When I traveled to Europe last month for a summer rail adventure, I knew to allow plenty of time for delays.
I learned that lesson two years ago on a similar journey, when one of my trips on the state-owned German railroad Deutsche Bahn was hours late.
What I wasn’t expecting was a DB train that didn’t run at all — with no warning and zero customer support.
The hypocritical message: We want you to take the train instead of driving or flying, but we’ll make you miserable in the process.
During my previous trip, in 2024, a four-hour ride from Cologne to Hamburg turned into a meandering seven-hour journey beset with unexplained detours.
That experience mirrored statistics: Only 60% of DB’s long-distance trains run on time.
“Deutsche Bahn now underperforms even the worst British train operator,” the Financial Times found last year.
Why? Because, much like New York’s 2017 “summer of hell,” decades of poor decision-making have caught up with the transit system.
But in Germany, it’s been years of hell.
The country neglected its rail network as social-service spending grew.
Now it’s making $124 billion in investments — but upgrades are coming slowly.
Fine, I told myself this time: Just don’t rely on same-day connections or anything else requiring punctuality.
I wasn’t expecting trains that go nowhere.
But that’s what happened on what should have been a two-hour fair-weather trip from Brussels to Cologne.
The nominal explanation was unplanned track work after previous heat waves damaged rails and wires.
But it’s not breaking news that heat harms infrastructure.
The issue is poor communication — and a lack of fair compensation.
DB knew this track would be out of commission for days; a competing French-run service, Eurostar, told its customers that trains wouldn’t run on that stretch for at least the rest of that week.
Yet DB continued to sell tickets for trains it knew wouldn’t go anywhere, and issued misleading updates on its app past the last minute.
After my train was canceled, the app attempted to hoodwink me into sitting around the train station for another four hours — to wait for another train that would also be canceled.
A Brussels station agent suggested an alternative: I could continue as far as possible on Belgian rail, then try my luck with replacement buses where the line stopped just short of Germany.
So I took commuter rail east through Belgium.
At the last stop, a little place called Welkenraedt, I found hundreds of wheelie-bag-toting passengers, guarded by armed, flak-jacketed Belgian police, waiting for buses to take them farther.
Clearly I wasn’t DB’s only victim.
After an hour watching too many people get on too few buses while waiting fruitlessly for a DB update, I took a $380 Uber across the border. (The Uber driver was so excited that he called his daughter to marvel: “Allemagne!”)
Annoyed, I applied for “compensation” through DB’s cumbersome online form — and got even more outraged.
Amazingly, when DB cancels not only your train but all trains for days, it doesn’t offer an automatic refund.
Its only mechanism for online compensation involves a bank payment that requires a type of account number Americans don’t have.
(Oh, you can get a voucher for a future trip — not much help for a foreign visitor.)
When I inquired again a week later, I received an email saying DB might answer my email soon.
After nearly a month, DB offered me not a refund, but a voucher for half the price of my train ride.
I called to complain ($72, thanks to 15 minutes on hold) to learn that I should . . . write them a letter.
And pay to mail it to Germany.
The week of the Cologne debacle, DB informed me of another change: The Berlin-to-Paris train I’d booked for two weeks later wouldn’t run, either.
This cancellation seemed to have nothing to do with weather; it was just . . . because.
And again, no automatic refund was forthcoming.
A big part of making transit systems more appealing to riders has nothing to do with infrastructure.
It’s customer service: You’ve got to tell people what’s going on, and you’ve got to make amends when you can’t deliver what you’ve promised.
The underlying problem is contempt for those riding the rails.
The United States has the same affliction.
Outside of the northeast corridor, where trains run well, we say we want people to take trains, but offer abysmal reliability — just 53% of long-distance rides run on-time.
And California cares so much about getting people out of cars and planes and onto trains that it’s spent billions of dollars over two decades . . . pretending to build high-speed rail.
Getting more people on trains would be good for the planet.
But you’ve got to — crazy idea — run trains.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
