We took that train, realised when we got to the other end of the line that we hadn't gotten where we expected, then turned back to the place where it separates. Waited for the next advertised train to airport (it's signalled on the electronic board as two separate entries; yes, it says "board whatever carriages for airport, and the rest for ...", or at least I assume it did, as it was in German of course; but again, it literally shows up as two different trains). Train arrives, stays there for a while (it's a big train, so the part in front of us didn't move so we didn't realise it had already separated), then after like 5-6 minutes it leaves. Only as it starts moving I notice that a small electronic board on the side of the carriage said "airport". The notice board then changes and obviously "both" trains disappear.

We were so lucky that we'd decided to go to the airport much earlier than we needed.

And don't get me started on the ticketing machines not accepting Visa, Mastercard, or Amex at the central station in Munchen. Or the web ticketing interface which was at least as annoying as the train to use.

This just happened to me a couple days ago trying to get from Luxembourg to Heidelberg, got on what I thought was the right train at a transfer but was apparently the wrong half, announcement only in German, rushing to find a spot for luggage in packed train and getting scolded by various Germans and we missed it. 3 hours of travel to end up back in Luxembourg and we got a very expensive rental car to get to our next couple destinations, not proudest travel moment. Next train we took was easiest possible scenario, Nuremberg to Munich, one train no transfers, assigned carriage, app helpfully shows you where to stand, arrived with time to spare. Except the platform changed as train was arriving, announcement again only in German, asked an attendant if train on other platform was our train, “No that train is on platform 9” rush up and down platform 9, carriages and train number don’t match ask another attendant if the original train on the other platform is ours, says you have no time, jump on that train, it is right but we are on opposite side of train and walk through the entire train with luggage again with various Germans giving scolding looks. Peaceful way to travel.

Splitting trains is a quite common thing in Germany (though more long distance) and communicated in the official app.

If third party apps don't show that information that's on their part. Usually it's also said after departure inside the train by the conductor, though maybe just on long distance trains.

Had something similar from Nuremberg to Suhl and accidentally ending up in Bad Kissingen for a bit.

But I don't think DB is unique in this weirdness.

Back in the UK, I think something similar happens on routes going past Gatwick; I've only heard English announcements on that train despite the airport being one of the ones serving London.

Plus, one time I was on a work trip to Liverpool (via London), and somewhere around Nottingham or Crewe a fellow passenger asked me when we'd be getting to "Liverpool Street": https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Liverpool+Street+Station,+Lo...

There's also the way my first leg home from university was Aberystwyth to Birmingham New Street, but the train regularly terminated early (Shrewsbury? Or was it Wolverhampton?) to game the rules.

When was this? Took the train (S1) last week and every single screen at the stations and in the train explains this in detail and there are probably 20 announcements both in German and English telling everybody which coach goes to the airport and which to Freising.

It's not that complicated.

This is pretty common in other countries. I almost got screwed multiple times by SNCF (french trains) where they don't announce which half of the train goes where on the speakers. Even in the official app, it's buried deep: for some reason, it's under "Travel Details" and not "Train Details".

It was partially on me because there are assigned seats and carriages, but I was late and had to jump in the train. But still no vocal announcement of "cars x to y go to z, the others go to w".

Splitting trains is not uncommon. Generally for Amtrak there will be two conductors one for each part of the train. On the platform both conductors will tell you which part of the train goes where. They often check tickets more frequently than usual just to make sure you are on the right part of the train.

Train splitting is quite acceptable when the customer service is alright.

I'm pretty sure there should be english announcements. Maybe they were broken. You also get this information via the displays on the wagons and on the screens inside. There is a bus/train from Freising to the airport every 10 min that takes 15min, so you are not trapped there for hours. Google maps also has all the public transport connections available for navigation. That it does not support certain things like train splits or instant train changes is not DBs problem.

The preferred way to get to the airport is via S8 (not S1). Idk how one could push/guide people more to take this one. S8 does not split and it definitely has announcements in english. They also prioritize keeping S8 running above anything else.

I'd also recommend buying tickets via app, not via ticket machines.

It’s likely some utilitarian reason, i.e. sacrifice the riders on the train for the good of all the other schedules.

This is the one benefit of living in an overly-litigious country that has news media which can pick up on a story like this. They’d rather have the masses suffer to avoid the legal fees and bad press, so instead of sacrificing a train, they’d make everyone’s lives worse overall.

I’m not arguing for utilitarianism, though. Ir allows dictators to thrive.

In general the S-Bahn in Munich is a massive s*t show I can report more info about this if needed. However, in the S1 going to the airport (the train you took) it is quite well described that the train splits and it's both on German and in English.

To be fair (and I am not fan of DB and many other rail companies), DB is not the only rail system that splits trains, and it is rather clearly indicated, but you have to 1) expect something like trains that split at specific stops and 2) know what you are looking for on a ticket or billboard, partially because indicating that, especially far in advance is a bit of a UI/design challenge.

Also, I believe you were trying to write "nein". But why would you expect an English announcement in Germany on a German train? Google Maps? What does that have to do with that; it's an unofficial and only like an 80% solution.

Yeah, the S1 from Munich to the airport splits regularly, and you have to be in the rear half of the train. The first time (as a not-perfect-German-speaker) I'd have missed it but for the kindness of another traveller.

Now, at least, the announcements are also in English, which frankly is very positive - that DB are improving anything noticeable. (And to be clear, Bavaria/Germany are absolutely not given to accommodating non-German speakers, like, ever.)

But then you already entered the wrong train. The destination of a train is usually clearly written on the train, unless it's a very old one where it's not visible on every coach

I agree that it's not that intuitive that a line can have multiple end stops (like Stuttgart - Munich ends in both Stuttgart and Munich, depending on the direction you are entering?

I guess you took the S1 S-Bahn. Yes, it always splits in Neufahrn. Part of the train goes to the airport, the other section to Freising (a cute University city, by the way)

That is indicated on the platform screens before getting on the train. It tells you which part of the train goes where so you know which wagon to take.

