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This is an interesting conclusion to a problem other countries are facing as well. The Czech Republic fully divided its railway infrastructure (under SŽ) and national train operator (ČD) sooner than most of the EU. SŽ being incompetent is a favourite topic of railway fans here, but most everyone agrees that this kind of split was for the best, at least for long-distance trains.

Pretty soon after the railways were opened to non-state operators, quality of long-distance train routes improved, both by new trains by private operators and increased competition forcing ČD to improve. On regional railways, where the state pays for train operations, costs have gone down thanks to competition. It seems to me like this model can work well, you just need an infrastructure operator that's receptive to its "customers" (which SŽ often isn't), or a political structure that can force them to listen.

> On regional railways, where the state pays for train operations, costs have gone down thanks to competition.

German here. Yes, costs have gone down thanks to competition, but at what cost?

IMHO, the cost of "competition" on regionals has been massive. A lot of infrastructure has had to be rebuilt (e.g. maintenance shops), a huge expense and waste of space (think about how long a regional train is - easily 150 meters [1], which means the shop has to be at least that long). Some operators chose to run with old, run-down rolling stock or go for the absolutely cheapest options. Others, and that has happened at least twice in the last few years, calculate their offers to be barely profitable and then a crisis (Covid, Russian invasion and energy cost explosion) hits, forcing the companies into bankruptcy. Cleanliness of trains, regular expulsion of toilets takes a hit as that's a very easy way to save a few hundred euros. In the case of demand surges (e.g. soccer games, Oktoberfest, Karneval), there's no way to ad-hoc add rolling stock and drivers because there are no spares and modern rolling stock isn't compatible with anything other than its specific model and configuration.

And some regional tender processes have gotten even worse, where the state prescribes or outright buys the rolling stock... and suddenly the only way the providers can compete is staffing cost.

Thanks but no thanks, I'd rather like the old system back!

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Desiro_HC

> some regional tender processes have gotten even worse, where the state prescribes or outright buys the rolling stock

Isn't this done in an attempt to resolve some of the issues you mentioned?

If you don't want the absolute cheapest old run-down toilet-less rolling stock, the tender has to be quite specific about the minimum requirements the rolling stock is expected to meet. This in turn means an operator switch leaves the new operator having to quickly obtain a bunch of highly-specific rolling stock with the old operator having to get rid of a bunch of now-worthless highly-specific rolling stock.

The logical result is that the old operator sells the rolling stock to the new operator. Or, you have the rolling stock owned by a holding company, who leases it to whoever happens to be operating the tender. Same with the maintenance shops.

So why not cut out the middle man and have the rolling stock and maintenance shop be government-owned? The end result is the same, but it's cheaper for everyone involved.

Complaining about disastrous and unnecessary competition has a long and proud tradition.

> And some regional tender processes have gotten even worse, where the state prescribes or outright buys the rolling stock... and suddenly the only way the providers can compete is staffing cost.

Sounds pretty bad.

In Czechia, competition was a huge boon for the railways. I still remember the rusty, hopelessly dirty Communist trains with fake leather seats that glued your buttocks with sweat, "open hole" toilets that stank to high heaven in summer and froze your ass off in the winter. Nowadays, we usually ride in nice and clean trains, and on the main lines of some operators, there is a delivery service where you can order small snacks or even warm meals to your seat and get them. Compared to the past, it is a freaking luxury.

Maybe the problem that you described is German-specific. Over my lifetime, as I visited Germany, I noticed a steady drift towards lower quality in almost all public services, not just trains. As if the German voters just somehow stopped to demand or value quality of governance. IDK why, but it can be seen everywhere. And there is already a visible contrast in public cleanliness and order when you travel, say, from Zurich to Munich. Germany looks like a has-been.

That wasn't the case in the 90s. Back then, the difference between BRD and Schweiz was negligible.

My pet theory is that Merkel's 16 years of sleepy rule was too much. Most politicians need to fear replacement in order to do something. If the nation votes for the same person over and over again, there will be no real political competition.

But IDK how that works on the Länder level.

You might the Wikipedia page on the impact of British Rail privatisation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics straight after privatisation, you might think the change would be universally acclaimed. High fives all around. Instead, it's one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done.

I especially like the almost miraculous recovery in rail's share of passenger transport. Or just the very first graph on the page, that shows the total number of passengers.

I agree privatisation did indeed cause a massive revamp of train usage, and I feel like the nostalgia is sometimes rose-tinted and misplaced because 80s BR by all accounts was pretty bad even in the context of the UK in the 80s.

