Deutsche Bahn is Germany's state-owned rail giant. The company employs 211,000 workers in Germany. National auditors have described it as being in a "deepening, permanent crisis". Barely 60% of long-distance trains arrived on time in 2024, placing Germany near the bottom of the European pack.
In September 2025 transport minister Patrick Schnieder unveiled a new strategy for Deutsche Bahn and appointed Evelyn Palla as chief executive. Palla is a company insider who most recently restored its regional-train division to profitability. She began her rail career in the much more successful Austrian system.
Loss-making and burdened with debt, Deutsche Bahn is contending with years of underinvestment. Capacity has not kept pace with rising passenger numbers. Soaring Trassenpreise (a toll charged to all rail operators) have led to fears that loss-making long-distance services may be cut and fares increased. A planned refurbishment of 40 big rail routes over 12 years means performance may get worse before it gets better. Under EU rules, Deutsche Bahn's freight arm must turn a profit by 2026.
In 2004 Deutsche Bahn's annual budget for the building and modernisation of Germany's rail network was cut from €4bn to €1.5bn. Last year the government pumped a record €22bn into the company. Ms Palla reckons it will take around a decade to get the business back on track; in March 2026 she described "a dilapidated rail network, broken switches, signal boxes dating back to imperial times, excessive bureaucracy and an oversized administrative apparatus".
Italo, the Italian high-speed rail operator co-founded by Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, plans to enter the German market by 2028 with two routes (Munich-Cologne-Dortmund and Munich-Berlin-Hamburg) covering 18 cities, investing €3.6bn ($4.2bn) and buying 30 high-speed trains from Siemens with the option for 14 more. Italo's entry to the Italian market in 2012 saw rail prices fall by 40% over the following seven years. Track access is handled by DB InfraGO, an arm of Deutsche Bahn overseen by the Federal Network Agency; Italo says it is prepared to pay €250m a year for access. Ten years ago the EU adopted the Fourth Railway Package, focused on opening domestic markets to competition, though Germany has dithered. Spain's high-speed-rail market is now fought over by state-owned Renfe, Iryo (majority-owned by a subsidiary of Italy's Ferrovie dello Stato) and SNCF.
The new punctuality target is 70% of trains running on time by 2030, downgraded from earlier "unattainable" goals. Christian Böttger, a transport expert at the Berlin University of Technology and Economics, has advised decentralising decision-making and ensuring long-term budgeting stability, as in Austria. Much of the money that has flowed into the railways in recent years has simply stoked inflation, owing to bottlenecks and labour shortages.
Deutsche Bahn is a major focus of Germany's €500bn climate and infrastructure fund.
<doogie> Thinking is dangerous. It leads to ideas.