Calling the Deutsche Bahn private is a very good indicator that the person isn't able to look up Wikipedia Article and think critically.
See Wikipedia article here. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung
Translating that to english is train privatization. Does this lead to a privately OWNED company? I never said that. The decision to privatize and to make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows.
In German private means privately owned. It is rare that people out of Germany care about the legal status of Deutsche Bahn thus I used the German meanings and many posters as well.
Having seen the US attempt and lived with the UK railway, the German one is definitely a huge improvement. Yes, it does go wrong sometimes, but my experience at university in the UK was the end of term had two carriages with twice as many passengers as seats, that regularly terminated 20 minutes before the official destination, and my experience visiting the UK now that I live in Berlin is that the UK rail fares are (or often were pre-pandemic) more expensive than the flights to the UK. There's even a standard "money saving trick" on UK fare prices where you split a journey from A to B into A->C, C->B, where C is one of the stops in the route from A to B so you don't need to disembark.
That doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, neither the UK nor the US railways are role models. (I assume Japan is still a role model for rail? Not heard much since the 90s…)
Perhaps the A->C ticket entitles you to travel on either an air-conditioned nonstop high speed train, or a slower train that stops a lot along the way, and buying A->B and B->C tickets you can only travel on the slow train and that's cheaper.
Perhaps all the discount advanced-booking tickets leaving A have sold, mostly to people only doing A->B, and when you look up B->C there are discount advanced booking tickets still available.
Perhaps you depart A during peak hours and so pay a peak fare, but as the B->C portion of the journey starts later, it doesn't fall into peak travel hours.
I would say you need to compare DB to other Western European railway operator/networks. In my personal experience, DB comes dead last and it's not even close to the 2nd to last. Renfe (Spain), Trenitalia/Italo (Italy), SNCF (France) have much better services, at least on the long-distance routes (> 200KM). So much so that they are a viable alternative to domestic flights.
Additionally, most of those countries also have a much worse geography to contend with (e.g. Italy with the Alps and Appennini) and they still manage to have a nice high-speed rail network that works.
Finally, answering your last point, Japan still is THE role model. So much so that you can get stuff delivered to a train station your train is transiting through (at least with the Shinkansen lines) because the carrier knows exactly when your train will be there. I was astonished by that.
Berlin-Munich
In France, Paris to Lyon is 2 hours by train and there is simply no way going by car is faster (legally).
These are just examples, my point is that a high-speed line should be a lot faster than going by car. Not slightly faster, and sometimes even slower.
And those longer trips wouldn't even count as delays since they were hopefully announced weeks ahead of schedule and so passengers know it will take longer to get to their destination.
So its just a goverment agency.
As far as I know this all boils down to the fact, that the European Union (or better it's predecessor) wanted to get rid of state monopolies. It did work out for the "Deutsche Post" (more or less) and very good for "Deutsche Telekom". But "Deutsche Bahn" was a failure coming from that policy.
It didn't work very well for Telekom's competitors, though.
I've switched apartments about once every two years in average and every.single.time I've had to wait more than a month without internet (after already waiting a month for the scheduled appointment) because Telekom is the owner of the DSL lines and they connect their competitors' customers only when they feel like it.
My experiences in France were quite the opposite. So much for stereotypes.
It worked great for rail in Japan, so I’m not sure that’s the obvious lesson to learn.
I still remember "traingate", the smear campaign that followed Jeremy Corbyn (1) and how leaked CCTV video proved him right much later (2).
(1) https://www.politico.eu/article/jeremy-corbyn-walked-past-em...
(2) https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/virgin-release-traing...
Yes, it's true that things were pretty grim. I remember being embarrassed when a colleague from Norway travelled with me in a filthy, worn train carriage stinking of piss :(
But IMO that doesn't excuse the lack of poor management since then. Things could be much, much better.
Sectorization was, of course, the prelude to privatization.
This is only a Wikimedia page, so if you have better evidence that contradicts it, feel free to present it. But note that it cites trustworthy sources.
>The most basic, fundamental difference between the British and Japanese railways is how they were privatised. In Britain, the tracks were split from the trains.
from a ft article I apparently can't link
The split of infrastructure and the invisible hand of the train operator market seems to be a correlation.
Source: I live in Sweden there was a DN article recently about it. Here it is
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240721074607/https://www.dn.se...
(Its all too segmented, the trains, the track all different companies now nobody sees the full picture)
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240726054426/https://www.dn.se...
(The land is not enough to fix trains and the land next to it was reserved but somehow sold to build a sports arena because the train land section became a company that had to post good numbers)
I hear UK is not too happy about their rail too. https://youtu.be/DlTq8DbRs4k?si=yNWcAUZ69nN1B29O
Seems like it just does not work to separate rail and traffic like that.
Separating maintenance from operations is a terrible idea and has never worked well on any railway that I'm aware of.
Alos, one important thing that happened in Sweden was that the part that was not privatised was also ran like a for profit company.
The railway infrastructure "CEO" basically stopped a lot of repair work and long term projects and was able to show some very good numbers to the goverment, which they very much liked. 10-15 years later things started falling apart, by which time she was long gone.
I consider it safe to assume that the reason for this is that it had been just the same when it was still a government org, but a government org will see its responsibilities very different from a company eagerly cosplaying shareholder-value while the sole shareholder happens to be the government they can freely rip off because of an ongoing legacy approach to the principal-agent problem.
As for delays, I think one reason, besides lack of maintenance and the massive interdependence in that large network that allows neither a star nor a main axis simplification is the high speed Autobahn: if they weren't overambitious in terms of travel times they would perhaps put bigger time buffers in their schedule and that would certainly help a lot.
And they don't cheat either with an x minute grace period. On time means the minute on the timetable.
So it's certainly possible.
The largest shareholders for all the privatized rails in Japan are a mixture of Mitsubishi Group, Mitsui Group and Mizuhou Group.
Western anti-trust doesn't allow that level of consolidation - everything is basically owned by a handful of Keiretsu.
I highly recommend reading "Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap to learn about this [0].
[0] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-a...
Vertical and Horizontal Integration (like what the 3 groups above do) is heavily regulated and litigated against in the EU [0][1], especially under Vestager.
Japan on the other hand doesn't actually regulate against either forms of market dominance. All three of those groups (called zaibatsu/keiretsu) have had market dominance in Japan since the 16th century.
That's why I recommended reading that book above - Antitrust in the Western sense doesn't actually exist in Asian countries, all of whom modeled their economies on Japan and with Japanese advice (METI) and aid (eg. ADB).
[0] - https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust-and-cartel...
[1] - https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/br...
Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company and the bad from the government bureaucracy.