Okay sooo…explain japans nearly flawless record of trains? The whole country is littered with them.
This guy did a single train trip and experienced no delays there and has decided this is the factual experience for the entire history of the rail line. This joke became a joke for a reason. What an absurd article.
I’ve never experienced a delay on a delta flight in my life (having flown the for almost every flight) but that doesn’t mean they don’t have delays.
The Shinkansen system is rarely late, that is true. Part of the reason for that is that they are running on their own, isolated tracks. Downside here is that they are quite expensive. Flights between, let's say Tokyo and Osaka, are often faster and cheaper.
The trains that normal people take every day to get to work, are, depending on city and line/owner of course, partially late every single day during rush hour. They don't even show the time or kind of the next train that will come.
The commuters of course know this and just leave the house a bit earlier, so in practice it's not a huge problem.
I don't think the author's hypothesis, that complaints scale with utilisation, holds.
Germans travel fewer kilometers per year per capita by passenger rail than Japan, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, France and Korea [1]. The two topping that list–Japan and Switzerland–also have exceptional systems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
https://delaybahn.com/en/?fromId=A%3D1%40O%3DK%C3%B6ln+Hbf%4...
Click the "+30 min (28/30 days)" tags to see the delays of the last month.
Ignoring the pathetic state German rail fell to in the last twenty years is silly. That said, the problem seems to have been recognized with a path to returning to a solid state by the 2030s.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6f719dcd-1df0-4b45-af3b-b08ff5485...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/72839510-58de-4291-bf25-f3a34f0a5...
> In August 2026 a new cross border passenger rail connection opened between Tornio in Finland and Haparanda in Sweden. This then allows an uninterrupted rail journey from Kemijärvi in Finnish Lapland to Lagos in Portugal, the two places furthest apart in the EU that can be connected by train. I, Jon Worth, the person who worked this out, aim to be the first person to complete the whole trip, and set the first record time for this journey.
When you've gotten accustomed to a system that actually runs on time, like the Swiss rail or New York's LIRR and Metro-North systems, it's grating to go back to padding every journey like that.