For people less familiar. Germany privatised its national rail company in the 90s but the federal government is the only shareholder. It’s a weird model that doesn’t make much sense. DB is a monopoly so the rules of competition don’t apply (and don’t work with railways anyway) it’s led to perverse cost cutting incentives and fat bonus programs for C level employees. Combine that with a conservative government’s austerity politics since the GFC and the whole system is at breaking point at the moment. Reforms and work is happening but the amount of work is staggering and means frequent line closures. DB estimates its trains to be running reliably in 2070.
Expat in Germany since 2014.
(Also, I do not own a car).
I can confirm that Dbahn service was not so great from the start, and became noticeably worse after COVID.
I live in Rostock. 2 weeks ago I landed in Hamburg at 2:30pm and tried to return home by train. Distance is 185 km, and I arrived home at 10:00pm
Reasons: works on the line that forced us to go to Lubeck first, then take two more regional trains to reach Rostock. On top of that, one train from Lubeck to the next stop was so full that a hundred passenger could not get in (me included).
The next train was canceled.
Finally we got a (packed) train at around 8pm.
All "fine" except that this is the third time in the last 12 months that the same line undergoes maintenance forcing you to move to Lubeck first and adding 1 hour to your trip.
Rostock-Berlin: similar story. For three times in the last year there were some problems between Oranienburg and Berlin, forcing you to either travel around it with a 1 hour detour or to disembark in Oraniemburg and move to S-Bahn (sort like BART).
In other words: railways are overstressed and failing repeatedly causing massive delays; Oraniemburg is 40km from Berlin Central Station. I find it unconceivable that you have to repair the same short segment thrice in 12 months.
> All "fine" except that this is the third time in the last 12 months that the same line undergoes maintenance forcing you to move to Lubeck first and adding 1 hour to your trip.
And there are even longer interruptions scheduled for the RE1 between Rostock and Hamburg in 2025. As someone who strongly prefers bikes and trains it forces me to commute by car. It's a disaster.
So it is still a state enterprise in all but in name.
The swiss federal railyway has the exact same model (a company fully owned by the federal government) and it works very well.
Blaming the ownership model for the DB's woes is just wrong in my opinion. German railways have been chronically underfunded, overburdening the company with below cost ticket and the company has some perverse incentives with respect to rail maintenance and other things.
If the state had any control over DB, they wouldn't have been invested in Arriva (a bus company) until a few months ago, and they wouldn't make most of their cargo revenue with trucks (DB Schenker).
The state is the owner of the DB company. If they didn't like where the company is going they could just fire the CEO and board and pick other people and then define any goal they want. To me it looks that the bund is not active enough in their oversight (as 100% owners) of the DB. I assume no one wants to take the blame because it is such a shitshow.
I can't answer why DB is doing certain things which Arriva and their cargo division.
The DB is losing more than EUR2 billions per year[1] so the managment is probably trying hard to get this trainwreck under control. Kinda ironic that their truck business is actually doing the heavy lifting. It's one of the only divisions besides energy that actually makes money subsdizing the other failing parts of the railway. Withouth those you would be looking at EUR2.6 billion losses per year[2]. Great thing they have DB Schenker going for them! I don't undestand the complaints about that.
Also I don't think it is possible to fix the DB without more government subsidies. It looks like they barely get any (sometimes discounts on power but thats it)[2].
If you check the SBB (a very well run operation) you can see from the public finances
that about half of the operating income is from public-sector funding (aka government subsidies) without that it would be in deep red[3].
