How German efficiency failed Deutsche Bahn
A subjective press review and personal complaints. Not an investigation
If I were Dan Rather, I’d title this article “A reason to frown”. Unfortunately, for both you and me, I am not.
As someone who grew up in Transylvania, I heard the myth of German efficiency ad nauseam. The ethnic Germans (Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Swabians) were thorough, systematic, organised, disciplined, never late, you name it. Even the non-Romanian books I was later in life exposed to, like Robert Kaplan’s Balkan ghosts, feed further into that narrative: when he visited the country in 1990, in the aftermath of the Romanian revolution, the only pockets of hard work and civilisation (albeit heavy-drinking) he found were within the German minority.
In 1866, when our proto-country needed fixing, we imported a deadpan workaholic Prussian to fix it. In the 90s, the dawn of our consumerist democracy, German products, when you could get your hands on them, were the pinnacle of functionality and high quality. In 2014, when the country needed fixing once again, we elected an ethnic German from Sibiu as President. As many Romanians will gladly explain to you, that move proved as efficient as the German trains. But not yours truly. Detective Vladiana is busy with another question of utmost importance: What happened to Deutsche Bahn?
My moving to Germany in 2011 was not a blow to that myth. Germans were not walking around with Swiss clocks instead of hearts and computers instead of brains, but commitments were respected, almost no one was late, and all in all, things were moving efficiently and on time. But not the trains. The trains famously didn’t. Deutsche Bahn, the national train operator, seemed to be a national pain point.
The dichotomy between the expected efficiency and reality is written on the face of every DB passenger. A look of amused disbelief (or hopeless frustration, depending on how long they spent in the train station) when dealing with delayed and cancelled trains, broken air conditioning, and an ageing, crumbling network. People sneer, roll their eyes, and shrug. Urban folklore like this little happy song mocks both the train operator and the Germans’ pronunciation of “th”: “senk ju vor träwelling wis Deutsche Bahn” (the sentence was coined by a series of satirical books by the journalists Mark Spörrle and Lutz Schumacher).
These thoughts were keeping the goblin that controls my brain busy on a train back to Brussels from Dortmund, on 12 June 2026. After I managed to silence my inner-Karen (”I’ll scream, I’ll shout, I’ll complain, I’ll be an absolute environmental hazard and never step foot in a train again…”), that is.
My original trip was supposed to start at 10:15 on the ICE (which stands for Intercity Express; it is not a subtle hint that the railway traffic is frozen) to Cologne, and from Cologne to Brussels. The first train was cancelled; I got a new ticket for a regional train and a later train from Cologne to Brussels. No seats. The regional train was delayed by about 20 minutes due to a “signal issue”. According to Deutsche Welle, some of the signal boxes are more than 100 years old.
The change that never was
In August 2025, the then CEO of Deutsche Bahn, Richard Lutz, was dismissed by Germany’s transport minister, Patrick Schnieder. He had been in office since March 2017.
In an interview published the same month in Monocle Magazine, the rail expert and professor at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, Christian Böttger, explains that the dismissal of the head of the state-owned transportation operator was hardly a surprise, as Richard Lutz “presided over years of missed targets and a culture of glossing over problems rather than fixing them”. However, what surprised everyone was the timing: in the middle of the summer holidays. No new face, no new strategy. Richard Lutz’s successor, Evelyn Palla (the railway’s first female CEO), was confirmed in September 2025. Richard Lutz left DB on 30 September 2025.
The Monocle interview is a deep dive into DB’s issues, political dependencies, finances, crippling bureaucracy, lobbying, outdated technologies, regulations, and workforce shortage. Mr Böttger takes no prisoners.
