Berlin-Munich high-speed train services carry 2M passengers in first six months
railjournal.com
railjournal.com
Air travel is the king of hidden time fees. They say that it's an hour from Berlin to Munich, but you have to show up at the airport an hour before the flight, it takes 15 minutes to get off the plane and get out to the curb, even if you didn't check a bag, it takes 40 minutes to get to the airport, and another 40 minutes to get from the airport to the city center. By the time you add it all up, 4 hours is how long it takes on the plane, and most of that is annoying stressful walking from one place to another, waiting in one line after another, cooped up in a tiny seat, and for maybe 30 minutes of the whole 4 hours, you can use your laptop and do something useful.
The best thing about trains is that you end up right in the city center, and you can often just walk wherever you need to go.
Heaven forbid someone invoke Poe's law!
I've got <20 minutes by car to airport, about an hour by public transport to central train station - even though the train station is closer as the bird flies, and this is Europe with "good" public transport.
1. I absolutely could not sleep on a bus that makes frequent turns on country roads.
2. On the way back to Germany, we got stuck for 2 hours in a passport check, because customs found a Bulgarian family on the bus that had previously been extradited, and there was a long argument before they left the bus.
- "same speed as the "high-speed" train" - are you deluded
- "Only with the car is faster" - yeah, if I drive the kind of car that can average 180 km/h.
I mean, there are no speed limits on Autobahn so nobody would stop you...
Now I live further away it's much more variable. If I'm travelling from Heathrow T5 you have to be into security at t-35, so off the train at t-40, so out of Paddington at t-62, add a bit of leeway means leaving Paddington at t-80 to t-90 depending when the trains are due.
If it's a long haul where there only one flight a day I may well push it out to plan to arrive at an airport as early as t-75, which while excessive, is just in case there are problems like punctures or whatever.
First of all, it's nearly legendary how unreliable the trains can be here during winters and hot summers. Second, flying is actually cheaper (I rarely fly with a big luggage).
Finally, it takes me 15 minutes to get to Tegel airport. All the security and boarding procedures are highly optimised there. I usually leave my flat around an hour to the boarding time.
Then the flight to Munich is an hour or less. In the end (with the train to the city center) it takes less than 4 hours.
On the other hand I wouldn't mind taking a long distance overnight international train provided I had a bed there.
You might want to reconsider if slightly more convenience is worth ~80-90% higher emissions.
I've always liked this scheme, because assuming you set the tax high enough for society to - as a fallback - take action to rectify the problem (e.g. hiring more people to clean up in this case), with a punitive margin on top, the tax provides a financial incentive to innovate to drive down the cost of acting responsibly.
There is a collective return service you can participate in, but if you find a better alternative you're free to use it as long as you can demonstrate what your return rate is. Or you can pay the tax and leave it to the government, but your margins will be worse than the competitions, as the return scheme is cheaper.
The general mechanism feels like it'd be adaptable to a lot of situations where you want to make sure it gets rectified, but also don't want to trust the government to dictate specific solutions - in this case it doesn't matter if e.g. the fallback solution is severely cost-ineffective; the more costly the fallback is, the stronger the financial incentive to find a better solution is.
Anyone has good recommendation of a reliable charity for this? Also, so far all calculators I've seen usually count the carbon emission for economy, but for longhaul flights in business class, I'm sure the actual emissions are significantly higher... I cannot avoid flying but I do think that I should at least pay the actual cost of the carbon emissions I cause.
Its calculation also includes the flight class, aircraft type, flight type (charter, scheduled) and they documented it as well (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/standards/emissions_calculation/...). We use it to offset our business flights. It's a charity and donations are tax deductible under German law.
But for only one hour of that can you be working, reading, or just relaxing. For the rest you'll either be on your feet or at the very least aware of your next connection.
I use this time to organise my thoughts and take a breath.
