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.

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.

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).

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.

Canada: 30% on-time

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

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.

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.

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.

Talk about a very appropriate domain name lol