Alle reden vom Wetter. Wir nicht. Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t. In 1966, the Deutsche Bundesbahn, the West German railway, advertised itself with this line. A 23-year-old secretary at the McCann agency in Frankfurt, Margot Müller, came up with it while serving coffee at a meeting. The railway presented itself as a way to travel that the weather could not stop.
Today the railway publishes its punctuality every month. A long-distance train counts as on time at a stop if it arrives no more than 5 minutes and 59 seconds late. By that measure, 62.5 percent of long-distance trains were on time in 2024, and 60.1 percent in 2025.