Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
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A traveler's harrowing tale of being "kidnapped" by Deutsche Bahn, Germany's national railway, sparks a lively debate about the reliability of European train systems. Commenters passionately defend or trash DB, with some comparing it unfavorably to the UK's train network, while others share personal anecdotes of delays and cancellations on both sides. As one commenter quips, "competing on which system is more dysfunctional" isn't a great competition to be in, but the discussion reveals that regional trains in Germany are generally on time, while long-distance ones often aren't, prompting travelers to plan with a healthy buffer. The thread resonates with many who've had frustrating experiences with train travel, highlighting the need for more reliable and efficient rail services.
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Dec 29, 2025 at 7:24 AM EST
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Many are cancelled without a decent reason being given. I rarely take British trains now they are so expensive and unreliable. Only long distance maybe because buses are unpleasant.
> It is twenty minutes late. I consider this early.
The one good thing about frequent long-distance delays is that you might be lucky and catch an earlier delayed train and actually arrive a bit earlier than planned ;)
I travel from Basel to Hannover and back every two weeks on DB. Trains south are almost always late, trains north usually late. Frequently the train is already late in Hannover having come from Hamburg. The worst was when I was kicked out in Frankfurt and had to stay in a hotel. The delays were so bad there were no more trains left that could connect me to the last train out of Basel.
Things have been getting better for the past couple of months I think though.
Recently while driving an hour journey turned into a three hour journey, and not because my car broke down. I've never experienced any delay anywhere near that significant on British trains.
My biggest gripe with DB is not that it's late, but that it quite often cancels the trains. If you decided to go by regional trains with 1-2 hops instead of direct (bc you can go much cheaper with Deutschlandticket), it's close to be guaranteed that at least one of your trains get cancelled and things will not go according the plan.
I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.
25km each way is 680 miles a month.
Alton to Waterloo is £5520 a year, 50 miles each way or 23,000 miles a year, 24p per mile.
Brighton 17p/mile
Battle 22p/mile
Compared to people doing one off journeys. Southampton 77p/mile, Brighton 46p/mile, Battle 53p/mile
Don't worry though! We're currently building the most expensive bit of high speed rail in Europe, that won't even go into the centre of our capital city, or further north than the Midlands. Passengers who have the audacity to want to travel further north will have to transit over to the old tracks, creating even further capacity problems.
All of this is entirely avoidable, if the government just took a few common sense measures, but sadly it doesn't seem to be anyone's priority.
Latest punctuality figures for UK are 84.8% and DE 88.1%. Making an assumption on distribution I’d guess UK comes out slightly better.
Of note, DE long distance stats are pretty bad!
UK: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/ebmnxxih/performance-sta... DE: https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/en/interim-group-manageme...
In all 4 cases the train was delayed in Germany - the longest by 4 hours, one by a mere 30 minutes.
People also miss the fact that a big reason why HS2 is being built is to take load off of the West Coast Main Line, which is running at full capacity at the moment. There's no room to run additional services. Even though some unfortunate compromises have been made, this will still massively benefit parts of the North because they'll be able to get more frequent services once the line is no longer clogged up by trains from London.
Long range trains from, say, London to Manchester are often overcrowded and ridiculously priced.
Season ticket prices are under 20p/mile into London
Nationalisation will likely break this and increase costs for all but the richest. For the last decade the public have been clamouring for “simplification” because they couldn’t understand the restriction codes. Now it’s being rolled out they are of course seeing price rises and complaining “not like that!”
DB is state owned, yes ... but it's run like a private company. It's basically the classic "privatize profits, socialize losses" - done as a yearly routine.
Not even remotely exaggerating, it's incredibly corrupt.
losses get pushed to be picked up by the state/taxes.
That's why it's privatize profits, socialize losses.
But there has just been a leadership change, maybe things will improve..
I guess that makes you the person that's...?
I do think they’re working on improving these conditions. But I wish they did more to communicate that. Where is a big marketing campaign explaining how they got there, apologizing, and explaining how they will do better?
No matter whether the train operators and the network operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the government. The network operator just deals with the maintenance.
Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your network runs at 150% capacity every day.
I've had the last train out of central London for the night cancelled at about 1am and you can just message the train company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to get you a taxi all the way to somewhere like Cambridge.
