After living in Italy for a few years - if you're doing worse than Italy with your train schedule it's time to reflect hard.

Germany and Italy should gang up together to make the trains run on time and... wait a minute.

Hey Japan wants to join. I know we are a bit far away but we can form some sort of a tri-something axis.

I heard that Japan's trains cannot compete with the Germany's trains. /s

I think, the joke about Germany and Italy should team up is a reference to the new CEO of Deutsche Bahn, Evelyn Palla, who is from Italy. The "to make the trains run on time" gives a hint here, because this is her declared task.

Not about Germany, Italy, and Japan, forming some sort of axis, I guess.

Japan wants the trains to run on time too!

The tri partners have a mutual goal.

In Germany in 2025 it got worse with only 55% of trains being on time (defined very generously as being less than 6 minutes late).

I find this figure absolutely baffling. How can you run a train system with half of all trains being late?

Someone has never been outside the Western world, lol.

In many countries the train comes when it comes and goes when it can, regardless of any fictional like schedules.

I have. Mali didn't have trains at all. Our Indonesian train was on time.

It's not like countries outside Europe can't make trains run on time. Japan's are even more punctual than Switzerland's.

(Hence the occasionally heard witty announcement in the UK…)

“Please mind the gap between the timetable and reality.”

Talk about a very appropriate domain name lol

As per my other comment, Swiss trains (especially SBB) are not as pleasant as they get credit for. I get a lot that "you know, in other countries it's much worse", and it reminds me of software hosting, where it was normal in the past to be offline occasionally. Then Google et al. came and showed that much more reliability is possible with good engineering. I think there would be a lot of room for improvement.

I disagree. Swiss trains are a delight. They even have trains going up mountains (although some of those cost extra). Public transit in Switzerland was extremely reliable when I was there, and also according to official statistics.

Complaining about Swiss trains is beyond me.

Unlike other commenters, I agree that there are some (arguably significant) things to complain about. The first one is price - tickets are quite expensive. I frequently travel Zurich HB -> Lugano. This is 200km and costs a whopping 120+ CHF round trip. Zurich -> Geneva, Zurich Bern are similarly expensive. However, it's a bit hard to fault them as Switzerland is an expensive country and perhaps the high prices keep the service good.

What I am less able to excuse them for is capacity issues, especially on weekend and Friday trains on popular routes in the Summer. That Zurich Lugano train is packed to the gills most weekends during the summer such that it's standing room only for most of the 2 hour ride. They need to add more trains or at least more cars.

Reliability is not something to complain about. The trains are punctual, that's for sure.

Eh? Just checked in SBB Mobile, Zurich<->Lugano is 68 CHF roundtrip (with Halb-Tax, of course, but if you live in Switzerland, it doesn't make sense to not have it unless you have a GA travelcard) with 2nd class.

The less complex your train network, the easier it is to ensure trains are on time. France, Italy and Germany possibly have larger networks than Switzerland.

Then split your network into segments you can handle. Switzerland receives lots of international trains. Not only that; it has a lot of rail companies, serves even tiny villages, and has the highest use per capita in Europe. Size of the network is a lame excuse. German trains used to be fine. Now they're a disaster.

Switzerland has all public transport synchronized across the country. In any of the countries you mentioned they don’t even gave synchronized public transport at city level.

The swiss have a more challenging geography and weather than Germany.

They also spend far more per capita on their train system.

All that and afaik they still manage to connect all important places.

No, Swiss SBB is just generally very competent and has insane amount of traffic in comparison to any European rail.

Except that The Netherlands has the busiest rail network in Europe [1] and still manages to be second in that list.

[1] https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/acm-rail-monitor-netherla...

That does not make Germany look any better but I find the "percentage on time" not very useful compared to the "years of delay" metric. And arguable a average/median delay per train would be better? Also some delay volatility data would be interesting.

If you look at France for example, 80% of trains are not punctual but the "total delays" is actually on the low range, France being on the large side with lots of lines, I would say that it shows that the delays (20% of the time) are actual shorts.

Canada: 30% on-time

https://media.viarail.ca/en/press-releases/2025/q1-2025-time...

I gather that this is an average of all trains. In Italy, the high velocity train are quite punctual, but the slow regional trains drag the average down.

Keep in mind that a train in Germany counts as one-time if it is less than 6 minutes late. In Switzerland, it's 3 minutes.

Also in Germany, a train that did not even arrive does not count as too late.

There is also a concept of the "Pofalla-Wende", which is when a train is so late that it just does a 180 and drives back, to mitigate that the delay doesn't carry over to the train's next route. Of course, that means that it skips the stations at the end of the route.

Experienced that a few months ago. Next time I‘ll be tempted to pull the emergency brake which will cost them at least half an hour to get the train going again. Or so I have been told.