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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> now to the most complex train system probably in the world.

Having seen the US attempt and lived with the UK railway, the German one is definitely a huge improvement. Yes, it does go wrong sometimes, but my experience at university in the UK was the end of term had two carriages with twice as many passengers as seats, that regularly terminated 20 minutes before the official destination, and my experience visiting the UK now that I live in Berlin is that the UK rail fares are (or often were pre-pandemic) more expensive than the flights to the UK. There's even a standard "money saving trick" on UK fare prices where you split a journey from A to B into A->C, C->B, where C is one of the stops in the route from A to B so you don't need to disembark.

That doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, neither the UK nor the US railways are role models. (I assume Japan is still a role model for rail? Not heard much since the 90s…)

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Honestly it's a very low bar and Germans should aspire for better and not for a meager "we are not the worst there is".

I would say you need to compare DB to other Western European railway operator/networks. In my personal experience, DB comes dead last and it's not even close to the 2nd to last. Renfe (Spain), Trenitalia/Italo (Italy), SNCF (France) have much better services, at least on the long-distance routes (> 200KM). So much so that they are a viable alternative to domestic flights.

Additionally, most of those countries also have a much worse geography to contend with (e.g. Italy with the Alps and Appennini) and they still manage to have a nice high-speed rail network that works.

Finally, answering your last point, Japan still is THE role model. So much so that you can get stuff delivered to a train station your train is transiting through (at least with the Shinkansen lines) because the carrier knows exactly when your train will be there. I was astonished by that.

Italy's geography is not universally worse. The mostly linear shape limits the number of required connections between stations: you only need a couple 1000km long distance lines to connect everything on the north-south axis, whereas in Germany they must go 500km+ in every direction for full coverage.

Yes and no. If you need to go from cities east to cities on the west you need to tunnel a lot and those choke points also make maintenance more tricky because you can't really re-route trains elsewhere without adding hours to the trip. Germany, as you said, it's mostly open ground and so you can go in any direction. Rerouting trains in this setting using viable alternatives for effective maintenance should be easier.

And those longer trips wouldn't even count as delays since they were hopefully announced weeks ahead of schedule and so passengers know it will take longer to get to their destination.

Long distance with Deutsch Bahn is an embarrassment. I don't know if they have any line where a car isn't faster.

> I don't know if they have any line where a car isn't faster.

Berlin-Munich

Depends on the conditions. It is 6 hours by car, but with a BMW or Mercedes you can easily make that 5 hours (averaging just 117km/h). Meanwhile it is 4,5 hours by train, but will likely be over 5 hours due to delays.

In France, Paris to Lyon is 2 hours by train and there is simply no way going by car is faster (legally).

These are just examples, my point is that a high-speed line should be a lot faster than going by car. Not slightly faster, and sometimes even slower.

And we're talking about high speed rail here (ICE trains). The UK has exactly one line that qualifies - from the channel tunnel to London St Pancras, and I don't think the US has any.

UK also has HS1

That _is_ the line from the Channel Tunnel to London St Pancras.

The ticket splitting thing you refer in the UK to works in other countries also.

How does it work? In my country (at least non-regional trains) the ticket price is calculated as ax+b where b is a constant price and x is the distance in kilometers. So splitting the ticket is always more expensive than buying two separate ones (but there are other reasons to do it, for example it's a trick to use when there's not enough seats to ride a->c directly - but that's an edge case)

Ticketing on the UK train network is completely inscrutable.

Perhaps the A->C ticket entitles you to travel on either an air-conditioned nonstop high speed train, or a slower train that stops a lot along the way, and buying A->B and B->C tickets you can only travel on the slow train and that's cheaper.

Perhaps all the discount advanced-booking tickets leaving A have sold, mostly to people only doing A->B, and when you look up B->C there are discount advanced booking tickets still available.

Perhaps you depart A during peak hours and so pay a peak fare, but as the B->C portion of the journey starts later, it doesn't fall into peak travel hours.

The UK is also relatively unique in extending full passenger rights even to split tickets as long as you adhere to the usual minimum connection times. (Apparently not out of the goodness of the train operating companies, though, but rather some interpretation of UK contract and customer protection laws which seem to demand equal treatment even for separately bought tickets.)

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