Penalising medium and long haul, and flights to minor towns or remote towns excluded of course as alternatives are rarely viable. And of course, alternatives can't immediately handle all the passenger load so scaled approaches are needed.
Thinking more of the Paris-London, New York-Boston, etc. Seems it worked with Barcelona - Madrid already, which might be more due to convenience than price?
Though don't think it will happen as the opposition will be too much, and making the taxes/fee rules work easily without complicated red tape will also doom it.
The decision to close it is just a way for insincere and short-term thinking politicians to gain some cheap points.
Maybe it's just Tegel airport, but every time I have to pass security in Frankfurt Flughafen (last time a few days ago), I feel violated. I travel quite a lot and it's the strictest security I've seen in an airport.
The ICE trains in Germany are not that great either. I remember buying a ticket from Hanover to somewhere in the south and to save money I bought a non-registered seat ticket. Imagine my shock when upon entering the train there were dozens of people sitting on their suitcases or on the floor, and I proceeded to spend the next 3 hours in similarly miserable conditions.
Regarding ICE's: That's one of the trade-offs. Either guaranteed (cramped) seating after being "violated" or un-violated uncertainty.
Every time I use one mode of transportation, I'll damn myself and vow to always use the other mode from now on.
Unless you live north of Tegel though, it's going to be faster to get to either Hbf or Südkreuz, and when you get there, you just walk to the platform, wait for the train, walk on, and sit down.
The hidden times you mentioned depend heavily on where you live and what your destination is. Going to the train station can be painful in the first place.
Another thing to consider: I regularly feel sick when I work on trains not so when flying. That’s why I prefer a long plane flight to a train ride.
The flight ended up being 3 minutes faster.
But because I‘m super paranoid about missing my flight I would never show up at an airport „just in time“. So I‘d definitely go by train for this route.
Arriving at an airport - even last week in Moscow where's there's convoluted immigration, security, and I was checking a bag, more than an hour before take off seems crazy. An extra hour a flight adds up to days of wasted time hanging round at airports.
There is no need. You just turn up at the platform before departure time and get on.
1) The trains go every 30 minutes to Munich, so I don't have to wait that long.
2) The price structure of trains vs planes. The standard DB train ticket is flexible, i.e. you can use any train at the given date. Booking a flight on the same day is very expensive (and might be impossible if all seats are taken). There are discount tickets that are not flexible, but the price of the flexible ticket doesn't increase to enormous sums just because I book it on the same day - it's always the same.
I regularly take flights that only fly directly from Luton or Stansted, both of which take around 1 1/2 hours of travel time from our office in Central London. But that involves multiple connections, each of which could be missed or held up.
With a train it basically never takes more than 10 minutes from arrival to walk to your platform, so you don't need to waste so much time just in case there is a delay. Also if you miss it you might be able to get the next train for free depending on your ticket.
With trains I just factor how long takes for the subway right across the street to take me 8 stations to the center.
Even an inner german (or inner Schengen for that matter) flight has a lot more unknowns than a train:
1. public transport times are often a lot longer to airports. So you usually have to factor in more buffer. 2. what‘s the waiting time at luggage drop? 3. what‘s the wait at security? 4. how long do I need to go through security (I travel with lots of electronics which I usually have to take out)
If any of these things don‘t go as I expected my stress level increases because my calculated time buffer goes down. That‘s why I factor in an insane amout of time before boarding and usually end up hanging out at airports for hours.
For trains: The only unknown is the time that it takes me to get to the station. Every other time is practically zero.
And as someone else pointed out in this thread: the cost (in terms of money and time) for missing a train is a lot smaller.
This isn't true, or at least that's not true in a general sense. IIRC ticket prices of all high-speed services offered by Spain's high-speed train operator, Renfe, increase as we get close to the travel day. In some cases, I assume due to low demand, sometimes prices drop a couple of weeks to the travel day. I assume all prices follow a predetermined progression accompanied by ad-hoc adjustments depending on demand levels.