I found it also not very intuitive first time I took it. But hey, when travelling there’s always local peculiarities to take care of ;)

That fucking Sbahn is the bane of the existence of many tourists. It happens so much that there‘s now a bus line from those cow fields to an airport. You will be late.

I had similar experience only in Poland. Where this part of the train goes was posted on the glass window on the doors. Somehow I missed it and went to a city I didn't intend to.

Same we missed the right stop on our way back to France. We just managed to get in a train going the other way but dB personal almost ticketed us a penalty...

Your ticket was without assigned seat? Because if there was assigned seat, surely the seat would be in the correct carriage?

DB is infinitely better than Trenitalia. I once took the train equivalent of what airlines call a code-share from Venice to Munich and Trenitalia just straight-up forgot half the train somewhere. It was a total gong show.

I am German and the three times I took an ICE from Cologne to Berlin and then back, EACH TIME I boarded at a wrong wagon. The entire system, their app, the signages at the tracks... it is all complete and utter dogshit.

[flagged]

We had similar occurrences on Amtrak but there was a trick - the conductor could let people out of a stopped train to “smoke” on their own reconnaissance and risk.

And if you went to smoke with your bag and disappeared, well, they never saw it.

> The term "kidnapped" is kinda over the top

If you got in a taxi to take you 35km away and he drove you 60km away to a random other town instead, would you consider "kidnapped" to be over the top?

Does it only count as "kidnap" if you are not eventually released? Or is it just that it's not kidnap when a corporation does it?

I was imagining something more Kafkaesque. There are some transit systems that have transfer only stations. If DB dropped you off at such a station, and then cancelled the only trains leaving that station (due to weather, holidays), I'm sure you could end up spending Christmas there, and you'd be entitled to €3.75 compensation.

I don't think it's safe if the track is electrified

Why exactly you cannot get out and walk ? Just curious whether that's impossible or just not allowed ?

Would you happen to know if they would be using their own branded/livery trains, or would they be using DB trains, or maybe just DB cars pulled by a British locomotive?

It just raises so many questions in my mind that of all entities, a British train operator would be operating a train that is bounded within the German rail system.

My first thought is that it's some kind of counter-union effort through fake "competition" by bringing in foreign, private operators into the network.

No. The problem with DB are not the trains or the personnel on the trains. The problem is that the tracks are in miserable condition and that they are operated in a terrible way. The fault in this case is 100% with DB. Nobody else is to blame.

Shifting the blame away from DB, who is responsible for creating the terrible track conditions and is responsible for the operations, to the train operator, who zero ability to influence what DB is doing is just totally unfair.

DB is at fault here, they lead the train onto the wrong tracks and they also caused the previous delays. Regional trains in Germany have many different kinds of operators. Taking any of them is always miserable in exactly the same way, which is in almost every case caused by DB, because they can not operate the train network.

What is worse is that these operators also get into conflict with the DB trains. E.g. they prioritize a DB train, which is already late, over a regional train, causing delays for regional trains.

DB last year: I took train last year from Frankfurt airport to Bonn only to see Bonn sail past the window and train to go to Cologne.

I asked locals what is going on, turns out that all trains were late, and this train departed from the platform already marked for Bonn! “You should watch what train number you board on DB, not trust sign on platform!” locals helpfully advised me.

I was in a similar situation in Egypt once. At the specified time a train arrives, I board it. Only to see that my seat is occupied. We started to discuss the situation and the other passenger showed me his ticket - it was one of the previous delayed trains. We figured it just in time for me to jump out of the wrong train before it left the station :)

proof or it didnt happen. this is a meme joke. even osho made a joke exactly like this.

Exactly! When you spend billions on car infrastructure but hardly anything on rails, there will be issues.

What people don’t write clickbaity blog posts about is how in general things work very well. I’m currently sitting on a train from Nuremberg to Berlin and it takes less than three hours, it’s on time, quiet and just a good experience. This trip used to take five hours but then the high speed rail track got completed and cut the time by two hours. Wonderful!

As someone said during COVID supply chain disruptions: when a system is very optimal it becomes fragile.

So probably they need to add more parallel tracks, unused most of the time.

Airlines are vague about this (at least in Europe) because different types of problems mean different obligations to compensate passengers.

After the incident they will determine what's the least expensive lie they can plausibly give (perhaps the weather will change fast enough that you can blame the weather, perhaps you can't lie about an equipment failure when everyone in the airport sees you swap out the airplane). If they tell the passengers the truth at the time they risk being held to that later.

> The argument is that travellers don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed

Deutsche Bahn does not think this is true and neither do I. If this was ever the thinking, they've performed or read studies and changed their mind

You can very clearly hear the drilled setup "<delay info> grund dafür ist <error category>" rigidly being regurgitated every. single. time. a delay is announced. The middle words are (per my understanding) a formal way to say "because of" and it's not something you will hear in daily life, so I presume it's the output of a committee and corporate requires them to say this, no matter if they know anything more than "the signal is red". Whether they know or not, the detail is always at a level that sounds like malicious compliance. I'd rather they say "we don't know" or say nothing at all. And if they do know, I'd hope they make up a new sentence like "someone was spotted on the crossing up ahead after the barriers closed. Someone is checking the cameras to make sure it won't come to a collision" but we instead get the robotic "we have come to a stop on the grounds of person on track". It mimics their training samples and what colleagues got into the habit of saying so I guess they think it's good like this, but is not actually helpful

Idk what creates this useless information culture, but they clearly know that passengers do want this information

At the station itself, on the other hand, you might as well play "delay bingo". Is it an earlier training running late that is now slowing down other trains? Is it yet another Stellwerksstörung? Or maybe it's urgent track repairs? It might also be an Oberleitungsschaden!

To be honest, I don't care about excuses. Yes, problems happen, but this is systemic. Does it help me if I know the train tracks are broken yet again? It does not. The reasons (excuses) they bring up ring hollow. I don't feel that drivers or station staff would appear stupid if they don't tell. They are victims, too.

