Niclas Füllkrug arrived early at the Adidas campus just outside Herzogenaurach, a postcard town in Bavaria that was set to host the German national team ahead of this summer’s European Football Championship. Staff had been told the players would arrive on a Monday morning, a few days before their opening game. But Füllkrug, one of the team’s forwards, showed up Sunday night.
He had decided to make the 300-mile journey from his home in Hanover on the Deutsche Bahn high-speed train. The company was not only one of the tournament’s sponsors; It should also be a sign of the ecological quality of the event.
But years of failure to invest in rolling stock, modernize railway lines and digitize signal boxes have made Deutsche Bahn notorious for delays and cancellations. In a country that has long prided itself on its efficiency and punctuality, Germans – and fans too – have been warning for months that the problems could affect the tournament.
So Füllkrug was hardly surprised when he found himself on a school trip in a wagon full of high school students. He spent the trip answering their questions about life with the national team.
When he reached Herzogenaurach, he was several hours longer than expected, which was not ideal preparation for a top athlete on the eve of a major tournament. Nevertheless, the delays had at least confirmed his decision to build overtime. In Germany, according to Füllkrug, it is important to “have a little respect for Deutsche Bahn”.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of fans from across Europe – and a remarkable number from the US – who accompanied him in Germany will no doubt understand what he means after an often grueling opening week.
Deutsche Bahn was a central part of the German tournament plans. The company offered discounted prices for “climate-friendly rail journeys” which organizers claimed would be the “most sustainable” edition of the European Championships. When the tournament draw took place in December, the stage decorations included miniature versions of Deutsche Bahn’s long-distance and high-speed trains.
But as fans flocked to Germany to follow their teams, the country’s rail networks were broken. Even before the tournament began on June 14, employees of the Munich transport company were sent out to hand out popsicles to overheated travelers who were stuck for hours on stalled trains through the city.
In Gelsenkirchen, an industrial city in the Ruhr region, some England fans, fearful of missing their team’s kick-off, decided to make the five-kilometer walk to the city’s stadium after trams came to a standstill. In Stuttgart, Hungarian fans who arrived at the city’s main train station for a game on Thursday discovered that it had been replaced by a giant hole thanks to a major renovation project begun in 2010.
Instead of arriving via a huge concourse, disembarking passengers were instead directed through huge wooden tunnels that snake towards the city. “I’m here to give them orientation,” said a representative from the Hungarian consulate, who was among about a dozen officials sent to orient arriving passengers but who were unwilling to give their names at the event.
Despite their best efforts, some fans found the tunnels so long and confusing that even when they were almost through them, they turned around and retraced their steps, hoping to get out of the station quicker. (Deutsche Bahn recently announced that completion of the Stuttgart project has been delayed again until December 2026.)
In Hamburg, Cologne and Düsseldorf, local transport held up somewhat better: after Hungary’s game against Switzerland on June 15th in Cologne, trams stood in front of the stadium in order to reduce the backlog as quickly as possible.
Equally unpredictable were long-distance trains, which were offered to fans at a reduced price. The German rail network covers over 20,000 miles. However, over the last 70 years, around half of these tracks have been destroyed, straining existing lines as demand for both freight and passenger transport has increased.
The late arrival of one train negatively impacts others and causes widespread delays throughout the system. According to Deutsche Bahn, only 63 percent of the system’s trains reached their destination on time last month. In comparison, punctuality in neighboring Austria is over 94 percent and in France it is 87 percent.
The situation was so embarrassing for Germany that last week Felix Dachsel, a columnist for Spiegel, one of the country’s largest media companies, felt the need to apologize “in all 21 languages of the tournament” for the state of rail transport. (At least he takes it in a good mood: because what could be more environmentally friendly than a train that doesn’t run?)
“You can beat Germany,” he wrote, “but you will lose to Deutsche Bahn.”
Critics blame a lack of investment in the system in the decades since Deutsche Bahn was founded as a private company in 1994, merging the state railways of the former East Germany and the former Federal Republic of Germany. The federal government is the sole shareholder.
“It has been strategically clear for a long time that there is a lack of money,” said Andreas Knie, a professor at the Berlin Science Center for Social Research who deals with transit and technology. “As a rule of thumb, the sums that should have been invested in the railways should have been twice as high as the sums actually invested.”
The system held for a while. The last time Germany hosted a major tournament, the 2006 Men’s World Cup, Deutsche Bahn’s excellent service was hailed as a key factor in the event’s success, helping to create an enduring image of Germany as a smoothly functioning, through and through to promote through modern nation.
This time around, many fans – including Füllkrug – have learned to view schedules as more of a guideline. This was of no help to the Austrian fans who came to Düsseldorf last Monday to watch their team kick off against France. Dozens were stranded shortly after crossing the border into Germany, and some didn’t reach the game until well into the second half.
Deutsche Bahn has announced that it will personally apologize to those left behind. “We ask fans to contact us,” said Ralph Thieme, responsible for the Deutsche Bahn train stations that serve passengers. “We will find a good and fair way to compensate them.”
The problems have reached such proportions that Germany has set aside 40 billion euros, or $42.7 billion, to invest in its aging railway, despite a government spending freeze. Work on 40 key corridors is expected to begin this year.
Deutsche Bahn has already warned that there will be dozens of construction sites on the main routes and therefore even more delays. Nevertheless, at least fans don’t have to worry. Work is not scheduled to begin until July 15th – the day after the final.
Tariq Panja and Christopher F. Schütze contributed reporting.
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2024-06-23 13:30:02
www.nytimes.com
