Venting thread

[hwhatting]

@raphael @W.E: I don't want to be the old guy who tells how stuff was better in their youth, but it is possible to organize a better rail service in Germany, because we had a good one 40 years ago. I used trains much more than nowadays, but had less of the kind of mayor delays than I experience now, even though I use the train relatively rarely.
The reason is well known; the railways were privatized in the 90s and were both starved of investment and subjected to cost cuttings, which now shows by decayed infrastructure not working anymore and lack of qualified staff, so when we had waves of sick leaves in the past years, there is noone to replace the absent staff (train drivers, signalmen, etc.) and problems pile up.
This was tolerated by several governments, both from the left and the right, who wanted to a) make the railways attractive to private shareholders and b) receive dividends out of the share the government still holds. Everyone (except those who generally don't think public transport is necessary) sees that it can't go on like this, and the railways are another example where past greed and stinginess have come back to bite the current government, requiring money while it doesn't have enough to fill all the holes in other areas.

[Raphael]

@raphael @W.E: I don't want to be the old guy who tells how stuff was better in their youth, but it is possible to organize a better rail service in Germany, because we had a good one 40 years ago. I used trains much more than nowadays, but had less of the kind of mayor delays than I experience now, even though I use the train relatively rarely.
The reason is well known; the railways were privatized in the 90s and were both starved of investment and subjected to cost cuttings, which now shows by decayed infrastructure not working anymore and lack of qualified staff, so when we had waves of sick leaves in the past years, there is noone to replace the absent staff (train drivers, signalmen, etc.) and problems pile up.
This was tolerated by several governments, both from the left and the right, who wanted to a) make the railways attractive to private shareholders and b) receive dividends out of the share the government still holds. Everyone (except those who generally don't think public transport is necessary) sees that it can't go on like this, and the railways are another example where past greed and stinginess have come back to bite the current government, requiring money while it doesn't have enough to fill all the holes in other areas.

Interesting take. Especially given that Germany is still full of people who think that the problem with Deutsche Bahn is that they used to be public.

[Ares Land]

Interesting take. Especially given that Germany is still full of people who think that the problem with Deutsche Bahn is that they used to be public.

The French railways are in a weird, in-between state that's not unlike the German situation. They separated the underlying infrastructure (the actual railways) and the company that runs them; also set things up so that SNCF (the train company) shares could be sold to private investors.
I think things are about similar in Germany.

All in all the move towards privatization had pretty poor results. Similarly, there were a lot of cost-cuttings in the 2000s and the 2010s and generally I remember the train service being better run in the early 2000s. (Before that I was too young to tell!)

[Raphael]

I might have eaten a bit more food for dinner than I should have.