German Railway Forum

Last night, via German public TV,  the Hart Aber Fair (Hard But Fair) public forum show (live) went and covered the topic in discussion of the German railway system....is it a climate-savior or a piece of crap. 

I sat and watched the bulk of the group discuss this. 

There are two key directions on this.  First, if you are pro-environment and pro-society, you want the Bahn (the German railway system) to double over the next decade, and everyone to use it in order to reach work, school, or your destination (rather than cars or airplanes).

Second however, if you are a regular daily user of the Bahn...you laughed your way through the entire show.  The toilets on the trains rarely work.  The AC system is marginally working in the summer months, and sometimes completely broke. It's over-crowded.  The trains are continually off-schedule and cannot be depended upon. 

This second group simply won't accept the Green Party premise that the Bahn can double or be this Jesus-like miracle situation....to save us from evil C02.

As a fairly regular rider of the Bahn, I have a different prospective.  Having ridden AMTRAK in the US, and several systems in Europe (Netherlands, Switzerland, UK, and Austria)....the Bahn is a great delivery system, for the price. 

The three chief problems however....start with the premise that Germans have very high expectations, and having a daily train leave Wiesbaden at 7:32 to Frankfurt.....with the results of it arriving at the correct time of 8:07....will only occur 40-percent of the time.  Course, it's within five minutes of it's correct time in 75-percent of cases.  Then you come to the once-a-week point, where it's 20 minutes late. 

Second, the trains are all highly technical now.  The toilets are mostly broke because it's not built along the lines of what you had in the late 1970s.  The AC system is modern and can be very capable, but breakdown rates in July just make you question who designed the system, and tested it. 

Finally, you come to urbanized usage.  Most of the big cities are at a maximum point, and I would suggest the doubling-scheme of the Greens simply won't work in that case.  Go to Frankfurt and just sit for two hours in the rush-hour period to observe how the 'tubes' now work.

It was a great chat forum, and the story detailed for public consumption.  The sad truth is that the Bahn is at maximum capacity now.  It can't be that much bigger or better.  Regular daily users?  They aren't buying into the argument.