Deutsche Bahn — negative world leader

1Opening

The description negative world leader is not polemical. It is the sober description of a measurable situation. Among the major rail systems of the developed industrial nations — Switzerland, Japan, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Great Britain, South Korea, Taiwan, China — Deutsche Bahn is the worst. It is outdone only by individual special cases such as Amtrak in the US, which runs on other operators' tracks and was never a national high-performance network, or Eurostar, which is a single cross-border operator without a network of its own. In a comparison of national rail systems of comparable importance, DB stands in last place. At the top. But from the bottom.

This working paper examines the situation in two layers. The universal layer describes what is specific to the Megamachine in the crisis — that is, what could occur in any developed rail system in the world under the conditions of late-modern large-scale technology. The national layer describes what is specifically German — that is, what other countries have avoided or gone through differently. The thesis is that neither the universal nor the national layer alone explains the negative world leadership. It is the combination of both that produces the result.

The railway is thus the paradigmatic empirical example for the three preceding working papers in this series — The End of a Form of Administration, The Lowest Common Denominator, Homo Economicus. The railway displays all three diagnoses at once, in one concrete object. It is not a case but the case in which the structural crises of German late modernity become legible.

2The facts

The punctuality of DB long-distance services has been moving in one direction since 2015 — downwards. A brief overview:

DB defines a train as punctual if it arrives at a stop less than six minutes late. The Swiss SBB defines the same quantity at three minutes and reaches about ninety-two per cent with it. Japan's Shinkansen defines it at one minute and achieves an average delay of eighteen seconds over the year. In a fair comparison using the Swiss yardstick, DB's punctuality would be not sixty but about forty-four per cent.

The physical substance on which the railway operates is in a comparably poor state. From the DB InfraGO network condition report for 2025:

The group's own statement, made by DB chief executive Evelyn Palla on publication of the 2025 network condition report: We have not yet achieved the turnaround. Many installations and stations are still not in good condition. From the mouth of a chief executive, this is a remarkably plain self-diagnosis. She does not say the railway is getting better. She says the railway is no longer getting worse. That is the message of a company that has shifted its reference values downwards.

According to InfraGO's leadership, the annual investment of twenty billion euros is just enough to keep the maintenance backlog from growing further. To reduce it would, according to existing estimates, require twice that amount over twenty years. Signal-box technology stands at grade 4.02 — that is, in the German school grading system, in the range of poor. Every second signal box needs renewal.

3What is specific to the Megamachine

First — the temporal asymmetry. A railway infrastructure is built up over decades and wears out over decades. Damage appears with a delay of thirty to forty years. A bridge built in the seventies fails in the 2010s. Those responsible for its construction are long gone when the reckoning of failure arrives. The Megamachine knows no actors who have to answer for its consequences — those who caused them are retired, those who commissioned them have died, the structures have been renamed. That is universal, not German.

Second — optimisation against the substance. Wherever large-scale technology is under economic pressure, the measurable quantity is optimised (profit, quarterly result, share price, EBIT) and the unmeasurable one is consumed (substance, condition, reserves, service life). British Railtrack in the nineties, Amtrak since liberalisation, the French SNCF in its profit-oriented phases, Japan's JR after privatisation — the same pattern everywhere. The Homo Economicus, to whom the preceding working paper was devoted, optimises the railway, and in doing so the railway loses its preconditions. What was not in the objective function drops out of sight. Substance is not in the objective function. Substance drops out of sight.

Third point — the entanglement of veto players. In every developed state a railway has a dense web of central government, states or regions, the EU, trade unions, the rail industry, municipal bodies, associations, passenger representatives and residents' initiatives. Every round of reform produces the lowest common denominator — which as a rule means keeping the existing structures under new terminology. That, too, is not German. Italy, France and Great Britain have their own veto players. Everywhere they slow reform down.

Fourth point — complexity beyond controllability. A modern railway is a socio-technical system with millions of components, continuous adaptation and many interfaces. It cannot be centrally planned and steered. Nobody has the whole picture. That is Mumford's Megamachine finding: the large structure cannot survey its own conditions of functioning. That, too, is universal.

These four layers would produce a railway crisis in any country. And they do. Italy had ten difficult years, France has its structural conflicts, Great Britain had to reorganise the system after the Railtrack disaster at Hatfield in 2000, Amtrak has been in a permanent state of trouble for decades. Megamachine railways no longer function without crisis. That is the condition of late modernity.

