[ceejayoz]

Here in the US, Amtrak considers within 30 minutes to be "on time"... and struggles a lot even with that.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-amtrak-cant-run-trains-on-t...

> The Coast Starlight, which runs between Seattle and Los Angeles, had an on-time performance of 4 percent in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30. For the California Zephyr, connecting Chicago and San Francisco, the figure was 7 percent. In the current fiscal year, the California Zephyr has not once arrived on time.

[glofish]

ok but the California Zephyr covers 4000 km - that's like going from Madrid to Moscow - I doubt any train or set of trains over that distance ever arrives on time.

[ceejayoz]

Amtrak doesn't fare much better when you evaluate it on smaller sections of the routes. Not owning the rails tends to put them at the mercy of freight trains. I've seen some of the longer routes on https://asm.transitdocs.com/map have 1-2 day delays marked at times. I arrived eight hours late the last time I went from Rochester to NYC (~500 km).

Look at https://asm.transitdocs.com/train/2019/12/13/19 and you'll see it's been losing substantial time at almost every stop along the way.

Ride some Swiss or German trains and then try out Amtrak and the difference will be difficult to deny.

[vinay427]

I live in Switzerland and in my anecdotal experience with only a few samples of each (which is not statistically valid but affects my immediate perception nonetheless), Amtrak has been somewhere around as punctual as Deutsche Bahn including on Amtrak's longer routes. The long-distance Amtrak routes also have far more comfortable rolling stock, but that's only natural for a 10+ hour route.

I once took a Czech train which was perfectly on time to connect with a German train which was delayed enough that I'd miss my next German train, except that delay ended up not mattering because the second German train was also delayed, but then the second train was completely canceled so I ended up waiting in a random city to be rerouted on completely different trains.

I'm sure DB is better than Amtrak in general, but the current state of DB is much more pathetic to me given its better performance in the past (AFAIK, tried to find data on this). The infrastructure and political will seem to exist to do better, which isn't generally the case with Amtrak, so it seems less excusable to me.

[glofish]

Sure, I got no love for Amtrak. Just pointing out that we should criticize it for short trips not 4000km ones.

[rayiner]

Amtrak’s on time performance on the northeast corridor, which it owns, is miserable too.

[wongarsu]

For context: the longest German rail line is ICE 27 traveling 1432km in 13 hours (as far as I can tell it's as punctual or unpunctual as any ICE).

The transsibirian railway covering 9288km seems to be famously punctual. On a multi-day journey it's probably easy to add enough slack to achieve that.