Evelyn Palla, chief executive of Deutsche Bahn since October, told Welt am Sonntag earlier this month that her own company suffers from "organisierte Verantwortungslosigkeit" -- organized irresponsibility. Decisions get made centrally, she said, and the consequences land on the people running trains locally, who did not make the decisions and cannot be blamed for outcomes they did not control. For years, she said, you just had to explain a missed target well enough and nothing further happened.
This publication does not, as a rule, find itself agreeing with the chief executive of a state-owned rail operator. We are making an exception. Palla has correctly diagnosed her company's problem, and she has diagnosed it in terms any systems engineer would recognize immediately, whether or not she intended to: a control plane making decisions with no visibility into the nodes it governs, and no path for the nodes to report back before the next decision ships. Long-distance punctuality sits at 59 percent this year, regional at 88. The gap is not a coincidence. Regional decisions get made closer to where regional problems are.
Since Palla is right, this desk sees no reason to stop at agreement. Two structural recommendations, offered in the spirit of continuing her reform rather than replacing it.
First: close two of the Bahn's central administration buildings in Berlin, Potsdamer Platz among them, and move the staff who currently occupy them into working space at major railway stations -- Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, Leipzig, Cologne, wherever the headcount lands. This is not a punishment posting. It is moving the control plane to the edge, where the latency between a decision and its consequence drops from a memo cycle to a walk down the platform. Staff who make scheduling decisions should be able to watch those decisions fail in real time, on foot, without a report having to travel back to Berlin first to tell them it happened.
Second: assign a dedicated train to the transport minister, or failing that, to Palla's most senior deputies, and keep it moving. Not a ceremonial train. A working one -- office car, meeting car, direct line back to the ministry -- whose job is to be wherever the network's worst problem currently is, and to solve it from there rather than receive a summary of it three weeks later. The precedent, historically, is Trotsky's armoured train during the Russian Civil War: a mobile headquarters that let its occupant reach the actual front instead of governing it from a desk in Moscow. We are not proposing the rest of what happened on that train. We are proposing the itinerary.
Palla told Welt am Sonntag she cannot promise fast improvements -- there are still too many faults in the network and too many construction sites, and DB's own half-year figures, released the same week, confirm it. She named 2035, the railway's 200th anniversary, as the year she hopes to have "the worst behind us." That is a nine-year timeline for a problem she has already correctly identified. A control plane that can see its own network usually does not need nine years to fix what it can already see. It needs to be moved closer to the network, which is precisely what she has not yet proposed, and precisely what we are proposing for her.
This publication is aware that recommending the Bolshevik approach to executive mobility to a German state-owned enterprise is, on its face, an unusual editorial position. We stand by it anyway. Ms. Palla has correctly diagnosed organized irresponsibility. The fix is organized proximity. Let the people making the decisions be close enough to the trains to hear them not arrive.
E. Halberd Filed from Sussex.