4What is typically German

First — the inability to reform oneself as a virtue. In Germany stability counts as a value in itself. Whoever radically rebuilds a structure is regarded as irresponsible. Other countries are more capable of reform because their political culture allows ruptures. The Italians built their high-speed network by leaving the old railway alongside and placing next to it a private competitor in Italo and a modernised state structure in Frecciarossa. The Spanish practically built a new railway with AVE. The French have radically restructured the SNCF several times. In 1994 Germany carried out a reform that essentially continued the old structures under a new logo. Then in 1999 it restructured in preparation for the stock-market flotation that never took place. Then in 2024 InfraGO was founded as a federally owned subsidiary — a construct that revives the substance of the old Bundesbahn under another name without solving the structural problems. Movement without change. That is the specifically German mode.

Second — federalism as a brake. Sixteen federal states with their own transport ministries, their own authorities responsible for regional rail passenger services, their own relationships with DB, their own station projects, their own route priorities. Every state secures its own piece of the network, its own regional rail connections, its own hubs. Federal policy has to negotiate through sixteen levels of veto before it has a strategy. That is the German specificity — federalism as a structure that inhibits reform. The joint-decision trap (Politikverflechtungsfalle) that Fritz Scharpf described in 1976 is drawn particularly tight in its German railway variant.

Third point — the illusion of success. Germany experienced decades in which the Bundesbahn really was world-class — from 1957 with the introduction of the Trans-Europ-Express, through the InterCity network of the seventies, into the eighties with the development of the ICE. From this arises the collective notion that the model works in principle — it just needs a little care. Other countries were either never at the top (the US, Italy before the 2000s) or had their peak in other eras (France with the TGV from 1981, which required a different social form). The German memory of success is an obstacle to reform because it suggests that the old structure is merely a little exhausted. It is not exhausted but obsolete.

Fourth point — privatisation followed through only halfway. The 1994 railway reform turned DB into a public limited company and prepared it for a stock-market flotation — the one that never happened. As a result, DB has been stuck in a hybrid state for more than thirty years. It is no longer the Bundesbahn (with the mandate to guarantee public services), but nor is it a genuine public company (with the pressure of an owner who demands substance). It combines the disadvantages of both models: the veto-heaviness of the state structure with the short-term logic of a listable public company. As chief executive from 1999 to 2009, Hartmut Mehdorn systematically cut spending on infrastructure in order to make the group ready for the stock market. Other countries made a decision — Switzerland and Austria remained state-owned, Great Britain privatised ruthlessly with its own disasters, France remained majority state-owned. Germany remained suspended in between. That is the German specificity of the railway reform.

Fifth point — engineering culture on the defensive. Germany had the strongest railway engineering culture in the world. Over the last thirty years it has been overlaid by controllers, consultants, lawyers and sales people. The engineering logic (substance, service life, reliability, long-term planning) was displaced by the management logic (efficiency, key figure, reporting, quarterly report). That happened everywhere, but in Germany with the additional pain of loss that a genuine engineering tradition was buried. Other countries did not have this tradition in the same form. The Swiss SBB preserved its engineering logic because there the culture of railway operation was never devalued into a management discipline.

Sixth point — the diagnosis as taboo. Only now is the German public slowly bringing itself to recognise that the railway would need not to be reformed but to be structurally replaced. Political discourse remains within the vocabulary of reform. Renovation, modernisation, general renovation, high-performance network, corridor renovation — all terms that suggest the existing system is the framework. Other countries have diagnosed more honestly. The British dissolved Railtrack in 2002 and founded Network Rail. The Dutch decided on a clear separation of network and operations. In 2024 Germany founded InfraGO — a federally owned subsidiary of DB AG. That is a shift within the same construct, not a structural break.

5The specific combination

Other countries have the Megamachine phenomena without the German specifics — the US, for example, with its weak railway tradition. Other countries have German specifics without consequences for the railway — such as the long German coal phase-out or the tax reform that was never implemented. Only Germany combines both layers at this depth in such a central infrastructure sector.

The Megamachine logic alone would produce a normal railway crisis — as in Italy at the beginning of the 2000s or in Great Britain after Hatfield. Such crises can be worked through; they are dealt with, new structures emerge. The German specifics alone would produce a slow erosion — as in public administration, the school system, tax law. Such erosions cost substance, but they do not lead to the top position at the bottom of an international table.

Together, both layers produce negative world leadership. A railway whose decay is accelerated by the Megamachine logic (the Mehdorn period, the preparation for flotation, the consumption of substance) but which at the same time cannot be corrected because of German incapacity for reform (sixteen state vetoes, the mediation committee, the illusion of success, the taboo). Acceleration meets the brake of reform incapacity. The result is stasis combined with loss of substance.

It is not surprising that at the end of such a constellation a railway emerges that brings up the rear of the developed world. It would have been more surprising if anything else had come of it.

