Let the Mudslinging Begin
It all began … oh, never mind: The point is “we have been in office for eight years and nothing is our fault“.
I see the queue to the washing-basin beginning to form.
Okay, in case you have no idea what I’m talking about: The Danish railways desperately needs more and more modern trains as well as a signalling system which does not predate the invention of the transistor. In the meantime, the DSB’s commissioning of new trainsets has gone seriously off the rails – the all-new and Italian-engineered class MGs should have been introduced in back in 2003 and formed the backbone of long-distance services by now – and in the meantime passenger trains break down on an almost hourly basis.
One word of advice would be: Never, ever take the InterRegio-trains between Copenhagen and Aarhus. You see, there are no locomotives west of the Great Belt these days1 so if – that is: when – the locomotive breaks down, passengers are stuck.
But perhaps the DSB is learning what happens if by coincidence you have a journalist abord a train which has stopped in the middle of nowhere: DSB is short for a##, DSB’s steaming, With the benefit of hindsight.
On a personal note: I’ve tried just about everything during my years travelling through much of Europe by train – don’t get me started: I could open a blog just covering those experiences – and while travelling in general has been endlessly more comfortable during the last twenty years, it is true that train toilets are less reliable today (closed systems always break down) and just as nice air-conditioning is when it works, just as uncomfortable a coach with a broken or shut ventilation system gets.
Correction: The MG story is even sadder than I remembered. The trains should have been introduced in ordinary traffic in 2003 and fully commissioned by 2006. And so, delivery has been delayed more than six years by now. It is one of the biggest scandals in the history of Danish transport.
- In fact, there are. But they belong to goods companies and are of no use for passenger trains [↩]
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