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It's getting worse year by year. In 2018, 71% of trains arrive on time. In 2025, it became 58%
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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Iirc for the DB a train is considered on time when it's not later than 7 min on arrival. Which is a joke if you miss your following connection.
A train that doesn't arrive at all is also not considered late.
they abuse this mechanic to catch up on late trains, by stopping their trains a couple stops before the end stop and turning them around to drive the other direction, now not late anymore.
The Pofalla-turnaround, named after a politician
I'm not sure I agree. The real world is never going to run perfectly, so some slack must be included (either by adding buffer time to schedules, or using the way you mention). Of course there are examples like Japan that have done a really good job at optimizing these systems, but you won't be able to successfully apply their approach to every country. Some locations require more work to achieve this, others require less.
Generally the closer you get to an "ideal" performance, the more costly every further improvement gets. If 7 min isn't reasonable, what number would be? Say we manage to shave off two minutes, at twice the cost of the current system. Is that really worth it?
The better approach is to include reasonable slack time in people's train schedules, while increasing frequencies so missing a connection doesn't result in hour-long wait times.
I have this same argument with my spouse. If fifteen minutes late is "on time", then change the arrival time and just be on time.
Ah, the Ryanair approach. But unreliable arrival times are annoying for passengers and a drain. Sure, build in a small amount of slack, but a functioning train system should be able to get to 90% punctuality without adding 15 minutes of slack everywhere.
Luckily the next train you have to take is also late, so nothing really changes. A system so broken that it works "perfectly".
Having been on a delayed German train, my connection actually waited so that everyone on my train connecting to it could catch it...
That obviously can’t be done regularly without impacting the whole system though. Meaning either that’s why they’re always late everywhere, or that doesn’t happen very frequently
It can happen if delays are rare, yeah
Yeah, unfortunately they’re not rare with DB :(