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German trains are less punctual than Britain’s ‘broken’ railways
Olaf Scholz mocked UK trains. FT analysis of 1.9bn data points show they are more reliable than Germany’s network
Germany’s rail problems have become so bad that Deutsche Bahn’s intercity service is less punctual than even the worst operator in Britain, a country the German chancellor mocked for its “broken tracks and bad trains”.
Olaf Scholz last week dismissed the idea of privatising Germany’s rail system in a debate for Germany’s snap elections, arguing that it would “end as badly as in England, where nothing works any more”.
But Financial Times analysis of railway data shows Germany’s state-owned rail group Deutsche Bahn consistently delivering one of the least reliable services in central Europe — and even when compared with the UK network, which is routinely criticised for poor performance at home and abroad.
About 72 per cent of Deutsche Bahn’s intercity trains arrived within 10 minutes of their scheduled arrival time in the year to January 2025, compared with 78 per cent of British long distance trains, according to the FT analysis.
Any interaction with the German rail network is also one of the biggest factors affecting the punctuality of long-distance rail travel in central Europe.
Services from Germany to Amsterdam, for instance, are delayed by an average of almost 13 minutes, while trains coming to the city from elsewhere are typically within two minutes of their scheduled arrival time.
The poor state of German trains has become a symbol for the country’s vast investment backlog and a top theme in the federal elections on February 23. Politicians have debated how to fix crumbling roads, neglected railways, housing shortages and depleted armed forces.
Germany and the UK use different definitions for punctuality. To allow for a direct comparison, the FT used detailed German rail network statistics collected by the websites Bahn-Vorhersage and Zugfinder.
The analysis is based on more than 1.9bn train arrivals at stations that were tracked by the websites from February 2024 until the end of January 2025, amounting to over 5mn per day.
The data paints a picture of Deutsche Bahn, which runs about 95 per cent of all long-distance trains in Germany, struggling to meet even basic service targets.
While just 37 per cent of German long-distance trains arrived with a delay of less than 60 seconds, even Britain’s worst performing train operator — Avanti West Coast — met this service level in 41 per cent of all cases. The UK average is 69 per cent.
About a fifth of intercity trains in Germany were delayed by more than 15 minutes, almost twice the share at Avanti West Coast and 10 times as much as in the UK overall.
The performances of the rail networks in both the UK and Germany lag far behind some of their European peers. In Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, punctuality consistently exceeds 90 per cent.
Germany’s neighbours also suffer from Deutsche Bahn’s patchy performance, as its delayed trains have knock-on effects for timetables across central Europe.
In Basel’s central station, trains originating in Germany arrive with an average delay of more than 12 minutes — 12 times higher than those coming from elsewhere.
The Swiss network, renowned for its punctuality, has resorted to stopping some late-arriving German services at the border to prevent them disrupting local operations.
Deutsche Bahn told the FT that infrastructure was “the key to more punctual railways”, adding that 80 per cent of all delays were caused by the poor state of its network. The company described its infrastructure as “too crowded, too old, and too prone to disruptions”.
As a positive example, Deutsche Bahn pointed to 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.
For decades, Germany skimped on maintenance and infrastructure upgrades as successive governments put a higher priority on fixing roads and balancing budgets.
According to data by Pro-Rail Alliance, a German railways lobby group, the German government in 2023 spent just €115 per citizen on railway infrastructure, compared with three times that amount in Austria and four times in Switzerland.
Andreas Geissler, a transport policy expert at Pro-Rail Alliance, told the FT that investment surged to €190-€210 per citizen in 2024. Over the past 15 years on average the investment stood at just €73 per citizen.
Since 1995, when the government started to prepare for a privatisation that was later shelved, 12 per cent of the track network has been axed while passenger traffic is up by 50 per cent and cargo traffic has risen by 90 per cent.
Poorly designed funding laws made matters worse. Deutsche Bahn was long required to fund maintenance work with its annual budgets, while renewal and extension was paid for by the federal government.
“This created incentives not to properly maintain kit, but to run it down and then replace it at the governments’ expense,” said one person familiar with the matter, adding that this issue was only recently addressed.
More than half of all the interlockings — a type of signalling apparatus — need to be improved, with some that date back a century to the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
In Frankfurt, one of Germany’s main railway hubs, a critical bridge across the river Main close to the European Central Bank has been labelled beyond repair. Built in 1913 and quickly repaired after it was damaged in the final days of second world war, it has now been declared unsafe for pedestrians. It will take years to build a replacement.
Deutsche Bahn has labelled 16 per cent of all German railways infrastructure as “poor”, “deficient” or worse. The investment backlog that needs to be dealt with grew by €2bn in 2023 to €92bn, according to Deutsche Bahn estimates.
Even a 74 per cent surge in federal investment in the railways infrastructure in 2024 to €16.9bn was unlikely to turn the tide, according to an insider who added that this push was only expected to stop further decay.
Friedrich Merz, the centre-right leader likely to be Germany’s next chancellor, has said he wants to split the operation of the network from the operation of the trains — a move reminiscent to UK rail privatisation in the 1990s.
But Merz has not committed to provide the billions that Deutsche Bahn says it needs by 2027. A person with deep knowledge of the investment backlog in the German railways network told the FT reforming the structure “would not improve the punctuality of a single train”.
I thought when people referred to the brokenness of UK rail they mostly meant how much more expensive tickets became after privatisation?
I have extensive experience of both being a British person living in Germany. British trains are much worse, or at least used to be. German trains are often late, but at least they are clean and modern. How can you compare ICEs when the UK doesn’t even have high-speed rail (no, the short stretch to the channel tunnel doesn’t count).
Agreed. Moreover, the article fails to mention the ticket prices or costs for the end user, which tend to be higher in the UK. Additionally, even if the ICE (high-speed train) is delayed by 10 minutes, it still outpaces a regular train, resulting in a better overall consumer experience compared to the UK.
I mean, the Deutschlandticket for €40 is a steal. That’s the price of a return off-peak in the UK.
The Deutschlandticket was 49€ until recently when they increased the price to 58€ per month.
Still good value, but considering this is like a 20% increase within a year of existence and the price shouldn’t even be meant to cover the costs (since there are many other benefits it provides) it is disappointing.
Ticket prices in Britain aren’t due to privatisation. They were a side-effect of the unexpected success of British Rail in its final years at attracting more passengers. As demand went up, the ailing infrastructure struggled to cope. Upgrades can take decades to plan and execute correctly, so the answer was to raise prices to ease off demand.
This also fulfilled the longstanding policy of both parties for rail users to carry the financial burden of rail operation and maintenance. So, under privatisation, 40% of tickets were priced directly by the Department for Transport. The rest were priced by the train operators, who often engaged in price wars that lowered prices compared to the controlled fares.
Now of course privatisation is effectively over and 100% of tickets are priced by government. Prices will still be maintained high because of the desire to make passengers pay for the system, and to keep demand manageable. Already some routes have reached saturation.
Wait, so you’re saying that it’s the DfT that caused the high prices, and not to cover costs but to control demand? Ie. that privatisation wasn’t actually to blame? (Do you have a source, I’d like to read up on this)