Get Vladiana Petarlecean’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
“Historically, the railway never held much prestige — neither in East nor West Germany”, the railway expert says. In 1994, four years after the reunification, East and West Germany’s rail operators merged into Deutsche Bahn AG, a state-owned company operating like a private one. “The newly merged DB became a respected company”. Lured in by the high speed, comfort and efficiency, the number of DB passengers increased. In the 90s, “Pünktlich wie die Bahn” (“punctual as a train”) was still a phrase used in German, says Jens Kaminski, a DB train driver interviewed by Deutsche Welle. In the decade I spent in Germany, I never once heard the idiom used non-ironically.
Being the loved, reliable train company taking people on holidays was not enough. DB’s management wanted to become a global player. This resulted in neglecting regional infrastructure, administration and workforce. What we see nowadays is the tip of the iceberg, the result of three decades of bad administration, poor management and low investments. The technology is outdated, and tracks and trains are being poorly maintained. DB’s workforce is understaffed and underpaid, and the network is in disrepair, with fewer tracks and more traffic.
It’s the infrastructure, stupid. ‘Cept it isn’t
The most common narrative when it comes to the railway’s many failures is blaming the infrastructure. In 2024, the then Minister of Transport, Volker Wissing, promised a complete overhaul of the infrastructure by 2031.
Christian Böttger believes that, even if the promised fairytale transformation of DB’s infrastructure into the “most modern rail in Europe” happens, this will not solve its many woes. The problems run deeper. They are structural, and so are the changes needed: streamlined bureaucracy, accountability, and clearer governance. The kind of things that push you into making decisions, taking responsibility, being strategic, having a reliably trained workforce and ditching the fax machines. “Funding is the least of my concerns”, Mr Böttger concludes.
In December 2025, Evelyn Palla announced a restructuring plan for 2026 “to streamline management, decentralize decision-making, and improve punctuality and efficiency by making the organization more agile”, writes DW. DB’s punctuality has become a cross-border mortifying problem. In 2024, Switzerland decided to cut short at its border various Deutsche Bahn long-distance trains because the chronic delays of the operator, which defines trains delayed less than six minutes as “on time”, would disrupt their timetables.
Alongside Ms Palla’s internal reforms, “unprecedented levels of public funding” are expected: 23 billion EUR for rail infrastructure in 2026 and 107 billion EUR by 2029 for modernisation and renewal works.
It is getting worse before it is getting better
However, this is not a short-term solution. The much-needed overhauls are expected to improve performance but currently create notable disruptions. The works advance slowly, and their efficiency is questioned. The railway’s largest construction project, “Stuttgart 21” (the underground railway station and high-speed rail lines in Stuttgart), was delayed multiple times, and the costs have more than doubled. Initially planned for completion in 2019, the new horizon is 2031. The most recent delay in works was caused by 1,000 kilometres of cables incorrectly laid before the signalling system’s final design was complete.
The perpetual crisis of DB makes this article obsolete before publication. On 23/24 June 2026, an outage, the result of scheduled work to replace a component, halted trains across Germany. DB explained that the culprit was a problem with the GSM-R system, the digital internal communications network. The result: passengers stranded in crowded train stations, long queues of unhappy faces, in the middle of a heatwave, and another hard blow to Deutsche Bahn’s reputation. Oliver Krischer, the regional transport minister in North Rhine-Westphalia, called the situation “a new low in already poor operating quality”. The possibility of a cyber attack has been ruled out. Interviewed about the blackout, Christian Böttger explains that a redundant system is in place, but the switch was not automatically made. When the interviewer suggests an IT management problem, Mr Böttger says that is the interesting question, noting that recent software updates have led to system failures. He also explains that the technology is outdated and no longer taught, leading to a shortage of skilled workforce. Here is a more detailed account of the blackout in German.
Instead of conclusion
What broke Deutsche Bahn: a combination of under-investment, a shaky, questionable vision, poor management, and, according to DW, hubris: “Anyone in a position of authority at Deutsche Bahn has long needed, above all, one quality: the ability to show humility and acknowledge mistakes”. A recipe for disaster so safe that not even German efficiency can survive it.
