to do, let alone give me a refund. In one trip the teller while exhaling cigarette smoke on my face shrugged then suggested I took a bus from Campiglia to Piombino, which ended up been one of the scariest rides of my life (I have crossed the Andes in South America by speeding buses racing each other with 200 ft exposed cliff drops on the side, so I’m not strange to scary rides)
  • pflenker 9mo ago
    When was that? DB has gotten much worse in the past ~5 years
• tdiff 9mo ago
  It just destroys the "eco" image of deutsche railways. Well, I'm all pro public transport, but please make it work first.
• drnick1 9mo ago
  And this is precisely why I don't use public transit when traveling on vacation and rent cars instead. I also don't fly unless the drive is longer than 7 to 8 hours. Driving in Germany is also reasonably fun.
• giorgioz 9mo ago
  On the other end Germany has a great used-cars markets. So if you feel the train service is consuming too much of your time that you can allocate better, evaluate if buying a used car is an improvement.
• bytesandbits 9mo ago
  The issue there is the comp. 1.5 euro doesn't make sense. should be O(50). If the compensation (which for DB is a fine in a way) is not high, DB has no incentives to do better.
  • lorenzhs 9mo ago
    Good news for you! 1.5 is in O(50) since they’re both constants! (It’s 1.50 because the author has the 58€-a-month flat rate ticket for all local and regional services in the entire country. If you buy a regular ticket, you get back 25% of the ticket price for delays over an hour and 50% for delays over two hours)
    • bytesandbits 9mo ago
      25% for 1h?? L O L it should be 100%. A delay of 1h is extremely inadmissible. Try doing this in Japan
• bitcurious 9mo ago
  My most recent Deutsche Bahn train was announced as being 3 hours late. I watched a few passengers leave the station to grab coffee nearby. The train arrived 10 minutes later, and left 5 minutes after that. The whole system seems broken.
• mystifyingpoi 9mo ago
  The term "kidnapped" is kinda over the top, but I can understand the author. I've travelled with Polish trains a lot when studying, and there were a few situations like this. Especially frustrating, if the train stops because of "some issue" while you can literally see the platform 200m away. No, you can't get out and walk the track (which will be guaranteed to be empty, because well, the train is broken) and take a bus or something, no, you have to sit there for ~2h until a replacement engine gets there.
  • jstanley 9mo ago
    > The term "kidnapped" is kinda over the top If you got in a taxi to take you 35km away and he drove you 60km away to a random other town instead, would you consider "kidnapped" to be over the top? Does it only count as "kidnap" if you are not eventually released? Or is it just that it's not kidnap when a corporation does it?
    • Valakas_ 9mo ago
      From the Cambridge dictionary: kidnap: to take a person away illegally by force, usually in order to demand money in exchange for releasing them. The "usually" refers to the money, but the part that is "always" is the existence of an intent. There was no intent here. This was a mistake, not on purpose. Nobody would say, unless to make a joke, "i was kidnapped by an elevator" Because the elevator works automatically, it has no intent to take the person by force and hold them hostage. Can't believe i had to type this down.
      • jstanley 9mo ago
        There plainly was intent. The train operator deliberately drove the train, with passengers on it, to places they knew the passengers didn't want to go, and did not allow them a chance to get out sooner. If a taxi driver were to do the same thing we would say he kidnapped his passengers. The fact that trains are operated by big corporations does not absolve them of responsibility. If anything they should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. (I can't believe I had to type this down.)
• apexalpha 9mo ago
  I once took the train from Berlin to Netherlands. Just after Hannover but before Dusseldorf and such the train stopped: fire next to the tracks. Honestly, not DB fault this time. Luckily DB trains have a restaurant/cafe in them. I went to get some food but the man behind the counter told me it was closed. I asked him how since he was the seller, he stood there, there was power and internet. What's the problem? Well, he said. And I shit you not: my shift is up. I have worked 8 hours. I am done. And he was serious. Never mind that he was stuck on the train, just like us. Never mind that the replacement obviously wasn't there yet since they were stuck waiting on the next platform. Nope. He works 8 hours. 8 hours done. He done. A thousand thirsty and hungry (and annoyed) on his train. He has food, drinks and time. But he just didn't give a shit. He just stood there, for 2 hours, waiting to get off. To Dutch people German civil servants are like NPCs following a very narrow script. It's baffling.
