More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

To add a bit more detail: SBB (Swiss federal railways) consider a train on time if it reaches its destination with less than three minutes’ delay [1]. DB (Deutsche Bahn) puts the threshold at 15 minutes ("Reisendenpünktlichkeit") [2].

[1] https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/responsibility-society...

[2] https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...

This has removed the potential for improvisation in dispatching (no one wants to be responsible for delaying that other train), making the train network unable to give any trains room to make up their delays.

There is a reason every other dispatcher has problems with alcoholism.

I wonder what's going on over there. I understand that there are complex organizational issues involved, but, besides this long-term rotting, there seems to be some more recent, abrupt diseases affecting them too.

Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world.

Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company and the bad from the government bureaucracy.

Official Deutsche Bahn figures are likely underreporting the extent of the problem as the reported times and actual timetables are -aggressively- out of sync (to the frustration of many riders).

It's hard to dissect the true source of the problem as there are various factors at play. However the central cause is starving the system of funds. This presents a strong warning for countries that are trying to encourage the use of public transport in order to meet their climate goals.

Some detail is available here: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-whats-wrong-with-the-deutsche-...

https://travic.app/?z=9&x=890440.8&y=6126327.9&l=osm_standar...

And today is a good day in southwestern Germany, just look at the current general redness in the Ruhr area and Cologne.

My favorite anecdote from riding a German train in Switzerland was a journey from Interlaken (Switzerland) to Frankfurt in Germany. Now if you're not used to train schedules: Stops are quick, and trains are punctual. It's fairly common for stops to just be 2-3 minutes. Connections between trains are often around 5 minutes, sometimes shorter.

So, this Intercity Express departed Interlaken perfectly on schedule, made a bunch of scheduled stops in Spiez, Thun, Bern, and continued on to the border city of Basel. Everything running perfectly on schedule, the train arrived at the Swiss station in Basel, continued (on time) to the German train station that's still in the same city, just a few minutes farther. Having had 3-5 minute stops all the way from early morning to lunchtime, the train then sat in the German station for about 15 minutes, departed with only a minor delay, and just a few yards after exiting the station proceeded to stop, sit on the tracks for half an hour ("to catch up with the prevalent delay conditions on the German rail network"), before starting to move again.

Waiting in a comfy seat on a train with working AC isn't the worst of fates, and we made the final destination within half an hour of the scheduled time, so it all went well -- just funny to observe how different parts of this interconnected network had very different ideas of scheduling.

Swiss railways optimise for punctuality, sacrificing line capacity (compensated for with double-decker cars).

Meanwhile every other European rail transport authority seems to be bent on squeezing out the most of the lines it has.

I grew up in a city that had two parallel rail lines in the east-west axis - one for long-distance connections, cargo and everything else, the other a refurbished old main line with trains only once per hour.

The latter was punctual almost to the minute(even if comparatively slow at an average 30km/h including stops), while the former was a mess and you were often better off driving instead.

My friend living in the suburbs close to that refurbished line always boasted how it took him a grand total of 18 minutes to get to the city centre and he could rely on the train to always arrive. That was quicker than I could get there by any means, despite a similar distance.

It’s somewhat akin to the packet dropping question, though packets don’t complain as loudly as passengers.

In a rail network with one train a day it’s not a big issue, but with regular service you can’t let a late train get out of control or it blows the entire network out of sync until you have some dead time - which is one reason some systems have an “hour of the dead” where no trains run - it lets it reset and get back to something sane.

Trying to build a system that has 15 minute heads and can handle a train going late or dying on the rails is really, really hard without ridiculously complexity like quad tracks everywhere and spare train sets at every station.

IIRC Swiss passengers waiting in Basel SBB get a replacement train travelling at the original time.

I don't think it's fair for the article to say that a "temporary measure" has now become a permanent one, it likely is temporary until the problem is solved.

Sometimes I ask myself why the schedule of those always-late trains isn't changed. If it would be planned that it always arrives "15min later", people and other transportation could work with that timing so much better.

The Swiss trains arrive on time, more often than any other country. Second place is the Germans. What's the difference?

The Germans set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. Then the famed German engineering kicks in, and they move Heaven and Earth to identify and fix any problems which are keeping the trains off schedule.

The Swiss set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. They use these measurements to identify when trains aren't arriving on schedule and... adjust the timetable.

Look at the regional feeder lines, though. Unmaintained tracks, ancient trains, diesel instead of electric. Many towns have no connection at all - where I used to work, there was an old train station, but the tracks had been ripped up years earlier.

I used to (have to) rely on the German train system. Thankfully, I am now in Switzerland. It is a huge difference.

SBB - Swiss rail - doesn't want its schedule to be affected by the long-distance DB - German - services. So it doesn't allow the DB service to enter the country after a given cut-off delay.

This means that travellers need to transfer to an SBB service for the final 1-2 hours of their trip. This transfer typically takes 15-30 minutes.

For years the train from Linz to Vienna was always punctual.

However, recently (Last ~9 Months or so) all trains are super later. The reason is, all of them go through Germany (Innsbruck (via German) -> Salzburg -> Linz ->Vienna), and given everything is delayed in Germany it also delays Austrian trains.

> SBB introduced the regulation back in July 2022 in consultation with Deutsche Bahn. Introduced as a "temporary measure" at the time, it is now permanent.

Just a reminder to folks that there is nothing so permanent as a “temporary” government program.

And the worst is that you have no recourse. You get 25% of your ticket after ONE HOUR! It makes me so angry.

Look for using Bus like Flixbus as an alternative if possible. They are not perfect but more reliable than the DB train for sure.

This is not motivating anyone to switch from cars to trains.

would have been more accurate, less clickbait.

In Germany they don't even express regret when they do it.

DB Data Mining which showed hacks used to gamble metric

This is not as dramatic as it sounds, since Basel is at the border. There's probably many trains into town.

ಠ_ಠ why not "aren't punctual"..

(In hell the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the police are German, and it's all organized by the Italians.)