Source: I've scraped price data out of Renfe's site for fun.
> there is just a certain amount of lower fares (going up in stages, the closer you get to the travel date...
That's true for saving fares (Sparangebote). The train price for Flexpreis (an offer without a binding to a certain train) does not change that often.
[0] for all the reasons cameldrv mentioned, plus the impact on the environment. It may be noted that high-speed trains are worse on the environment than classic ones, although still in a different league from air travel.
I fly frequently but I'm also unable to predict how much time I need. It varies greatly. Security/check-in can take anything between a few minutes and 30+ min each. Usually, late passengers can cut the line, but I wouldn't take the risk.
I've personally never been on a German train that was on time. Of course this is anecdata, but still...
[0] https://www.citymetric.com/transport/are-german-trains-reall...
So, I took the old ICE a couple of times which took over 6 hours and indeed never really gets anywhere near it's maximum speed. They had a particularly slow variant taking nearly 7 hours. The new one should be a bit under 4 hours. So, the new line is very competitive with air travel and I'd prefer it over taking a plane. It's a much more relaxed way of traveling. German trains are pretty comfortable.
They could improve things further by eliminating stations from the route and improving the track. https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ has a nice visualization of the speed limits on different routes. There are only a handful of segments where trains can go full speed in Germany. If you look at the Berlin-Munich track, it only goes full speed about half of the route. IMHO, Berlin-Munich could get to about 2.5 hours but it requires a lot of investment. Faster if they get proper high speed trains. Compare this to France, which has proper high speed tracks and trains ride at 300 km/hour there.
That‘s also what happened with this new Berlin-Munich connections. The route makes little sense when you want to connect both cities as fast as possible. The detour only makes sense if you understand that the route needed buy-in from the states in goes through, and it was galling to state governments not to have their biggest cities connected, as well.
But it‘s not just influential elites. When Deutsche Bahn recently mulled killing the IC stop (not ICE - a category lower) stop in my town I was very unhappy. Fortunately they decided against it. But just from the plain numbers I can believe that it shouldn‘t have an IC stop.
The food is known to be quite expensive and not great thought, I wouldn't recommend it
Especially if you're flying into Berlin. I spent an hour in the air from Munich to Berlin, and then an hour waiting for my baggage to be unloaded and placed on the conveyor...
On a scale from 1 to 10 (being the best), airplane food ranks -5. ICE restaurant brings home a solid 0.
ICE's bigger cooking compartments (relative to the everything cramped airplanes) allow for better options. Plus, you have real tables to eat from and elbow space.
The ratio of "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other" vs. "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other because of the ridiculousness of the food" is way higher in ICEs than in planes.
Long story short: In an ICE you have to know what to order. Most meals will be optimized for their type of kitchen (stews; the most ordered item must be Chili con Carne). At least ICE meals don't shy away from their humble origins of being heated-up like airplane food does ("Sansibar Airplane Currywurst...").
Last month I had to instead take a flight (direct ~1h) but it ended up being more stressful and pretty much taking the same time since you have to add the time it takes to get to the airport and go through security.
Not to mention that the trains are quite comfortable and there’s lot of room to walk or even sit down at the on board bistro for a beer or some food.
These ICE4 are the worst ICEs in terms of comfort. They've been reducing the distance between rows over the years, and it is now only 85cm. It used to be 102cm in the ICE1 -- that was cool. ICE2 had 97cm, ICE3 had 92cm, which was still comfortable for me. Now, 85cm is too short to sit comfortably if you are a tall person. The previous models all had good seats and enough space. But the ICE4 is awful. The seats are also too upright and the backrest can only be tilted when pulling the seat to the front, which is impossible for taller people because the legs will have no space. Without this, the seats are so upright they almost push you over. Naps are impossible due to this. And where some lordose support should be, there is a hole. I really hate the ICE4s, I always end up with a sore back.
But sure, there is 10% more capacity thank you very much.