  • Ekaros 9mo ago
    Sounds extremely reasonable to me. Not all people want to work extra hours for free.
    • xenonite 9mo ago
      Indeed, but I guess that the seller got compensated anyways for the extra two hours of delayed arrival.
• giorgioz 9mo ago
  Your 2025 Train Delay Wrapped https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
• snr243 9mo ago
  Tbh this is just another average trip using DB. I was on a RB from Munich to Kochel and the driver decided to stop in the middle of a field for reasons best known to them, the other time I took an ICE from Stuttgart we were marooned at Augsburg.
• xxmarkuski 9mo ago
  When you have a simple journey and no interruptions DB in long distance is pretty good, not excellent but solid. But with more complicated things traveling with DB is not well thought out and they don't see what could be possible. Changing a platform should show you in-station navigation door to door. DB navigator should not show you impossible journeys, it presents you with train switches where the second train already left once you arrive or displays the stop is canceled entirely. DB Navigator and bahn.de have a monopoly over german train routing and ticketing, but are not subject to anti-trust regulation enough or run by the government directly (dataquality issues, etc). DB is very much against grassroots movements trying to improve customer experience and quality, like community built ticket stores or wallet and calendar integration. I also think the ministry of transportation and politicians are at fault for not getting DB to step up their game. Trying to privatize DB, rigid regulations for how DB has to run and not enough attention to rail as a whole for example. I would consider the "ampel" (21-24) to be one of the better ones. After some reforms, the government is still not in a position to control the monopolist enough.
• tipsysquid 9mo ago
  The most maddening part about this experience is the helplessness. Its inconvenient, sure. Ive been late because of traffic, etc. Being carried along well beyond my will without a breakglass: Fine, I'll just walk! option makes my skin crawl. Events like this seem to only be explained by accountability sink[0]. Naming it gives me some brief sense of sanity. I appreciate that there is a safety concern; where's the humanity in large systems, especially as we trend towards more automation? [0] https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
• grishka 9mo ago
  As a Russian, this is such a bonkers idea to me. I only took a Deutsche Bahn train once so far. It got delayed 20 minutes. When I complained about it on social media, I was told something like "what do you mean, it arrived and took you where you wanted to go". Russian trains only get delayed if there's something seriously wrong. Like an accident or an act of sabotage because of the war. A month or so ago, a Sapsan train from St Petersburg to Moscow broke down en route. People had to wait for hours to get out. It made big news. As far as I can tell, this is a weekly occurrence in Germany.
• torcete 9mo ago
  I guess a brave soul would have pulled the alarm at Troisdorf.
• stockresearcher 9mo ago
  I used DB quite a few times last month and all of the delays and problems were listed on the trip planner website (in German and in English) despite there being no notifications at the departure station and the train driver speaking in German only when communicating. We had a trip planned in which we needed a specific train. The website said “there has been an incident on the tracks. There will be a delay of 20-50 minutes waiting for a platform. Not all connections will be made,” and that is exactly what happened. This worked for our time window so we took the train. But there were a lot of confused and upset passengers who had absolutely no idea what was going on. I’m sure DB has many problems, but one of them appears to be communication that surely isn’t too difficult to fix.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• Atlas667 9mo ago
  Watch the neoliberals feed off of rigid bureaucratic incompetence to pander for privatization and create for-profit bureaucratic incompetence. All with massive subsidies that citizens will pay through taxes or cutting of public services elsewhere. Gotta love the "free" market and "democracy".
  • abigail95 9mo ago
    Why is DB worse than other operators of similar legal structure and funding, in terms of free markets and democracy, from your perspective?
    • Atlas667 9mo ago
      I'm not gonna pretend I know about the specifics of DB, but tales of crappy public services are plenty around the world and a lot of the critique is aimed at enabling privatization. My anecdotal evidence is that these public entities usually suffer from lack of funding or incompetence fueled by corruption, that usually takes a few forms: - the contracting of work to a third party with kickback (incentives to continously do sloppy work) - inaction due to lack of corrupting opportunities (leaders try but cant set up a good fraud scheme) - nepotism that leads to incompetence And lack of funding can and has been weaponized to cause a shitty service to then set the pretext for privatization. Usually there are private interests behind this public policy decision. The more menial reason for lack of funding is sometimes massive spending or subsidies for capitalists elsewhere which skews the budget. And of course also the intense bureacracy needed due to lack of democratic control. Yes, im saying people dont actually have a say and they could have a say. IE delegate democracy. These are just universal problems of modern capitalist economies and their bourgeois politics. Quite possibly DB suffers from these more intensely than others.
