What follows was originally written about a month ago. It was then sent to Richard Malins of the Railway Study Association (RSA) who commented on it. Rather than incorporate his comments I thought it might be best to publish them verbatim even it meant exposing my gargantuan ignorance to the full light of day.

A couple of weeks ago I spent an excellent few days on a study tour of German railways organised by the Railway Study Association and Deutsche Bahn. This included lectures on subjects as diverse as S-Bahns and the Thalys, to trips on the latest high-speed line along with plenty of time to explore Germany's rail network for ourselves. Our hosts did an excellent job in making it such an enjoyable and informative couple of days. While it is a cliché to describe the Germans as efficient and organised I can't think of a better way of putting it - they were efficient and they were organised.

Germany has a great variety of trains from S-Bahns (Schnell-bahns) serving (as I understand it) the commuter market, to regional expresses to the pride of the German fleet: the InterCity Expresses (ICEs). Many of Germany’s railways are built for trams. There are the ordinary surface trams, the Stadt bahn and then there are the underground trams, the U-bahn. These amaze me. To go to the trouble to build and underground network and then operate nothing more than 2-car trams suggests financial loss on an enormous scale. Mind you, I saw precisely the same thing in Brussels, so clearly it is quite common.

The S-Bahn

From a passenger's (if not a taxpayer's) point of view German railways are very good. Trains on the whole seem very modern with the vast majority appearing to be less than 20 years old. Trains were without exception spotless. With one exception (at the beginning of a ride on the ICE (Inter City Express) (of all things) the ride was excellent.

German trains can be late. Bit of a shocker, I know, but on plenty of occasions I saw trains running 5, 10 and even 20 minutes late. Again, it was difficult to tell whether this was normal or just my bad luck.

It may just have been my perception but fares seemed to be much the same as in the UK. But that is a very rough and ready view and it is perfectly possible that the fares people actually pay when you add in things like discount schemes may in fact be considerably lower.

Germany does seem to suffer from an overcrowding problem. On three occasions the trains were packed and on one I had to stand. Some of the DB people did say that there is an overcrowding problem on platforms at peak hours - rather worrying if you ask me. Sadly, I didn't get up in time to verify this for myself.

Even the graffiti is better (not that that'll be an acceptable excuse on CrozierRail)

Although there is a graffiti problem it is not as great as in the UK.

Stations varied. I think Cologne Main Station may be the nicest in the world. I can't off hand think of anything better. It is spacious, modern and clean. There were plenty of ticket machines (which worked unlike the (identical) machines I tried to use when I got back to the UK.)

Your luggage goes in here

I really loved the left luggage system. It really was the Rolls Royce of left luggage systems. The sort of thing that Brunel would have designed had he not spent too much time on the Great Eastern. None of this leaving your bags with some unshaven slob who really would rather you didn't distract him from reading the paper. Oh no, the Germans decided to do things properly. You go to a terminal. A little door opens. You put your bag inside and take a ticket. OK, that bit happens at few places. The clever bit is what happens next. Your bag is (automatically) placed in a steel container. The container is (automatically) taken down into the basement and deposited. When you come to collect your bag you go to one of the nine terminals (not necessarily the one you used to deposit your bag) and insert the ticket. Your bag should appear within a minute. And it does. I used it and it took 59 seconds. Marvellous.

...and gets stored down here

Mind you Cologne is not the full story. Bonn, for instance, could be a really nice station were it not for the dossers' encampment that seems to have taken over a large part of its precincts and the surrounding area.

One of the big things on German railways is connections. On Inter City trains you will, usually, find a list of connections on your seat. Very useful if you are travelling off the beaten track.

A Regional train

I found the arrangement for fare collection very surprising indeed: there are no barriers. I mean, really, nowhere. So, how do they get people to pay I wondered? Apparently, there are on-train checks and if you do happen to get caught the fines are heavy. If you get caught three times you go to jail. It is almost the precise opposite of the Japanese system where it is almost impossible to enter the system without a ticket. I came to the conclusion that the reason for this vast difference is because the Japanese don't like telling people off while the Germans just love to.

