Deutsche Bahn struggles to shake off ‘travel hell’ reputation

Deutsche Bahn recently took journalists from Berlin to Frankfurt on a trip aimed at showcasing massive new investment in Germany’s rail network. Their train was 45 minutes late.

Such delays are now typical of a railway system that used to symbolise sleek, speedy efficiency and is now a byword for travel hell.

Fans converging on Germany for the Euro 2024 football championship have been shocked by how poor the DB system is. Last year, only two out of three long-distance trains arrived on time. Switzerland is even thinking of excluding German trains from its network because they’re often so late.

“With all this travel chaos the railways have become a national embarrassment,” said Ulrich Lange, transport spokesman for the opposition Christian Democrats. 

The press trip ended as badly as it began. On the way back, reporters were directed to take a local train to Frankfurt, which arrived with a 35-minute delay. As a result, many missed their connection home.

“Of course, it sucks,” said Wolfgang Weinhold, the DB executive in charge of the company’s infrastructure renewal programme, who attended the misbegotten trip. “But it also spurs us on to make things better.” 

The reason for the poor service is prosaic — wear and tear. Years of under-investment means the equipment needed for a smooth-running rail service — signal boxes, overhead lines, crossings, switches and track — is in a terrible state.

“For decades, we basically ran the system into the ground,” Berthold Huber, head of infrastructure at Deutsche Bahn, told the Financial Times. “And now we’re at a tipping point.”

The problems have been compounded by the huge spike in demand for rail travel seen over the past few years. More people are taking the train than ever before — helped by the success of the Deutschlandticket, first introduced in May last year, which allows unlimited travel on regional and local transport for €49 a month.

“We have a lot more rail traffic, which is exactly what we wanted,” said Andreas Geissler of Allianz pro Schiene, a rail lobby group. “But that combined with massive under-investment over many years has led to the crisis we’re seeing now.”

“The rail infrastructure is too old, too full, and too prone to disruption,” said Huber. “We’re operating ever more trains on a system that hasn’t kept up with our needs.”

Deutsche Bahn has a solution: a massive modernisation programme.

The only catch: some of the network’s busiest lines will have to be closed down for months to allow for repairs. For DB’s hard-pressed customers, that means things will get worse before they even start to get better.

“It’s like open heart surgery,” said Geissler. “No one has experience of carrying out repairs on this kind of scale. It’s uncharted territory.” 

DB’s woes have their origins in the 1990s, a time when the government contemplated taking it public and turning it into a global, partly privatised player along the lines of Deutsche Telekom and Deutsche Post.

The company cut costs to make itself more palatable to potential investors. It shut down unprofitable lines and reduced the amount of track in its network from about 40,000km to 34,000km.

“With the reform of Deutsche Bahn in the 1990s we were trying to create the most efficient railway system possible,” Huber said. “But we removed too much infrastructure. With the efficiency drive, we went too far.”

Germany now invests much less per capita in its rail infrastructure than most other countries — just €114 in 2022, compared with €450 in Switzerland and €319 in Austria. Rail became the Cinderella of German transport policy, as successive governments channelled billions into road construction.

“The railway got the warm words and the roads got the money,” said Geissler.

Now that is changing. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government is channelling much more investment into the system than his predecessor Angela Merkel ever did. DB bosses hope the current multibillion-euro modernisation programme will presage a real turnaround in the company’s fortunes.

First up for an overhaul is the “Riedbahn”, which connects Frankfurt to Mannheim and is used by up to 16,000 passengers a day. Hardly a day goes by without train cancellations or delays on a route transport minister Volker Wissing has called Germany’s “most neuralgic line”.

Now it will be closed for five months, with trains diverted along alternative, longer routes and local travellers forced to take replacement buses.

The plan is to fix everything in one fell swoop — stations, tracks, ballast beds, switches, overhead lines and crossings.

DB chiefs insist there is no alternative. “Imagine both your knees and elbows are bust. If you just deal with the first knee, you’ve solved a problem, but the other three will just get worse,” said Huber. “That’s why you have to deal with everything simultaneously.”

The Riedbahn is just the start. Ultimately, 41 of Germany’s most important rail transport corridors will be modernised by 2030, with DB promising tangible improvements in the service by the end of this year.

Wissing has said DB needs €45bn to repair all of Germany’s rail infrastructure. So far he has only managed to secure about 60 per cent of that sum — €27bn. DB’s equity capital will be increased by €20bn by 2027 in part to pay for the renewal programme and some funds will come from the sale of DB’s logistics unit Schenker, which could fetch more than €15bn.

Huber said he still wondered how they will finance it all. “But the fact is we’re getting an extra €27bn, and that is a hell of a lot. And that means funding for all the projects we’ve planned for the next two years is secured.”

Yet the new funds have been slow in coming. As a result, the company was forced to dip into its own pockets to pay for essential repairs — one of the reasons why it made an operational loss of almost €1.3bn in 2023, down from a profit of €1.2bn in 2022.

Executives insist the renewal programme is good news for customers. But it’s not much consolation to the 150 Austrian fans who arrived too late for a Euros match in Dortmund last month because of network problems.

Or to Philipp Lahm, the Euros tournament director and former German captain, who missed a TV appearance where he was due to comment on a Euros game because his train was late.

Many will agree with French film star Julie Delpy, who vented her frustration on Instagram last year after a flurry of missed connections. “Please travellers never ever travel by train in Germany,” she wrote. “Go by foot if you have to.”