Suggestion for more punctuality on the railway: fewer trains on the route

Expert committee advises the railway: Fewer trains, but more punctuality? As of: October 30, 2026 • 3:59 p.m

The railway wants to be more punctual. That's why a new commission of experts should now provide suggestions for rapid improvements. One idea: fewer trains on congested routes. But criticism comes from the industry.

Fewer trains on the rails, but more punctuality. This is one of the ideas of Deutsche Bahn's newly created “Robust Timetable” committee. The expert commission is due to start work next Tuesday and look for ways to quickly make the trains more punctual again.

More punctuality through less traffic on the rails should be one of the possible solutions. "An example could be that a long-distance train only runs once an hour between Berlin and Hamburg instead of every 30 minutes, but the trains are reliable," said the federal government's former railway commissioner, Enak Ferlemann, to the Tagesspiegel. "With the commission we want to tell people the truth: given the situation, there are far too many trains running on our tracks."

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Ferlemann is a member of the supervisory board of the railway subsidiary DB InfraGo, which is responsible for infrastructure. She convened the expert commission. Ferlemann should also be a member of the committee. This emerges from information from InfraGo for the Transport Committee in the Bundestag, which is available to the dpa news agency. The Tagesspiegel had previously reported on it.

“The experts will discuss at several meetings with a lot of experience and from many perspectives in an open-ended manner. Suggestions for more reliability on rail should be available in the new year,” said a railway spokesman. “The results will be evaluated together with politicians, countries and the industry.”

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The high level of unpunctuality is mainly due to the poor infrastructure. In addition, there is overload. “In 2025, more than ten percent of trains ran on routes with a capacity utilization of over 115 percent,” says the information for the transport committee. As a result, the traffic jams on the rails continue to grow. "In the past ten years, traffic jam delays have increased by 150 percent."

The railway is currently renovating and building at a record level in order to get the rail network fit again. Passengers have so far noticed little of this. In the current year, almost every second long-distance train was unpunctual in most months. If things continue like this, there will likely be a negative punctuality record at the end of the year.

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The expert commission should now look for solutions “to enable more stable and reliable rail operations during the upcoming years of intensive construction activity,” as it goes on to say. According to the information, the committee receives support from the Swiss company SMA und Partner, which specializes in timetables.

The managing director of the competitor association Die Güterbahnen, Peter Westenberger, made a similar statement. The industry rejected the “simple approach of driving less instead of more” a year ago, he explained.

This topic in the program: NDR 2 | News | Oct 30, 2026 | 3:00 p.m