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We complain a lot about Renfe (and a good part of those complaints, with reason). But although it may seem otherwise, Germany has been neglecting its railway network for decades at decadent levels. And just as they count According to the Financial Times, only six in ten long-distance trains arrive on time. However, the country already has a plan in mind, a plan that involves investing some 100,000 million euros in solving its punctuality problem. The problem. In 2000, 84% of German long-distance trains arrived on time. Today that figure has fallen to 60%. Already last year, an analysis The Financial Times placed Deutsche Bahn, the German public operator, below even the most late railway operators in the United Kingdom. Just like account The German Transport Minister, Patrick Schnieder, even warned in March that the situation threatened to erode public confidence in the institutions. In his own words, he assured that if the State is not capable of guaranteeing basic services, “democracy is harmed.” How we got here. According to the media, this deterioration has been the result of a series of poorly made decisions over two decades. In the early 2000s, the German government considered taking Deutsche Bahn public. The plan never materialized, but to improve the balance sheet for that hypothetical exit, network maintenance was cut. To this was added that between 2005 and 2010 the budget for railway infrastructure was, adjusted for inflation, 20% lower than in the mid-nineties, according to calculations from the FT itself. The icing on the cake came in 2009, when Germany constitutionalized the so-called “debt brake“, which forced the State to balance the accounts every year. This caused investment spending to systematically lose the battle against social spending. The current state of the network. Just like account According to the FT, 16% of the assets of the German railway network are classified as deficient or directly inadequate. There are bridges dating back to the time of Kaiser Wilhelm II and signal boxes installed in the 1960s that are still in service. In fact, according to DB InfraGo, the Deutsche Bahn division in charge of maintaining the network, 80% of all delays are directly caused by deterioration of the infrastructure. You have to open the tap. In 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz took advantage of a constitutional loophole to create a fund of 500 billion euros to renew the country’s infrastructure over the next twelve years. The railway is one of its top priorities since, of that total, Deutsche Bahn has committed 107 billion euros until 2029. However, Philipp Nagl, CEO of DB InfraGo, recognize to the FT that needs at least 130,000 million to cover the accumulated delay. And as he comments, every year, more assets reach the end of their useful life. How it is being executed. The strategy is being extremely drastic, closing entire sections of the network for months to rebuild them from scratch, instead of patching section by section. Furthermore, it is an atypical way of doing things at Deutsche Bahn, which historically had a tradition of keeping lines open while carrying out construction work. “With that method it would take forever,” explains Nagl to the FT. The number of active works on the network has grown by a third since 2024, to exceed 28,000 in 2026. The immediate consequence is more chaos in the short term. And the punctuality goal has been lowered to 70% and postponed until 2029. A real example. In one of the busiest corridors in the country, the one that connects Cologne with the Ruhr Valley, along which up to 280 trains circulate daily, the line has been closed since February. According to account In the middle, the 55,000 regular travelers must resort to more than 200 replacement buses, many of them stuck in traffic jams. In return, 81 kilometers of track, 50 detours and 12 stations are being renewed in five months. The person in charge of the project, Arno Jaeger, defined the medium as “a monumental task” with a budget of 800 million euros. To speed up the work, specialized heavy machinery is used. In fact, one of the machines, colloquially nicknamed Mamut, renews two kilometers of track per shift, four times faster than if they did it through the conventional method. It’s about operators. Beyond Deutsche Bahn, there are private competitors waiting for their chance. And just as account FT, FlixTrain, the railway arm of the Flix group, has reserved 2.4 billion euros to buy up to 65 high-speed trains that it wants to deploy from 2028. The Italian high-speed operator Italo has also announced its intention to enter Germany with an investment of up to 3.6 billion if it gains access to the network for several years. Both point to 2028 as a key year. Cover image | Deutsche Bahn In Xataka | The Spanish west has a forgotten train that it wants to recover. The problem: neither Madrid nor Europe are interested