[eqvinox]

For context, in case people are less familiar with German politics:

DB is in a misbegotten state of privatization, started in the 90ies. The government spun it out into a private company but still owns 100% of it. They were trying to pump it up so they could sell it for good money. They did that by skimping on everything including maintenance, to try and make the numbers look good.

Except they never got to whatever magic numbers they wanted before the maintenance debt came rearing its ugly head and now everything is royally screwed. And because it's a private company, there's a whole bunch of barriers limiting how much they can even subsidize the thing at this point.

Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story, but at the end of the day the only thing that will solve this is if they re-nationalize the tracks & infrastructure. What kind of an idiot thought including that in the privatization is a good idea is beyond me. It's not like you can build a 2nd railway network in order to get free market & competition. (For comparison, imagine privatizing the entire road network, village street to Autobahn.)

[ahartmetz]

The one good thing is that they failed to take it private. Imagine how bad it would be with the current maintenance backlog and no public funding.

[robocat]

The New Zealand government sold their rail system, then Toll didn't make a success of it, so the government bought it back at a massive loss.

Now rail is just a nightmare moneypit. But older voters love rail "it's efficient" so the government panders to them and wastes more taxes on it.

[martinald]

Well, the EU insists that track & train operations are separate. (ironically the UK _is_ combining passenger operations and track somewhat back together, which is only possible because of brexit).

The bigger issue tbh is the enormous cost inflation in civil engineering in general. This seems to be a problem everywhere. There's no doubt some of this is caused by material cost increases, labour shortages etc, but I'd say the huge amounts of regulation added over the years is really a core driver of this.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story

“About 72 per cent of Deutsche Bahn’s intercity trains arrived within 10 minutes of their scheduled arrival time in the year to January 2025, compared with 78 per cent of British long-distance trains, according to the FT analysis.

Any interaction with the German rail network is also one of the biggest factors affecting the punctuality of long-distance rail travel in Central Europe” [1].

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/d3b6e6b5-eddb-4230-b866-932d284ce...

[eqvinox]

The UK's railway network was only privately owned from 1994 to 2002 though, everything after that is already under the umbrella of re-nationalisation, which didn't go super well either (my knowledge about that is rather vague). Not sure how useful 2025 numbers are in this context.

[ed.: to be clear - AFAIK they are in the same state currently, private company but 100% government owned. But there's a huge distinction in that the UK has made the decision to move back in the direction of nationalisation. In Germany, some people still pretend this is somehow fine and just needs to get cleaned up before the privatization can continue.]

[LearnYouALisp]

The secret, as told in some other threads (elsewhere), is that "If the service is canceled, it can't have been late!" So trains that are over ~30 minutes late can be canceled.

[cyberax]

Heh. Ukraine is doing better than that _during_ _the_ _war_: https://en.cfts.org.ua/news/ukrzaliznytsia_boasts_97_train_d...

[lmm]

> Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story, but at the end of the day the only thing that will solve this is if they re-nationalize the tracks & infrastructure. What kind of an idiot thought including that in the privatization is a good idea is beyond me. It's not like you can build a 2nd railway network in order to get free market & competition. (For comparison, imagine privatizing the entire road network, village street to Autobahn.)

If you privatize the infrastructure and trains together you can at least compare one region against another, even if they're not directly competing. Trying to operate the trains separately from the tracks was a disaster in the UK and lead pretty directly to two mass casualty incidents.

[hylaride]

Governments can be just as bad at infrastructure investments.

That being said, I get the sense it's a German cultural problem. I used to travel to Germany quite frequently and was always surprised at the poor quality of much of the infrastructure, including private. The cell phone networks and internet speeds were all awful. As recently as 6 years ago my phone dropped to edge as soon as I left the city and within the major cities I had terrible performance. I'm not kidding when I say that I often had near dialup speeds, despite having full LTE bars. Maybe this has improved since.

As for rail, for Europe, the rail lines should probably be run as a cooperative with the rail companies paying dues.

[iknowstuff]

What is the incentive for politicians to sell a publicly owned company for a lot of money? How would they personally benefit from a high price? I can only think of incentives to sell it for as little as possible to a most favored investor/buddy.

[eska]

Exit strategy for after their political career. Compare with Gerhard Schröder