To be really funking fed up of the shit train services in this country

German trains are absolutely worse than they used tp be, but you have to remember they had a long way to fall. Where I am they're pretty good and the connection I use most frequently will often wait if there's a small delay. And importantly, every haystack has its station. The Deutschlandticket is an amazing deal, too (notwithstanding tje constant discussions about its funding kicked off by the parties more closely aligned with the motor industry).

I’ll tell you what’s also shit. I live an hour drive from Leeds. If i want to catch a direct train from my village to Leeds it takes 2 hours via train and costs £35 return! Wtf. Why would i want to spend twice as long and considerably more money getting there. Never mind the risk of delays.

Ridiculous that people have to resort to this
while those in power gaslight us that we have a great public transport service.

How much extra do the Ubers cost you?!

At the Euros this year, Austrian fans were singing "Die Deutsche Bahn ist so im oasch" (to the tune of "when the saints go marching in...") while Scottish fans sang "are ye Scotrail in disguise?".

That made me laugh. Yeah Scotrail is abysmal too. Football fans can be quite witty 😂

Well I’m glad it’s not put you off enjoying what German train travel has to offer, and your planned trip sounds pretty exciting.

I think unfortunately I’d find excessive train delays on journeys involving connections too stressful, especially as I tend to travel solo.

I will admit I don’t even fully understand who all runs the railways and train companies in the UK, or how things work but everyone involved needs to get a grip and sort it.

Every train journey I have been on recently has either been delayed and/or cancelled.I have actually given up on them and resorted to using Uber instead.

I’m in Perth, Australia. All public transport is free this year from mid December to end of January. Trains are frequent, clean and reliable. This thread is not making me miss my old London commute at all!

The one good thing and Avanti services is delay repay. I love it!

But yes moving back to the UK I could not understand why all the rail networks are such shit shows and why we are meant to be happy with it.

My trains are always cancelled due to “shortage of staff / crew which is odd to me because apparently the “immigrants have taken all of our jobs” so why haven’t they taken these ones!

Germany is not Switzerland. "National embarrassment" was what one German tourist I met in the UK said. I remember speaking to a booking office clerk in Amsterdam (having arrived 4hrs 28 mins late) who said that they deal a lot with passengers disrupted by DB. At the Euros this year, Austrian fans were singing "Die Deutsche Bahn ist so im oasch" (to the tune of "when the saints go marching in...") while Scottish fans sang "are ye Scotrail in disguise?". All that said, there are never any issues with ticket acceptance when it goes wrong, and station staff will quickly endorse your ticket for travel on another train. If you make some allowances for delays you'll be fine. It doesn't put me off, I'm going to do a circuit of the Baltic by train and ferry in the Spring, I just build in some padding at interchanges (especially where sleepers are concerned) and ensure that I have a plan B. If you'll be based in Berlin you should have fewer issues, the worst bits of the network are in the West, around the likes of Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Köln.

Post-reunification lots of investment was piled into the East, which has meant that the infrastructure in the West hasn't been looked after. They've also had staff shortages and industrial disputes, just like us. German long-distance trains also suffer from the same issues Crosscountry and Transpennine Express do in the UK - they cross multiple regions so pick up one delay and carry it over to the next. Regional trains are fine though, and cheap, 58EUR for unlimited travel on local public transport for a month https://int.bahn.de/en/offers/regional/deutschland-ticket

What really isn't helping the UK is how tight budgets are. The last government liked to talk of "modernisation" a lot. "Modernising maintenance" was code for "wait until it breaks, and then fix it". I'm getting tired of points failures which are merely down to lack of lubrication or something equally preventable. Skimping on preventative maintenance like this costs more than it saves. It's important to remember that 43% of Avanti's cancellations were outside of its control - usually down to Network Rail.

@blackbird77 Completely agree with all of that - there’s no excuse for the state of the public transport here.

I used to live in Seoul and the trains/buses were only late maybe a handful of times throughout the entire first year that I lived there. Whereas here they’ll be late a handful of times in one week. And yeah I used to have issues with buses here too when I took them. It’s all a shambles.

I just can’t understand how we are paying so much for such a poor service.

I used Southern Rail trains every day for various jobs for the best part of a decade and a half (for the last few years I’ve not needed to as my job is local). I can’t remember the last time I used a train where my day wasn’t plagued with delays or cancellations or short carriages or the absolute worst- replacement buses. I was paying soooo much money. The service was utterly disgraceful.

I used to live in Tokyo where you could time trains arriving and departing to the second and lateness caused by trains was so rare that if this ever happened, you were given a stamp card by the train company to prove this to your employer because a train being late in Japan is such a rare and unbelievable circumstance.

It’s not just the trains but also the bus network. I now take a bus across town to my work and they are just as rubbish as the trains. And I live in the town which has the supposed best and most extensive bus network in the country. Almost every other day, the bus home is cancelled or delayed by upwards of 30 minutes. Delays and cancellations never reported on the app so you are waiting in the freezing cold for ages for a bus that may never show up. Sick of it. We are a rich and successful country. There is no reason why our public transport infrastructure should be so bad.

Thats awful. I used to work in Blackfriars and lived about 50 minutes away using the train or thameslink.