Which is the better system? I really don't know - though it does make me wonder about whether CrozierRail should reconsider its ticketing policy.

If there is one area where German railways aren't as good as they are in Britain it's in terms of customer information - especially timetables. Over here, there is usually somewhere a table that lists all the trains to a specific destination. In Germany, there is simply a list of the departures along with the stations they call at. This creates two problems. First of all, it means that you find people crowding around the departure listing. You see if it's 11am, people aren't that interested in the list of departures at 9am a couple of feet away. Secondly, or at least this is how it seemed to me, the destination listings seem to miss out some intermediate stops. Very odd.

Although the trains seemed very modern, I was very surprised by the number of suburban services operated by push-pull trains. I had thought that push-pull was a thing of the past but according to our hosts it had the advantage of being extremely flexible - it being possible to roster them on regional services at short notice. Push-pull trains are also (ahem) rather more reliable than some of their more modern competitors.

An ICE3

The undoubted high point of the tour was the trip to Frankfurt on the ICE on the newly opened high-speed line. The line has been built almost entirely using slab track (rails set in concrete). This is supposed to lead to lower maintenance costs, reduced noise, and allow for greater cants. It also has some extremely (for a train) steep gradients. A short way into our trip our guide promised that after a while the curves would get interesting and the gradients extremely interesting. They didn't. The ride was a smooth as silk the whole way. Boring even.

The French high-speed network is fairly straightforward. Lignes a Grand Vitesse (LGVs) branch out of Paris to the South, West, North and, soon, the East. In Japan, it is possible to travel all the way from Hakata, on the westernmost island of Kyushu, to Hachinohe, on the north coast of the main island, Honshu. In both cases (as I understand it) all the lines are of a similar quality.

But Germany is different. Germany has bits of high-speed line. And they seem to be rather different in terms of top-speed and rolling stock that can use them. And there are about (if memory serves me well) something like 5 different types of ICE rolling stock - all doing subtly (and not so subtly) different things.

If there was one thing the trip lacked it was a really good top-down description of the structure of German railways. A lot seems to depend on a rather different interpretation of EU 91/440. For instance, while infrastructure has been separated from operations (much as it has been in the UK) little seems to have changed. Sure the operations bits of DB have to tender for contracts and, though they have lost some contracts they have only lost one big ie long-distance passenger, contract. The winner of this contract? Connex.

We never really got to the bottom of how it is paid for either. We got some of the picture but by no means all of it. One of the speakers did talk about how a 60% petrol tax is used to pay for the S-Bahn - though I wasn't clear whether this was for fare subsidy or for capital infrastructure. We did discover that fares are subsidised to the tune of 60-70%.

Another puzzling thing was the relationship between the various levels of government. In London we have three: borough, city and national and the rows (think congestion charge, think the Tube PPP) are enormous. In Germany they have a similar system and yet, although they row, things do get done. Whether this is due to some kind of cultural difference or due to the existence of someone, somewhere who pulls the strings, I am yet to discover.

Richard Malins, Chairman of the RSA comments:

I don't understand your point about the railways being built for trams. This is not correct. Germany has a national heavy rail network, which is DB. It also has an extensive heritage of light rail systems, almost all of which grew out of local tramways. Unlike the UK, most of the larger continental systems survived the war and motor transport, and some have subsequently been expanded to create light metro systems using reserved track and often with tunnel sections too, but as street running remains, most have tramway type vehicles. Some are now styled as U Bahns (as in Cologne), but other cities like Munich have separate tramways and a more conventional U Bahn as well as an S Bahn (S Bahn as you will appreciate operate on the heavy rail network). To add to this complicated picture the Germans have also developed hybrid trams that can operate on the heavy rail network and on street - Karlsruhe is the pioneer for that, scene of an RSA visit a few years ago.

I think your observations about DB punctuality are probably correct, after all we saw it for real in that network control, but it should be pointed out that the complex nature of their polycentric system makes it like a large version of Cross-Country here, and on that comparison they do rather better. Also look at the size of their trains compared to ours and still an overcrowding problem.

My own impression is that their graffiti problem is as bad as ours, if not worse.

