| ▲ | sajithdilshan 9 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time and if you're unlucky most probably a delay of 4+ hours and missing your connecting train. The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany. I used to date a guy who works at infra department in DB and based on what he told me, I couldn't believe how inefficient and massively complicated DB is. They have internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT department and no matter how cheap or good outside IT providers are they must get the service from internal IT department (so much for competition). At this point DB needs a complete overhaul and let go of so much dead weight to make it working again and unfortunately German politicians are just throwing more money at every problem hoping they would magically solve themselves rather than fixing the actual structural problems. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | tazjin 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. Ironically, Russian trains (even over distances of thousands of kilometres) are usually almost perfectly on time. Germany's DB seems to fill the same niche as other companies there, like Telekom: semi-private companies living off old state-built infrastructure that they're now incapable of (or unwilling to?) maintain. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | ngruhn 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time I can't recall that this happened to me. The "lucky" scenario is when the connecting train is even more late so you can still catch it. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | tim333 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In the UK the railways used to be kind of bad in the nationalised British Rail days. People moan about the current privatised rail but it mostly works. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | on_the_train 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT Same here, with a big German semiconductor player you all know. The IT department has to battle the non-it departments and external contractors for internal software dev jobs. It's a made up game, costing 70% of our work time (just the beurocracy). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | renewiltord 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
That’s pretty strange about this competition thing. I’ve been repeatedly informed that the government is much better at running things like this. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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