Those who mean it particularly badly with Deutsche Bahn may be wondering why the transport company is still drafting timetables at all. For trains that are either on strike or completely canceled for other reasons. Or they depart and arrive according to an unfathomable random principle instead of a binding timing.
It is not easy to determine whether these malicious people also include executives from the Swiss railway SBB and the Swiss Federal Office of Transport. The fact is, however, that both of them no longer want to include Deutsche Bahn in their plans: the German ICE, coming from Baden-Württemberg, will foreseeably only go to Basel instead of Zurich or even Chur and Interlaken as before. And the EC trains from Munich only go to St. Margarethen, at most to St. Gallen. Shortly after the national border it should say: “Our journey ends here.”
The reason is as simple as it is obvious: you can’t rely on the trains. Or only insofar as they are almost always late. This messes up the finely tuned, closely interlinked timetable of the Swiss railways. And the Swiss definitely don’t want to have it destroyed. Especially not from the Germans.
The Deutsche Bahn is in comforting company, as the French TGV is also said to befall the same fate. Although they are comparatively punctual. The director of the Swiss Federal Office of Transport, Peter Füglistaler, recently wrote in a social media: “International trains with integrated schedules carry a high risk of delays.” If this somewhat tacky phrase is a mocking allusion to the lack of language skills at Deutsche Bahn when it comes to announcements on board their trains, then this tip would have been right.
From Switzerland’s point of view, the matter is quite unfortunate: Attractive long-distance connections to Munich, Frankfurt and Hamburg or to Paris and from there on to Amsterdam, Brussels and London are definitely desirable and a contemporary alternative to air travel. In addition, German ICE and EC could also be useful in domestic traffic for people who want to travel from Zurich to Bern or from Basel to Winterthur.
Instead, Deutsche Bahn is in the process of getting itself kicked out in Switzerland because of its unreliability. Apparently, people in Berlin are misinterpreting what is to be understood by the internationalization of rail transport: namely, an effective and travel-friendly dovetailing of European rail services. And not an approximation to Indian conditions, for example.
Stefan Fischer likes to travel on night trains. They travel so slowly that they make up for any delay.
(Photo: Bernd Schifferdecker (Illustration))