Sun 8 Oct 2023 14.00 CESTthe start of a prestigious concert in Berlin recently because their train was late, I, along with many other longsuffering German rail travellers, reacted by thinking: “Typical, welcome to the club.”
The cruellest journeys are those that start on time, which is not often the case on my Munich to Berlin ICE. My weekend frequently has to start early on Saturday morning rather than on Friday night. As a regular passenger you learn not to hope. But inevitably, you start out feeling optimistic. Then you look at the information display. A little delay. Come on, who minds two minutes? But the scheduled delay grows so that what starts off as an innocuous sliver of time becomes a missed appointment.
It might be a trace of Hegelian thinking or simply the influence of too much crisis communication training, but in Germany everything is fine as long as there’s an explanation for it. This is not only true of the railways.It does not always help that Deutsche Bahn thinks its announcements work best when delivered in a jaunty or slightly ironic tone, as staff explain delays, an absence of food in the buffet car , or drinks served in paper cups .
One theory goes that the decline began in the mid-90s, when the government started its efforts to make Deutsche Bahn. Another is that the politicians in charge simply didn’t care. In the 12 years to December 2021, all four ministers for transport came from the CSU, the Bavarian sister party of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Being from Bavaria, the BMW state, they were more interested in building new autobahns.