Not to knock you guys but saying that the country with the 3rd highest gdp in the world has better trains than the Balkan seems like a really low bar to clear. It's also that the Deutsche Bahn of the 70s was substantially better than what we have now, maybe apart from the bullet trains, which are hilariously expensive and comparatively slow regardless.
Sounds like that's what OP did due to multiple trains missing their connections. If you take the ICE, then Munich to Hamburg would be a bit under 6 hours and you wouldn't have to change trains at any time.
Going border to border from Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Flensburg would increase that to ~11 hours due to the regional trains being slower and ~40 mins layovers each in Munich and Hamburg.
I remember when my foster fathers train started going backwards and added an extra 8 hours to his trip. Making him come home very late. Like how can geemany has such a city train system? My countries is way better than that(Hungary)
They've not properly invested in their railway system for decades. They've only spent money on maintenance, not actual improvements to it. That maintenance also causes issues, because instead of actually renewing railway infrastructure, they now need to spend more and more time on fixing old infrastructure, which also causes delays.
At the same time traffic keeps increasing, but they already don't really have the capacity for it, so if something minor goes wrong, it cascades throughout the entire network.
They also have a lot of old signalling infrastructure, which needs to work together, but often doesn't. That old infrastructure also frequently breaks. They need to replace them with digital interlocks, and move to ETCS everywhere, but that's a massive project that takes years, if not decades.
So basically they could fix it, if they'd actually invest in it and plan for it.
There is a challenge in germany where you try to get to all 16 countries in 24 hours via train, and it's barely possible. So you could easily take 30 hours from the very south to the very north, since the 24h one is a highly optimized route going in what is basically a small circle in the middle of Germany
Back in 2015 I took the Trans-Siberian Railway. 72 hours non-stop on a train surrounded by a bunch of Russians who didn't speak a word of English, and most of that time was indeed spent within Siberia.
It was. I had lived in China for a year and decided to make the trip home into a vacation. I took the train to Mongolia, spent a week there exploring, took the bus across the Russian border to Ulan-Ude (where I ran into a border guard who spoke Swedish), visited Lake Baikal, took the long train ride to Moscow, spent a few days there and then flew home.
The train ride was pretty meditative. I booked the train that originated in China so that I could speak some Chinese, but I ended up in a carriage that was added on the Russian side, so it was just me and a bunch of Russians who didn't speak any English. I spent my time watching movies and series, reading a ton (I finished four books in three days) and just sitting at the very back of the train and watching the countryside pass by for hours.
It was unfortunate that I wasn't able to make any stops on the way, but I still found watching the landscape and people fascinating. I'm also happy that I managed to get it done back then since it's not exactly the sort of thing you'd do today.
I have a friend who was in the Soviet army in the 80s. He got two weeks of leave but didn't take it as he would have only made it halfway home before he would've had to turn back.
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u/SpareRelation9363 22h ago
People in russia driving for 30 hours just to be still in siberia