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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> Washington-Baltimore is actually a very good connection by rail--you'll have a train at least once an hour

That's really not a lot, especially between major cities.

For comparison, in the UK there are around 8 trains per hour during peak times between London and Cambridge (around twice the distance of DC-Baltimore). I'd imagine there are cities that have even more per hour in central Europe.

Although according to Google Washington DC has 700,000 people and Baltimore 600,000. Probably a more realistic comparison would be Bristol and Southampton/Portsmouth where there is realistically 1 train an hour (technically 2, but the second one has a change and runs 8 minutes after the first one).

Comparing trains from London is not really fair because virtually every train in the south ends up in London eventually. Somewhat tragically, I once tried to take a train from Watford to visit Hatfield House, some 14 miles away. I think it took me 3 hours getting in and out of London :-)

>Washington DC has 700,000 people and Baltimore 600,000

You really have to look at the metro population.

London has a population of over 8 million and 14 million for the metro population. I was trying to pick something that had even close to a similar population density of of Washington Baltimore in the UK. Comparing to London is like comparing to NYC.

> Although according to Google Washington DC has 700,000 people and Baltimore 600,000. Probably a more realistic comparison would be Bristol and Southampton/Portsmouth where there is realistically 1 train an hour (technically 2, but the second one has a change and runs 8 minutes after the first one).

OTOH between Macon (pop 34000) and Lyon (pop 500000) there is up to 4 trains / hour at commute times (1 an hour otherwise), over a slightly longer distance.

that's a story and a half you could tell. No buses? And I wonder why blablacar hasn't taken off in the UK

Part of the problem with starting that here is that many railroads have to just stop roads dead for 5-10 minutes every time they go by. Even if it's a fast train and it's 2-4 minutes, that would cause a crazy traffic increase here, because you've just lost between 27 and 53% of your roads' capacity.

In a high traffic area, you'd just use bridges and tunnels. Level crossings in central Europe are usually only on minor roads in smaller towns.

London and Cambridge are exceptional cities for political and economic reasons, so that’s not a good comparison.

Plus, the connection ends around 9pm every night.

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