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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

Well, that took very long... it's 2018 and finally a real high-speed connection between Berlin and Munich. In France they had that since forever, and also Spain and Italy have a much better high speed network than Germany.

If anything, why Germany is so late to the party?

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Does France still have the problem that a lot of the connections are via Paris because there are no connections that run between the lines that are connecting cities to Paris? The image of the rail network on the TGV article in Wikipedia is giving the impression.

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).

Yeah, pretty much.

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.

Yes they still do. You can arrive in Paris North in a fancy Thalys or Eurostar, but will then have to somehow get to Paris Lyon or South using weird subway like trains which are often packed, dirty, smelly and confusingly inefficient unless you're used to them.

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.

There's the circle tgv line around Paris, there's part of a line between Strasbourg and Lyon, and I believe they're working on Bordeaux-toulouse, which should enable Bordeaux-Marseille.

Germany has high speed trains for a long time (eg. the 200km of Frankfurt-Cologne: 55 minutes, topping out at 270km/h or so outside the city centers)

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.

Small correction: the Cologne Frankfurt line tops out at 300km/h, unless they reduced speed recently.

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 :-)

Because Germany's population is much more decentralized than most countries, which leads to a new line being planned to become a very political topic. You can't plan a line from A to B without the cities C, D, E that are roughly on the route joining in and requesting to be added as stops.

On top of that, Germany is a federal system whereas France has a very centralized government... so I imagine the politics of financing and building HSR lines is very different (and you end up with very different networks, check out the maps on wikipedia)

Big mess of privatization of the rail operator and then decades of non-investment in infrastructure maintenance while overspending on badly planned flagship megaprojects (this one was completed 17 years behind schedule)

They started building this route in 1991 right after German reunification (it connects the old East with the West). Parts of the route were built in the following years.

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.

Germany was divided - Munich in West Germany, Berlin in the middle of the eastern/socialist DDR. So there was the unification to do, with huge costs. Also there is no high-speed rail in the UK (except for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link).

while that's true, intercity trains in the UK run at 125mph, which I believe falls into the "high speed" category in the U.S.

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)

HS2 will arrive in 15 years optimistically (20 years realistically) and will only get you from London to Leeds - the other half of the distance to Edinburgh or Glasgow will still be on slow tracks... Better than the US for sure but two decades behind FR, DE, IT or ES.

Sure it's slow, but there will be big savings in 8 years time when London-Crewe opens up.

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).

> intercity trains in the UK run at 125mph, which I believe falls into the "high speed" category in the U.S.

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).

Paris-Bordeaux and Paris-Strasbourg also opened fairly recently. On the other hand, there have been high speed lines from Cologne to Frankfurt, Hannover to Würzburg and Hannover to Berlin for many, many years.

The oldest one is the Würzburg - Hannover track which was opened in 1991.

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