On the other hand, from about the 90s onwards there was a huge increase in London employment relative to the rest of the country, and also a huge (5x or more over that time) house price increase in London. This pushed a lot of people into the commuter belt. and As you basically cannot drive into London from there, those miles can only be provided by rail.

It would be interesting to know how much of the effect is in the South east, and how much is showing labour migration into a rail-centric region after industrial sectors outside the South-east were dynamited in the 80s.

And privatisation does usually have a cycle: influx of cheap capital in a boom phase, followed by a slow ratching squeeze as you struggle to exceed that great initial growth every year thereafter.

> Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics .. one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done

This is a classic of metrics driven management, isn't it. Customer satisfaction isn't in the metrics so people stand around saying "well they should be happy!"

Mainly about the cost, but the overcrowding on certain lines and the unreliability are also major factors. Commuters end up using the train because they're more or less forced to - you're not going to drive into rush hour London, and there's nowhere to park; and that's also a matter of policy to get people on the trains for sustainability reasons.

The "playing at shops" market setup exacerbates the problems. Original comment says "costs have gone down due to competition", but since the UK's operators are little regional monopolies they don't actually compete. The operators own neither track nor rolling stock; most of the money flows to the "train landlords", the ROSCOs.

Privatising the track, through "Railtrack" was the big disaster. They cut maintenance, but when you enshittify railways eventually people get killed, and nationalization was inevitable after Hatfield.

>Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics straight after privatisation, you might think the change would be universally acclaimed. High fives all around. Instead, it's one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done.

I could tell at the time that they were itching to tell a narrative like yours coz they sent me a survey asking me about every aspect of the service except price and value for money, the one thing I and everybody else who routinely used the service was most furious about.

As a narrative shaping device it does seem to have not been completely wasted though.

That graphic from the Swiss Railways is absolutely wonderful

https://sma-partner.com/storage/app/media/Dokumente/Netzgraf...

Nice, but I did one of the obvious things and looked for Geneva. Near the bottom left it says "Genève-Aéroport". Is that labelling the small portrait-format grey rectangle to the left of the larger landscape-format rectangle that should be labelled Genève-Cornavin?
If I could find one like that for London I'd probably get it printed and hang it on my wall.
huh I find this totally incomprehensible. Is this easier to read if you spend a lot of time looking at wiring diagrams?
This is the way I like to think about problems. Essentially you start backwards from the problem and (hopefully) arrive at a solution. If at some point in the depths of abstraction you lose touch or forget what that original problem was, you've already failed.

Building infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is a good example of being completely out of touch. The problem was there weren't enough trains at the right time to the right places. The bridge builders clearly weren't thinking about that.

In my work this often happens because of the XY problem. People ask for X, but in fact they need Y and X is just their proposed solution. This would be like people asking for a new train from Cambridge to London, but in fact they are really going to Oxford and were only using London to connect.

There are also assumptions that even the most pedantic people don't mention all the time. If people ask for more comfortable seats on trains, they implicitly also mean at the right time. They don't mean a comfortable seat at 2:00 in the morning that takes 3x as long to get there.

I've often thought some kind of daily meditation to remind yourself of what the problems are is useful. There are the "bedrock" problems (like the train timetable) that never change, and there is the specific problem you are trying to solve right now (like connecting Cambridge to Oxford). I think it's worth thinking about it every day lest you lose sight and build the bridge nobody needed.

Contrived conclusion: Given a good frequency, passengers can completely ignore schedules.
Yes, that works great in dense cities that can justify running a train every 5 minutes. What sets Switzerland apart is that it can offer reliable, punctual service to tiny mountain villages that may only have a couple of trains a day, but those trains are carefully scheduled so that you can get there from Zurich or wherever with an absolute minimum of waiting around for your connections or fretting if you'll make it. (In the unlikely event that your train is a few minutes late, they will hold the connection.)
Something which I only realised by watching a London Underground driver who was vlogging for a while (before he was asked to stop) is that, yes, the frequency of the trains is the main metric for customers.

However, once things go off schedule it can have pretty acute consequences for drivers and operational staff. The timetables are built around having drivers at specific places at specific times who will have required breaks at certain times and a maximum allowable working time. The rolling stock itself needs to be where it's needed as well, it's easy for it to get bunched up behind a track circuit failure etc.

