It's easy to call other rail infrastructures "primitive" when your baseline is Berlin to Munich. The US eastern seaboard handles those routes well too. Rail doesn't do so well when you need NYC to Chicago (~800 miles).
You would really compare German intercity travel to Acela (i.e., rail service on the Boston-NYC-Philly-DC route)? Three differences that immediately come to mind:
1) Severely limited track speeds through the entire NE corridor.
2) A boarding experience that seems to be modeled on air travel, with security gates, ID checks and waiting rooms.
3) Very infrequent service compared to main intercity routes in Europe.
Calling it primitive is provocative but pretty accurate.
1) Totally fair: average speed from DC to BOS is half of Berlin-Hamburg.
2) That's not my Acela experience at all; last time I took it (a few years ago) it was no more involved than boarding a Metra train in Chicago.
3) Totally fair.
I guess this is just knee-jerkism on my part. The topic comes up on HN every once in awhile about how backwards the US is w/r/t/ rail transport, and while you could still make a lot of strides on DC-BOS, there are good reasons why most of the country doesn't have rail connectivity. But that wasn't what was being argued here.
1) Severely limited track speeds through the entire NE corridor.
2) A boarding experience that seems to be modeled on air travel, with security gates, ID checks and waiting rooms.
3) Very infrequent service compared to main intercity routes in Europe.
Calling it primitive is provocative but pretty accurate.