Simplicity, or why Japan kicks Dutch Rail’s ass | Hacker News Reader

Simplicity, or why Japan kicks Dutch Rail’s ass

micheljansen.org

16 pointsmicheljansen13 comments

While the link is down I'm going to rant about the british rail system :)

Can anyone suggest any reason why it costs me upwards of £25 if I want to take the train from Edinburgh to visit my parents in Montrose (distance is 59 miles), while I can fly to Stockholm, Berlin, Paris (ie completely different countries, thousand miles or more) for the same price or less?

This is including the weird charges tacked on at the end by Ryanair, easyjet and the like.

Because the british rail system is one of the oldest in the world. Whether through mismanagement or misfortune it has never been able to afford the lump sums to significantly improve its infrastructure and is left with the more expensive (in the long run) option of continually patching over the aging pile of crap.

The world is smaller than you think!

Stockholm is 823 mi, Berlin is 712 mi and Paris is 541 mi from Edinburgh.

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=EDI-TXL,EDI-CDG,EDI-ARN

And the reason why you can get cheaper flights is because the budget airlines sell excess capacity at deep, deep discounts as a marketing measure. Most of the people on those flights aren't paying less than 25 quid.

If you're flexible with your dates and times and/or can plan trips way in advance, the budgets are great. If you're not able to secure one of the 1 quid flights, you may well find a traditional carrier offers better fares.

Oops, I got the distance by looking at google maps and gauging the approximate distance using the scale at the bottom left - then used the wrong units from what I intended. I would have fit in perfectly in the Mars Climate Orbiter team :D

Rail is in the UK is just ridiculously poor and overpriced. Edinburgh to Inverness which is not much further is over £50. I think this is entirely down to a system where different companies own bits of the track, the stations, the trains and even worse another company will actually operate the trains.

Several years ago I took a train from London to Huddersfield (between Leeds and Manchester) and it was about £75. Then I flew from Manchester to Amsterdam and it cost around £50. I don't understand it either.

Because low-cost carriers often benefit from subsidies directly or indirectly.

Because when you miss a connecting train they have to pay for a freaking taxi to get you there. It happened to me, I payed like 20 pounds for a ticket and spent like 80 km in a taxi

It also doesn't help that until recently, the Dutch freight trains weren't well coordinated with the commuter trains, sometimes leading to unnecessary delays.

Standardization seems like the easiest first step to pull off. For a given route, a train should always stop at the same platforms, be the same length at a given point in the day (that is, morning trains might be longer to deal with more traffic, but then they should always be equally long) and should stop so as to align its doors with painted cues on the platform.

Is it down for anyone else?

It's not just you!

Google cached it: cache:micheljansen.org/blog/entry/955

It looks down from here: http://www.websitecheck.org/http://micheljansen.org/blog/ent...

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