In the UK they do tend to say what the actual problem is, even if it's someone "under a train". But it has resulted in mockery for things like "leaves on the line" from people who apparently know how to run trains safely. You can't win really.

By always talking only about non specified "problems" and getting people not to expect any further information it is easier to hide when it's a suicide.

I am always a bit annoyed when the root of the problem is not explained. This is the case most of the time (DB of course). I would really like to have a bit more information. Even if there is nothing you can do, it helps to understand how big or small the problem is. Then you can make a decision based on it. Like getting out in the next station or something.

Part of the reason is that train drivers often dont even know themselves. They might simply get the signal to hold the train or that it needs to be diverted.

I think they look stupider by not saying anything. They look stupid by all of these constant delays, cancellations, and the occasional utterly surreal self-inflicted problem like in the article. That's what makes them look stupid.

Just explain what's wrong. Arm passengers with the best info you can give them. And figure out a way to let people disembark close to where they need to be.

DB has become a complete joke. I've had to travel to and through Germany several times these past couple of years, and almost always there's a problem.

I once paid 80 euro for a taxi from Essen to Dusseldorf because they cancelled the train that would connect to the last ICE to Amsterdam. When I got to Dusseldorf on time, the ICE arrived at a different platform than announced. I only noticed that because some people were suddenly leaving the platform. I warned a few people who still hadn't noticed it. I bet a lot of people still managed to miss that train after all the trouble making it to Dusseldorf.

I've always considered the S-trains to be pretty good -- at least in my experience. At least on par with the NYC MTA that I'm used to.

My sense is that this has happened over the last 20-30 years as overall competence has just dropped in many of these key positions. COVID was a good example of this - lots of humming and hawing about why decisions were being made, and garbled messaging about the reasons. Basically they get angry and defensive about blaming the "peanut gallery" or "armchair experts" while not being specific, because they themselves don't know why or how something is being done, and therefore being unable to defend their own positions from solid ground.

Before the DB became a public limited company, their services worked remarkably well. I know from first hand experience because I was already a customer then.

The privatisation and the crazy idea that it could somehow not being run on a deficit is what ruined it. Of course the competition thing is artificial, and the internal structures are kaput, but I doubt that more competition would fix it.

Surprisingly, 90% of the train personnel is still pretty good, acting friendly and professionally.

> The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany

Cannot be - there is no competition in Switzerland, but things run pretty smoothly -> in the case of Germany I'd rather say: "lack of oversight, controls, 'konsequent zu sein'" -> in the case of Germany's DB I think that nobody at all levels gives a *hit about its problems.

> If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time

I can't recall that this happened to me. The "lucky" scenario is when the connecting train is even more late so you can still catch it.

> Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette.

Ironically, Russian trains (even over distances of thousands of kilometres) are usually almost perfectly on time.

Germany's DB seems to fill the same niche as other companies there, like Telekom: semi-private companies living off old state-built infrastructure that they're now incapable of (or unwilling to?) maintain.

I don't really buy that this is the core issue, even though it may very well be one issue. Rail was operated efficiently and on time in the past when competition did not exist even in a contrived manner, and rail is not really an industry in which real intra-industry competition is really possible. Rail competes with flight, and personal and mass surface transportation. It cannot really compete among rail operators in an efficient manner.

It is way more complicated than that, but you could commoditize the rail separate from the transport of goods and people, where they each compete on price for capacity, but it all gets extremely political very fast, i.e., public transport people vs goods transport that primarily pays for the whole network.

In the UK the railways used to be kind of bad in the nationalised British Rail days. People moan about the current privatised rail but it mostly works.

> internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT

Same here, with a big German semiconductor player you all know. The IT department has to battle the non-it departments and external contractors for internal software dev jobs. It's a made up game, costing 70% of our work time (just the beurocracy).

That’s pretty strange about this competition thing. I’ve been repeatedly informed that the government is much better at running things like this.

It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains)

That's very outdated, DB has been terrible for a long time though. Switzerland is still the best though. Here are some stats for 2025:

https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped

Since you have to scroll down quite a bit to get the list of most reliable European trains (with percentage on time):

1. Switzerland 97.8%

2. The Netherlands 93.9%

3. Belgium 88.6%

4. Austria 82.2%

5. France 79.7%

6. Italy 62.0%

7. Germany 58.5%

(Not sure why these are the only countries in the list.)

I recently moved to the Netherlands to study, and I experience that a lot. Despite almost all official information everywhere being written in both Dutch and English, in-train announcements are only done in Dutch. I have to constantly listen to the announcements and try to understand based off their vibe if they sound like something critical or not.

> we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time

When taking an international train from Germany to Switzerland, don't count on it that it will run through to the final destination.

SBB (Swiss National Railways) started to block German trains if their delay is more than 15 minutes (so, basically every DB train) and won't allow the train on their network.

This is only peripherically educational. Constantly delayed DB trains completely fouled up the scheduling on the extremely dense Swiss network. So they just won't allow it anymore.

On a sidenote: In 2024 SBB trains were 93.2% punctual. Connectivity punctuality (where you have to catch a connecting train) was 98.7%. A train is counted as punctual if the delay is less than 3 minutes (half the German figure).

German trains, as recently as the 90s, were phenomenal, and integrated superbly with the Swiss and others. It is in the 21st century that Germany has gone off the rails.

German trains do typically announce in English. If they don't, that's the exception. Just ask around. Most people here speak English and will be able to repeat what was said, especially if they're under 40 or so.

Funny thing, but the Swiss are looking at banning DB trains because they are never on time and messes up Switzerland’s public transport schedule.

I did learn German at school but it didn't help much when trying to get to Munich airport last year. I could understand what was going on with the cancelled trains at the station I boarded at, but the train I did catch end up tipping us all out after a few stops.

I could make out a bit of what the driver said, but not enough to be sure of the detail, which is what really mattered. I expected to miss my flight, but just made it in the end.

> Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc

It's true of Switzerland and probably Austria. Germany is famous for having infrastructure issues that will take some time to resolve.

Eg see https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped for some stats

> I know the author mentioned this, but I just got nervous imagining this as a tourist who doesn't speak German at all. This shouldn't be like this. Why they don't help at all?

How much help does your home country give to German tourists who don't speak English?

Swiss trains are very civilized. On an ordinary intercity train can sit at a table with a white tablecloth and have a beer or wine and a proper dinner. It really makes the time fly by. The SBB also has merch store with their own line of watches.

> Why they don't help at all?

If it's anything like the UK, the staff have incredibly secure jobs and recently secured some good changes to their working conditions/pay. It's probably not in their contract to announce in other languages, so they do exactly what their contract says

> Germany trains (and Switzerland trains)

Other commenters have already set the record straight, pointing out that these are clearly not in the same cluster.

See also https://www.thelocal.de/20250430/switzerland-suspends-deutsc...

Pay-walled, but the title says it all: "Switzerland suspends Deutsche Bahn trains due to chronic delays". DB is so unreliable that it impacts the networks of neighboring countries.

It's not so bad, with luck you'll eventually end up at a station outside of Germany.

Swiss trains are always on time. I've heard they've start to refuse delayed German trains entry to the country because their delays disrupt the system too much. The Swiss train system is excellent. The German train system is a joke.

Germany had a great train system but Germany also has a big automobile industry that spends a lot of money on lobbying.

In the end of the 90s with neoliberalism being very popular, it was decided to privatize the trains. The effect was only minimal investments in the infrastructure and a gradual rotting away of the train network. Now we a reaping what we have sown.

The enshitification of the German trains was done on purpose so they don't compete with cars.

I'd reverse the question ask why Germany (or any other country where English is not an official language, and does not majorly rely on tourism for income) would provide any public information in English? Commercial services can choose to do so a matter of self interest, but why would state financed services?

Deutsche Bahn ist anything but wasteful, it's underfunded to the tune of tens of billions per year. Cleaning out trees more up to ten meters away from railways was seen as to expensive, now 6m tall trees fall in them all the time during storms. Having two railways next to each other was seen as unnecessary, now we have no backups when one fails.

Swiss railway is seen as the ideal DB should strive for, but fact is that Switzerland invests more than double per capita into its rail infrastructure. German stinginess now compounded over decades, and that's not the fault of management.

> They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie.

Would you mind sharing some examples? My only complaints with DB are cancellations and delays. Well, the ticketing might be a bit confusing the first time you realize "ticket" and "seat reservation" are two completely independent entities. Similarly, rules for which train you're allowed to take might be a bit confusing. But I wouldn't call it scamming.

After privatization, the Deutsche Bahn became private enterprise and is now 100% owned by the German state. As such, insolvency isn't going to happen. Though it would be funny.

If a company fails this hard, the solution isn't to feed it more government money to prop it up. It's to let it fail and rebuild from scratch.

Blacklist everyone who was involved above a certain rank. Put together an entirely new structure. The only real way to get rid of this kind of rot is to make the consequences of dysfunction hit.

So there are actually train companies in Germany that are worse than Deutsche Bahn?

https://nationalexpress.de/de/

Passenger rights are very good in the UK. It's easy to claim Delay Repay, where you get 25% refund after a 15 minute delay, 50% refund after 30 mins and 100% refund after 60 mins. Other train operators are obliged to help you get where you need to go if the company you intended to travel with has cancelled your trains, or you've missed a connection due to a previous train you were on being delayed.

I've had the last train out of central London for the night cancelled at about 1am and you can just message the train company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to get you a taxi all the way to somewhere like Cambridge.

Also, not sure how it is in other countries, but in the UK, everything is entirely open data. You can go to a site like https://map.signalbox.io/ to see a live map of every train in the UK, and sites like Realtime Trains let you get all the details about every train (eg. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:KGX)

UK has airline-style pricing that goes up extortionately as seats run out, making it prohibitively expensive to use. It's also frequently late and/or trains randomly cancelled, although you can plan around it, you end up 1hr+ late on most long journeys.

On the plus side: local journeys are great. Delay Repay means you get up to 100% of your ticket back if you're delayed. If you cannot make the last train due to delays, they're obligated to get your home by bus or even by taxi. Train stock is (in my area at least) new and very comfortable. Views are good!

My experience of the trains themselves has been fine in the UK.

Ticket prices vary a lot and are unpredictable. I have not a last minute ticket from London to the midlands for just over £20, but they can be a lot more (several times as much?) for the same journey even booking ahead.

I definitely prefer the train to driving if I am going long distance by myself, but if its multiple people the car becomes a lot cheaper.

Local services in cities are pretty good. I never owned a car in London, nor in Manchester until I had a child.

Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.

I think it depends on where you are going. My local commuter link into London is OK and reliable, if expensive.

Long range trains from, say, London to Manchester are often overcrowded and ridiculously priced.

People who claim the U.K. is worse have no idea what DB is like and just think that “nationalisation” makes trains half the price and twice as reliable.

When comparing to the UK you have to also factor in how absurdly expensive it is. Eg a monthly ticket to the nearest city ~25km away is 292 EUR (nowhere near London. A city with not very high wages either). And the train is just 2.5 carriages and full every day.

UK trains are terrible. I don't have direct experience to know if they are worse than DB trains, except for DB's dire performance being a running joke amongst my German colleagues at work.

I bet that UK trains "win" by being far more expensive than German trains, along with absurdly complex pricing. If you choose the wrong ticket you could also "win" a criminal conviction!

Don't worry though! We're currently building the most expensive bit of high speed rail in Europe, that won't even go into the centre of our capital city [edit: apparently it will now, see reply], or further north than the Midlands. Passengers who have the audacity to want to travel further north will have to transit over to the old tracks, creating even further capacity problems.

All of this is entirely avoidable, if the government just took a few common sense measures, but sadly it doesn't seem to be anyone's priority.

> Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."

I'm on the other side of this. I end up chaperoning lost tourists on my DB disaster trips with a regularity that I should be getting a paycheck from DB.

If you've never been on a train that stops at the right station, maybe the problem isn't with DB.

> DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe

Oh c’mon have you tried trains in Slovenia? The ICE from Budapest with a constant 230+ min delay, the regional one from Ljubljana to Celje where half the track is seemingly under perpetual construction (so transfer to a bus!), passenger trains delayed all the time waiting for freight trains, trains randomly going 20kph on some segments, and lately even vandals sabotaging the tracks. And don’t worry, they announce all of that exclusively in Slovene with no extra answers.

I’ve been on DB and it wasn’t that bad. It was expensive but at least the train didn’t max out at 80kph.

It's so weird. That doesn't seem to be the lesson to be learned from Nazi Germany. The train going on time was not the part to fix.

The train is indeed the most comfortable means of transportation in Germany, but it's so unreliable nowadays that it's practically unusable if you need to get somewhere on a schedule.

Want to get to the airport 2 hours before your flight? Sorry, you have to plan in at least an extra hour, because there's a 40% chance your train will be severely delayed or canceled.

This unreliability drives people who need to get places on time to other modes of transportation. But if you don't mind being randomly delayed by an hour, the train is great. It's sad, and it didn't use to be this way.

> the train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem. Grow up

> didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow

Aren't these statements contradictory? I think "grow up" means problems are unavoidable and the adult thing to do is expect them and accept them, and then you say you didn't have to worry, as if problems never happen.

To me it sounds like you just got lucky on your Christmas trips. Two trips on time hardly prove a rule that there's never trouble, and in any case you directly state there's trouble sometimes and that's something to accept.

Now I don't know the stats on problem frequency, which of course matters. But that's different from "don't have to worry". Opposite really. "Here's how much you should worry".

I don’t think it’s ridiculous. A complex system that delivers customer further from destination than they were originally from, is flawed by design. And we all know what the problem is exactly: it is the design for capabilities that the company could not afford based on its budget/planning/KPIs. DB did not invest enough in infrastructure to support the big dream, and now they also have huge aging and retiring workforce problem. So let’s not pretend it’s normal and business as usual: complexity is not an excuse for mismanagement.

I'm glad at least someone has a sense of proportion here. German trains have problems for sure, but the train system in Germany is nonetheless fantastic.

Where doesn't that happen?

In any neighboring country, where punctuality is at like 74-99%, depending on the country.

The DB is at 48.5% (Oct 2025) to 60% (2024 avg).

Yeah, this is the great irony of it all. Germany really wants to discourage taking a car for "environmental reasons" and so on and does everything to encourage public transport.

But one thing is clear: I won't be bothered, robbed or even stabbed in my own car, and I also won't arrive in a different village lest I drive there myself. I won't arrive three hours late either, or have to stay overnight in some shitty Hotel because they couldn't find a replacement train.

The German public transport, like many other things in Germany, is an absolute fever dream for a "developed country".

Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs but also because the price of gas is literally political.

The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.

I worked for a massive German company you heard of, this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility.

As a French, the culture shock was brutal and I never really got around that work attitude. I went through a similar issue back when I used to take a regional train in France, and the crew swiftly adapted by bending rules to accommodate a difficult situation caused by bad weather. I'm not sure this could happen today, but it was a thing 10 years ago, we used to trust the operators back then.

I feel the same. I was in Kuwait city a few days ago and decided to learn their public transport system which is buses only but was pretty extensive and abundant with good google maps integration.

When you get on the bus there's a big sign stating the rules of riding the bus which include strictly stopping at designated bus stops ONLY and threatening fines. For the rest of the day I watched every bus driver stop anywhere they like if a person hailed the bus, allowing people to get in while waiting in red traffic lights, and if you talked to the driver he'd drop you off anywhere you wanted as long it's possible. Those drivers make nothing from this so they are doing it because this is life and also because there's no real enforcement against it. Also you can get in through the exit doors and leave through the entry doors, whatever you like.

I decided I feel ok about this and don't want it to change

Venkatesh Rao offers the following definition of the "Fourth World"

Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore.

This is what this story reminds me of.

I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing, not the whole world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so much that whenever it doesn’t work, it’s basically ”well bummer”. You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and you’re supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that you have to learn to see the good side of the system and understand that you can’t have the cake and eat it too, unfortunately.

I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world

I feel the same. It is easier to hide behind rules, regulations, bureaucracy etc. Not saying we should stop following rules, but using a bit of common sense and having a bit of compassion would go a long way.

I also remember reading about a train that Japanese railways kept running, just for one kid, she took the train to school. They kept it running until she finished school, just for her (I know, someone is going to point out the inefficiency, cost etc about this story, but that is a separate conversation). I suppose stories like these are going to become rarer and rarer as time goes by, as everything has to be "efficient" and everyone has to follow some "rules".

> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere.

I'm from Bangladesh, and the attitude you're describing is one reason why the country is poor and a mess! Deviating from the schedule for the sake of a single person is completely insane and maddeningly inefficient. It's classic third-world mentality. In a good country, the system would never tolerate such deviations. In a really good country, someone wouldn't even ask for such accommodation for themselves, because it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake.

> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere.

In many places without rigid rule enforcement, that kind of flexibility can actually feel more humane in practice, even if the overall system is worse. What frustrates me in the US (and sometimes in Europe) isn't rules themselves, but how aggressively and impersonally they're enforced in very ordinary situations.

For example, a friend of mine in New York casually crossed a line at a small PlayStation event and was stopped by a bodyguard as if he were bypassing airport immigration. I had a similar experience at a small event, maybe 300 people, where I tried to cross a line to get coffee and was abruptly blocked by security (they were just preparing the snacks).

Compared to more informal cultures, this kind of hyper enforcement can feel oddly hostile, especially when it's disconnected from any real safety concern.

