2021 was a horror year for Deutsche Bahn, and passengers naturally felt that too.

They had to wait for their trains much more frequently than in previous years.

Only a good three quarters of the long-distance trains arrived on time last year.

After a steady improvement over the past few years, the railway is now picking up on the old days of strolling around.

You have to know that a train is considered delayed if it arrives at its destination more than six minutes late.

The railway handles more than 800,000 journeys with passenger trains per month, the vast majority of them in regional traffic.

There the balance was better, the punctuality values ​​are consistently over 94 percent.

Corinna Budras

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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However, the railway also had to struggle with particularly severe crises last year, and on Wednesday the group even spoke of "disruptive factors of historic proportions".

The flood disaster in July, which destroyed large parts of the rail infrastructure in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, is particularly striking.

At that time, the railway estimated the damage to be more than one billion euros.

It was not until November that the first section on the particularly badly affected Ahr Valley Railway in Rhineland-Palatinate was put back into operation.

One of the "toughest wage disputes in the history of the railways"

In the further course of the summer, the collective bargaining dispute followed with the union of German locomotive drivers (GDL), here too the group uses superlatives: one of the "toughest collective bargaining disputes in the history of the railway" resulted in three waves of strikes by mid-September and abandoned the train service Coming to a virtual standstill for days. Finally, the railway also named a third reason for its modest performance: In the past year, the railway has built a particularly large amount. This was not only felt by the passengers, but also by the major customers in freight transport, a particularly large number of whom complained about delayed trains in December.

On average, only 75.2 percent of the ICE and IC trains arrived at their destination on time, significantly fewer than in the previous year. The year before, the train sounded much more euphoric: In 2020, punctuality was just under 82 percent - and thus higher than it has been in 15 years, the group cheered. However, the increase of around 6 percentage points compared to the previous year was mainly due to the corona pandemic, in which many trains were almost empty. Many delays are caused by the fact that clusters of passengers obstruct each other when boarding. In addition, fewer trains were in use overall. As a result, the route network was less stressed.

The railway has been bothered by criticism about the lack of punctuality for years.

In 2019, it launched its own “Strong Rail” strategy program, which initially also made progress: Even the record number of more than 1,000 construction sites per day no longer seriously damaged punctuality.

Thanks to improved construction planning, the number of construction site-related delays has fallen by five percent, the company announced in 2020. It also helped that the railway was able to use newer trains.

But that didn't help anymore in 2021.