Also, not sure how it is in other countries, but in the UK, everything is entirely open data. You can go to a site like https://map.signalbox.io/ to see a live map of every train in the UK, and sites like Realtime Trains let you get all the details about every train (eg. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:KGX)
Ticket prices vary a lot and are unpredictable. I have not a last minute ticket from London to the midlands for just over £20, but they can be a lot more (several times as much?) for the same journey even booking ahead.
I definitely prefer the train to driving if I am going long distance by myself, but if its multiple people the car becomes a lot cheaper.
Local services in cities are pretty good. I never owned a car in London, nor in Manchester until I had a child.
Oh c’mon have you tried trains in Slovenia? The ICE from Budapest with a constant 230+ min delay, the regional one from Ljubljana to Celje where half the track is seemingly under perpetual construction (so transfer to a bus!), passenger trains delayed all the time waiting for freight trains, trains randomly going 20kph on some segments, and lately even vandals sabotaging the tracks. And don’t worry, they announce all of that exclusively in Slovene with no extra answers.
I’ve been on DB and it wasn’t that bad. It was expensive but at least the train didn’t max out at 80kph.
I'm on the other side of this. I end up chaperoning lost tourists on my DB disaster trips with a regularity that I should be getting a paycheck from DB.
On the plus side: local journeys are great. Delay Repay means you get up to 100% of your ticket back if you're delayed. If you cannot make the last train due to delays, they're obligated to get your home by bus or even by taxi. Train stock is (in my area at least) new and very comfortable. Views are good!
But at this point, I'm convinced you should avoid any train in and around Germany. This includes Denmark as well. Just take a plane, but don't have a layover in Germany. The same could probably be said about France. My first train from Paris to Nancy stopped for about 2hrs in the middle of nowhere. As the machinist said: "The train is tired."
Other countries like Italy or Spain seem to actually have well-functioning rail though.
I regularly travel on DSB (2.5hr journeys, 4 times a month minimum), and only very rarely encounter issues. Staff have always been easy to deal with and on the rare occasion I've had to be refunded (the carriage with my reserved seat didn't show up) I've received it within days.
Avoid trains run by GoCollective though.
The UK government hates how expensive it is to operate, so they are reducing subsidies and massively prioritising the most profitable routes and raising prices.
Staff got nice condition/pay bumps during COVID and all have the attitude that they are doing us a favour. I don't mean that lightly or that I've had one bad experience with a member of staff on a bad day. They are work-shy, offensive, rude, lacking training and plain bad tempered.
I'm very pro car now these days, which is exactly what the Government wants.
I consistently find railway workers to be some of the most helpful and approachable people I have to interact with, which is remarkable given the sort of people they have to put up with. I think the sort of person you'll be speaking to certainly depends on the part of the country you're in though - in Scotland and Wales, I've seen people who've been let off for having a ticket that expired several days prior, and staff are happy to have a friendly chat if the train isn't too busy.
It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc. But I am sure if this happens here it would be on the cover of newspapers.
But, for example, Rotterdam or Utrecht are already a lot less likely to be announced in english.
In Northern Europe the percentage is even higher. In the Netherlands there are almost as many people who speak it as there are Dutch speakers.
Taking into account people from other EU countries who are there on business plus tourists there is a good chance that if only one language was to be used for train announcements more people on the train would understand if it was in English then if it was in Dutch.
The point of an official language is that the government makes it as convenient as possible living your life knowing only that language. It wouldn't be that unreasonable IMO to switch official language to English, but seeing as NL is a democracy, that ought to be a democratic decision. A referendum of some kind would probably be best. It's not a small decision to be taken lightly.
But it's still nice to offer information in other languages in certain situations. Infrastructure used heavily by tourists and recent immigrants who don't speak the language yet should be made as usable as possible to people who don't know Dutch. Making important announcements in both English and Dutch on trains is an example of that.
If we follow your line Dutch will go the same way as Welsh or Basque.
Portugal has been better at that game when you consider its size.
No it won't. Mirroring important announcements in two languages is a thing most countries do, and their languages are far from extinct.
Or maybe that is just me having grown to understand dutch and flemish as a cyclocross rider and spectator.
Honestly, I don't see the problem. As a tourist, you have to be prepared with apps, or you can ask someone for help. Happens all the time, and most people are happy to help.
Someone living here needs to learn the local language.
They do have very good pay (drivers can earn as much as some airline pilots) and a very good pension scheme on top of that.