There's a saying

"In a developing country nothing works but everything is possible. In a developed country everything works but nothing is possible"

In Lord of the Rings, fellowship of the ring when Gandalf arrives in Shire and Sam runs to meet him he says, "you're late!" to which Gandalf replies, "Deutsche Bahn is never late but arrives precisely when it means to".

Same here. An Amtrak train would just stop at the next convenient road crossing, if there were really something preventing them from stopping at the scheduled station. Most Amtrak stations don't even have staff, or any way to prevent people from coming and going, so this would most likely involve construction on the station platform itself. That’s fairly rare but the last time I took the Zephyr headed east there was exactly that situation. The construction crews had the whole platform blocked off so we boarded at the road crossing a block away.

Anywhere doesn't help you much. You want to stop at a station with sufficiently good connections to continue your travels.

This situation seems pretty unusual, even for the DB. A regional express train should have many more stops than that. It sounds a bit like they switched the train to a direct connection to the final stop because they switched to the other side of the rhine (so you can't make any of the other planned stops anyway).

The major mistake here was not making the stop in Troisdorf. At the point where they missed that they should have planned the earliest usable stop for the passengers that needed to leave there.

I would also assume that there is no safe way for the conductor to halt at any earlier stop. A safe halt would need to be planned at a higher level.

> I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train).

While Iran is not a third-world country per se, you'd be surprised how many times the bus driver would stop at random locations closer to passengers' destinations as well as bus stations.

There's more flexibility in day-to-day life of Iranians; people are expected to follow the rules but there's also this ancient concept of "morovvat" in the culture which encourages self-sacrifice for the betterment of others. Ask any tourist who's traveled to Iran and they tell you about the hospitality of Iranian people; e.g., you ask someone how to get to a place and they literally pause whatever they were doing and walk you to that place so you don't get lost!

It's strange how the image of Iran has been stained by the theocratic government (which Iranians protest against many times...).

Note that DB definitely has processes to add stops ad-hoc. It's just that nobody bothered in this case.

It's a big, systemically failing organization running way beyond its capacity. Failures rippling through and compounding in a tightly coupled rail network.

If they weren't able to announce the train would stop at one station, why do you think they'll be able to do that at another?

I'm pretty sure train conductors aren't allowed to just stop somewhere unscheduled for good reasons, there's always a train behind and in front of them with no buffer.

Used to work for a bus company: lady had asked driver to drop her off 10 meters from the next bus stop. Then fell into a hole, broke her leg. Then sued us.

At one university in Denmark that opened in 1972 there used to not be a train stop. Instead of going to the nearby city central station and walk for half an hour, you’d pull the emergency break in the middle of a field, traverse the field and reach the university. Pulling the emergency break was of course not allowed, but it was very common.

Today, pulling the emergency break to get off in a field would quickly end you on surveillance videos and with a large fine for obstructing operations, possibly with a detour to the police station for a stern conversation.

I miss the “yeah, whatever” attitude.

The Germans follow the rules too strictly and in South America we ignore the rules too lightly.

I wonder if there's a country somewhere with the right balance.

We live in a society where complaining is considered "verbal abuse" or "harassment", but where we have to put up and shut up about everything going on.

The message out of 2020 and 2021, is that the big people know what they're doing and we don't.

This has been done in USA using slow moving freight inner-city. Just can't do it on passenger service. It is illegal, but there is no one around to enforce it, the vast majority of the time.

I can neither confirm nor deny, I may have done it to get to/from the grocery store from near my house when I didn't have money for a car.

>I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world.

When every useful idiot is screeching about statistical optimization you lose any optimization for anything that isn't measured or isn't optimized for.

Like it's not hard to imagine the breathless comments on HN about how trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.

It reminds me of letting a child that's too young to not be stupid pick it's own dinner and it picks of candy then to the surprise of nobody with a brain it's cranky later despite being calorically satisfied by the numbers.

>The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.

It'll come back if there's something bad enough that happens to kick society back to a point where "lol we ain't got the spare resources for that shut up and go away" becomes an acceptable way to deal with the peddlers of these things. But anything that gets us that far won't be pretty.

Not with trains, but I have a GO Transit (regional) bus that passes within a block of my house, whereas the actual official stop is about a fifteen minute walk away. I have taken that bus home many times, and the drivers are always willing to pull over at the stoplight and let me hop off.

I wonder if it's not safety but money. In the UK, train operators pay station operators a fixed fee to stop. As a result trains can't just stop somewhere randomly (except I hope in an emergency) even if that would benefit many people. All this is, needless to say, very stupid.

On a warm summer evening, on a train bound for nowhere, a passenger missed their stop.

Conductor radioed ahead and the train heading the other way stopped when we passed it and the passenger was transferred over.

They didn’t have to do that, but it was nice.

They’ve also hired a cab for a station miss that was their fault.

Lost humanity is right, and it stems from lost community.

During the Great Financial Crisis astute observers pointed to the loss of local bankers for most transactions as a component of the multifaceted structural causes. When you have your mortgage through the bank down the street, you're much less likely to mail them the keys instead of paying your bill, especially if you have to see the banker in the grocery store etc.

What did we do about this? Of course we didn't learn anything - we actually further consolidated banking.

The same is true of train service, traffic etiquette, and political discourse. The tragedy of the commons is exacerbated by moving away from local community.

So true. Another third worlder and it's still the same. On the interesting side, if they didn't stop we would make sure a coach or two (empty of course) experiences some arson or fractures. From major to minor depending upon how pissed the locals were. No, I am not condoning it course. Trains should not be burnt. Buses are a different story though. (That included not stopping even after the "chain pulls" :P)

You're touching on points that Ayn Rand touched on in Atlas Shrugged, which as it happens uses the dynamics of the running of a railway as a metaphor for organisational incompetence and which opens on a scene of railway workers refusing to take initiative and following policy blindly.

Where she started to go a little weird is she thought anyone who had an idea had the right to just go do that, and society can go hang (she grew up suffering the worst Sovietism could serve up, her concept of community was damaged as a result). Unfortunately, her ideas are now held close to the hearts of some of the most powerful people on Earth, who are also going a little weird.

