[lqet]

After 30 years or privatization, Deutsche Bahn might be broken beyond repair.

> "Deutsche Bahn is unable to cope with the simplest tasks of daily rail operations,” says a senior European railway official [0]

In this case, however, I think they are doing the right thing in keeping software that has been working reliably for over 30 years.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/deutsche-bahn-str...

[consp]

> After 30 years or privatization, Deutsche Bahn might be broken beyond repair.

Well, it's cheaper than state run. And that comes at a cost.

[zilti]

It's still state-run, and 90% of the reason why Deutsche Bahn AG is in such a sorry state is the German government. Want to see privatization done right? Look no further than Germany's southern neighbour.

[inglor_cz]

In Czechia, the track (much like the highways) is managed by a state corporation, while the trains themselves are partly state-owned, partly private.

From my 25 years of commuting experience, the results are decidedly mixed:

* the track-managing state corporation, Správa železnic, is a shitshow that causes a lot of unnecessary delays by just ignoring needs of passengers and cargo companies alike; true bureaucrats,

* the highway-managing state corporation, Ředitelství silnic a dálnic, is very well managed by the latest director (Mátl) and really kicked off many projects in last years, which is notable in a very NIMBY-friendly country like Czechia,

* the state-owned railway company, České dráhy, used to be terrible, but competition forced it into providing quite decent services within last 10 years or so.

* the two main private competitors, Leo Express and Regiojet, are now visibly cash-strapped (esp. Regiojet), so the overall level of service has stagnated for several years. High costs of traction electricity don't help either. As of today, there isn't really a qualitative difference between boarding state-owned or privately-owned trains.

[morsch]

As you allude to, whether it's a public service or a publicly owned corporation is probably less important.

Switzerland just pays four times as much per capita for railway infrastructure.

And of course, it's small: a bit more than a tenth of the area, a tenth of the total operated railway length, a tenth of the population. There are economies of scale, but also system complexity that scales super linearly. Afaict, a train that takes four hours from start to finish is on the long side in Switzerland, not so much in Germany.

But I'm not saying that financing and management aren't the main problems. The current CEO of SBB has a background in computer science and railway transport. Many of the DB CEOs in the past 25 years had an MBA and a career in air travel.

[jamil7]

It's state-owned (the federal government is the majority shareholder) but it's not really state-run as far as I understand.

It has a lot of autonomy and is responsible for its own failures in my opinion.

[lobochrome]

SBB isn't privatized. It's 100% state owned.

[zilti]

...just like Deutsche Bahn.

[flgstnd]

given the power of the car lobby in germany, if i were a conspiracy theorist, id say its deliberate mismanagement to nudge people into using cars.

[redeeman]

and that cost is cheaper. Both provides crappy services, one just does it cheaper.

[wslh]

It is a good recommendation to follow the "if it works don't touch it" motto, but it is also true that they have time and resources (you don't need that much!) to port this to a modern platform and perform all the QA activities that you need to be 99% sure everything works as expected.

Through one of my companies we were/are involved in many of these efforts (e.g. application virtualization) and the use of legacy software [1]. Win 3.11 is a relatively easy target. Much much easier than other projects we dealt with.

[1] https://blog.nektra.com/2014/02/12/nektra-escalation-support...

[incrudible]

The problem with modern platforms is that they remove many constraints that kept complexity at bay. Combined with a large bureaucratic organization that is state owned and financed, Parkinson's law is going to hit very hard.

[miyuru]

Are there any trains that runs on k8s?

[zyx321]

Nope, they're all running on Rails.

[kitd]

Don't tell us, you're here all week?

[zyx321]

What can I say, they walked right into that one...

[Traubenfuchs]

Hi, I was deeply involved in DBs Vendo project which completely replaced/renewed most of it's sales / customer-facing related backends and we were using Open Shift.

5/6 years ago... Everything could have changed again by now.