Your next excuse is on platform 5 – German train travel has become an experience worthy of Kafka
Your next excuse is on platform 5 – German train travel has become an experience worthy of Kafka
Erratic Deutsche Bahn services make our commutes a misery. Luckily, their meaningless announcements are an art form, says German journalist Jens Schneider
Erratic Deutsche Bahn services make our commutes a misery. Luckily, their meaningless announcements are an art form
My favourite excuse is an expression that might one day be emblematic of contemporary Germany. I hear Deutsche Bahn wants staff to stop using it, but it can’t banish it from our minds. Verzögerungen im Betriebsablauf – “operational delays” – is meaningful and meaningless in a way that only the German language allows. One day it might even become one of those golden words co-opted into the English language – like zeitgeist or schadenfreude. (Let’s retire Blitz, a word that is jaded and overused in sport, politics and beyond.)
Verzögerungen im Betriebsablauf is the magic phrase for not getting anywhere fast while also suggesting everything is full steam ahead. It is sinister in a beautiful way. It is a phrase Kafka might use if he were writing today, a perfect description of a situation where no one can do anything but everyone is busy.
One theory goes that the decline began in the mid-90s, when the government started its efforts to make Deutsche Bahn fit for sale.
Yep, that'll do it.
74Privatising infrastructure is stupid AF. It was part of the 90s Zeitgeist, which haunts us to this day.
50And it was known to be stupid in the 1990s already. The only people who benefit from it are the investors. Everyone else pays for their dividend.
14It's not the privatisation per se. It is the privatisation accompanied by a lot of other circumstances bringing the worst of public and private businesses to the table. The main problem is that DB is a private company that is incentivised to let the infrastructure rot. The solution is actually pretty easy: split up the company, return infrastructure to public hand, and open up the operations to fair competition. Flixbus showed how competition absolutely decimates prices even in transport business.
2
It's funny how privatization literally (literally literally) always makes services worse, but right-wingers always manage to believe the exact opposite
6As theories go, this one is pretty well supported by evidence.
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has become
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
30TL;DR: Commuting in Germany is terrible und unreliable and the author really liked his idea of comparing Deutsche Bahn to Kafka.
15I wonder if those in charge use Verzögerungen im Betriebsablauf, Operational Delays, while in bed as well
14Not sure if that excuse is officially approved for that particular situation, would have to look it up in the official DB excuse catalogue. (Yes, such a thing does in fact exist)
5
I know someone who works as a conductor for DB, he once showed me the smartphone app they use for organisation and internal communication, it literally had a page listing the officially approved excuses for delays and the possible actual causes they are supposed to be used for.
10UK train companies should use this. So often I ask why my train is delayed and they basically shrug their shoulders
2It's an open secret that "police operation" most probably means "somebody jumped in front of the train".
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We can only hope the German people vote to reverse the privatization of this service and restore the trains and their infrastructure to something exemplary.
9Since years they've slept on separating people from fright transport. So much money sunk into someone's pocket, instead of adding more railway routes. But there also were a lot of NIMBYs blocking railway expansion, to be fair.
An anecdote of my student life:
For many years I commuted by train, on one of Germany's worst train routes and 90% of the trains had at minimum 5 to 15 minutes delay. Also like 10% right out never arrived, so you had to wait for the train afterwards. The next train is 60 minutes later. If you had to transfer to another train, this often resulted in waiting 60 minutes, miss the transfer train, wait another 60 minutes. Lose additional random amount of minutes, because even if the second train arrived on time, you'd often be later than expected. God help you, if you needed to use a bus afterwards. Guess what, wait more, because you missed the bus you intended to actually use. Same fun on the way back, for a single day. While dealing with the stuff explained in the article. This breaks you inside.
Let's do some simple math if you're still reading:
A simple job, with 8 ½ hours work per day, plus commute time, with time lost from leaving earlier too, plus sleeping, could result in spending all day away from home. Leaving you between 0 and 1 hour remaining time, to do everything, like chores, cooking, friends, family, free time (haha).
I simply couldn't do this and wonder how people have any real life, if they have to endure this every single day. For perspective, that's a distance a lot of people travel for work and you can drive there by car, but there's often slow traffic, but you'd probably save two hours or more every day, if you don't use the train, even if you're stuck in traffic.
