[rurounijones]

Sorry, previous commenter said something along the lines of "Trains always on time to the second" which prompted my response.

I don't know the exact numbers they use for their statistics (I think it used to be 1 minute).

If a train is delayed by 10 minutes you can ask for a ticket to take to work to show your boss that being late was not your fault.

Don't get me wrong, the punctuality is much better than most European countries I have lived in and quite a lot of the time the are perfectly on time, but the west has raised the Japanese public transport system to near mythical status.

[moe]

In germany we're glad when the train arrives within the hour that it was scheduled for...

[arrrg]

Not true. http://www.bahn.de/p/view/buchung/auskunft/puenktlichkeit_pe...

In August 2012, 99.1% of all stops happened within fifteen minutes of the scheduled time, 94.2% happened within five minutes. Looking only at long-distance trains, 75.8% of all stops where reached within five minutes of the scheduled time and 90.5% of all stops were reached within fifteen minutes of the scheduled time.

[BostX]

Not true. Today morning "We appologize bla bla", last Saturday evening "We appologize bla bla aprox. delay 60 min". In the end it was about 120 min. In Germany trains do have delays a way TOO OFTEN.

[arrrg]

I don’t think you should respond to data with anecdotes. That’s not very useful.

You might be using a train connection that – for whatever reason (construction work, etc.) – is consistently late. Sucks for you, doesn’t mean train in Germany are in general late. Most are on time.

[moe]

If you click on "Fernverkehr" you'll notice that actually only 90% of intercity-trains have been within the 15min window.

Every 10th train was late for more than >15min.

Yes, Regios may be better. That doesn't help when, for example, you need to catch a plane in a different city.

[arrrg]

One in ten seems pretty good to me. Everything else are completely unrealistic expectations.