After a better year 2020, the punctuality of Deutsche Bahn in 2021 fell back to the level of the previous years.
(Photo: imago images / Ralph Peters)
Berlin Last year, Deutsche Bahn passengers again had to be annoyed significantly more often about delayed long-distance trains. On average, only 75.2 percent of the ICE and IC trains arrived at their destination on time, significantly fewer than in the previous year, as Deutsche Bahn announced on Wednesday. In 2020, the first Corona year, punctuality was just under 82 percent, which is the highest it has been in 15 years. Now the railway is back at the low level of the pre-Corona years and is thus far from long-term goals. A train ends up in the statistics as being late if it arrives at its destination more than six minutes late.
However, in 2021 the railway had to contend with several crises that severely restricted train traffic. The severe storm surge in July, for example, destroyed large parts of the rail infrastructure in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia. At that time, the railway estimated the damage to be more than one billion euros. It was not until November that the first section on the particularly badly affected Ahr Valley Railway in Rhineland-Palatinate was put back into operation – around four months after the disaster.
In the further course of the summer the collective bargaining dispute with the union of German locomotive drivers (GDL) followed. Three waves of strikes brought train traffic in Germany to a virtual standstill for days.
In addition, Deutsche Bahn built a lot in the past year. The construction sites also slowed down the traffic. “That had mainly negative effects in the highly frequented bottlenecks in our network,” it said. This was not only felt by the passengers, but also by the major customers in freight transport, a particularly large number of whom complained about delayed trains in December.
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