3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2020–2023score 4
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN brings it up in any thread about German or European rail as a data-driven, entertaining analysis of why trains are late.
David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in an English translation, analyzes a year of scraped Deutsche Bahn data covering every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It explores delays and how punctuality is actually measured.
“There was this really great talk on the Chaos Communication Congress some time back” (HN, 2021)
There was this really great talk on the Chaos Communication Congress some time back on the punctuality of German trains. I searched for it and even found the English voice over translation [1]. [1]: [this video]
English-translated talk on German train punctuality
Obligatory mention of a great talk on the topic: "David Kriesel: BahnMining -- Pünktlichkeit ist eine Zier" (2019) English translation: [this video] Edit: Note: And that was still with better numbers than lmm posted.
Great talk analyzing Deutsche Bahn punctuality, English translation
The was a CCC talk about why the Deutsche Bahn has so many delays: [1]. It turns out that East Germany has great on-time performance, probably because all the infrastructure is new. But overall, Germany has to invest more in upkeep of its existing infrastructure. 1. [this video]
At Chaos Computer Club a few years back, David Kriesel presented an analysis of the on-time performance of the Deutsche Bahn, based on a systematic scraping of their API.[0] One of the surprising things he explained: if a train never arrives at a station, it's not late, according to the Deutsche Bahn. 0. [this video]
Scraped Deutsche Bahn API data revealing how lateness is counted
Don't expect German "Pünktlichkeit" on German railways, though.[0] The Austrian and especially the Swiss railroad systems are far superior. Since the "Bahnreform" of 1994 the infrastructure progressively deteriorated from the passenger's perspective. One hard fact: about 20% of the railroad network has been dismantled since 1994 (44.600km to 33.400km [1]). Way too much. Reasons for this are a confluence of excessive bureaucracy, brutal management style, powerful industry interests (think e.g. "Autobahn"), lobbying. Today's "Deutsche Bahn" as an entity is split into eight distinct divisions [2]; DB Schenker (global logistics and freight transport company) is by far the most profitable of the bunch and single-handedly lifts the whole DB group out of the red on the regular basis, it accounts for about 50% of the total revenue.[3] [0] [this video] [1] [link] [2] [link] [3] [link]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
6 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more