German intercity trains are less punctual than even the worst operator in Britain, a new analysis has revealed – despite the German chancellor mocking Britain for its “broken tracks and bad trains”.
Last week, Olaf Scholz dismissed a suggestion of privatising the country’s rail system during a snap election debate, stating that it would “end as badly as in England, where nothing works any more”.
However, analysis of railway data by the Financial Times found that Germany’s state-owned rail operator Deutsche Bahn, which runs around 95 per cent of all long-distance trains in the country, delivers one of the least reliable services in central Europe, even when compared to the state of the UK’s rail services.
Around 72 per cent of Deutsche Bahn’s intercity trains arrived within 10 minutes of their scheduled arrival time in 12 months to January, compared with 78 per cent of British long-distance trains, the Financial Times research states.
It was also found that punctuality also affects long-distance train travel across central Europe, for example, services from Germany to Amsterdam are delayed by an average of almost 13 minutes, while trains arriving into the city from elsewhere are typically within two minutes of their scheduled arrival time.
The analysis is based on more than 1.9bn arrivals at stations tracked by websites Bahn-Vorhersage and Zugfinder from February 2024 until the end of January 2025.
Just 39 per cent of German long-distance trains arrived with a delay of less than 60 seconds. Britain’s worst-performing train operator, Avanti West Coast, met this service level 41 per cent of the time.
Overall, the UK average sits at 69 per cent.
The analysis found that about a fifth of intercity trains in Germany were delayed by more than 15 minutes in the 12-month period, which is almost twice the amount that Avanti West Coast experiences and 10 times as much as all the services in the UK.
That being said, compared to much of Europe, there is a lot of competition for both countries for on-time train services, such as Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, whose punctuality consistently exceeds 90 per cent.
Switzerland has even gone as far as preventing some late-arriving German services from crossing the border to prevent them from impacting punctual local timetables.
A Deutsche Bahn spokesperson told The Independent that: “Since the rail reform 30 years ago, operating performance on the German rail network has increased by 28 per cent.
In contrast, the network in terms of operating length in kilometers has shrunk by 17 per cent. As a result, the rail network is heavily used and sometimes overloaded,” they continued. “However, the rail network is not only too full, but also too old and prone to disruption.
“The effects are clearly measurable. In a good 80 per cent of cases, the delay in 2023 was due to the poor condition and congestion of the rail network,” they said.
As a result, the operator said it is currently defining plans that would see the investment of billions of euros to improve the rail infrastructure, such as in its stations, refurbishment of the network, maintenance, as well as new long-distance trains.
Deutsche Bahn did also point to some services that have proven to have a higher punctuality rate, such as the new high-speed track between Berlin and Munich, where 82.5 per cent of all trains in 2024 arrived within 10 minutes of their schedule, the Financial Times reported.
Complaints over German train services were thrust back into the spotlight during the Euro 2024 football tournament, when fans reported chaos due to long queues and train delays.
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