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.
has become
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
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.
This 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.
Breakfast 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.
Since 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.
During 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”.
I 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?
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.
Privatising infrastructure is stupid AF. It was part of the 90s Zeitgeist, which haunts us to this day.
It’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.
This is more or less what they ended up doing in the UK after rail privatisation, taking the infrastructure back into public hands.
But you can’t have anything like fair competition on train services. It’s not like anyone can just plonk a train on the tracks and outcompete the other trains. They’re awarded franchises, which typically have a monopoly over a particular type of service on those tracks. They can’t be outcompeted, the only way they lose their franchise is if the govt is forced to step in to pick up the pieces (which has happened several times in the UK).
Flixbus showed how competition absolutely decimates prices even in transport business and Flixtrain did as well, even though it is heavily sabotaged by the entitled DB aristocrats.
Is Deutsche Bahn in private hands? It sounds like the same mistake that Thatcher made in the UK
Also why isnt competiton bringing the prices down?No, it’s not privatised, although currently organised as a joint-stock company (AG) with the state being the sole shareholder. But it was supposed to be privatised and made “profitable” starting in the 90s.
They didn’t control it very well though. DB AG did spend a lot of money on non-rail related expenses like the DB Schenker road freight division and also on investments in other countries. Apart from that they also have some sort of weird division between maintenance and rebuilding costs, the former DB AG needs to pay and the latter are often paid for by separate funds which gives a strong incentive not to perform maintenance.
Yeah privatization in general doesn’t work great. The only good arguments I’ve heard for private ownership is the initial investment portion.
It does work alright in some fields but it definitely does not work for natural monopolies like infrastructure (rail network, power, gas, internet/phone networks, cable, water, waste water,…) or for things people can’t not choose to avoid buying (health care) or buy very infrequently (once or twice a life only).
And 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.
As theories go, this one is pretty well supported by evidence.
I wonder if those in charge use Verzögerungen im Betriebsablauf, Operational Delays, while in bed as well
Not 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)
The fact that it exists is not even that bad. As long as it was limited to events like suicides that have good reasons not to talk about them openly I would have no problem with that.
Suicides by train were never announced as suicides. The term before they re-coined it to “Notarzeinsatz am Gleis” (roughly translates to “severe medical emergency near the track”) was “Personenunfall” (accident involving a person).
My point was merely that it would be fine to have a guiding document for acceptable phrasing for events like that for the employees. It would also be fine for things too technically detailed to be understood by most customers for that matter.
The problem arises when you use something like that for things that you shouldn’t be hiding as a company.
That’s exactly the problem, they are using their official phraseology to deliberately obscure everything, and the example with accidents involving persons being coined as “medical emergencies near the track” is one of the most ridiculous ones, because everyone and their cat knows that that obscure phrase actually means that a train has run over someone.
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.
TL;DR: Commuting in Germany is terrible und unreliable and the author really liked his idea of comparing Deutsche Bahn to Kafka.
