I am glad that Mr Mehdorn considers Rail traffic still as his core business, but then I wonder how much attention is paid to his peripheral activities. Have you ever sat in a train which unannounced and unexpectedly stopped for an hour due to an inaugeration celebration of that train, where some free sandwiches were distributed to angry passengers, leading to missing your last connection train, forcing you to stay in a hotel overnight? Have you been stopped in a train for an hour, due to a platform fire in the next station? Had you ever had to wait for 2 hours in a train because your locomotive had to pull another train whose locomotive was broken, leaving you without air conditioning in a small box whose windows cannot be opened in the summer heat? Did an employee at the ticket counter ever recommended you to go to McDonalds and buy your train ticket there as they were cheaper there at the moment (German Railway had a one-time offer selling tickets through McDonalds)? Did you ever try to order a German Railway ticket from a foreign country where most of the flexible pricing options are not available to book, leaving you with the most expensive pricing? Did you ever order through a ticket through the Internet online order system where tickets were mailed to “Germany” although “Switzerland” was explicitly chosen as address, having the tickets travel for three weeks by mail and arriving to late at your place? Do you realize that monitors, showing the percentage of punctuality of trains, which had been mounted in stations were silently removed again, as they were often showing embarassingly low percentages? A friend who works at the railway control center is frustrated because turnouts and signals are not maintained anymore. Instead they wait until they actually break and repair them only when needed as this saves money overall (but causes an annoying interruption for passengers each time). I generally like to travel by train, but I do understand why Mr Mehdorn prefers to fly.