I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe. What I'm not OK with is using the policy as a prop to avoid independent thought or agility. I'd rather that instead of a procedure or a policy, people were taught a way of thinking about the World.

"We're not allowed to stop at the next station because we're not registered to do so", is a statement made in deference to a policy regardless of whether it makes sense or not. "We need to spend a few minutes making sure we're registered at the next station before we go any further" complies with the policy, but is a person taking ownership of resolving the problem, and comes from a place of empathy for the passengers on board. We need more of the latter, but unfortunately the Randian version we're now getting is "We'll stop or carry on wherever the driver feels like because he is sat at the controls so there's nothing anybody can do about that".

Or maybe the tracks the train was routed onto didn't have platforms at the station.

In 3rd world countries it might be acceptable for people to jump out of 5-foot high carriages onto live tracks with trains running at 100mph for convenience, but not in Germany

He has a loaded lawyer and is not afraid to use him. The world is filled with economic traps like this. All the economic advantages gained by the commoner, would unravel by one risk of harm coming for the driver and the company.

Humanity has been codified into rules, and the rule does not allow throwing out people somewhere random, because that would be differently inhuman (and someone would sue you if they have a bigger harm than lost time).

Ugh. don’t remind me. my fiancée and I live in different cities in Germany. the train ride is 5 hours. but it has been 15h in the past just because DB is DB. and the only thing we got for it was like a 10 eur discount voucher. 10 hours of my life partner’s time is worth a lot more than 10 eur. i have cussed them and their mothers countless times, DB is a garbage transportation company owned and ran by garbage people.

This has nothing to do with lost humanity.

In my experience, this doesn't always happen, and I say this as someone who traveled very often on that same RE5. The situation is what it is (poor maintenance, etc), but the main issue is that the tracks are shared with freight trains impossible to stop given their weight, so to avoid collisions and have a nice (albeit late) Christmas, they made that call to play it safe, rather than have a freight train crash into a train full of people.

I wouldn't blame it on the person, I would rather blame it on the shitty system the train driver has to rely on - apparently so unreliable they had to do what they did. Keep in mind, that's a delay also for that person who very likely doesn't want to work on that day either - the same person that has to deal with that level of BS every day now.

Of course, just to be clear, there is always the German ready to save the world by following an idiotic nonsense procedure, but that's everywhere in the world.

> I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.

You got lucky many times. All it takes is that one time someone makes the wrong call and you get smashed by a train. In Europe this is very rarely the case, because exactly of these "nonsense" rules.

The main issue is the shitty maintenance/sync with other trains etc. "Digitalization".

i think most humanity left when corporates began to dominate industries and everyone just had to follow rules and structures

Why NOBODY pulled emergency stop

Remember the rules are written in blood

So that is what the classic "Cheney on MTA" Lisp implementation paper was named after. It felt like a reference, but I never had an idea about what it was referring to. Thanks!

Ha, that was my immediate thought as well!

The leaves are actually a big deal because they get crushed into a slippery film that stops the wheels making good friction with the rails. Occasionally you will see specialised debris-removal vehicles moving along the tracks and spraying them

On a recent train from London to Bath. it was delayed because the train in front of me had hit a swan and came off worse for the wear. Its passengers had to disembark, and ours had to stop to take them on.

On the train back, we were delayed by the train in front of us catching fire.

Maybe worth mentioning that this „1.50€ compensation“ rule only matters if you use the „Deutschland-Ticket“ which is a fixed price ticket for a whole month, unlimited travel on the Regio lines (short distance trains, i.e. non IC)

If you bought a regular route ticket you get 25% and more than an hour delay, and 50% at more than two hours. Not sure how it is with other multi-use tickets.

This, combined with the certain delays CAN make traveling by train quite affordable… /s

https://www.bahn.de/service/informationen-buchung/fahrgastre...

Planes have never diverted people to the wrong country. It’s always state institutions.

I know how sketchy it sounds, and it was even documented in DB Navigator. But DB makes this information inaccessible a couple of days later in the app, so there is no way to „proof“ it except asking DB itself.

It's for emergency.. if that happened to me I'd argue in court that I thought the driver went insane (because a system can't work like that) so it qualified as emergency..

But back to my country (Poland), it's better here - some had problems with physically getting out on the right station, and when the conductor saw it she even encouraged us to pull this lever in those cases so we don't have to get out at the wrong station.

This has been EU-wide legislation for quite some time, see https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...

Fundamentally, the Germans tried to cheap out on high speed trains by trying to engineer them to run on normal tracks so they didn't have to build new, expensive high-speed tracks like France and Japan did.

This is the fundamental mistake underpinning their train service since the long distance trains frequently have to wait for other trains to pass, cascading delays through the system.

That and an almost criminal level of underinvestment in the past 20 years or so.

> All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to suppress.

No one is trying to suppress Uber. They are just obligated to adhere to the law like anyone else in this business.

I would not have blamed them.

That reminds me in turn of a joke we used to have, that the afterlife is being on a subway car with constant, unclear, but important announcements. Maybe this stop is heaven, maybe hell, maybe nirvana, maybe oblivion. There's no way to tell. Getting off at the wrong stop would be catastrophic. So, you remain, forever, riding in this afterlife subway car.

And being delayed for 15-40 minutes, getting thrown out in the middle of nowhere, or having to continue by bus is an inconvenience for most people, but a nightmare for people with disabilities. Imagine being in a wheelchair, having a digestive condition (Crohn, IBS, etc.), or some sort of anxiety. I imagine that there are groups of people in Germany that simply do not travel anymore.

It is an area where proper governance is failing. I don't know about Germany, but in The Netherlands, Dutch law requires at least 90% of the trains to be on time (less than 5 minutes delay). If national train company do not reach those numbers, they are fined and I think in an extreme case they can lose their concession.

> P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for the absolutely shit service they provide.

