After living in Italy for a few years - if you're doing worse than Italy with your train schedule it's time to reflect hard.

As per my other comment, Swiss trains (especially SBB) are not as pleasant as they get credit for. I get a lot that "you know, in other countries it's much worse", and it reminds me of software hosting, where it was normal in the past to be offline occasionally. Then Google et al. came and showed that much more reliability is possible with good engineering. I think there would be a lot of room for improvement.

Keep in mind that a train in Germany counts as one-time if it is less than 6 minutes late. In Switzerland, it's 3 minutes.

Also in Germany, a train that did not even arrive does not count as too late.

There is also a concept of the "Pofalla-Wende", which is when a train is so late that it just does a 180 and drives back, to mitigate that the delay doesn't carry over to the train's next route. Of course, that means that it skips the stations at the end of the route.

That does not make Germany look any better but I find the "percentage on time" not very useful compared to the "years of delay" metric. And arguable a average/median delay per train would be better? Also some delay volatility data would be interesting.

If you look at France for example, 80% of trains are not punctual but the "total delays" is actually on the low range, France being on the large side with lots of lines, I would say that it shows that the delays (20% of the time) are actual shorts.

Canada: 30% on-time

https://media.viarail.ca/en/press-releases/2025/q1-2025-time...

I gather that this is an average of all trains. In Italy, the high velocity train are quite punctual, but the slow regional trains drag the average down.

In Germany in 2025 it got worse with only 55% of trains being on time (defined very generously as being less than 6 minutes late).

The less complex your train network, the easier it is to ensure trains are on time. France, Italy and Germany possibly have larger networks than Switzerland.

Talk about a very appropriate domain name lol

Dutch announcements in the Netherlands. Fancy that. Almost like it's the national language or something.

Yep, only semi-consistent exception is that Amsterdam Central & Schiphol are usually also announced in english. Including delays related to these stations.

But, for example, Rotterdam or Utrecht are already a lot less likely to be announced in english.

Since you moved to Netherlands is understandable they speak Dutch. You should consider learning it off you want to get by in the society.

In other words: it's going downhill ever since the DB was privatized.

"Off the rails" hehe

The Netherlands has a very similar problem: the train system was privatized in the late 90s/early 2000s and has been going downhill since the 2010s or so. While it's still better than Deutsche Bahn, it's just so much worse compared to how it used to be.

German trains were great twenty years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if things went haywire after lockdown. Many things did. It gave people a licence not to work and introduced a sloppiness into everything.

> Most people here speak English

Germany is the country where I found the highest number of people not being able to speak English, even people working in accomodation!

French people probably know English but they refuse to speak it; Italians don't know English that well, but they try their best using rolling R's and gestures.

(I'm a bit ironic)

Announcements in English aren't done for every station. Usually only for central stations and airports.

I thought they already rejected delayed trains. Trains that are on time are still allowed. But I'd love to see Switzerland take over some of those international connections.

I'm a heavy public transport user in Switzerland, and even though it's almost a meme how reliable the trains are, reality is different. Yes, they operate in a way that make the stats look good (x% on time), but they take tradeoff to get there. E.g. they won't await connections if another train is a few minutes late. So you might have to wait for 30 minutes for the next one, or even longer if you're unlucky. And there's the occasional big incident, where you get stuck for several hours. I missed flights that way, even though planning in 3 hours of buffer. There is zero compensation in such cases as long as they bring you to your destination on the same day. Plus, several trains are regularly way too crowded.

Because the State wants to attract well educated international workers to fix it's failing economy?

You're really wondering why a state-funded service would consider the needs of tourists?

English is the most common lingua franca.

Idk how it is in Germany but my wife is currently trying to became a train driver in France and there are far more requirements that what you would imagine.

Even if the job is actually opened to basically everyone (and that’s pretty nice), you have to be in perfect physical and psychological shape with pretty strict tests, you have to be intellectually apt enough to follow the training which is pretty intense. You have to accept work conditions such as not knowing your work hours until the day before. You have to accept sleeping who knows where at least 2 times a week. You have to accept having only one weekend off per month.

So what happens is that when you have that much filters and you still want to hire train drivers, you can’t afford to expect your drivers to know another language on top of all of the rest.

I have found station and train staff in the UK to be very friendly and helpful.

They do have very good pay (drivers can earn as much as some airline pilots) and a very good pension scheme on top of that.