I have also been on a cross US Amtrak trip that was literally 30 hours late and they rationed food and the staff became increasingly rude and unhelpful.
Pretty awesome watching the train you've been waiting for just sort of keep going :D. (The magic of newtown Wales!)
The worst is tho running and rushing and then finally making it into train car that turns out to be going completely wrong direction.
And yes, Japanese trains are crazily accurate. Not only are they (almost) always perfectly on time, they also stop exactly at the position that is indicated on the platform, so you can line up and wait right in front of the train door.
On the other end of that spectrum, I can also empathize a bit with an increasingly unhelpful crew of a 30 hour late train. Yeah, you don't have to be rude about it, but at some point, there's simply a decreasing amount of help that can be given.
Is it because of language? Religion? Genetics? Isolation? What is the reason?
Computer control is more of a safety issue than a reliability enhancer. Computers are pretty good at stopping trains before they crash into another train or rocket off of a curve some idiot took at 80mph, but not so good at driving the train at its safe limits. Ever ride BART? It's been fully automatic since its inception (in normal operation, drivers have an e-stop button and make announcements) and it isn't setting records for on-time performance.
I think the fascination with Japan's on-time record is a little overblown. I went to high school in Tokyo and I was late plenty of times due to train problems. Snow? Schedule is fucked for the entire day; trains canceled, trains late. Someone falls in front of a train? You're not going anywhere for an hour. As a rider of the New York subway system during the "meltdown", I can tell you that you can absolutely do worse than Japan. But the MTA was still happy to hand out vouchers explaining why I was late to work.
I don't know if they do this, but I'd imagine if they built in buffers and then controlled the train speed based on arrival/departure times they could get pretty accurate. If a run's maximum average speed (mouthful) is 120 km/h then plan on 100 km/h which gives you +20 buffer to play with in order to make sure the time is right. A computer would allow that +20 to be evenly spread so passengers aren't aware of it.
That, of course, has much less to do with computers and more to do with planning and eliminating and accounting for unknowns as much as possible.
It can, if the door slam shuts instead of attempting to reopen and close.
The high punctuality isn't necessarily without its faults; it creates a high-stress environment to adhere to schedule. 106 people died in a train crash that is hypothesized to have happened because the train was 60 seconds late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
LOL. If that was true the Swedish train companies would have been bankrupt decades ago. Swedish trains are extremely unreliable. As someone who used to take the Stockholm-Gothenburg train a lot for work I was happy every time I arrived less than an hour late.
For intercity routes you get 25% off the ticket after 1h delay and 50% after 2h delay.
Yes, if they screw you over you might get a taxi ride. But most probably you'd just have to wait for several hours and get up to 50% of the ticket price as a voucher for the next trip.
Trains are one of the most embarrassing part of Sweden. And we are probably going to spend and absolute fortune on new tracks and new slow trains (slow because costs have already spun out of control).
Some may not know this, but trains, and railcars in Japan are accurate _down to the second_ and if there's any deviation from that, the management company for the line will generally offer an apology to the riders.
The easiest one I could find was from 2017 where a train left the station 20s earlier than scheduled. Source: https://www.mir.co.jp/assets_rti/pdf/2017.11.14.pdf