That's the famous German efficiency, not to waste time on things that were not done or caused by being inefficient in the first place. There's no point in wasting time on improving some process, fax machines still work, don't they?

The accountability part is what makes me more angry. I get to lose so many (maybe hundreds?) of hours a year because of how bad DB works. Meanwhile the executives at DB get their nice boni each year and absurdly high wages for what they do... which is consistently worsening the train experience year after year. Probably none of them even use the train.

> I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out

It's not "your train connection didn't work out", it's "you were planning to go somewhere, and the train took you somewhere else entirely, much farther away than when you started, and gave you no way out of this, and not even an apology or explanation". This is absolutely comparable to a form of kidnapping.

Still, in Germany only 58.8% of the trains were on time in 2025 [1]. Maybe it's not as bad as the author states, but it's certainly valid complaining about it. I lived in Germany for five years and for longer stretches it was certainly very common to have a 30-60 minutes delay. A lot of my colleagues would even do trips like Stuttgart <-> Leipzig by plane because they hated traveling with DB so much.

[1] https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped

> no developed country with a worse train company than DB

Italy is pretty similar, and I would say even worse, but after reading / hearing more about DB I think they're just competing for being the worst train company ever

3 hours!! Unbelievable. In the UK we would smash the doors/windows open these days after an hour or two. We got sick of the railway having no contingency plans for getting people off stuck trains in bad conditions

When was that? DB has gotten much worse in the past ~5 years

> This includes Denmark as well

I regularly travel on DSB (2.5hr journeys, 4 times a month minimum), and only very rarely encounter issues. Staff have always been easy to deal with and on the rare occasion I've had to be refunded (the carriage with my reserved seat didn't show up) I've received it within days.

Avoid trains run by GoCollective though.

Nope, leave Italy off the well-functioning rail. I am a commuter, i use the train here since 2009 and it's terrible. We're going through the same experiences described in the post, but often even much worse. On December 1st, my train took 6 hours to travel 100km instead of 1 hour so we too felt like the post author.

I thought in Germany you got unlimited train travel for €58?

Customer service on British trains is excellent. It only takes a few minutes to claim Delay Repay if you're delayed more than 15 minutes, and you can even set it up to do it automatically for you. If your last train back home for the night is cancelled at 1am, you can message the company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to sort you out with a taxi for a distance like London to Cambridge.

I consistently find railway workers to be some of the most helpful and approachable people I have to interact with, which is remarkable given the sort of people they have to put up with. I think the sort of person you'll be speaking to certainly depends on the part of the country you're in though - in Scotland and Wales, I've seen people who've been let off for having a ticket that expired several days prior, and staff are happy to have a friendly chat if the train isn't too busy.

I'm pro car, I would much prefer to relax on a train, but the economics just don't work in the UK. I can't think of anywhere I want to go where taking the train is cheaper than driving

Kicked Off = we have to stop for some technical reasons that are further unspecified, and everyone has to leave the train because we are driving now in the opposite direction. a replacement bus is coming. Once every hour. With a capacity of 8 people. In some cow village 50km far away from the next city. With no cab service available. Thats was what i meant

What facts are missing in your opinion?

Of course there’s exaggeration. Nobody really believes this person was kidnapped by the German train company.

People do get kicked off trains, usually it’s the entire train that is being emptied. Happened to me in NRW. Happened to me in Brandenburg. When there’s a problem with the train, then sometimes it has to be evacuated.

He would have not been entitled to a cab ride by the way, he was travelling with Deutschlandticket. Your entire comment is not only pedantic, it’s also completely wrong lol.

Found the Deutsche Bahn PR employee.

Yes, you get kicked off. If the train is too full. I got kicked off myself and friends also told me they had to leave the train for the same reason.

Entitled to what?

He could try to do it on his own accord - they have leverage to decline and he'd have to take it through several other over burdened agencies.

He could also try getting into contact with DB, and good luck with that.

My own DB story was from Hamburg hbf where 3 huge DB employers was standing guard in front of reisenzentrum (the customer service counter) and yelling at every own being incredibly rude.

DB is a joke, and it is imploding on itself. Staff seems so stressed and embarrassed by being a part of it.

Please, don’t go there.

He could, but that would be a very expensive stop.

The author makes effectively the same comment that twenty minutes late is normal for Germany (below). I don’t have any statistics, but anecdotally I’ve had worse experiences with DB than in the UK. DB does not just run late, but has a bad habit of teleporting you to random German towns, from which you must quickly route find to your original destination (as is the exact story of the post).

> It is twenty minutes late. I consider this early.

OP mentions "six minutes" as a DB metric. But the thing is that DB doesn't care about trains being late. It's absolutely normal to have an hour delay in Germany. You can be considered lucky if it's under an hour. What will usually happen is that you spend half a day in some village waiting for your connection and travel the rest of the way standing in the doorway with your bags.

Competing on which system is more dysfunctional, is .. not a competition we should be in. Especially when there's 0 reason for it to be this way.

> Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.

My biggest gripe with DB is not that it's late, but that it quite often cancels the trains. If you decided to go by regional trains with 1-2 hops instead of direct (bc you can go much cheaper with Deutschlandticket), there's a high chance that at least one of your trains get cancelled and things will not go according the plan.

Not my experience. I regularly travel by train and a 20 minute delay is unusual. Almost every train is on time in my experience.

Recently while driving an hour journey turned into a three hour journey, and not because my car broke down. I've never experienced any delay anywhere near that significant on British trains.

That happens very infrequently on my commuter service in the UK. I'd say not more than once every couple of months, normally due to someone committing suicide in front of a train.

Good news for you! 1.5 is in O(50) since they’re both constants! (It’s 1.50 because the author has the 58€-a-month flat rate ticket for all local and regional services in the entire country. If you buy a regular ticket, you get back 25% of the ticket price for delays over an hour and 50% for delays over two hours)

This has been the case since I moved to Germany, 6 years ago. National humiliation is apparently an insufficient detterent.