If trains are frequent enough, passengers do ignore schedules and just turn up. This is common on metro/subway/underground services.
In Berlin, in a large part of the city, the trains come every 4-5 minutes. You rarely need to check a timetable (and when you do, you'd rather check the app, which knows where the trains actually are, not just where they should be). You just show up at the station and wait for the next train.
Truly a wonderful revelation I had to stop reading the time table and see that it says every 15 minutes or so a bus will come during the times I'd expect it to, worst case 45, etc.
I'm surprised the author doesn't mention that centralised time itself was a product of the railway. Prior to that, every town had its own time, London and Bristol were 20 mins apart. In order to have a central timetable, there had to be a central time.
Yes, and it was a huge thing at the time. The social effects of all this time coordination and time tabling are one of the underlying themes of Stoker's novel Dracula.
Services at Oxford’s cathedral (Christ Church) still start at 5 past the hour because that’s “Oxford Time”.
He missed something. The train means you dont have to park. That is often a big advantage. Parking is expensive and stressful if there are not many spots. In a city the train system can probably get you closer to where you want to be. Especially if you dont want to pay top $ for parking.

Parking in cities is also stressful with finding tbe entry on the correct one where you booked. And you miss the entry? Yep that is a one way street. Go round the block? No right turn? Satnav says 15 minutes to get back there again.

If the only train was 6 hours before you needed to be there then you'd probably just deal with parking instead.

The point isn't that the timetable is the only reason to use a train, it's that without a good timetable it really doesn't matter what other advantages it offers and planners need to keep this in mind at all times.

The motorcycle eliminates that where I live. However the train adds the flexibility of arriving in one place and leaving from another, or from having a drink, or from just sitting and reading instead of driving.

I like trains, when they're reliable.

There are open-source projects trying to replace older closed-source software used to produce these timetables:

- Netzgrafik-Editor: https://github.com/OpenRailAssociation/netzgrafik-editor-fro...

- OSRD: https://osrd.fr/en/

(Disclaimer: I'm working on OSRD.)

"The product of the railways is the successful arrival of passengers at their chosen destination." Clearly, this was not written in the USA. With a few exceptions (NE corridor, Wolverine route), Amtrak is forced to share rails with host freight (goods) railroads who could give a hoot about the expedient delivery of passengers. The Big 4 (BNSF, UP, CSX, NS) would rather just let their freight have priority and pay a minimal fine. Sadly, this will continue to be the case where Amtrak does not have their own right of way (NE Corridor, Wolverine).
The US is very much the exception, not the rule.
I simply don’t agree with the conclusion though I appreciate the approach to thinking about products.

I recently chose to take the train vs driving and the factors behind that decision were:

* Time, yes. Train was approximately the same but an actually a bit slower.

* Cost. Train was slightly cheaper when looking at the true cost of driving. Also significantly cheaper than flying.

* Experience. This is entirely overlooked in the timetable centric approach. Train is simply the most pleasant way to travel long distances (maybe ferry is competitive there). I was able to move around and get work done and enjoy the view. If the train company had swapped my train for a bus I would NOT have been a satisfied customer.

* City center to city center (vs airport to airport). Had the train company said “we swapped the arrival location to the airport but technically we still got you to the city” I would NOT have been a happy customer.

The “trains as timetables” hypothesis would imply that the train could meet my needs via something other than rail travel and would definitely lose me as a customer.

On the other hand, improvements such as better wifi service (it was terrible and not sure why cell service is also poor on a train) or a route that was more scenic but did not impact my arrival time significantly would positively affect my likelihood of choosing train.

So the better lesson is know your customer needs and know their specific jobs to be done and center your hypothesis around this.

I think a lot of that is colored by the fact that you were doing a long-distance trip. I would completely agree with your points if I were, say, living in Frankfurt and planning a holiday in Paris.

But the math is a lot different for regular day-to-day trips, and for that I do think the timetable is the primary product. My goal is to get from A to B, and do so 1) reliably, 2) quickly, and 3) affordably. I don't really care if this means taking the car, the bus, the underground, the train, my bicycle, or a ferry - I'll use whatever option is most convenient.

If I'm only in/on there for 30 minutes, I could not care less for a scenic view. It matters far more whether there is a frequent service I can rely on, which doesn't involve half a dozen needless busy-work with transfers and endless waiting and anxiety for each connecting service. The more it acts like a taxi, the happier I am.

The product of the railways is the successful arrival of passengers at their chosen destination.

The fact that this isn't obvious, and that instead the means by which that product is delivered is considered more important than the actual arrival of passengers, is very telling.

This is a common issue in the technology world - too often, the actual end result is overlooked, for the sake of the means by which that product is produced. Your special organisational tricks mean nothing if the customer is left at the station, standing in the rain, hundreds of kilometres from home.

