EN ROUTE TO BERLIN — As the 12:06 p.m. Intercity Express to Berlin leaves Bern and crosses into Germany, passengers reluctantly bid farewell to punctuality — a guarantee in Switzerland where trains run like clockwork.
Fifty-seven-year-old Elisabeth Eisel regularly takes this seven-hour journey. “Trains in Switzerland are always on time, unless they’re arriving from Germany,” she says. “Harsh but true, sadly. It didn’t used to be the case.”
Chronic underinvestment has derailed another myth about German efficiency. Deutsche Bahn’s long-distance “high-speed” trains are now among the least punctual in Europe. In October, the national operator broke its own poor record, with roughly only half of all long-distance trains arriving without delay.
Waning reliability is only one problem for state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which is operating at a loss and regularly subjects passengers to poor or no Wi-Fi, seat reservation mix-ups, missing cars and frequent “technical problems” announced over the intercom.
After decades of neglect, the government has announced a 100-billion-euro investment in rail infrastructure. But Lukas Iffländer, vice chair of passenger lobby Pro Bahn, says it will take more than money to fix the system.
“We are now paying the price for years and years of neglect, basically since 1998,” Iffländer says. It’s not just crumbling tracks and sticky signals, he explains, but an overly bureaucratic network operator. “Every process at Deutsche Bahn is really complicated. It takes forever and that frustrates the people that actually want to do something.”
Iffländer says Deutsche Bahn is top heavy: there are not enough train engineers and signal operators, but too many managers at desks. Der Spiegel recently reported that upper management allegedly approved canceling long-distance trains to boost punctuality ratings, since canceled trains do not count in the statistics. Deutsche Bahn denied embellishing its data, saying the report relied on chat messages between dispatchers, not the official statistics.
On a different train — the 11:18 a.m. from Munich to Berlin — passengers are packed beyond capacity because another fully booked Intercity Express was canceled at the last minute. The mood is surprisingly jolly despite many having stood for more than four hours with no hope of reaching the restroom.
Catherine Launay, 51, from France, manages to have a seat and is surprised by the lack of complaining. “If this had been a French train, there’d have been more of an uproar!” she quips. “In fact, French passengers would have revolted by now.”
To defuse tensions, Deutsche Bahn launched a mockumentary series for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube about a train crew struggling under preposterous conditions. The fictional crew’s dance routine and the line “zenk yoo for träveling wiz Deutsche Bahn” have been well received — even if passengers often can’t stream it on board because the Wi-Fi can’t cope.
As trains rattle along the track, the line between parody and reality blurs. A conductor on our train wishes passengers a pleasant journey “as far as it’s possible,” adding “we should just about make it to Berlin.” The car laughs.
Federal Transport Minister Patrick Schnieder warned that “many equate the malfunctioning of railways with the malfunctioning of our state.” Hopes rest on Deutsche Bahn’s new CEO, Evelyn Palla, who comes from Austrian Federal Railways. Palla has announced plans to slim management and improve efficiency but warned there’s so much to fix that it will take time.
As the train finally pulls into Berlin Hauptbahnhof, passengers are resigned: whether it’s signal failure, humor failure or state failure, Germany’s trains appear to have gone off the rails.