I have two things to say about trains.
1) The meme of the asdf guy liking trains died too young. It kind of died instantly when no new asdf videos containing the joke got published. So, in a way it never was a living meme. I don't yet accept the fact that people don't know what I'm referring to when I make a reference to the asdf video series whenever somebody publicly announces that they like trains. I will continue to make such references and will probably never again meet somebody who remembers and likes the series.
2) Trains work very reliably in Germany. It's often said that people in Germany like to claim that trains are never punctual and really unreliable in general. It's true that that is a very common thing to hear in Germany. And there are good reasons for that. Many things have gotten worse and look like they're continuing to get worse. In my area it has become a common problem that there is not enough staff to run the system. Regional trains are sometimes substituted for days or weeks with buses driven by people from other countries, usually located in the east to Germany. Sometimes train people get sick and no bus substitution is available at short notice. I had planned a one-day vacation for today. But when I got to the train station a display and clear voice told me that the train will not come. I checked online and learned that no trains will come until the evening. That way disappointing and it would have been very unusual 30 years ago. But if it had happened 30 years ago, I would have waited at least a bit over an hour for the next train, likeky two hours, before going back home. I wouldn't have known that trains will also not come tomorrow until the afternoon. It would have been more frustrating. It is a sign of a change in sentiment that an occurance like this has become an accpeted possibility. (Well, what could you do if you wouldn't accept it?) But I believe the right perspective to take here is that things really are very reliable and more than okay. Given the history of Deutsche Bahn to not invest in necessary infrastructure and saving personell more and more in many places since its privatisation, we should expect things to get worse and worse. (And I do think it is a valid question to ask why the state spends so much money on roads and car subsidies but almost none on rails and trains.) Even if my experience from today would be an everyday one, if every other week there would be a day or two with no trains and you wouldn't know which days, it's still fine. I still get to ride the train either direction almost any day and for a few Euros I get to any of dozens of towns and cities. You could also argue that it is embarrassing that such a rich country as Germany can't make its public transport run reliably every day. But I think we're past that. I already have to walk 45 minutes to the next train station becasue there is no regular bus anymore. In the town I was going to visit I would have walked over an hour to one of my destinations because there are only two buses a day. I would have had to wait over an hour in one transfer because some trains are only scheduled every other hour. All the other connections only run one per hour during most of the day, not at all in the morning and after 8 pm. We've accepted this. We'll accept so much worse. It's great that I get to travel by train so flexibly at all.