It’s a system run at the absolute border of what is possible and that was designed with the “just enough” philosophy in mind.

You cannot add a stop if the rails are single track and the next train is just behind you.

If you do said train will be delayed, will not be able to switch tracks at its final destination ( since it has a hard slot for that) and errors cascade.

It’s the best possible train system, given how little was invested …

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3ds 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly! When you spend billions on car infrastructure but hardly anything on rails, there will be issues.

What people don’t write clickbaity blog posts about is how in general things work very well. I’m currently sitting on a train from Nuremberg to Berlin and it takes less than three hours, it’s on time, quiet and just a good experience. This trip used to take five hours but then the high speed rail track got completed and cut the time by two hours. Wonderful!

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Etheryte 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Things do not work well in general. DB is internationally infamous for its garbage service because everyone who has ever taken DB has a horror story. I lived in Germany some years ago and not once did I manage to catch a train that was on time for both arrival and departure. And this doesn't even touch on the topic of being stranded in the middle of nowhere as a regular occurrence.

	▲	britzsquad 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		absoluter grützkacke die du da redest

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hobofan an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Depending on what regions/lines you are exposed to one can definitely land on different sides of "it works well in general" vs. "it doesn't work well in general".

Of course if you cite a Sprinter line like Nuremberg <-> Berlin, which has the newest tracks and newest trains, you will have a far better experience than on lines that have the worst maintained tracks and trains. Sadly, the badly maintained ones seem to make up the majority of the DB network.

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deepsun 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As someone said during COVID supply chain disruptions: when a system is very optimal it becomes fragile.

So probably they need to add more parallel tracks, unused most of the time.