• Bewelge 9mo ago
  To all non-Germans who might get scared by this blogpost: While there's valid issues to complain about, this blogpost is really hyperbole. And frankly, to someone who has lived in the area, it reads purposefully disingenuous. Just enter the places he mentions on Google Maps. Everything in NRW is so close together that to travel between cities you can often choose between international trains, regional trains or even just public transport. The connection he needed, is serviced several times per hour by several different train lines. Why did he stay on that specific train when he heard his stop would be skipped? The only reason I can think of is to write this blogpost. Since he's local to the area he should have known better. Also it's worth noting that driving that same route by car, at that time, just a couple of hours before everyone starts their Christmas dinner, might've taken even longer. I'm not trying to deny common issues with the DB but the author tried to travel through the densest urban area in the whole of Europe during the busiest 2-hour window of the whole year. AND he made a bad judgement call. To leave the transportation hub, staying on a long distance train which was already being re-routed. Funnily enough, the fact that every "Kuhdorf" needs to be connected by train is one of the difficulties the DB faces for which there is no easy solution. And if a long-distance train needs to decide between dropping some stops which can also be reached by short-distance trains or delaying the whole train, I think that dropping those short-distance stops is absolutely the correct choice.
  • tartoran 9mo ago
    > Why did he stay on that specific train when he heard his stop would be skipped? The only reason I can think of is to write this blogpost. Since he's local to the area he should have known better. Because the train didn't stop?
• niemandhier 9mo ago
  It’s a system run at the absolute border of what is possible and that was designed with the “just enough” philosophy in mind. You cannot add a stop if the rails are single track and the next train is just behind you. If you do said train will be delayed, will not be able to switch tracks at its final destination ( since it has a hard slot for that) and errors cascade. It’s the best possible train system, given how little was invested …
  • 3ds 9mo ago
    Exactly! When you spend billions on car infrastructure but hardly anything on rails, there will be issues. What people don’t write clickbaity blog posts about is how in general things work very well. I’m currently sitting on a train from Nuremberg to Berlin and it takes less than three hours, it’s on time, quiet and just a good experience. This trip used to take five hours but then the high speed rail track got completed and cut the time by two hours. Wonderful!
    • Etheryte 9mo ago
      Things do not work well in general. DB is internationally infamous for its garbage service because everyone who has ever taken DB has a horror story. I lived in Germany some years ago and not once did I manage to catch a train that was on time for both arrival and departure. And this doesn't even touch on the topic of being stranded in the middle of nowhere as a regular occurrence.
      • cyphar 9mo ago
        As someone who has caught DB a fair number of times over the years, I think DB is most hated by Germans (who love to complain) and German locals. Maybe I've just been lucky so far, but as an Aussie it is hard to overstate the fact it is even possible to travel almost anywhere within the country and between several other countries by train for fairly cheap is already quite miraculous to me. Yeah, I've run into a fair few issues and it was annoying but that goes for every country I've been to (Japan had the least by far but trains still get delayed there more often than people think and I've also run into situations as in TFA where if I didn't speak Japanese things would've ended up worse). I'm not sure I'd even put DB in my "bottom three" in terms of overall experience. Should it be much better? Of course. But if you listen to Germans it sounds like DB is the worst train network in the universe by a clear margin, and that's just obviously not true.
• Taek 9mo ago
  Oh man, DB has one of the worst experiences in my well traveled history. If you don't buy a seat, you don't get a seat. I was taking the 4am train 8 hours from Brussels to Berlin, and I bought seats for both legs of the trip. To sleep, of course. The first leg of the trip was delayed, so they gave me a free ticket on the next train, 40 minutes later, but with no seat. So, exhausted as all hell and wanting nothing more than a little nap, I was forced to stand in one of the hallways between the carriages, unable to rest much even vertically because people had to push past me to get to the bathroom. Absolutely horrid experience.
