-Hannover S-Bahn trains are 20 years old
-new rolling stock needed
-they privatize the network and hand it to transdev
-transdev runs 40 year old rolling stock on the network

Example no. 5382736919 why the profit motive has no place in public services and ruins everything

The trains aren't even bad. They work. Riding such an old train is kinda fun.

But the original Hannover S-Bahn trains had much more capacity. And they were accessible. These old trains aren't.

@schratze
that's also the issue with the re6 between leipzig and chemnitz while the real issue goes entirely unaddressed

Even the new transdev rolling stock is a huge downgrade in terms of capacity. And they'll often only run half a train because so much of the fleet is broken

@schratze giving trans devs a bad name

@schratze :) i think we are at 3 layers of replacement stock on the leipzig-chemnitz line

@owl @schratze so you're telling me they should give it to cisdevs 🤨

@cadadr @owl
Hot on the train
And you're to blame
Transdev, you give devs a bad name

@schratze i am honestly still waiting for people to realise that profit is literally money they're not putting back into the service.

@charlotte the lack of electrification?

@schratze and some fuckass railfan will say that we need competition
yeah sure man, competition is when old trains get replaced by older trains but at least it’s cheaper right? ​​

@schratze before privatization the db ran 90s stock on them which is Perfectly Fine honestly.

The real issue is the track infrastructure which is a hot mess

built around the start of the 20th century as two tracks, one of which was dismantled by the soviets, the DB then rebuilt the remaining track for 160km/h which is a Bizarre choice given that it’s single track and also not electrified

they are working on electrification now but also since then they added additional train services on that track which actually made having just 1 track quite bad

@jeder competition for rail traffic is such a funny idea to me. You're a person. You need to be in X place at Y time. Do you take the transdev train that goes to X place at Y time? Or you take a competitor's train that goes somewhere else entirely at the wrong time

@schratze @owl for some reason this involves carly rae jepsen in my head

or more appropriately trainly rae jepsen

@cadadr @owl the song is by Bon Jovi!

@charlotte I rode the old train on that line once. The screeching was unbearable. But some guy gave me waffles, so it wasn't all bad

@schratze the stock they want to use (some BEMU) is stuck in approval hell, so they replaced it with 60s DR stock, which has died, so they replaced it with some rental train that is also partially broken and every second one is now some other newer DMU stock that they have

@charlotte wait I thought they were running the stupid battery trains there already

@schratze last i checked they did not. i avoid the route now instead opting for the much less used Chemnitz-riesa-leipzig route which is dual track and fully electrified

@schratze and arguably also evidence that it is possible for transdev to not entirely fuck up a route. the chemnitz-elsterwerde route is also used by basically nobody

@schratze probably a victim of the approval process tbh

it would have made so much more sense to build a second track, 160km/h and electrified since it would have likely massively reduced interruptions due to construction work

@schratze (there are historical reasons why the soviets removed that second track but not the one between elsterwerda and chemnitz but i can’t believe that it’s been 70 years and we are still not done fixing infrastructure damage as a result of the second world war

@dysfun @schratze profits be like

@schratze @cadadr go forth and bone jovially

@schratze @charlotte as someone living in Leipzig: yes they are

@awoo @charlotte yeah I saw one of them in April

@schratze @jeder it makes zero sense on a much more fundamental level, which is that the nature of a high-coverage public transport network is that profitable lines subsidize unprofitable lines, and there is fundamentally no way around that, that's how population distribution works

you literally *cannot do* competition in that scenario. doesn't matter how many options there could conceivably be for a given route. nobody is going to compete for more or less losses. so private operators will only compete for the profitable parts and take away the subsidy for the unprofitable parts, toppling over the whole network. the whole concept is completely absurd in a way you just can't fix no matter what you do

it has never been anything but an excuse for private extraction of public funds and everyone involved must have known this from the start because the idea doesn't pass even the most basic economic scrutiny

@awoo @schratze
oh are those low floor height ones the bemu?

nvm then

@charlotte @schratze yup ^^

@charlotte @schratze though they had LINT 41‘s for a while as a replacement for the rented Dosto carriages ^^

@joepie91 @schratze @jeder yeah, and also, the profitable lines stay profitable in part because the unprofitable fringe lines are feeding passengers on the more profitable lines. that's the whole point of a transport network, every line gets more passengers as the number of interconnected lines is increased. chopping that up to several independent operators just weakens the network effect considerably.

@Stoori @joepie91 @schratze @jeder

Don't worry, some day they'll see the light, too

https://luxtoday.lu/en/knowledge/why-public-transport-is-free-in-luxembourg