Overview
- Official 2025–2026 quality data show a multi‑year collapse in punctuality with NRW unpunctuality rising to 28.0 percent in 2025 and Regionalexpress services running late in about 36 percent of cases.
- Some key lines have fallen to crisis levels, with RE2’s punctuality plunging to roughly 39.9 percent in Q2 2026 and RE10 suffering episodes when more than 40 percent of scheduled trips were cancelled.
- Hessian transport authority figures confirm extreme outages and cancellations, including RB48 losing 50.7 percent of services in 2025 and RB46 seeing about 40.7 percent cancellations in 2026 while long RE routes such as RE11 show punctuality near 60 percent.
- Transport authorities and Deutsche Bahn blame severely overloaded nodes, the routine priority given to long‑distance and freight trains, aging signaling and track components, widespread construction works and sporadic vehicle failures for cascading delays.
- Deutsche Bahn and regional bodies have pledged large, multi‑year modernization programs but warn that meaningful relief will be gradual and that commuters must expect continued disruption as staged upgrades and projects like RRX roll out over the coming years.