It's Deutsche Bahn. You are lucky if only some non-critical parts of the trains are broken and the train arrives at all.

"Ssenck you for travellinck wiss Deutsche Bahn" ... ;-)

Well, the DB has worked really hard in the past few decades to earn this bad reputation. But it's not like the trains fall apart while driving from A to B. The rail network is overloaded, maintainance has suffered for decades, and there are a lot of political descisions that made the situation worse.

I usually use my car to drive to work, simply because it is way faster. And no, I don't drive the Autobahn. I'm living at the border of Hamburg. To get to work by car, I can drive almost at a straight line, following an old road from the times of the Hanseatic League. From door to door, I need about 50 to 60 min, my best time is 40 min late at night with almost no traffic. Using public traffic, my only sane option is to drive to Hamburg central station using bus and subway, then use the DB Regio train. If everything works well, that takes 2 h 9 min door to door, according to the HVV timetable info service. If you miss the right bus or subway, well, bad luck, wait 10 min for the next bus or subway, then wait an extra 20 min for the next DB Regio train. So, four to five hours of travel time for eight hours work time. No, thank you.

I would really like to use public transport to get to work, but it should not take more than about an hour from door to door. That simply does not work. If I prohibit using trains in the HVV timetable info service to avoid Hamburg central station, I get combinations of four or five bus lines and a travel time of about three hours from door to door. And I insist on arriving before 08:00 at work, the timetable info service proposes to start the evening before and spend the night at some bus stop, resulting in a door to door time of more than 10 hours.

So, for me, public transport is just a fallback solution for times when I can't use my car, and home office is not possible.

And that fallback can get really annoying when "Schienenersatzverkehr (SEV)" (train replacement by busses) comes to play. Sometimes, it is planned and anounced, e.g. for construction and maintainance work, and you can avoid it. Sometimes, SEV gets you, e.g. when some idiot decides to ignore red lights and crashes into a train, or wants to commit suicide, or because a tree falls onto the rails.

SEV means that a full train of people is stuffed into busses - in theory. Because in practice, there are way too many people for the few busses that actually drive from station to station. And to make things worse, DB does not use busses available in the region (e.g. from its own Autokraft brand, or from the Hochbahn or VHH operating almost all bus lines in and around Hamburg). Instead, cheaper busses from former east germany are used. They have to drive 100 km or more just to get to the train stations. Guess how long it takes to get SEV running. My worst experience with SEV on the way from work to home was waiting for hours at a station for busses to arrive, and finally drive back home by the very train that stopped at the station for SEV. More than five hours doors from door to door, arriving at home way after midnight.

As bad as it may sound, public transport just works fine most of the times. Yes, a door may fail, or you need to wait an extra 15 min for a train. But if you don't have to arrive at a fixed time, it is quite relaxing.

Alexander