”The company” is not one company. The infrastructure manager (DB InfraGo in Germany) is managing tracks on behalf of the state. Operators (a regional operator in the case of this article) run as many trains as they want/are allowed, which in practice is more than the system can handle reliably. There are laws regulating how track access is awarded, so even when a DB group operator runs on tracks managed by DB InfraGo there is no single ”company” that makes a certain promise. The remedy is political either way, either change how track access is awarded to limit the number of trains allowed or increase funding for added capacity and maintenance.
As I see it, InfraGo could technically fix the problem by increasing operational buffers based on failure rates and reduce number of slots. This would contain the cascade of delays, but they decide to go easy way because they are not accountable for those delays.
So in principle you are right, it’s a political problem - cost of delays is not shared with infrastructure provider as it should be, and while InfraGo actually could fix the problem (because they determine the number of slots), they choose not to.
