DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."

I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.

Passenger rights are very good in the UK. It's easy to claim Delay Repay, where you get 25% refund after a 15 minute delay, 50% refund after 30 mins and 100% refund after 60 mins. Other train operators are obliged to help you get where you need to go if the company you intended to travel with has cancelled your trains, or you've missed a connection due to a previous train you were on being delayed.

I've had the last train out of central London for the night cancelled at about 1am and you can just message the train company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to get you a taxi all the way to somewhere like Cambridge.

Also, not sure how it is in other countries, but in the UK, everything is entirely open data. You can go to a site like https://map.signalbox.io/ to see a live map of every train in the UK, and sites like Realtime Trains let you get all the details about every train (eg. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:KGX)

UK has airline-style pricing that goes up extortionately as seats run out, making it prohibitively expensive to use. It's also frequently late and/or trains randomly cancelled, although you can plan around it, you end up 1hr+ late on most long journeys.

On the plus side: local journeys are great. Delay Repay means you get up to 100% of your ticket back if you're delayed. If you cannot make the last train due to delays, they're obligated to get your home by bus or even by taxi. Train stock is (in my area at least) new and very comfortable. Views are good!

> Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."

I'm on the other side of this. I end up chaperoning lost tourists on my DB disaster trips with a regularity that I should be getting a paycheck from DB.

My experience of the trains themselves has been fine in the UK.

Ticket prices vary a lot and are unpredictable. I have not a last minute ticket from London to the midlands for just over £20, but they can be a lot more (several times as much?) for the same journey even booking ahead.

I definitely prefer the train to driving if I am going long distance by myself, but if its multiple people the car becomes a lot cheaper.

Local services in cities are pretty good. I never owned a car in London, nor in Manchester until I had a child.

Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.

I think it depends on where you are going. My local commuter link into London is OK and reliable, if expensive.

Long range trains from, say, London to Manchester are often overcrowded and ridiculously priced.

People who claim the U.K. is worse have no idea what DB is like and just think that “nationalisation” makes trains half the price and twice as reliable.

> DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe

Oh c’mon have you tried trains in Slovenia? The ICE from Budapest with a constant 230+ min delay, the regional one from Ljubljana to Celje where half the track is seemingly under perpetual construction (so transfer to a bus!), passenger trains delayed all the time waiting for freight trains, trains randomly going 20kph on some segments, and lately even vandals sabotaging the tracks. And don’t worry, they announce all of that exclusively in Slovene with no extra answers.

I’ve been on DB and it wasn’t that bad. It was expensive but at least the train didn’t max out at 80kph.

UK trains are terrible. I don't have direct experience to know if they are worse than DB trains, except for DB's dire performance being a running joke amongst my German colleagues at work.

I bet that UK trains "win" by being far more expensive than German trains, along with absurdly complex pricing. If you choose the wrong ticket you could also "win" a criminal conviction!

Don't worry though! We're currently building the most expensive bit of high speed rail in Europe, that won't even go into the centre of our capital city [edit: apparently it will now, see reply], or further north than the Midlands. Passengers who have the audacity to want to travel further north will have to transit over to the old tracks, creating even further capacity problems.

All of this is entirely avoidable, if the government just took a few common sense measures, but sadly it doesn't seem to be anyone's priority.

If you've never been on a train that stops at the right station, maybe the problem isn't with DB.

When comparing to the UK you have to also factor in how absurdly expensive it is. Eg a monthly ticket to the nearest city ~25km away is 292 EUR (nowhere near London. A city with not very high wages either). And the train is just 2.5 carriages and full every day.

It's so weird. That doesn't seem to be the lesson to be learned from Nazi Germany. The train going on time was not the part to fix.