I design hardware, data science is not my thing. Is it that hard to collect all the delayed train events, categorize them. Create few groups like suicides, train breakdowns, infrastructure failures, too many passengers to close the doors, etc. And then fight the issues by groups defining oldest and possibly failing infrastructure and trains. And managing trains to squeeze everyone inside. Political failure is one thing, but some things can be solved by science.
It's lack of maintenance / modernization on the rail lines. This is 100% a political failure. If the money would be allocated towards that, the problem could be fixed in a few (IIRC 5-10) years.
Of course in addition towards that there is the additional political failure of wrong incentives which creates mechanisms like the "Pofalla-Wende" (delayed trains turning around mid-journey, so that the back journey doesn't count as delay) to game the bad statistics.
We get what we have, and that's it.
Rail is a lost cause in Germany.
That does not mean that we shouldn't invest more money into improving it. But I would not count it as a lost cause.
Hopefully, when the current government is replaced by a more progressive one at some point (let a man dream), we see more political will.
I must have like 5k hours at least across all Total War titles since Medieval 2 and I don't consider myself a great player at all.
Their reliability is so abysmal that I fly multi-hop flights from Berlin or to airports a few hundred miles off my destination if that allows me to not rely on them. Boats that go up and down the Amazon have not let me down the way DB reliably did.
I played 'esports' before that was a term and before it was this popular and had any mainstream awareness. Essentially we had large LAN-parties with some competitive elements.. good old days of early CS and UT.
To kill the mood, maybe it's a bad idea considering one DB signalman was distracted by a phone game and let 2 trains into one train segment heading into each other: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36025951
I expect we may see more things like this in the future.
My former employer sponsored an Esports team (Liquid).