• WA 9mo ago
  Deutsche Bahn is a joke among Germans by now. It is THAT bad. It's utterly unreliable. We pretend everything is fine, that we have some functioning infrastructure, but it just pretends. They have some policy that they need to give you a reason for a delay and they'd happily announce something like "we're late because of another train in front of us" and the irony is, of course, the train in front of us is probably late, too, and you never get to know the real reason. No, strike that. The real reason is because the entire system is completely messed up. Train time tables are fantasy by now. > In DB’s official statistics, a train counts as “on time” if it’s less than six minutes late.1 Cancelled trains are not counted at all.2 If a train doesn’t exist, it cannot be late. This is true and it is ridiculous.
• eviks 9mo ago
  > Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so we are on the wrong tracks. We cannot stop.” And of course there is some huge fine or even potentially jail time if you moo in protest and pull that nice red lever to avoid the Christmas present of this bureaucratic idiocy (after all, you have legs that are capable of crossing train tracks and eyes to do that safely)?
  • zb3 9mo ago
    It's for emergency.. if that happened to me I'd argue in court that I thought the driver went insane (because a system can't work like that) so it qualified as emergency.. But back to my country (Poland), it's better here - some had problems with physically getting out on the right station, and when the conductor saw it she even encouraged us to pull this lever in those cases so we don't have to get out at the wrong station.
    • morkalork 9mo ago
      Hyper-ventilate some, scream "Its too hot in here, I think I'm dying!" and presto-bango your very first panic attack and mental breakdown.
• lloydatkinson 9mo ago
  Sounds like an average day on UK trains, particularly Northern Rail.
• filmor 9mo ago
  The RE5 is operated by National Express. You have not been kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn. The connection in question is probably https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494-3e9d-803b-114b8e01ab0a https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494.... According to this page, it actually did stop at Troisdorf (though, that doesn't have to be correct). I don't see why they should have been able to stop at Neuwied but not any of the stations in between. Most of them are possibly too small, as the RE5 is quite long for a regional train, about 200m. The usual "RE" on this track, the RE8, is only about 110m max. Bonn-Beuel should have worked, though.
  • amai 9mo ago
    So there are actually train companies in Germany that are worse than Deutsche Bahn? https://nationalexpress.de/de/ https://nationalexpress.de/de/
• csmpltn 9mo ago
  Are we green enough yet? Would’ve been nice to take the car instead of this, eh?
• pranavm27 9mo ago
  There is one part of the world where nothing movies without rules. And then there's another where rules are joke and everyone optimises for personal efficiency. What should be the sweet spot?
• nickdothutton 9mo ago
  We have this sickness in the UK too. I think it may be terminal. It is some combination of regulation, not trusting anyone's initiative, mindless rule-following, "safetyism", never empowering front-line staff to make decisions, managerial tier expansion, and a few other things besides like infrastructure neglect, "financialisation", and general ignorance of the world of things, of the real, and over-reliance on the world of words, of laws, of construct on paper and not in steel and stone.
• tiku 9mo ago
  And I thought the Dutch Railways (NS, Nationale Spoorwegen) where weird.. We mostly have issues with trains not showing up, but then the next one arrives in 20 minutes so it usually isn't a big problem (unless you are cutting it close). We had a lot of issues in the past with the first leaves falling on the track or a bit of snow. And they ordered trains without toilets. So also cattle trucks. And have I mentioned that you pay a lot for this "service"? second class, normal costs: €18,80 to get from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back, 50 kilometers.
• helloguillecl 9mo ago
  Something similar happened to me between Essen and Dortmund while trying to get to the airport. The train stoped around 50 minutes between stations without a chance of getting off the train. I lost my flight as a result. I have also been left in remote villages when the last train of the day broke for some reason at 12:30 am. All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to suppress. I agree with some comenters that German companies seem to prefer to stuck with Bureaucracy other than finding what could be confortable or even human solutions.
  • cbmuser 9mo ago
    > All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to suppress. No one is trying to suppress Uber. They are just obligated to adhere to the law like anyone else in this business.
• pama 9mo ago
  Totally reminds me of Manhattan subways deciding to skip 6 stops after making some static noise on the speakers that nobody understands, and leaving you on a station that you have to pay reentry fee to go back the five stops you overrun (or run the lottery of staying for longer in case the next stop has an easy transfer.) Hopefully some day these absurdities of modern life will be fixed.
  • rendall 9mo ago
    That reminds me in turn of a joke we used to have, that the afterlife is being on a subway car with constant, unclear, but important announcements. Maybe this stop is heaven, maybe hell, maybe nirvana, maybe oblivion. There's no way to tell. Getting off at the wrong stop would be catastrophic. So, you remain, forever, riding in this afterlife subway car.
