If Russian invaded Ukraine, would you favor or oppose war against Russia?

[Duque de Bragança]

Surely German trains have always been on time and always will be.

No

I confirm. After a while, I chose TGVs over ICEs. Saarbrücken seemed to be quite the obstacle for ICEs, not just the old ones.

Local trains are a different thing and not held to the same standards, due to much cheaper prices.

[Duque de Bragança]

Surely German trains have always been on time and always will be.

No

I was actually really surprised at how bad German railway punctuality was (and I guess still is) in comparison to ours.

After maybe 200 trips to or from Barcelona or Madrid I can only recall arriving late once. In Germany, however, every second train seemed to be really late. You had to take that into account when planning your flights.

Spain and most other countries built a separate network for high speed trains.

Germany reused part of the existing network (often due to Nimbyism) and the purpose-built bits are often also used for regional or cargo trains. Also there lots of stops in smaller cities on the way due to local lobbyism.

One argument you hear is that Germany is more decentralized and more densely populated than e.g. Spain or France. But  I find that unconvincing as Northern Italy or Japan are just as densely populated if not more and have well-working train networks.

Spain is a special case since the new high-speed network uses a different gauge. so the network effect works in France unlike Spain, so the TGV uses the high-speed network and the standard network which may be very good or not.
Lately, some stations in the middle of nowhere have been built due to NIMBYism or regional rivalries (Metz vs Nancy) "beet stations" since they are in the country side nowhere near cities cf. gare de Haute-Picardie, nowhere near Amiens or any city, or Gare de Lorraine (between Metz and Nancy).