The timetable doesn't get anyone home. The trains do. The timetable just describes the intent - it is a requirement which describes a service, not a product. The train is required to show up at that time, and by publishing it the train company is establishing agreement with its customers in an open and fair manner.

A product is something which is produced, and the word 'product' describes, after the fact, that which was produced. A service is an act which is performed in support of producing something. Timetables are a service which are subservient to the fact of actually producing the desired result. I do not go to the train station to look at the services being promised delivery; I go to engage in the act of using that service, to gain my desired product: my ass at home, making a cuppa.

Disclaimer: if you've taken a train in any one of 38 different countries around the world, chances are your safety has been being predicted by SIL4-level online tests I've written for that purpose ..

The article got off on the wrong foot from the start by separating the purpose from the product. To my mind the purpose is the product and always will be.
On the other hand, "successful arrival of passengers at their chosen destination" doesn't say much either. That's the absolute bare minimum. It's like saying that the product of airplanes is to not crash. Technically true, but meaningless on its own. "Passenger arrives at destination" is also nothing more than a requirement which describes the service - and that could even be met by sending me a taxi!

You're absolutely right that a fancy timetable with all its trains getting cancelled is worthless, but so is a train service which doesn't provide useful routes, which is delayed by hours, and which only runs once a week. When I am looking into commute options, they are selling me the timetable: if they don't provide meaningful transit options, they aren't getting my ass home anyways.

The product they are selling is the promise of a convenient transit option - which is presented in the form of a timetable, and delivered in the form of a train. And yes, if they can't reliably deliver on that transit option by not getting me from A to B as promised, I will be asking my money back.

What the article points out is that the distinguishing feature of the railway is that the company has no control how and when you use the train. It's less like someone selling you a journey and more like renting a car. You do not get promised to be brought to your destination, you get promised the availability of the vehicle. That's the same with railways, you get promised the availability of movement at a specific time. That's what the timetable is.

That's also a common criticism by people who prefer there cars: With a railway you need to put in work and decision how you want to travel to a degree that you don't need to in a car.

SIL as safety integrity level ?
Now replace “timetable” with OKRs (objectives and key results).
I think the "successful arrival" framing isn't accurate. Or at least not comprehensive. Granted, "Commuter travel" vs "Leisure travel" are probably two quite different products.

Marketing guy Rory Sutherland talks about the product of the train journey a lot. I think there's a lot of wisdom in the idea of spending finite budget trying to make the travel experience more enjoyable rather than trying to make the journey quicker. (excuse the shortform slop) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Bywe3NUOB1I

Did you read the entire article? That's exactly the point it's making, but you decided to pick on the word "timetable"
It's an interesting take, and you may as well map it to industrial projects, architecture, software to see it from a different perspective.

The timetable is the specs. The product is what your customers experience.

The specs (loose or... very specific) is definitely a major product step. But in that it is a mean to deliver the service/experience in the end. Without the implementation details (that do not live in the spec), you get often unsatisfied people everywhere.

I can make some guesses as to where the author lives, purely from their confidence that trains will keep to their schedule.

People will still show up for trains that fail to meet their schedules. They just have to have a high enough frequency that you aren't sitting there for hours, or for there to simply be no other option.

In codeberg.org/cartes/serveur I'm building a stack to visualise transit plans using node-GTFS and setup and update a motis instance for transit calculations.

Open source transit plans are under-developped. Almost everything still needs to be invented.

It's one product, sure.

Arguably more important is standard time.

Before the railways towns ran on local-noon time, so the railways and their timetables required time to be synchronized across regions.

The most important product a train system offers is getting you from A to B.
Is anyone else getting bored with these "insights" which are flippant to the point of being rdiculous? Many things are necessary to have a "product", not just a timetable. Anyone can scribble a time table.

I swear this is an industry. "I'm so insightful, don't forget to like and subscribe"

the title, and the author, are uninformed railways are the most cost effective and resiliant means of terrestrial transportation. Rail networks have continued to function under the worst conditions of war and economic hardship. Railways main asset durring better times are there rights of way, which, when you look into it, exist in a special category of "no, No, NO, you cant move it or build on it, block it, or anything else" no matter how dissused it looks. which is to say that railways exist outside of time, and are in essence a physical manifestation of pragmatism, realism, whatever you want to call it, in these easy times, when people flirt with the "whens" and "whys", "wouldn't it be nices's" rather then songs extolling the great strength and worth of railroad ,trains, and the excitement that comes from people standing up under adversity and thriving get you some train songs in your feed, see what I mean