• stodor89 9mo ago
  It's wild how in 30 years DB went from national pride to national embarrassment.
• rramon 9mo ago
  No accessible emergency brakes?
• tomesch1982 9mo ago
  Clickbait. The opening paragraph contains some factual errors (you can only get kicked off a train when you do something illegal) and the whole story lives by exaggeration and missing facts. It is as moronic as saying people were kidnapped when a plane had to divert because of the weather. Also he would have been entitled to get a paid cab ride to his destination when that happens. But that is just one of the facts he did not mention. This story should be ignored and tossed into the local legends garbage.
  • blitz_skull 9mo ago
    [flagged]
  • aspect0545 9mo ago
    Of course there’s exaggeration. Nobody really believes this person was kidnapped by the German train company. People do get kicked off trains, usually it’s the entire train that is being emptied. Happened to me in NRW. Happened to me in Brandenburg. When there’s a problem with the train, then sometimes it has to be evacuated. He would have not been entitled to a cab ride by the way, he was travelling with Deutschlandticket. Your entire comment is not only pedantic, it’s also completely wrong lol.
  • meta-level 9mo ago
    Yes, you get kicked off. If the train is too full. I got kicked off myself and friends also told me they had to leave the train for the same reason.
  • JeremyTheo 9mo ago
    Kicked Off = we have to stop for some technical reasons that are further unspecified, and everyone has to leave the train because we are driving now in the opposite direction. a replacement bus is coming. Once every hour. With a capacity of 8 people. In some cow village 50km far away from the next city. With no cab service available. Thats was what i meant What facts are missing in your opinion?
  • tossandthrow 9mo ago
    Entitled to what? He could try to do it on his own accord - they have leverage to decline and he'd have to take it through several other over burdened agencies. He could also try getting into contact with DB, and good luck with that. My own DB story was from Hamburg hbf where 3 huge DB employers was standing guard in front of reisenzentrum (the customer service counter) and yelling at every own being incredibly rude. DB is a joke, and it is imploding on itself. Staff seems so stressed and embarrassed by being a part of it.
• otikik 9mo ago
  > Hello everyone. Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so we are on the wrong tracks. We cannot stop. Of course the train could not stop. It was not registered!
• renewiltord 9mo ago
  To think that, once we complete CA HSR, we too could have experiences like this. In fact, one of the best reasons to get trains in the US is so that we too can end up farther from our destination than when we started.
• jasonvorhe 9mo ago
  I guess that's what happens if you live in a failed state. It's like watching an accident happen in super slow motion. I live rather remotely and 90% of bus drivers don't even speak German so when they skip a station despite you pushing the button to signal wanting to exit, you basically can't even communicate, leading to having to walk up to 2km with all your grocery bags.
  • hexbin010 9mo ago
    Did you really just blame immigration for the German railway's issues...?
    • jasonvorhe 9mo ago
      wtf? No.
      • hexbin010 9mo ago
        "failed state" coupled with "don't even speak German" seemed like dog whistles What did you mean by failed state?
        • jasonvorhe 9mo ago
          It's difficult having an honest discussion if participants claim to sense barely perceptible noises where there aren't any. One attribute of a failed state is that it can no longer provide public services. German bridges are in dire need of repair, some just crumbled last year. Trains aren't on time if they ride at all. Bordering countries already complain about this affecting their schedules as well. Another attribute is crime. We've seen a rise in knife attacks over the last few years. German cities try to curb this via weapon-free zones with no effect because making something illegal doesn't fix the root cause. Then there's this intellectually offensive and unnecessarily expensive security theatre at local christmas markets. Next is state legitimacy. After last year's elections which followed a government collapse, the old (collapsed!) cabinet was brought back in to support a debt-driven military budget that the new cabinet wouldn't have approved. The Election Scrutiny Committee decided against a recount of the votes for a specific party that didn't make it into the Bundestag because of a missing votes to reach a requirement while there were many reports of votes having been mishandled - even in many previous elections. Not to forget the complete lack of interest in investigating critical infrastructure being destroyed that now affects the entire industrial core of the country. Then there's corruption: Mask deals, Cum ex, Azerbaijan as just rather recent examples involving national and international scandals. Economy: Barely any growth, inflation beyond the official numbers, rising energy prices (spot prices partially tripled in the ~5 years). I could go on. I know it's a far cry from "gangs rule the streets" levels of "failed state" but compared to some slightly saner Western governments and compared to pre-2020 Germany, it's quite the failure with no signs for improvements.