By the way, even ICE1 trains are less comfortable than they used to be because the rubber rings in the wheels were removed for safety reasons.
But Berlin—Munich has a Vmax of 300 km/h, so it would only make sense to put more ICE 3 on that route. I doubt the ICE 4 info is correct.
Something like Newcastle <-> Sydney <-> Wollongong?
[1]: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-22/australian-housing-una...
unlikely to ever happen!
The way the Spanish are doing it (and they've got a ton of high speed track) is to roll out slower / cheaper rolling stock on the shorter lines (RENFE Avant). The longer distance routes get the faster, fancy tiling trains.
Not sure if I understand correctly.
SF to San Jose is a similar idea. No sense in having Caltrain run HSR train sets.
I recall the cost of 2 train tickets being comparable to gas and 1 day 1-way rental for an entry level Mercedes (E class perhaps?).
Autobahn or train... it wasn’t a hard choice.
Edit: As Canadians, we took the car rental. We couldn't turn down an experience of no-speed limits, even if driving is work.
You can also book early. Often you get a ticket for 20-60€ but these are limited. At least they made an UI for this: https://ps.bahn.de/preissuche/preissuche/psc_start.post?dbka...
If you don't use ICE/IC you can get a daily flatrate for 44€ for whole Germany or for 20-25€ for one (or multiple) federal states.
Now we often have empty trains and busses are on the Autobahn...
Here are the prices vs. inflation: https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/1643856533...
However the price for a certain track depends on a lot of things and this new high-speed track has lot's of buisness customers that avoid a flight this way - so it's priced higher.
It's a complicated system with lot's of subsidies, subcontractors and so on. There is a price to pay for using the track to a different company that runs the train...
Another problem is that freight train traffic is even more expensive and they simply forgot to invest in the system for 30 years - now the Autobahn is clogged with trucks...
Can you say how it is "public owned" if it is not a publicly traded stock? It sound like their bid to list it on the stock exchange failed?
It's still not a government entity so they don't need to be that transparent and have more leeway to keep wages down.
Deutsche Bahn is infamous for extracting as much profit as possible, especially when they had no competition (long-distance buses were mostly outlawed until 2012 because of a Nazi-era law). A particularly well-known instance were the local express trains ("S-Bahn") in Berlin where they outright closed many depots and ignored mandated maintenance schedules until:
> On May 1, 2009 an S-Bahn train of the class 481 in Kaulsdorf derailed due to a broken wheel. According to S-Bahners, the scheduled general inspection of that train had been postponed for two years. This accident led to the S-Bahn chaos of 2009, since the Federal Railway office mandated shortened test intervals and therefore at times only 165 out of 552 required quarter trains were available. Eventually, all axes had to be replaced because they were generally considered to be inadequate.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn (lightly edited because the original article reads like it came out of Google Translate)
They really made a mess with this attempt at privatization. It went so far that Deutsche Bahn AG destroyed their own (payed with public money in the 80ies) working and good rolling stock in an attempt to keep the market prices up? https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880
Also there's the summer special, where you can get 4 trips for 96 euros.
Honestly driving on a long straight crowded highway is just as dull no matter what the speed limit.
We gave up on it when it said this 1-lane railway underpass, for 2 way traffic, was an 80km/h road...
I’m not that familiar with the models, but I know that Mercedes and BMW have lower-level models in N. America because they don’t want to “dilute their brand”. So entry/mid class definitions will differ between Germany and Canada.
The US does have the 1 series (finally), but just the coupe, and it’s still marketed as something sporty.
I liked the 118d hatch, but no dice in N. America (except Mexico).
As probably most people have heard, we in Europe think that Americans are a bit silly to want such large vehicles. Driving an A class or 118 would be both more fun and use much less fuel than an SUV that you really only use on highways and streets.
As a German, I wish we would impose strict speed limits on the Autobahn to avoid tourists, or anyone for that matter, do such wasteful dangerous joyrides.
