German commuter and knitter Claudia Weber travels to Munich regularly from her town Moosburg in the Bavarian countryside. Due to track repairs which began last year, her train commute was replaced with a bus service that would often be delayed for up to 30 minutes or longer. Weber decided to start detailing her daily travel troubles by translating the delays into a wool scarf. Each evening after she returned home she would add two new rows to her textile work— gray for any delay under five minutes, pink for when she had to wait up to 30 minutes, and bright red for a delay that lasted more than a half hour or was in both directions.
She titled her four-foot-long finished work “Bahn-Verspätungsschal,” or “rail delay scarf,” which went viral after it was posted by her daughter Sara on Twitter. […]
Source: German Commuter Knits Four-Foot-Long Scarf Detailing Transit Delays
msamba 
The situation is quite similar in Denmark, ever since the train system was privatized and supposed to give a certain amount of profit. For this reason all maintenance was neglected, and now they are fighting with the consequences.
How is it working in Britain? The railway is not state owned anymore, is it? We didn’t have any problems when we went from London to Lincoln last May.
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When I was younger I used to think it comical when an American tourist mistook London for England. Not so much now (one of our local stations has the worst timekeeping record in the country)…
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I am not quite sure that I get what you are hinting at. I am not mistaking London for England, that is just the only place I took a train from in the near past. From Lincoln our train was also on time … the other times we were in England and Scotland, we rented a car. So I haven’t got any train experiences in the rest of Britain, that’s why I was asking …
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It was certainly not you I was hinting at when I mentioned American tourists (they were in fact members of my family a long time ago)!
I meant that our method of privatisation of service providers and railway network have fundamentally suffered from decades of underfunding except when it comes to London and routes serving that city.
This reflects how our economy is structured, where the population lives, and what is prioritised. Politicians make nice noises as to investment to serve the rest of the country, but delivery is often frustrated, or cancelled altogether. For instance because electrification had been promised, and Northern England needed more trains to meet increasing demand, the government commissioned a “stop gap” of trains made by bolting a bus chassis onto train bogies meant to last around 10-15 years. Electrification is only now just beginning (haltingly), and we are still using those trains 30 years later! Meanwhile London is served with new stock and multi million pound engineering projects.
That said there are problems meeting demand in SE England as well.
When you travelled to Lincoln did you change at Peterborough? If so that is the East Coast Main Line, whose services were privatised for a while but taken back into public ownership when the franchise failed. It then consistently made a profit using old rolling stock, so the government wasted no time handing it back to the private sector.
I think the general consensus here is for re-nationalisation (the network infrastructure is already)…
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Thank you for clarifying and sorry for the misunderstanding.
Yes, we changed at Peterborough. Do I understand correctly that they privatized again after it made profit under public ownership?
It seems that the capitals of countries are always first priority, and everything is often centralized in the cities. We feel that here in the “neck of the woods” where we live; we have a lack of physicians and other doctors and specialized professions in general.
And the latest reason for delayed trains is the lack of train drivers … so if somebody gets sick, the train is just cancelled.
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Apology accepted and yes they privatised it again!
We have exactly the same problem with train drivers by the way (it costs a lot to train them, so private companies would rather poach them from their competitors, with the same effect on our train timetable as you suffer from with yours when they get sick), compounded by the cancellation of previous planned infrastructure improvements.
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Great story, thanks for sharing.
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