• canada_dry 9mo ago
  > A journey of 35 kilometers, or, in DB units, somewhere between forty-five minutes and the heat death of the universe. A bit like "no frills" airlines in the west.
• 7moritz7 9mo ago
  I can't wait for Italo and Trenitalia to enter the German market, it can only get better. It's already at rock bottom for long distance. Short distance with foreign train companies is bearable (Westbahn, transdev, RXX...)
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• britzsquad 9mo ago
  For my job, I travel all over Germany very often. I take the car, train, bus, or sometimes even the plane. The train is the most comfortable means of transportation in Germany. Of course, there are delays, and sometimes mistakes happen that result in very long delays. But where doesn't that happen? I find traveling by car to be the worst. How many times this year have I been stuck in traffic jams for several hours without being able to go forward or backward? No one pays me compensation for being late. With the train, I even get some of my money back if we are late. I find this blog post ridiculous. The rail system in Germany is extremely complex and tightly scheduled. We have regional, long-distance, and freight traffic on the same tracks. Of course, the train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem. Grow up. For those who are interested: I traveled from Berlin to Konstanz for the Christmas holidays, and both trips were on time. I paid €70 per trip and didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow. I worked on my laptop for 6 hours on both trips. It couldn't have been more relaxed.
  • eigenspace 9mo ago
    I'm glad at least someone has a sense of proportion here. German trains have problems for sure, but the train system in Germany is nonetheless fantastic.
    • DiogenesKynikos 9mo ago
      It's fantastic compared to Amtrak. It's terrible compared to the Swiss, Chinese or Japanese rail systems, or even just the Deutsche Bahn 20 years ago.
    • AmazingTurtle 9mo ago
      lmfao sorry to say that to both of you: were you lobotomized?
  • ivan_gammel 9mo ago
    I don’t think it’s ridiculous. A complex system that delivers customer further from destination than they were originally from, is flawed by design. And we all know what the problem is exactly: it is the design for capabilities that the company could not afford based on its budget/planning/KPIs. DB did not invest enough in infrastructure to support the big dream, and now they also have huge aging and retiring workforce problem. So let’s not pretend it’s normal and business as usual: complexity is not an excuse for mismanagement.
• dnrvs 9mo ago
  > Scheduled arrival in Bonn see that was your second mistake (first mistake was trying to use DB)
• N19PEDL2 9mo ago
  Couldn't he just use the passenger brakes to stop the train while it was passing in Troisdorf?
  • integralid 9mo ago
    He could, but that would be a very expensive stop.
• Havoc 9mo ago
  Need to fly to Germany and take DB tomorrow to/from airport and dreading it despite speaking German. Right out the gate 1st class tickets being half the price of standard tickets on same train does not fill me with confidence that this is organized in coherent fashion
• uliuscaesarjr 9mo ago
  I'll take Deutsche Bahn over Amtrack anyday. They should expand here.
• paxys 9mo ago
  Didn't realize I should file a kidnapping charge every time the train I'm on randomly decides to go express and skip my stop. The MTA is apparently the largest kidnapper and human trafficker in history!
• kunley 9mo ago
  "Kidnapped", c'mon
• kenanfyi 9mo ago
  I read the story and I felt like the mentioned background characters in it, saying "Deutsche Bahn..." to myself at the end of every paragraph. Once I was travelling back to home from Munich and the train stopped somewhere in Frankfurt in the middle of nowhere. Literally stopped on the tracks and it was completely dark outside except some far away lights from the houses around. We waited for 3 hours, with 2-3 explanations which did not make any sense. After 3 hours the train started riding again and I arrived in Cologne, which is ~1h away from home still, and they said this is the last station. I needed to spend the night in Cologne in a hotel, because it was 3 o'clock in the morning and there was no other train to my hometown. Fortunately I was able to get a refund plus the hotel cost for that night back.
