DB is a lot better run than British trains... My God. Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.

OP mentions "six minutes" as a DB metric. But the thing is that DB doesn't care about trains being late. It's absolutely normal to have an hour delay in Germany. You can be considered lucky if it's under an hour. What will usually happen is that you spend half a day in some village waiting for your connection and travel the rest of the way standing in the doorway with your bags.

	▲	nephihaha 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've been on UK trains that were an hour late, others that changed platform at least three times, headed to the wrong destination etc. Many are cancelled without a decent reason being given. I rarely take British trains now they are so expensive and unreliable. Only long distance maybe because buses are unpleasant.

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MrOrelliOReilly 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The author makes effectively the same comment that twenty minutes late is normal for Germany (below). I don’t have any statistics, but anecdotally I’ve had worse experiences with DB than in the UK. DB does not just run late, but has a bad habit of teleporting you to random German towns, from which you must quickly route find to your original destination (as is the exact story of the post).

> It is twenty minutes late. I consider this early.

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flohofwoe 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The TL;DR is: regional trains are usually on time, long-distance trains usually are not. If you need to travel between cities, plan with an hour buffer time. Basically, "show some adaptability".

The one good thing about frequent long-distance delays is that you might be lucky and catch an earlier delayed train and actually arrive a bit earlier than planned ;)

(also JFC, does the author like to whine about nothing - I'm travelling frequently with DB for about 25 years now, and while shit happens from time time, most of it is merely a slight inconvenience).

	▲	barrkel 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Plan with a ~40% of travel time buffer if you ought be there, and travel the day before if you must be there. I travel from Basel to Hannover and back every two weeks on DB. Trains south are almost always late, trains north usually late. Frequently the train is already late in Hannover having come from Hamburg. The worst was when I was kicked out in Frankfurt and had to stay in a hotel. The delays were so bad there were no more trains left that could connect me to the last train out of Basel. Things have been getting better for the past couple of months I think though.

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bryanhogan 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Competing on which system is more dysfunctional, is .. not a competition we should be in. Especially when there's 0 reason for it to be this way.

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ernst_klim 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.

My biggest gripe with DB is not that it's late, but that it quite often cancels the trains. If you decided to go by regional trains with 1-2 hops instead of direct (bc you can go much cheaper with Deutschlandticket), there's a high chance that at least one of your trains get cancelled and things will not go according the plan.

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gadders 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That happens very infrequently on my commuter service in the UK. I'd say not more than once every couple of months, normally due to someone committing suicide in front of a train.

	▲	nephihaha 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I stopped travelling by train because of it. I live near a station and can see services have become far more infrequent, so there is that too.

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globular-toast 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not my experience. I regularly travel by train and a 20 minute delay is unusual. Almost every train is on time in my experience.

Recently while driving an hour journey turned into a three hour journey, and not because my car broke down. I've never experienced any delay anywhere near that significant on British trains.