Now people might say, you can just move. Yeah good luck with the Quadratmeterpreise for the apartment. Good luck if you're a trainee or start your Berufsausbildung.
8Yes, that's how to fail the Energiewende. On the other hand, people could simply be more creative.
You say you have no time for friends, chores, free time? You just told us how much time you spent being unproductive!
Just wash your dishes in the crammed train. Physical contact and activities make it easy and fun to befriend other commuters. When missing another train, embrace it and relax 60 minutes. Or chop some veggies for dinner, endless opportunities!
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
But when 200 musicians had to delay the start of a prestigious concert in Berlin recently because their train was late, I, along with many other longsuffering German rail travellers, reacted by thinking: “Typical, welcome to the club.”
Deutsche Bahn, the state-owned German rail company, is so proud of running on green power that it makes a point of informing passengers that every ticket bought protects the climate.
Once there is a slight delay, the minutes begin adding up, as if any train can lose its slot on the overcrowded tracks and be forced to wait its turn in the system.
It does not always help that Deutsche Bahn thinks its announcements work best when delivered in a jaunty or slightly ironic tone, as staff explain delays, an absence of food in the buffet car (electricity issues), or drinks served in paper cups (broken dishwasher).
Carriages are then full of people discussing travel alternatives with their fellow commuters and, of course, because this is Germany, explaining why and when a system we once considered near-perfect, all went wrong.
Olaf Scholz’s coalition has recently announced plans to repair some mainline tracks and Deutsche Bahn is happy to spread the good news.
The original article contains 1,177 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
8During my last trip to Germany I made the mistake of traveling by train. My scheduled train got canceled and the next one would come in 1 hour.
I decided to wait and when the time came, no train showed up, the display said the train would arrive on platform 5, the announcement said it was platform 5, their app said platform 5 but nothing showed up.
About 10 minutes after the scheduled time I went to the ticket office to ask what happened, their answer was a "maybe it went through another platform".
7I went to Germany by train. At the first German stop, the train was declared “not up to DB standards” and cancelled (sold for scrap, I assume).
I mean, the train was exceptionally terrible, unlike any I went by with ČD. People were crammed in 3 coaches instead of 4, there was no A/C and the doors between coaches could not close, so I leaned on my luggage and held my bike propped up against a handlebar at the door I entered, all in noise such that people needed to gesture or show each other notes on phones. The train was apparently German-made, though.
However, way better trains get routinely rejected by DB. Why not just say „auf eigene Risiko einsteigen“ instead of „Raus“ and get people to their destination?
0
Last weekend, a few friends of mine and I made a trip halfway through Europe. I took the plane because I couldn’t get a ticket on the train any more, the others took the night jet (Austrian train service driving through the night with beds on board).
My 1.5h flight was delayed, and it was a big drama with connecting flights etc. It was by 5 minutes.
My friends' route was through Germany. Besides them needing 14h according to the regular schedule, they had a delay of 3h. There was no special accident or anything, the train just had to stop on the track a few times and in some sections it went at walking speed, probably because the track is in such a bad shape.
This is such a miserable experience. The price was about the same, btw.
6This is such a miserable experience. The price was about the same, btw.
Tbh if it wasn't for horrendous delays I'd still prefer a 14 hour night train over a 1.5 hour flight that in reality is usually a 5 hour test of my ability to kill time waiting. I'd rather get on at 8 pm, watch a movie, fall asleep, get up, have breakfast in the bistro car and get off at 10 am. Especially if it's the same price. Usually night trains are considerably more expensive if you desire any kind of comfort or privacy.
9Breakfast is included with these Nightjets, although it's pretty minimal (two rolls with butter and jam and a cup of coffee or tea). On the plane I got a sandwich with awful bread and a single thin slice of cheese in it.
The train is also an exercise in waiting, since there are about 4 hours before and after it's bed time. However, it's not so much time lost, because you have a fixed space and don't have to move around so much like on an airport, so it's easy to open up a laptop and get some work done.
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I know I've crossed into Germany once there's a delay. The sad part is that there's always a delay for the same train.
5What a stupid take…
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