September 3, 16:39 – Delays expected

It was a rainy Wednesday in September, and revenge was inadvertent – and fleeting. I had arrived nearly 40 minutes late for my appointment at Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s state-controlled railway, which operates western Europe’s longest and most complex network. Forty minutes, then, clawed back from hours of delays suffered, feet frozen or body baked, standing on dreary platforms. Except that once at reception, I was asked to sit down and wait. Franz Josef Junker, head of Deutsche Bahn’s Frankfurt network control operations, would fetch me when he had a moment.

We’ve been waiting for trains since 1840, the year a British parliamentary committee invented mass transportation by ruling that rail traffic should be exclusively in the hands of the companies that owned the track. It’s an odd notion now, but in the years before that decision, a debate raged about how to use rails. In the 1820s, the British railway visionary Thomas Gray called for a national network for use by private vehicles. He reckoned traffic in and out of London could be handled by 12 parallel “rail-ways”.

Our forebears opted against that, swapping personal freedom for the speed, safety and efficiency promised by a mass-transit railway system. First in the UK, but quickly also in continental Europe and the US, the railways drew up schedules for services on their tracks. They even standardised local times, so that railway-time soon became the rhythm of life. The sun stands directly over Bridgwater, for example, on the Great Western line, at exactly 13 minutes after noon at Greenwich.

And so, nearly 200 years ago, travellers made a bargain: we would adapt to the railway system’s terms – going where they wanted, when they wanted – if they’d get us there on time. No wonder late trains pain us so – they’re the embodiment of a broken promise. The question, really, is whom we can blame: the people making the promises, or ourselves, for believing them?

15:00 – Through train

Train timetables may have their origins in the UK but contemporary Germany is where they are most sorely tested. Where London is the hub of just one, radial rail network, the German railway connects 11 major urban centres. Three big north-south axes cross three important east-west lines; one delay on one east-west line can lead to knock-on delays on north-south routes, which can then lead to delays on the other east-west lines. If the Germans can make the trains run on time, then so can the rest of us.

Franz Josef Junker oversees operations at the Frankfurt Deutsche Bahn control centre

I was late for my date at the network control centre not because of a train, specifically. Rather, I’d got caught up in the place where Deutsche Bahn renews its vow of punctuality every year. A few miles across Frankfurt from the railway’s headquarters, a division of the company – called DB Netz – plans the country’s network, deciding which trains will run when. DB Netz’s offices are railway heaven, a place where a god-like hand fits reality into the neat columns of a timetable.

Past the quiet, glazed lobby of DB Netz, along a maze of hushed corridors, Jorg Sandvoss sat in a tidy office with a window facing the cloud-coloured wall of the building next door. Sandvoss is in charge of compiling Deutsche Bahn’s timetable. Across from his desk, a solitary poster hangs, a present from a friend. Issued by the East German railways in the 1950s, its red script thunders: “Railwaymen, the timetable is the law. Do not allow any deviations! Coerce punctuality!”

In that spirit, Sandvoss had just finished guiding a team of 300 to complete Deutsche Bahn’s network timetable for 2009, which will be published next month. “A timetable might sound like a banal proposition,” said Sandvoss as he leafed through a 30-slide presentation of his work, “but there are a whole lot more things to consider than the distance from A to B.”

Look, for example, at slide 18. “You also have to factor in speed restrictions properly, the condition of the track, the ability of train operators to meet their time windows, the weather, even the reliability of [other parts of] the timetable itself. The condition of each train is vital. If you have a freight train with a heavy load, say iron ore, the train will have to brake earlier. And that will, of course, reduce the average speed.” Of course.

The basic unit of train travel is the block – anything from one to a dozen kilometres in length, depending on the surrounding topography. Only one train is allowed in each block at any one time, and the signal allowing the next one to use that section of track remains red until the first train has passed on to the next block. A heavily used track could mean a succession of red signals for the trains that use it – a nuisance only overcome by slowing down the trains, reducing them in number or by building new track.

Time and space are co-dependent: the more track you’ve got, the faster your trains can go, and the less time they will spend on each block. But the different criteria for building extra time into the paths of each train across each block make for an extremely complicated system. Sandvoss admits as much; his last job, he said, co-ordinating take-off slots for the airline Lufthansa, was child’s play in comparison.

16:15 – Delays expected

The 2009 Deutsche Bahn timetable took a total of 18 months to prepare. As part of the process, Sandvoss’s team drew up hundreds of time-motion diagrams dictating which trains should pass which points on a map at what speed and at what time. The X axis of these charts shows the towns the trains pass through; the Y axis shows elapsed time. The result presumes to guide 37,000 timetabled trains every day – and another 2,500 requested at short notice – over 33,897km of track. They pass 4,585 junctions, go over 27,165 bridges, drive through 778 tunnels and stop at 5,718 stations.

