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Comment by Shalle135 | Hacker News Reader

The hing about trains in general though is the pricing around it.

In Sweden a flight from the northern parts to the southern is about $100 and takes an hour. The train cost $100-200 and takes about 16h depending on where you depart from.

I believe a requirement for people choosing to take the train is that they add some facilities (you feel pretty nasty after 16h on a train) and reduce the price. Raising the price on flights won’t help unless it’s drastically, around 2-300%. And if you do this on domestic flights then nobody will afford international flights.

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One benefit of sleeper trains is you can take into the account the price of a night stay at a hotel as well as the time saved (in the sense that you do your travel while you're sleeping, so you have more net waking hours available). I rode the Caledonian Sleeper from London to Edinburgh last Christmas and yes, the price was about the same as a flight but considering it saved me from paying for a night in a hotel it was actually a better deal.

Another point (not in Sweden) is that the rail operators are government-owned companies which often operate like the government does.

Couple of months back, I tried to buy a ticket to the car-train to Lapland (I can take the car with me to train in the evening, sleep in a cabin, wake up in the morning and set off for the remainder of the journey with my car). When booking the car slot, the booking system required me to enable flash and when it got started, it just rotated that thing on the browser window.

I got bored, checked out flights. In 5 minutes I had flight tickets, with extra bags paid, and a rental car, at half the total cost of what the car-train would have been. I returned to the booking window, it still had that rotating thing on the browser window. I closed the window and did not miss it.

The rail infrastructure is government operated, but train companies that are responsible for all customer interaction is not. SJ is just as government-owned as SAS. The rail is basically like the airport, and the train companies are like airlines.

The general problem is the lack of competition. Between two destinations you usually have the choice between multiple airlines, but for trains there is usually only one. Between malmö-göteborg-stockholm there is the fast train alternative but it is arguable if that actually serve as competition. With air-travel you got multiple airlines and multiple resellers.

Swedish rail operate like a monopoly, which is in my view the main reason why its both expensive and terrible at the same time.

Quite, though I think Swedish situation regarding competition is somewhat better than my experience which was in Finland - here there's only the government-owned VR (former Statsjärnvägarna).

Anecdotal argument: I rarely sleep as good as I do on trains, so 16h is not a problem - the price and frequent late arrival is.

There are some cost savings if you're traveling via rail regularly, though, via stuff like Eurail passes.

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