  • hexbin010 9mo ago
    3 hours!! Unbelievable. In the UK we would smash the doors/windows open these days after an hour or two. We got sick of the railway having no contingency plans for getting people off stuck trains in bad conditions
• qingcharles 9mo ago
  I often think about people in the USA, they might have some misdemeanor warrant for some traffic infraction they didn't know about on the other side of the country. They get stopped for speeding near their home in Florida, the police arrest them, take them to the county jail where they are stuck without bond waiting for extradition to the county where the warrant was issued. You might wait a few weeks in a cell, then you can spend another five weeks stuck in the back of a van, pissing into a cup while they drive you 3000 miles to Seattle, stopping at 25 other jails on the way. Only for Seattle to give you a court date and kick you out of the door with nothing except the clothes on your back. Except it's 40°F and you were arrested in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. The cops in Florida have your phone and wallet. You have no phone numbers. You have no money. You're 3000 miles from home. Good luck, champ! (this is a real thing that happens regularly in the USA)
  • driverdan 9mo ago
    How does this relate to the post?
• oxag3n 9mo ago
  Following inflexible procedures to the letters and not to the spirit reminded me Swissair Flight 111, any aircraft fire today would result in quicker decision to land nowadays. I think Swiss are even more strict than Germans (at least when I lived there and frequently traveled to Germany), it's a blessing and a curse.
• MrDresden 9mo ago
  I've attempted to take two DB trains this year, while travelling both through Germany and with Berlin as a destination. In the end there were seven trains, and 8 hours extra lost travelling with DB. My compensation was pitiful. Living in the Netherlands (not native Dutch) I will now rather fly than take a train if it means that I can avoid using DB. For contrast, tomorrow morning I am heading from the Netherlands to Paris with a train (non DB), and don't really expect anything but a pleasant and smooth journey.
• mvk666 9mo ago
  should've just pulled the emergency brake and ran...
• LargoLasskhyfv 9mo ago
  Should have taken the KVB/SWB line 16 from Cologne HBF to Bonn Bad Godesberg Rheinalle/BF instead, and the bus line 855 from there to Meckenheim BF, or so :) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnwagen_B#/media/File:KVB2043_SWB7752_Thielenbruch.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnwagen_B#/media/File:K... / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinuferbahn https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinuferbahn / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnstrecke_Bonn%E2%80%93Bad_Godesberg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnstrecke_Bonn%E2%80%93... )
• aswegs8 9mo ago
  Things like these happen _all the time_ with DB.
• vadiml 9mo ago
  What is strange that NOBODY pulled emergency stop
• amai 9mo ago
  The title should be changed. It should be: "Kidnapped by National Express". Because the train mentioned in the article is not operated by Deutsche Bahn, but by National Express, see https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494-3e9d-803b-114b8e01ab0a https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494... National Express is actually a subsidiary of the British train operator Mobico Group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Express_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Express_Germany
  • constantcrying 9mo ago
    No. The problem with DB are not the trains or the personnel on the trains. The problem is that the tracks are in miserable condition and that they are operated in a terrible way. The fault in this case is 100% with DB. Nobody else is to blame. Shifting the blame away from DB, who is responsible for creating the terrible track conditions and is responsible for the operations, to the train operator, who zero ability to influence what DB is doing is just totally unfair. DB is at fault here, they lead the train onto the wrong tracks and they also caused the previous delays. Regional trains in Germany have many different kinds of operators. Taking any of them is always miserable in exactly the same way, which is in almost every case caused by DB, because they can not operate the train network. What is worse is that these operators also get into conflict with the DB trains. E.g. they prioritize a DB train, which is already late, over a regional train, causing delays for regional trains.
  • hopelite 9mo ago
    Would you happen to know if they would be using their own branded/livery trains, or would they be using DB trains, or maybe just DB cars pulled by a British locomotive? It just raises so many questions in my mind that of all entities, a British train operator would be operating a train that is bounded within the German rail system. My first thought is that it's some kind of counter-union effort through fake "competition" by bringing in foreign, private operators into the network.
    • stefanlindbohm 9mo ago
      Competition on the railways is mandated through EU law. Most regional services are tendered to the (in theory) best operator. The details on how, both which governing body organises the tender and whether the trains are branded by the region or the operator, varies across Europe. In Germany, these contracts are operated by a mix of DB, foreign state-owned operators and private operators. DB sells tickets for all region-organised trains regardless of who is the current operator. Most countries have decided to have no or limited tenders on long-distance trains. In Germany, government support is prohibited for long-distance.
• _Microft 9mo ago
  This train (RE5 (RRX) 28521) is not operated by Deutsche Bahn. The operator is called National Express. Their trains look completely different than the ones of Deutsche Bahn. https://nationalexpress.de/de/re5 https://nationalexpress.de/de/re5
• jen729w 9mo ago
  I’d have pushed the red emergency button.
