On Mar 20, 2:37 pm, Mike Roebuck wrote:

It's because the Germans are so terrified of a train being late that they
allocate about 5 minutes of what we call "Charter Time" between every single
pair of stations.

Nonsense!

DB timekeeping these days is at least as bad as various TOCs here, and
has been since reunification. Admittedly, it was generally pretty good
up to that point.

I agree DB timekeeping isn't much better than ours now (and we have
huge amounts of padding in timetables too), but they do generally keep
to the allocated platform - or there's quite a commotion when they
don't!
Tim