The potential for the plan to go wrong is vast. Sensors – or “points” – can seize up, signals can fail, trains can break down, trees can fall and people can – and do – jump. A third of delays on German railways are caused by problems with infrastructure, a third by “externalities” such as the weather, a third by the trains themselves. “A hundred per cent punctuality is never going to be possible,” said Sandvoss. “There’s always reality.”

16:45 – Train approaching

That said, 90 per cent of the Deutsche Bahn’s trains do arrive within five minutes of schedule. What about the other 10 per cent? Back at network control, despite my late arrival, Franz Josef Junker was about to take me inside his dispatch centre. “You’re late, but that’s OK,” he said, tapping his watch and smiling. “We’re here to deal with delays.”

Junker, a short man of 60, has a taste for situational irony. “Do you have any idea of how much time you have?” he asked as he ushered me through the security doors. Inside, two darkened floors of dispatchers were guiding trains through central Germany. Commuter trains spiralled out of Frankfurt, high-speed trains bolted north from Zurich to Hamburg, freight trains rumbled westwards, towards France.

To the uninitiated, the place looked like an annexe of the rail-traveller’s hell, where a Faust-like Junker and his whispering minions served an invisible Devil in deciding which trains would keep time – and which wouldn’t. The difference between commuter salvation and suffering was but a keystroke or two. On the line running east from Frankfurt to Hanau, a dispatcher monitored the pulse of his track, rendered by lines of light, each representing a train, on a live time-motion diagram. The lines running from the top left corner of the screen to the bottom right were the trains running out of Frankfurt; the lines from top right to bottom left were the trains heading back. The faster the train, the closer the line moved to horizontal. When a train stopped, as DGS59634 now did, its corresponding line returned to vertical.

That is because the Devil just decided that the passengers on commuter train RE4542 from Frankfurt to Hanau would be saved. The dispatcher had ordered the lumbering freight train in front to stop before the town of Flieden in order to let the passenger train pass. A tiny “1” hovered next to the tip of RE4542’s pink diagonal, nosing its way across the screen. “It’s running a minute late,” said Junker. “But that’s the kind of time span it could easily still make up – and remember that it’s international practice to define any train with less than five minutes delay as being on time.” Too bad all the circuitry here couldn’t gauge passenger elation alongside time and motion.

18:04 – Red signal ahead

Suddenly, we both felt the tremor of muted commotion over in another corner of the room. On the far screens monitoring the high-speed line from Cologne, a pair of lights flashed red. The ICE127 (InterCityExpress) from Amsterdam had squealed to a halt 30km northwest of where we stood. “There was an error message that the points wouldn’t lock any more. We had to stop the train,” Junker said. The points are quite delicate. Something as small as an empty drinks can, blown on to the track, could get the monitors flashing. Junker reckoned ICE127 would reach Frankfurt 20 minutes late, which was too much of a delay to hold any connecting trains – good news for the latter and bad news for passengers on ICE127 who were hoping to connect with onward services.

Five minutes later, Junker’s dispatcher shunted a telephone receiver into its cradle. He had been asking a safety officer to reset the points, but the safety officer said he wasn’t allowed to. The dispatcher sighed and gazed at his monitor. To skirt the stubborn points, he and his colleagues decided to switch the southbound train on to the northbound track. To do that, ICE127 had to get to the nearest junction, 16km to its rear – a point it could approach only at a crawl because it was reversing. The trains behind and in front had to wait. By 6.15pm, Junker thought ICE127 would be 40 minutes late – and delays were increasing up and down the line.

“Look how quickly one delayed train turns into six,” he said, pointing at the vertical lines on the monitor. “Passengers don’t see how complex the system is.” He hesitated before going on: “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but what we have here is something close to a paramilitary structure: something happens, so something has to happen.”

A thirsty man slurps up a can of Coke, throws it to the wind, and chaos descends – it’s like the flap of a butterfly’s wing changing a weather pattern. There’s no design here, no Devil. And this is no annexe of hell – it’s a window on reality and encroaching chaos.

September 8, 12:00 – Mind the gap

The all-important timetable, at Frankfurt station

If the railway companies allowed travellers to see the complexity involved in even the most humdrum trips, might our frustration dissipate? Deutsche Bahn doesn’t seem ready for that experiment. In fact, it has spent the better part of a decade sprucing itself up through a glossy packaging project that conceals, more than ever, the railway network’s fragile workings. The company’s red-and-white high-speed trains and spiffed-up stations exude the glamour of aviation rather than dowdy diesel-powered drabness.

Erik Spiekermann played a small but telling part in this transformation. He and his team at Spiekermann Partners in Berlin developed a new typescript for Deutsche Bahn. The so-called DB-type is a derivation of Helvetica, the standard font for big corporations for a generation. Spiekermann’s new font is “warmer” than Helvetica, he said, and has “more personality” than its “technoid” machine-age predecessor.