• andyjohnson0 9mo ago
  Ahh... Chesterton's Fence anyone? Is it possible that running a railway at a national scale is harder than people who merely travel on it reckon?
• StopDisinfo910 9mo ago
  Plenty of people here will probably focus on the Deutsche Bahn debacle but the problem is larger. You have to understand that Germany is currently led by a mix of trauma and economy as religion rather than reason to get a sense of what is happening. To simplify, Germany is somehow convinced that any inflation and rules deviation is an unstoppable slippery slope towards a return to the 20s and paving the way to some kind of nazi apocalypse. They therefore follow a rigid economic system, ordoliberalism, which to put it nicely, doesn't have a strong academic following. As a result, they have implemented a mercantilist economy using internal devaluation while shielded by the euro and stubbornly refuse to recycle their surplus in the union or even in the country. You get this absurd situation where they have enshrined a balanced budget in their constitution while their median household wealth is bellow Italy, their infrastructures is crumbling, a significant portion of their savings finance foreign debts - especially bad foreign debts judging by what they lost with the Lehman bankruptcy - their industry fails to invest and the country is basically non ironically saving itself to irrelevance. Honestly, if it wasn't for the beggar thy neighbors policies and them mostly refusing transfers despite benefiting hugely from the currency at the expense of the poorer members, it would be amongst the funniest quirk of history.
• pm3003 9mo ago
  I've seen this in the same region, possibly on this exact line last year. I was going from Paris to Copenhagen, managed to have only 5 hours of delay. The return journey took 30 hours more and I could only get one hotel night reimbursed. I changed my ticket to get a French train as soon as possible. Other survival story: I lived in Northern Germany in the late 2000s as a young exchange student. Almost all the DB lines in the region would go through a particular railway node where, almost every Friday, someone (probably an evil reincarnator) would commit suicide, blocking the whole region. My reflex: so as soon as the train would stop, I'd get out, get a taxi, then convince 4 other people to go to Hamburg or even Hannover with me, sharing the cost. Never regretted.
• exabrial 9mo ago
  I had a 10am international flight to the US out of Munich. I boarded the train at the central station at 7am. At 8:15 they dropped us off several stops away from the airport, claiming this train could not continue because it was so delayed. So we hung out in the country... I finally go to the airport at 9am, rushed to the gate, but they people manning the counter had left (it's usually the flight attendants that man the counters I guess). I called the airline to try to get someone up there, but after waiting 45min on hold the flight had boarded and it was too late. also, whatever jackass put ellipsis "..." substitution on the Munich flight board because "H32" or whatever was too long to fit into to their div and they couldn't bear messing out their UI, needs a flogging. The UI on the flight board is completely useless, but OH does it it look pretty
• insane_dreamer 9mo ago
  Can someone explain why, with Germany's reputation of being so well organized, great engineering, great manufacturing, they can't get the trains to run on time? It should be like Switzerland and instead it's like Italy. Doesn't compute for me.
• didntknowyou 9mo ago
  At that point I wonder if it's reasonable to pull the alarm so they have an emergency stop?
• vidarh 9mo ago
  I like the Norwegian model: The train company is obliged to put up alternative transport to your destination. If they don't provide an alternative within reasonable time, you can demand refunds for documented costs for alternative transport up to fairly reasonable limits. I've been bundled into taxis by the train operator in Norway because it was expected, but also likely cheaper for them to ensure full taxis than have people arrange it themselves and end up with everyone able to demand the maximum refund. The costs are low enough that it's not a problem if it happens occasionally, but does create some real pressure to actually fix issues if it happens often enough.
  • tEem21 9mo ago
    This has been EU-wide legislation for quite some time, see https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-rights/rail/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...
    • srcreigh 9mo ago
      > EU countries can decide to exempt some rail services. These exceptions may apply to urban, suburban, regional, long-distance domestic trains
• MomsAVoxell 8mo ago
  I lived in Germany for a while, and thus had a DB card, which allowed me to get discount tickets and stuff to go anywhere I needed in the Deutsch region. It was pretty fun, I used it a lot, those beer/disco clubs on the train between Düsseldorf and Bonn and Frankfurt, whoa, just .. really used to be fun. So its real sad to hear of, what was once a great institutions’, demise ..