[3ds]

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]

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]

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.

[hwj]

I appreciate you sharing the positive experience as a neighbor, but unfortunately, the Deutsche Bahn is as bad as presented here. (I spend several years commuting to college via DB). Once my train stopped in a small village with the announcement "the train ends here". Thankfully, kind people picked me up.

[pm3003]

I used to complain about the French SNCF, then I discovered DB and stopped complaining. I've been a Bahncard 1. Klasse holder for a few years.

Last time I took the train in Germany I was 30h late and had to spend a sunday between Cologne and Karlsruhe (not that I was really surprised).

The punctuality is a joke, ICEs are unpractical, train management comically incompetent (remember when the ICEs cars would never come in the announced order and there was luggage room for maybe 15% of passengers?).

The cars are very dirty, especially in 1st class where eating a full meal at your seat is encouraged but the cars are cleaned once every two days.

However, the train attendants are usually very arranging for every aspect of the trip on board.

Cheap tickets are cool, but have been there for so long (the regional ones) Germans take them for granted.

[seec]

As a French I feel that the SNCF is pretty good. We like to complain about it but I have had a few minor problems (3 hours pause from locomotive breakdown, or 2 hours stop to allow cleaning after a suicide) but nothing too bad. There are on times and rarely canceled.

The major issues are with pricing and lack of investment outside of TGV but it's not too bad.

[m_fayer]

I live in Berlin but grew up in the US. Yep, Germany has much more train coverage than where I'm from originally. And that's great. But to understand the complaints you really have to spend some years living with the uncertainty created by the DB.

It depends which route you take, but for a wide swath of the German population, your chance of an absolutely wretched experience seems to be around 1 in 4. That means that people are constantly weighing the desire for affordable, sustainable, comfortable transport that may go horribly wrong, against the (similarly unpredictable) endemic traffic jams and exhaustion of driving, and often choosing wrong. If you have no car, you're weighing more reliable but slow and uncomfortable and traffic-jam-prone buses, or simply avoiding the travel. Constantly making decisions on penalty of deeply unpleasant consequences without any way to actually reasonably judge your decision is a special form of miserable.

At least in the US, most of the time, there is no decision to make: you drive.

[josefx]

> Maybe I've just been lucky so far,

A lot of the issues are local, some are time constrained. There is a CCC talk on youtube "BahnMining - Pünktlichkeit ist eine Zier (David Kriesel)", that concludes that any train traveling through certain trainstations will most likely end up significantly delayed. Then you have certain train models failing during summer. Or my recent favourite planned construction work with no apparent plan for a reliable replacement service beyond "here is a train, it might leave at some point".

[hobofan]

Depending on what regions/lines you are exposed to one can definitely land on different sides of "it works well in general" vs. "it doesn't work well in general".

Of course if you cite a Sprinter line like Nuremberg <-> Berlin, which has the newest tracks and newest trains, you will have a far better experience than on lines that have the worst maintained tracks and trains. Sadly, the badly maintained ones seem to make up the majority of the DB network.

[tormeh]

The worst parta are in NRW and in particular Cologne (honorary mention: Frankfurt). Unfortunately a lot of people live there and a lot of trains go through there. Don't understand why it's not getting fixed. Every time more money is dedicated to rail the government of the day decide upgrading the stations is what deserves focus.

[pm3003]

Agree. Cologne/NRW is the worst. Anything going to or through Neumünster also used to be an almost-guaranteed nightmare, but I've heard it's better now.

That said, last time I was there DB was on strike and I lost hours.