The twin-towered cathedral in the German city of Cologne is one of the world’s most beautiful and majestic cathedrals. It is the world’s largest Gothic cathedral.
Construction began in 1248 and it houses some exquisite religious treasures, such as the alleged remains of the Three Wise Men — who according to Gospel visited the infant Jesus in Bethlehem — as well as the golden Gero Crucifix, dating from 970.
The cathedral is breathtaking as one steps out of Cologne’s main train station right next to it. It is no small irony that this beautiful Unesco religious monument sits right next to the central train station that almost symbolises all that is unholy in Germany, the Deutsche Bahn (DB).
I have seen on social media in recent years how people make fun of the supposed unreliability of DB trains. I just attributed that to the highly punctual Germans getting upset if anything or anyone is delayed by more than a minute. As someone who spent a quarter century in Brazil, I wanted to scoff and thought if you want to know how flexible punctuality can be, go to Brazil. Expecting punctuality in Brazil can be a cause of major stress. But that was until last month when, on a visit to Germany, I experienced the chaos myself.
First I was on a train late one evening from Essen, in the industrial Ruhrgebiet in northwestern Germany, going back to Cologne, when the train inexplicably stopped in the middle of nowhere and just stood there, waiting for a platform to become available at Cologne station. We spent about half an hour like that until it finally moved.
That made me worry about my train the next day from Cologne to Frankfurt Airport (sold as part of my Lufthansa air ticket) with a tight connection. As I spent my last afternoon walking the medieval streets of Cologne (with a war plane flying overhead), I got the first alert that my Cologne to Frankfurt train would be delayed.
I decided I couldn’t take any chances missing my flight. So I returned to my hotel, got my bag and walked to platform 6 at the station, where, as luck would have it, a train destined for Frankfurt Airport was waiting. A friendly DB official said the train would leave in about five minutes and I could take it, so I boarded.
I promptly sat down when it was announced that the train would be delayed indefinitely while they were looking for a driver. I asked the people around me what was going on and they explained, clearly exasperated, that they had been waiting there for an hour already.
The dining car was just a few feet away, and some passengers decided to turn their frustration into an excuse for an early Oktoberfest and seemed to clean out the train’s beer supply. So I started chatting to new friends, who told me the DB had become so unreliable that no-one bats an eye if you arrive late any more. They know it’s the DB’s fault.
But how did this happen in Europe’s biggest economy? Years of mismanagement, lack of investment in infrastructure, poor maintenance of tracks and trains, and insufficient station expansion. It all sounded so very familiar to me, with our own Transnet.
After an hour on the train (two hours for my friends), a driver was found and we set off. In typical German humour, knowing that I had a flight to catch, they teased me that the train was going in the wrong direction, to Hamburg where, unbeknown to all of us at that moment, an attacker had just wounded 18 people with a knife at the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof.
During the hour or so it took to get to Frankfurt Airport I told my new friends of Transnet’s woes, and that it seemed the only difference between DB’s problems and Transnet’s was state capture. But for the rest, it was eerily familiar. DB has eroded one of Germany’s proudest attributes — punctuality and reliability. It’s not just the inconvenience of arriving late, it’s almost like it erodes the fabric of society.
There is no need to point out what Transnet’s collapse has done to SA. Unless you’re privileged enough to travel on Rovos Rail or the Blue Train, few people travel between cities in SA using trains any more. We go by car, or by bus. Our cargo is transported on increasingly heavy trucks that damage our roads, making them dangerous.
By then my friends and I had come to resemble a modern group of pilgrims from the Canterbury Tales, each with our own story. But I could tell that my fellow pilgrims were having a vision of a future DB resembling Transnet, with the Autobahn collapsing under potholes induced by overloaded trucks, unless DB gets its act together.
As we pulled into Frankfurt Airport, I said goodbye to my fellow travellers, checked in for my flight and walked through the airport, which suddenly seemed a haven of order compared to the rail chaos. The German Intercity Express trains were marvels of engineering 20 years ago, travelling at over 200km/h. It will definitely take a few more decades to reach Transnet level of collapse.
Germany still has time to prevent a total collapse of its rail infrastructure. However, as the war plane flying over Cologne reminded me, Europe is on edge, with the Ukraine war on its doorstep. We are not living in normal times, and everyone’s attention is diverted away from items like a rail system that one can set your watch to.
Is this how the slow unravelling of society happens? Two weeks after I came back the whole of Cologne’s centre, including the train station and cathedral, was evacuated after three unexploded World War 2 bombs were discovered and had to be detonated.
There is no way I would have made my flight if I had to travel then. Maybe the peace and prosperity Europe experienced between World War 2 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, brought about by the rules-based society we had come to take for granted, was the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps the chaos we seem to be returning to is the norm.
• Myburgh is an attorney practising in Johannesburg and São Paulo.
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