I have been to places in Germany where it was a 45 minute drive to the nearest train station. I'm not talking about somewhere in the Black Forest but an actual village where people live. It's great for cities but for villages I typically take the car.

Yeah. While I understand why Germans are so frustrated by BD these days, as a Canadian living , the train network here blows my mind constantly. It has problems, but it's still incredible.

Population density of 4 versus 240 people per square kilometer. NRW has 528 ppsk. Ontario has 15 ppsk.

Not surprising that Germany has a better train network.

Those numbers are pretty much irrelevant. Canadians arent evenly distributed throughout the country (nor throughout Ontario. That province is empty other than a tiny corner of it), the overwhelming majority of them live in a few areas that are quite population dense (i.e. metro-Vancouver area, Edmonton/Calgary axis, and the corridor from Toronto to Montreal.

Besides, Canada used to have a much more extensive train network back in early 1900s when the population was a tenth of what it is now.

Canada could have functioning train networks if we wanted them.

Naive question, why are Canadians more poorly connected by rail than they were at the beginning of the 20th century?

Rail networks are no longer a government priority in Canada because of planes and cars. We've kept some of the rail tracks, but theyre mostly just used for freight transport, not for people.

Yeah, the dependency graph for scheduling trouble to procreate is massive. Not comparable at all to a star topology as in France, or to a two coasts topology as in Japan. Closest thing might be Switzerland, but while that network is also very dense, it's also so small it might just as well be compared to some of the larger subway networks.

And then there's a pet hypothesis of mine, that a factor in the unreliability of German rail is the famous absence of a general speed limit on the Autobahn: that this might make DB strive for fast best case connection times more than it would if driving was slower, pushing them to schedule an unrealistic house of cards with not enough slack to recover from the unexpected.

Yeah, both Switzerland and the Netherlands have distributed networks like Germany, but their relatively small size means that they don't need to design around speed, and can focus more on synchrony.

That said, this doesn't mean it's impossible the fix Germany's trains. Germany's network did work quite well before, and it can again. The fixes are happening right now, but it's going to get worse before it gets better, because all the construction that needs to be done interferes with the network.