Deutsche Bahn: Minister of Transport lowers punctuality goals

With new railway chief, weakened punctuality goals and a focus on cleanliness and security, Transport Minister Patrick Schnieder (CDU) wants to tackle the crisis of Deutsche Bahn. But it should take a few more years for the passengers to improve.

The previous head for regional transport, Evelyn Palla, will lead the group in the future, as Schnieder officially announced in Berlin. It replaces the previous railway chief Richard Lutz, which became known from mid -August.

Schnied also gave the goal that at least 70 percent of long -distance trains are traveling online without major delays by the end of 2029. He criticized the previous, significantly higher goals of the railway itself as “beyond all reality” and not approximate. The railway wanted to create punctuality of at least 75 percent in 2027.

According to the ministry, the rate should now be at least 80 percent, in the long term, at least 90 percent. In local transport, punctuality should be more than 90 percent permanently. The strategy does not show a specific period of time for these goals.

In order to achieve the new goals of the railway, Palla is the best candidate on the executive chair, said Schnieder. It follows rail director Richard Lutz, who had not solved the many crises of the railway in recent years. There were many conversations in the search, in the end the result was clear, the minister emphasized. The most important goal is now reliability.

Palla has been with Deutsche Bahn since 2019. At first she was finance at DB Fernverkehr, since 2022 she has been responsible for regional traffic with around 780,000 trips per month-including all S-Bahn. The South Tyrolean born in Bolzano in 1973 is considered an empathetic than her predecessor Lutz, also charismatic. DB Regio wrote the black in the first half of the year.

The new railway manager will in future provide a six -member board. This means that two departments are eliminated in the committee. So far, there have been eight posts on the group board, which are currently divided into seven members. HR board Martin Seiler has also been responsible for finances for several months. In the future, the Infrastructure department will be eliminated in order to unklown the network subsidiary DB Infrago more by the parent company.

“Today we are pressing a restart,” said Schnieder about the new rail strategy. She also provides for three “immediate programs for a better travel experience”:

With the guidelines for punctuality or comfort in long -distance transport, the federal government is now closely taking the railway on a leash as expected. In the first half of the year, more than a third of the long -distance trains of the railways were on the road. In July, there were less than 40 percent on long -distance transport on three days in a row, emphasized Schnieder. That couldn’t stay that way. On Monday there were far -reaching restrictions between Hamburg and Berlin due to overhead damage.

The main reason for the high unreliability is the dilapidated and overloaded rail network. Schnieder wants to ensure that the DB Infrago, which is responsible for the infrastructure, can operate more independently and independently from the overall group. For this purpose, it is checked, for example, whether the previous domination agreement between train and infrago should continue. A decision about this should be made in the first half of 2026.

The division should also be geared more clearly to the common good. In this respect, profits should only be made in that they benefit from this goal.

At the Infrago, Schnieder also plans a change at the top: Dirk Rompf is supposed to replace the Austrian Philipp Nagl. Rompf has been the managing director of the IFOK strategy consultancy since 2021. Before that, he was the board of DB Netz AG for years, the predecessor of DB Infrago. The Supervisory Board of the Infrago still has to decide on the personnel. According to a report by the “Tagesspiegel”, there is considerable resistance on the committee on the employee side.

Nagl is considered a proven railway specialist. Under his leadership, the years of decay on the rail network was stopped. It is one of the heads behind the so -called general renovation concept, the comprehensive renovation of more than 40 busy railway lines. Rompf was a network boss under the then group board member Ronald Pofalla. During this time, the infrastructure was increasingly felled because too little money was invested in receipt.

Schnieder adheres to the concept of general renovation in his new strategy. It states that by 2036 more than 40 particularly important routes will be fundamentally modernized. The aim is to gradually reduce the number of construction sites in this way and to have train traffic more reliably driven again.

“Customers must be able to rely on the DB AG service offered, be optimally informed and at the same time feel good if they use the system,” the strategy said. The goal of “noticeable reliability” has the highest priority for the federal government.