Your Deutsche Bahn "joke" is no longer funny (if it ever was)

Before attempting my record attempt between Kemijärvi, Finland and Lagos, Portugal, people told me over and over it would break down in Germany. So much so that I even tried to re-but (pre-but?) some of the likely critique.

Now, having made the trip, and none of the total delay of 25 hours 30 minutes (making the journey 125 hours 31 minutes, rather than the 100 hours 9 minutes foreseen) was attributable to Germany. 24 hours was Sweden, the rest Portugal.

But the “jokes” keep on coming – just see the comments under this LinkedIn post from The European Correspondent for example. Ha ha, 100 hours of the trip must have been Germany. Oh aren’t you funny!

There is a point at 31:27 in the film about the project that underlines the issue. I am in Mannheim, and there are three different trains departing to Basel within an hour.

Between Badajoz and Entroncamento – currently the only train running into Portugal from Spain at all (because Porto – Vigo is currently a bus between Valença do Minho and Vigo) – there are two trains a day, and they both run in the afternoon, and it is a railbus built in 1955 with lousy air conditioning.

In northern Sweden it is little better. One third of the country (north of Umeå) relies on a single, single track, electrified line, and places like Haparanda and Kiruna hence have a handful of passenger trains a day.

But pretty much no one is complaining about Badajoz, because no one takes that train there. They drive. Rail is not an option to get from Spain to Portugal. As I put it in a recent newsletter, passengers do not complain about trains they cannot take, because those trains do not exist.

Now, don’t get me wrong – German rail has major issues, most notably the investment backlog that means things break down all the time with the tracks, signals, bridges etc., and so reliability is poor. But given the network is so dense, and there are different routes you can take between all the different cities, you will normally get there in the end.

And despite it all, the complaints are so numerous because the number of passengers and the number of trains is also so numerous! If a train on a track with 3 trains a day in France gets delayed, there will be no knock on effect on any other train. A delay to a train on a track with 3 trains every 10 minutes in Germany will have a much larger impact.

Ultimately any German who has ever voted for any party other than the Grüne also deserves what they get. The Third Way / Die neue Mitte of Gerhard Schröder from the late 1990s is at the root of all of this, but twelve years of CSU transport ministers left their mark as well, and while Volker Wissing (FDP) redeemed himself as at least being better than his party, the current government looks to be back to where it all was pre-Wissing. So if you’re laughing at Deutsche Bahn, and voted for one of those parties that helped cook up the current situation, well, this is at least in part on you.

And if you think this is just rail with a problem, well I have a Berlin-Brandenburg airport, or cracking bridges on German Autobahns to show you.

Meanwhile my ICE, a Siemens built ICE3neo, is somewhere between Aachen and Liège as I hit Publish on this post. It’s well engineered, smooth, quiet, the on board staff impeccable, and I booked it on Europe’s best rail website – bahn.de, and today it is even on time. Give me this over the railbus to Entroncamento any day!