In common with the rest of Europe, and Britain until the privatisers began undoing it, DB has long had an open stations policy. The aim of this is to make access to the train easy (imagine the impact on Cologne Hbf if you tried to put barriers in) and to concentrate ticket checking on the trains where it can be done more thoroughly. In my experience longer distance and regional trains are well patrolled, but you cannot do more than spot checks for shorter distance and S Bahn journeys (the latter have no conductors anyway). Here they rely on a penalty fare system, which like Britain is not a fine but a civil debt. I don't know about prosecution of persistent offenders, but I assume that, as here, that is the policy. Like the retail trade, some shrinkage (fare evasion) is inevitable, but that cost has to be weighed against the cost and problems of implementing a more intensive ticket checking regime.

The push-pull train (Wendezug) is a common feature across DB, and suitable for S Bahn networks where high power to weight ratios are not needed. It has as you say the merits of flexibility, cost and reliablity. Motive power is drawn from a large pool of electric locos.

The lack of uniformity in the German high speed network is the result of political history and geography. The old West German network had its main traffic corridors at 90` to the pre-war Reichsbahn and often these were originally built as lower speed secondary routes. Think of the old lines Stuttgart - Mannheim or Wurzburg -Hannover. The new high speed lines in those corridors were developed and built before reunification and intended as all purpose railways, not just for dedicated high speed trains on the French or Japanese model. They are still used as such. Hannover - Berlin was a hurried project after reunification to restore the main east-west axis of the network, while Cologne - Frankfurt, running through difficult terrain is on the French model - high speed trains only, other traffic staying on the classic lines.

The development of German High speed trains is no more involved than the TGV, bearing in mind that Eurostar, Thalys and Duplex are all TGV variants.

An ICE1

ICE 1 are the original long formation trains built for use on the initial high speed lines with two power cars (TGV style but no articulation). ICE 2 are half the above, in effect a Wendezug with 1 power car and a driving trailer, used on lower density routes or where trains split and join. ICE 3 are the latest, that we rode to Frankfurt, with distributed power (in effect an EMU). Most of the fleet is, like 1 & 2, 15kv only and can only run in Germany, Switzerland or Austria, but there is a 4 current variant that can run into Belgium and the Netherlands, and when approval is forthcoming on French type high speed lines. There is then an ICE3 lookalike which is actually a tilting train with lower maximum speed (230 kph) intended for classic electrified lines. There is also a diesel version of this train. This fleet vastly outnumbers anything equivalent that we have in the UK.

The new DB organisation was explained, if not in detail. It is now a form of holding company with subsidiaries. DB Netz is a sort of Network Rail, Reise & Touristik a sort of Inter City, various Regional Companies and Freight. Stations are also managed separately, and we had a talk on that. It's somewhere BR might have got to if the Tories hadn't messed it all up. Regional services and their budgets are now the responsibility of the Lander (Regions), and these are tendered. DB has not always won the regional service contracts, which are let in quite small bits, and are often successfully won and operated by smaller local concerns (not necessarily private sector - the Karlsruhe tramway for example won some with their hybrid vehicles). Many of these are Lokalbahn companies that existed from way back operating minor lines and have expanded. Connex has not made big inroads in this market, and some of their trains you may have seen are a form of open access operation. DB has not yet lost any S Bahn operation, although I am not clear about the nature of tendering for them.

The fuel tax is used to fund capital infrastructure projects, which is why there are so many of them, compared to here. It is not for fares subsidy, so revenue support comes out of general taxation and now through the Lander. DB itself still funds rolling stock, from its financial resources, some of which is Federal Government.

It is probaby true to say that Germany has a more rational government structure than we do and more concensus within it on such policies as public transport. This structure was of course imposed on the West by the Allies after the War, and the East has now been adapted to it. The differing responsibilities of Federal (Bund), Regional (Land) and City (Stadt) are probably much clearer. But they don't have the monocentric geography of Britain with a dominant capital in which a national government is bound to intervene.

Hope this helps, and interested to know when and where your thoughts are to appear. We are doing a piece for Modern Railways based on the visit.