Even if the job is actually opened to basically everyone (and that’s pretty nice), you have to be in perfect physical and psychological shape with pretty strict tests, you have to be intellectually apt enough to follow the training which is pretty intense. You have to accept work conditions such as not knowing your work hours until the day before. You have to accept sleeping who knows where at least 2 times a week. You have to accept having only one weekend off per month.
So what happens is that when you have that much filters and you still want to hire train drivers, you can’t afford to expect your drivers to know another language on top of all of the rest.
Most of the time they do what they can to deal with issues.
I don’t feel like there are too much issues it’s just they are extremely bad at communicating issues when they happen.
Sometimes the train is not there when it should but on the screen it just disappears as if it passed. Most of the time it’s just 2-5 minutes late but you can’t know. Maybe it’s just late. Maybe the traffic is stopped. Who knows.
I just dont understand how they don’t have people whose job is just writing messages for the information screens.
What is worse is that in my region, they have a pretty decent community managers for live information but they only post information in twitter because why not. So they already have the people doing this work but those people are saying different things than what the screen shows. Just let them write things on the screens :D
Germany is the country where I found the highest number of people not being able to speak English, even people working in accomodation!
French people probably know English but they refuse to speak it; Italians don't know English that well, but they try their best using rolling R's and gestures.
(I'm a bit ironic)
That's very outdated, DB has been terrible for a long time though. Switzerland is still the best though. Here are some stats for 2025:
https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
Since you have to scroll down quite a bit to get the list of most reliable European trains (with percentage on time):
1. Switzerland 97.8%
2. The Netherlands 93.9%
3. Belgium 88.6%
4. Austria 82.2%
5. France 79.7%
6. Italy 62.0%
7. Germany 58.5%
(Not sure why these are the only countries in the list.)
Not about Germany, Italy, and Japan, forming some sort of axis, I guess.
The tri partners have a mutual goal.
In many countries the train comes when it comes and goes when it can, regardless of any fictional like schedules.
“Please mind the gap between the timetable and reality.”
It's not like countries outside Europe can't make trains run on time. Japan's are even more punctual than Switzerland's.
What I am less able to excuse them for is capacity issues, especially on weekend and Friday trains on popular routes in the Summer. That Zurich Lugano train is packed to the gills most weekends during the summer such that it's standing room only for most of the 2 hour ride. They need to add more trains or at least more cars.
Reliability is not something to complain about. The trains are punctual, that's for sure.
[1] https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/acm-rail-monitor-netherla...
They also spend far more per capita on their train system.
All that and afaik they still manage to connect all important places.
Also in Germany, a train that did not even arrive does not count as too late.
https://media.viarail.ca/en/press-releases/2025/q1-2025-time...
If you look at France for example, 80% of trains are not punctual but the "total delays" is actually on the low range, France being on the large side with lots of lines, I would say that it shows that the delays (20% of the time) are actual shorts.
This was already the case around 2015.
Just don't count on them that they bring you to your destination in a timely manner.
Not true.
This is not true at all.
The shareholders set the targets and since the shareholder is the government they can set any target they want: profitability, more trains, cheaper tickets etc..
If the shareholder wants to inject 10% every year in stead of taking a profit they are absolutely free to do so.
I am sure the state could try to do _something_ about it, but I am also sure that a very strong car lobby here in Germany is working against that. BTW, the road network, which I would consider to conceptually be the same kind of infrastructure as the rail network, is to my understanding mostly built and maintained by state organizations, so it is possible to do it that way.
I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters, compared to "let's use tax payer money to build and maintain one-of-a-kind critical infrastructure from which everyone (with a car, which due to the less-than-great alternatives is a lot of people) can profit".
Again, having it organized as a private company adds indirection, diffuses power and responsibility, and adds a certain more or less implicit expectation of what private companies are supposed to do. That's my main issue with it. Private companies aren't supposed to run critical infrastructure as a monopoly for profit. It's the states job to provide and maintain critical infrastructure in the interest of all.
Again, if the shareholders decide this is the reason: yes.
But shareholders can just as easily set other targets or incentives.
>I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters,
The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company. It is a public company.
It is a private company, as in it is a legal entity under private law. This is in contrast to a "öffentlich-rechtliches Unternehmen" (I don't know if this even has a proper translation or equivalent in other jurisdictions). There is more than two options here, it can be privatized and public according to your definition.
You are under no obligation to make a profit.
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