And the font is only the beginning. The timetable displays he has designed will soon be arriving at stations across Germany. They’re meant to be a simpler, cleaner representation of the trains’ comings and goings. “Yes, I’m hiding complexity behind a warm and simple interface,” said Spiekermann. “But complexity doesn’t really come into the equation. The average user wants to know when his train goes and from what platform. He needs a filter, he only wants to know what interests him.”

Having worked for companies such as Audi, he recalled how car makers used to stress technical prowess 30 or 40 years ago. “The brochures back then used to load you up with details about valves. There was this idea that if you got stuck on the motorway, you could quickly change a fan belt or a cylinder head,” he said, shaking his head. “But that was pure myth. We were all at technology’s mercy – and we still are.”

October 9, 13:30 – Leaves on the line

The main reason Deutsche Bahn put so much effort into a sleek new look was a plan for privatisation. Back in the mid-1990s, the German government decided the company would one day need to tap private capital to better compete in a liberalised European railway market, which will see individual nations open up for competition in 2010.

Having watched as Britain split its state-owned rail company into myriad train companies and a separate network operator – to disastrous effect – Berlin decided Deutsche Bahn would be sold in one piece. Yet worries that such a huge entity would stifle competition forced the government to change tack. Instead of selling up to a quarter of Deutsche Bahn, it decided to sell 25 per cent of its train-operating subsidiary, DB Mobility Logistics, scheduling the €5bn flotation for October 27 of this year. But with the credit crunch starting to hit the economy, Berlin decided three weeks before the share sale to postpone it – until early 2010, the government hopes.

There’s a fitting irony to mull over during the next overlong sojourn on a cold platform: a delayer delayed, through no fault of its own.

Gerrit Wiesmann is an FT correspondent in Frankfurt.

See Matthew Engel’s Dispatch on US trains

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A brief history of timetables

The railway line that a century ago saw a single train a day now sees 10. In Germany, that means that even if your train is delayed or cancelled, you stand a better chance now than you did during the previous 180 years of reaching your goal. In the UK, that’s not quite true. The failure to invest in new track and overcrowding of lines makes the glory days of British rail travel appear to lie as far back as a century.

“In the old days, you’d maybe have two trains a day and they were special in different ways, they had their own names,” said Brendan Fox, editor of Thomas Cook’s European Rail Timetable. “Now you have a ‘service’ – the same kind of train at regular times. It’s easier to make generic statements about them in the [timetable] legend and not specify the features of each train. Some railways still have names for trains. But, with one an hour, who cares what they’re called?”

The European Rail Timetable – the edited highlights of dozens of national timetables – has been in print since 1873. Fox and five colleagues inhabit an out-of-the-way corner of a factory-sized publishing operation in Peterborough that churns out Cook’s tourist guides and brochures. Fox’s metal-rimmed glasses don’t sit quite straight on his nose, giving his enthusiasm for his subject a boyish air and counteracting the effects of a pin-striped suit.

He slides the August 1886 Cook’s Continental Time Tables across the table. It was sold as a “cheap, concise and simple” alternative to the compendious Bradshaw’s European timetable but there are glints of colour. When I turn to the August 1939 timetable, I’m met by a torrent of caveats and exceptions that the editors felt they could not ignore. There’s the C1st and 2nd class Pullman Train” from Basel. Many “Through services between Holland, Brussels, Bale [Basel], etc.” carried the full array of “1, 2 & 3 cl.” cars, as well as restaurant cars that were attached on specific sections of the line.

Did these carriages keep shuttling back and forth on different trains? What a feat of organisation! Cook’s depiction of Deutsche Bahn’s modern Amsterdam-Frankfurt service does not open such vistas. Repetitive columns show that in the afternoon alone, there are three daily ICEs (InterCityExpresses), starting with number 125, which leaves at 12.34 and reaches Frankfurt at 16.30. A wine-glass icon next to the numerals shows that each comes with a buffet car.

Every detail represents something particularly worthy of note. But it is details that rail companies – and their customers – now shun. “In the old German timetables, you’d find symbols for baggage cars. There was also better information about what type of catering was provided. In the old days every train was an individual ...” – Fox pauses and gives me a testing look, as if to check I won’t laugh – “... an individual train.”

Standardisation seems to have taken the promise out of travel. “Most young people just want to know when the train goes and when it arrives. They use the web. You get school kids now who have never even read a [printed] bus or train timetable.” Deutsche Bahn will publish its network timetable in book form for the last time this December.

When Fox shows me some readers’ letters, I can’t help but think it’s a real minority that still gets excited about train travel today. There’s the letter dated June 2007 from a man who calls “Cook’s” his “bible”. He says his “love of rail travel still burns bright” and, in a note written a month later, he promises that, “come 2012, the first train I catch” will have been found in Cook’s. The writer has been in prison since 1999.