Note: have been in a car accident so appreciate I am very very biased against how offhand and casually people go about such behaviour, how lives are destroyed for no reason.
Even if the train itself produces less CO2 than a car, somewhere along the line those extra EURs are being used to buy things that produced CO2. And Germany’s gas taxes keep that in mind.
Or maybe the car company just needed to relocate cars out of Munich (no surprise during Oktoberfest) and there weren’t many train tickets left.
Deutsche Bahn advertises their long-distance trains as running on 100% renewable energy.
Almost half of German electricity is from coal.
It’s all the same grid. If DB earmarks some renewable electricity for itself, then the non-renewable mix is increased for another customer.
Funny how two people can face exactly the same problem, both quickly conclude that the obvious choice is so obvious you don't even have to mention it and then both make the exact opposite choice.
If renting a car and taking the train was the same price I'd take the train without even blinking.
(Source: www.bahn.de, the official website of Deutsche Bahn)
If anything, why Germany is so late to the party?
Also frequency wise the Uk wins over this link. London to Edinburgh, 534km, takes 4h20 and runs every half hour.
HS2 is under construction which is a true high speed line and will knock an hour off trips to Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and allow more frequent trains (the WCML can only support one train an hour to Glasgow for example as the lines south of Rugby are crammed - over 40tph in each direction, or one every 3 minutes on each track)
The UK doesn't really have a great market for long distance trains in the same way that Europe does. If we weren't so insular and joined Schengen, then sure - high speed trains to Paris/Brussels/Cologne/Amsterdam from Birmingham/Manchester/Leeds/Bristol would work, but there's very few trips more than about 200 miles.
HS2 isn't really worthwhile as a speed improvement, the main benefit is the increased capacity -- effectively six-tracking the WCML south of Crewe (and 4 tracking the Crewe-Manchester link).
That would definitely be high-speed according to German standards. Local trains top out at 120 km/h (75 mph) or very seldomly 160 km/h (100 mph).
It's just this route which had some geography-induced engineering challenges that was finally upgraded to be able to service at the trains' maximum speed.
What's fun is that the train tracks go right next to a bit of Autobahn for a while. Despite the fact that it's a section without speed limit, it still looks like a long stretch of parking lot when the train goes by :-)
Did you know that mathematicians named a metric after that? It's the SNCF metric when the distance between two points (cities in real life) is defined as the sum of their distances from the origin (Paris in this case). (that is: go from city A to Paris and from Paris to city B, no matter how close A and B are geographically).
There are lines between other cities but they are usually serviced by slower regional trains rather than TGVs. Unless you're traveling to a neighboring city you'll probably have to wait for transfers too.
This is why I don't travel by train to the South of Europe. It's a waste of time, and an uncomfortable one at that.
A part of the route goes through difficult terrain. It's a completely new route that now contains 27 new tunnels and 37 new bridges, some kilometers long. All this through an environmentally sensitive area. So it was quite expensive and difficult to agree on. Work was even stopped on this part at some point around 2000, mainly because of the costs IIRC.
Will the CA train run at 186 mph or 220 mph?
This will translate to an extra 30-45 minutes?
By the way, CAHSR predicts ridership 20-30x higher than that mentioned in this headline.
It was one of the nicest train rides I've ever taken though - you got to see so much of Germany. The onboard restaurant was awesome.
I hope you don't miss out on seeing the incredibly scenic Bavarian landscapes and villages. I could do without looking at the mostly industrial landscape further up north though.
Here are some details (only found a german link: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrsprojekt_Deutsche_Einhe...) - costs for the whole track was around 10 billion euro.
Taking the train between major cities is often more expensive than flying in Europe. People choose the train because it's comfortable and convenient, not because it's cheap.
Also 150 EUR is a full price ticket. If you book a few weeks in advance, and are willing to take the 'slow' train you can probably get a ticket around 30 EUR.