6Connection to the diagnostic series

The railway is the clearest empirical example of the three preceding working papers in this series because it shows all three diagnoses at once.

Form of administration. The railway bureaucracy is the archetypal administration of the twentieth century — document-based, hierarchical, divided into departments, with a territorial scope and stable rules. None of the four preconditions identified in the first working paper still holds at the railway, or they are being undermined in practice. Document-based working collides with real-time dispatching. Hierarchy collides with the distribution of knowledge across thousands of clerks. The division into departments (long-distance, regional, freight, network, stations) is precisely the separation that obscures responsibility when failure occurs. The stability of the rules has been dissolved by ongoing restructurings and renamings.

Lowest common denominator. The 1994 railway reform was the paradigmatic compromise product of the federal government, sixteen states, the trade unions, the rail industry and EU requirements. It changed the structures just far enough for all veto players to be able to agree — that is, hardly at all. The nominal stock-market flotation as a common goal united politicians (who wanted to realise the value of federal assets), the group's leadership (who wanted entrepreneurial freedom), the trade unions (who were promised continuity of collective agreements) and the rail industry (which expected orders). Nobody got what they wanted. Everybody got the minimum that nobody could prevent. The result was a public company without shareholders, a privatisation without privatisation, a reform without reform.

Homo Economicus. The Mehdorn period of 1999–2009 was the open optimisation of group profit against the substance. Investment in maintaining the network was cut back because it weighed on the balance sheet. Staff were cut because they appeared as a cost item. Foreign expansion was pursued (Arriva, Schenker) because it broadened the group's portfolio and made it attractive with a view to flotation. What was not in the objective function relevant to the stock market — the substance of German infrastructure — dropped out of view. That is Homo Economicus in its pure form: an optimisation that consumes its own preconditions without noticing. Mehdorn was not an evil man. He was a consistent optimiser.

The railway is therefore not a chance case on which the three diagnoses can be exemplified. It is the case in which the three diagnoses have reinforced one another over three decades, until the result can be read off the table of the developed world — in last place.

7Open questions

Several questions remain open.

First — where is this heading? DB has set itself a punctuality target of seventy per cent for 2029. Even if this were achieved, DB would still be below the present level of every comparable Western railway. The chosen target is not a return to the upper half of the table. It is consolidation in the lower half. That is the group's open self-diagnosis: it is aiming for stability in a low table position, not for promotion.

Second — what breaks first? If negative world leadership persists for ten years, consequences will become visible that are still in the background today. Industry has begun to adapt its logistics — more lorries, less rail. Commuters switch to alternatives where possible, or move away. The trade-union structure is becoming brittle, because an eroded group no longer provides a strong basis for negotiation. At what point these consequences accumulate, and when they become politically visible, is open.

Third point — who takes over if DB falls apart? There are first signs that private and foreign actors are opening up the German rail market — Flixtrain in long-distance services, international consortia in regional tenders, Dutch and Czech operators on individual routes. That is no substitute, but it shows that DB can no longer hold on to its claim to a monopoly by its own strength. It holds on to it only because the network is in its hands. If the network were structurally separated from DB AG — which is repeatedly demanded politically — DB's share of the market would no longer be a matter of course.

Fourth — what remains for the next railway? If DB in its present form can no longer achieve an ascent, then the question is what substance can be preserved until a different form becomes possible. The engineering logic, the operating experience, the staff, the knowledge of the routes — all of this is substance that would have to be carried forward into a future structure. This question is not being asked systematically today. It will become more important.

Fifth — what does this case say about Germany as a whole? When a country turns the best rail system in the world into the worst of the developed world within thirty years, this does not concern only the transport sector. It is the symptom of a self-relativisation that affects the whole Federal Republic. What the railway has demonstrated, other sectors are copying — energy, education, health, administration, industry. The railway is merely the furthest advanced. It is the avant-garde of German decline.

The finding negative world leader is not polemical. It is factual. It describes what an industrial society that takes its bearings from the tradition of German engineering has done with one of its most important large-scale systems over three decades. It has neglected it, mismanaged it, optimised it for the stock market and worn it down through internal restructurings to such an extent that the end result is a position at the top of an international table — at the bottom end. That is a top performance. It was not forced from outside. It is the result of decisions made at home.

This makes the diagnosis not hopeless but realistic. A railway that makes its situation so unambiguous can no longer be handled with the vocabulary of reform. What will happen will be structural, and it will not come from DB itself. It will come when the consequences become so impossible to overlook that the German veto players lose their room for manoeuvre. It will not be pretty. But it will be clear.