If an ICE is, say, 15 minutes late, they cannot just drive faster to catch up. The schedule went on, and at that point there may be a much slower regional or intercity train on the same trajectory.
This is why ICE delays tend to cascade. It starts with a short delay, the ICE gets stuck behind a slower train, increasing the delay, etc.
The solution is better maintenance of tracks and trains, adding more rail capacity, adding redundancy, etc.
Of course, these are all much more expensive than an ICE speed experiment for PR.
Right here. Those slower (older) trains don't magically get any faster just because the train behind it sped up.
> pack the schedule
You actually can't just double it up because faster trains need bigger gaps between them, just like driving on a motorway. If the train in front needs to slow/stop for whatever reason, you don't want the train behind smashing into it at 400km/h because it was tailgating.
Switzerland SBB/CFF and the German DB can not be compared, not even from far.
The Swiss trains are amongst the best in the world in term on punctuality. Delays barely exceed few minutes most of the time. Every connection is scheduled to be done < 5min. The usage is smooth like butter and It works like a Swiss clock.
At the opposite, German trains in the eastern part are barely on time and give you an almost Soviet experience for the regional one: The trains are old, poorly maintained, like the track itself and the service suffers of it.
The only place in Western Europe I experienced train to be worst than in Germany is currently in Hungary where there were actual soviet trains.
Even the freaking French SNCF with their legendary strikes tend to be more punctual than the DB.
As someone from the region, since when is Hungary 'Western' Europe? We are happy when acknowledged as 'Central' but this is new to me.
Switzerland doesn't have high-speed trains, only low-speed ones. And all timetables are carefully tuned to half- or full-hour station distance intervals that all trains on a track take at the same speed ("Taktfahrplan").
Germany has the worst of all those worlds: No Taktfahrplan (because it probably would be impossible due to the larger and far more complex network), high- and low-speed trains on the same tracks, and only some sections of dedicated high-speed rail that drive up the cost but still have shared stations and sections with low-speed rail so that punctuality goes down when the tiniest thing goes wrong.
Yes 100% right. Japan has the same where the Shinkansen uses dedicated track. If I do not say a mistake, China does the same too.
The fact it never has been done in a modern country like Germany with a dense high speed train traffic like the ICE is clearly a sign of planning deficit from the authorities.
The Shinkansen initial network and separated tracks have been built at an age where JRails was still a single centralized company.
The main reason was to create a network with a focus speed and punctuality. And to be fair, it was the right choice and pretty revolutionary at the time.
That is not true, some TGV dedicated stations have been put in remote area (mostly in far right areas), but there are lots of cities that have high speed train stopping at the central station in the center.
On some Swiss lines it's fairly common to have trains recover their delay at departure (which also avoids cascading impact).
The most efficient use of the tracks would be to limit all trains to the speed of the slowest train that travels a route. Then you can have minimal distances between trains.
Also, faster trains are less fuel-efficient, quadratically with speed. So a slowdown would help the environment and the throughput. The only thing it wouldn't improve is passenger happiness ;)