The only way I’d avoid most of the London Bridge station chaos was leaving my house super early and then going home either very early or really late. That was only possible as I worked flexitime. If my day started off late or I had to work just slightly later so I’d be leaving around 5pm it would be a nightmare! I remember once being crammed into a train at 9am on my way to Blackfriars and two people kicking off at each other due to the lack of space. It was just miserable even if when it did run on time.

I used to also wonder how screwed a lot of parents especially single parents must be when they had these colossal delays, that would’ve prevented them from picking their kids up from school /childminders etc on time.

I feel like they just don’t care about peoples safety or wellbeing. Apart from the general inconvenience too many of us have been left in less than safe situations due to delays.

I feel it’s also a bit sexist or inconsiderate to bang on about how we should all use public transport when it’s often doesn’t feel that safe for women. Although tbf the one time I was (physically) assaulted on the train it was by a woman!

Make public transport more affordable, cleaner and reliable before you start telling us all to give up driving /our cars!

Really I’m surprised! Never been to Germany but I’d have assumed the trains there were super punctual and reliable .

That’s good to know. I’m planning on flying to Berlin this year and might have traveled around on the train to see other places in or near Germany but maybe not.

To be fair though, I'd rate long-distance trains through Germany as poorly as Avanti. I've been through Germany eleven times in the last five years and have been severely disrupted on seven of them. Frankfurt Hbf at 3am is an experience! Never mind my train from Stuttgart to Budapest leaving 40 minutes earlier than the time on my ticket or getting to Köln to find that my booked train had bypassed the city.

I can get from home to work in one hour five minutes in the morning if I catch the earliest train before delays build up. I have about 6 minutes for a connecting train which only comes every 35 minutes.
On the way home it frequently takes me 2-2.5 hours. Delays out of London Bridge are so bad I often miss the connection home. Which means I have to wait on a fairly deserted platform for 35 minutes in the dark and often the next one is delayed or cancelled. It doesn't feel safe.
It's making me consider leaving my job

This, most of our rolling stock should have been replaced ten years ago.

The interesting patchy franchising does not make for a good service.

“I feel that they only care slightly about getting people from the north down to london
If you've any experience of Avanti you'd know that they were no good at that either.”

Yeah true 😆 I don’t think they do a good job of getting us down to London either, hence my use of the word “slightly”!

It’s pretty poor either way but I’ve just had slightly worse experiences of travelling around the north though personally.

But yeah I have had some crazy journeys to London! My work also has an office there and once the train had such bad delays going there that I was two hours late for my work meeting - which thankfully my manager moved for me - and on the way back I ended up being dropped off in Stockport at midnight.

A. Stockport wasn’t my destination and B. the train was meant to drop me off (at my actual station) at 10pm 😵‍💫 I’m 30 minutes from Stockport by car so I ended up getting an Uber for £20. I was just exhausted by that point and the only option Avanti offered was a rail replacement bus that was going to take one hour and then I’d be walking to my flat from the station at 1am!

Yeah the prices are just crazy, definitely a smart decision to drive if you can!

I’m only 25 minutes on the train from Manchester and 45 minute in the car but so often there’s some kind of mishap which means the train journey ends up taking around 50 minutes. So it’s easier for my partner who lives in Manchester to drive over as he can plan his arrival time better. The train is so hit and miss and you never know when you’ll get there. Plus it just ruins your mood to arrive at the station and have to wait 30+ minutes in the cold and rain because of a delay or cancellation.

I feel that they only care slightly about getting people from the north down to london
If you've any experience of Avanti you'd know that they were no good at that either.

I have travelled a fair amount on trains in France and feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed when comparing them to British trains. It’s down to decades, if not generations of chronic underinvestment and shareholders being put first.
@KimberleyClark the TGVs are good, but the TERs can be patchy. Some lines only get a morning and an afternoon train.

Where the French do better than us though, it's down to investment. You get what you pay for. From the 1970s the French started building the LGV network, starting with LGV Sud-Est. Stick that line to Lyon in a gravity model and compare with just the planned HS2 line from London to Leeds. The UK line has a far higher score - never mind London to Manchester which is even better. If we'd started buliding HS2 in 1976 our long-distance operation would be world class by now (we'd probably be extending it to Aberdeen). Yet the UK government is too incompetent to build modern infrastructure, so Sunak cancelled it, as he can just use his helicopter instead.

I rather like the work Anne Hidalgo has been doing in Paris too, shame that she's retiring.

Me too. They’re just so expensive! We’re
going to Manchester next month and have decided to drive rather than use the train. Even using a rail card, it will be about 4 times the cost of charging the car 3 times (there and back).

I get the train from near Gatwick airport to St Pancras 3 days a week, I pay £28 per day for a return (including a discount as I still have a 26-30 rail card) and I can probably count on one hand how many times the train is actually on time, if it does arrive on time I am genuinely surprised. My husband does a similar journey 4 days a week and has £300 worth of delay repays in his account (bare in mind that usually with each delay repay you get about £3 if you’re lucky)

Yes and those shareholders include foreign rail travel companies so the ultimate kicker is that our shit trains effectively subsidise their brilliant trains. 🤬

I have travelled a fair amount on trains in France and feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed when comparing them to British trains. It’s down to decades, if not generations of chronic underinvestment and shareholders being put first.

This is why I've just bought a car. Quicker, cheaper and efficient. I'd prefer to travel by train but it just doesn't work properly. Think from a green perspective the govt should address public transport over making cars electric.