Independent railway commentator and cross-border rail expert Jon Worth has had enough of the tropes and jokes about Deutsche Bahn. And after completing his record-breaking journey from Kemijärvi in Finland to Lagos in Portugal, he has a point.

Worth’s 125-hour-31-minute journey was delayed by a total of 25 hours and 22 minutes. Yet none of that delay was attributable to Germany: around 24 hours were lost in Sweden, with the remainder in Portugal.

Still, the jokes about German railways continued.

In his blog post ‘Your Deutsche Bahn “joke” is no longer funny (if it ever was)‘, Worth argues that Germany’s railway problems need to be put into perspective. Yes, Deutsche Bahn has major problems, particularly the huge investment backlog that affects tracks, signalling, bridges and other infrastructure. But Germany also has an exceptionally dense railway network and a large number of trains. There are often several ways of getting from A to B.

Germany offers something many railways don’t: alternatives

That is something I recognise from my own travels.

I live in Antwerp in Belgium, while my sister lives in Switzerland, first in Zug and now in Küssnacht in the canton of Schwyz. In theory, travelling from Antwerp to Zug is straightforward: Antwerp to Brussels, Brussels to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Zurich and finally Zurich to Zug.

In practice, it rarely happened exactly as planned.

A regular problem was the 6:31 ICE from Brussels-North to Frankfurt Main Station, simply not running. I would check the previous evening whether the late ICE from Germany had actually reached Brussels. If it had not, I knew I had to improvise. I would take regular trains to Aachen and Cologne and work out the next step from there.

Another familiar occurrence was an ICE that was supposed to continue into Switzerland being curtailed at Basel. Again, no disaster. Once I reached the railway Walhalla of Helvetia, I had plenty of options, including travelling via Lucerne if that suited me better.

And that is precisely Worth’s point: there are options when travelling by train through Germany.

Not every passenger wants to manage the journey

This is where the experience of railway enthusiasts can differ sharply from that of the average passenger.

For those of us who regularly travel by train, disruption is often something we know how to handle. We know the geography, understand how the different networks fit together and have the apps and information we need to work out what to do next. A cancelled train may be annoying, but it does not necessarily derail the whole journey.

Many passengers, however, simply want the journey they booked to work.

They may have bought a ticket with a carefully planned itinerary and expect to follow it from one train to the next. When something goes wrong, they are suddenly faced with decisions they never expected to have to make. Is their ticket still valid? Do they need a reservation? Where should they change? Will they still make it to their destination?

I see this when I work on trains, and I hear the same thing from friends and acquaintances. Some people simply do not want their journey to require that much thought. They will tell you that flying is easier: book the flight, go to the airport, check in, board and get off at the other end.

Of course, flying is not necessarily easier. Finding a good fare, choosing a comfortable flight or working out the best connection also requires knowledge and experience. The difference is that many travellers have learned how to navigate air travel, while the equivalent skills for cross-border rail are less familiar.

And that matters for Deutsche Bahn’s reputation. When a journey goes smoothly, passengers rarely think about the complexity of the railway system carrying them across several countries. When something goes wrong, however, they suddenly have to engage with that complexity themselves.

For a railway enthusiast, a cancelled ICE may be an inconvenience to solve. For someone who expected a straightforward journey, it can feel like the system has failed them completely.

For some, taking the train is just not easy

In September and October, I hosted an American friend. And forget for a second the trope of the ill-informed American tourist. Using trains is a skill not everyone has. 

Trains are not an everyday means of transport in large parts of the United States. I had to guide my friend, and ‘hold his hand’. It was such a challenge for him. 

Sometimes, we – railway enthusiasts – forget this. 

Germany’s railway problem is partly a problem of expectations

Worth makes another important observation: passengers cannot complain about trains they cannot take because those trains do not exist.

His examples of northern Sweden and the Iberian Peninsula make the point vividly. Between Badajoz in Spain and Entroncamento in Portugal, there are currently only two trains a day, both running in the afternoon, using a railbus dating from 1955 with poor air conditioning. In northern Sweden, huge areas depend on a single-track railway.

Yet these services attract relatively little criticism precisely because so few people use them.

Germany is different. Its railway network is dense, heavily used and interconnected. A delay on a line carrying three trains a day is one thing. A delay on a line carrying three trains every ten minutes is quite another. The knock-on effects are inevitably greater.

That does not excuse Deutsche Bahn’s infrastructure problems. Nor should passengers have to become railway experts simply to make an international journey.

But it does suggest that the familiar Deutsche Bahn caricature misses something important. Germany has a railway system that is unusually extensive and heavily used, but passengers experience it not just as infrastructure and timetables. They experience it through the amount of effort they have to put in when something goes wrong.

And for many people, having to think their way through a disrupted journey is itself part of what makes rail travel feel difficult.

Perhaps that is the more useful distinction to make when discussing Deutsche Bahn. The railway enthusiast may see disruption as a puzzle. The ordinary passenger may simply see it as work they never wanted to have to do.