The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design
priestmangoode.com
priestmangoode.com
On a plane, the engines are right there out on the wing screaming and conducting that sound directly into the airframe next to you. With a train, the engine is way up front, hundreds of yards a way, separated by several linkages.
The end result is that a train car is as quiet as a coffee shop. I love it.
The pricing is nuts, though. A one way train ticket for that route is $36. The same trip via car takes about the same amount of time and $20 in gas. The train is a nice luxury for one person, but for the whole family it becomes very expensive.
Passenger rail in the US is absurd.
Long-distance rail travel seems to be fairly expensive. Is that kind of trip cheaper somewhere comparable?
So that’s the comparison I guess. It’s not fair, but it’s also sort of reasonable, given car ownership here.
I add the cost of “development” financing/spying/regime change as part of the cost of oil, and the U.S. pays for all of that, which is a de facto subsidy.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-f...
In the US, like many countries, these are very substantial:
And in the US, I’m a decent fraction of that ($13) just to take the commuter rail into the city one way.
And my 30 mile train into Manhattan is $14
$36 one way for a 5 hour train seems pretty cheap.
You can also rent a car when you get there for something like the same amount for the day and not worry about the wear and tear part.
Driving 1 person is already close to the price of a train ticket. Driving 2 people is ~50% discounted. Driving 2 people, and then not having to rent a car/taxi, is something like a ~75% discount.
With a real carbon tax, these numbers would look a lot closer to eachother.
https://theicct.org/blogs/staff/planes-trains-and-automobile...
They report some 80 passenger-km per liter of Diesel equivalent energy, compared to 13 passenger-km in a modern hybrid. Both values include the energy production, utilization and energy expenditure for infrastructure.
This assumes a modern network with electric trains though. I'm not sure if the article you cited still uses diesel-powered trains to arrive at such extremely different figures.
Taking a bike is a much easier thing to do if you want easy access to the inner burbs and urban core of Portland.
Regardless of what you think of these fares (it is cheaper if you book in advance), considering HMRC allows you to write off 45p/mile and it is slightly over 800 miles, only the anytime return is really more expensive if travelling for work vs a car. Plus you'll have £30-40/day parking in central london on top, so apart from the first class return the train (even at its most eye wateringly expensive) is cheaper than a car.
Don't forget wear and tear on the car, though.
The IRS sets mileage at 58 cents/mile. That's $100 for Seattle to Portland.
Still, even at the full rate, two people back and forth, it's still cheaper to drive.
The IRS has to come up with a fair number that translates all those fixed costs into per/mile. It is a good financial number, but worthless for this discussion.
Less car ownership on the horizon; 1)Cities are congested 2)The congestion in the suburbs is even worse than driving in downtown 3)For years the solution was to build more highways, but land for doing so is running out 4)Car ownership is no longer cool 5)Ride sharing and renting is become easier (GPS, Internet, Smartphones) 6)Cars have become safer, but the joy or riding in them has been killed. It's like being trapped in an egg carton.
Buying new tires are a thing. Even if you buy cheap tires and get good life out of them (and that combo is...rare, you get what you pay for), that's, say, $400 ever 40,000 miles, that's a cent a mile right there..and tires are usually more expensive than that and don't last that long.
The most obvious cost of wear and tear though is that eventually the car needs to be replaced. More miles = sooner replacement.
It depends on the car, but typically you are looking at $.20/mile for fuel, and $.05 for all other maintenance (including tires).
The average new car payment is something like $550/month. The average used car is somewhat less of course. Most people are making payments. Insurance is $500/year if you have a perfect driving record, many people pay more. These costs have nothing to do with how far you drive.
A few years ago I calculated my actual per/mile cost for my car, it was $.15/month, even though I bought it new (I track every fill up, though at 46mpg my fuel costs are less than average). The car had 200,000 miles on it to spread all the fixed costs across, and had been paid off for a few years.
The point is the marginal cost to drive a car you already own is low.
PS: Your insurance costs are fantasy land. The average US driver pays almost $1500/hr. I haven't had so much as a speeding ticket in a decade and live in a safe small town and am still over $1k/yr.
Sub in an eBike for the commuting & errands, its quite doable to go car light or car free (esp. if Car2go, Lime pod or another service is available in your city).
I wish we'd install more rail corridors. Especially outfitted with business and luxury amenities. I'd travel by train everywhere I could to avoid planes and long distance driving.
The problem with the US is not that rail travel is expensive (it is not), but that gas is waaaaayyyyy too cheap. (In Germany you pay around 6.20 USD/gallon)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_unit
And it’s still not annoying, at all. It’s very quiet, and I personally find the sound of electric motors much more tolerable than anything involving combustion.
Most of the rest of the world has gone down the "multiple unit" route, where there are smaller motors in each car, under your feet, and there are no dedicated locomotives.
And BTW, even many high speed trains, including tgv duplex and the acela u nention are effectively locomotive hauled trains.
One notable exception is the Bombardier/Talgo 350 (known in Spain as "the Duck" for obvious reasons).
I believe the Acela replacement (avelia liberty) uses powercars as well.
They are not multiple units or likely to be if they were refurbished tomorrow. The reason being that the stock is not in 24/7 use. It does the one long night journey then gets parked all day.
The train out of London gets split to serve different bits of Scotland, so you do get some shunting around going on when they do things to the train.
It doesn't go that quickly as a train because there is no need. Being in Euston at 5 a.m. is no fun, might as well be there at 6 a.m. with some sleep had.
So the loco that pulls the train can be any old freight thing. Although now it is likely to be a Class 73 diesel electric that can use electrified track as well as diesel. Note that there i no electric track all the way out to Scotland.
Train travel can be absolutely luxurious in a way that a plane or self-driving car could never be. You don't even need to book a $3,000 historical reenactment to get a taste. On a whim, I once booked a 1st class AVE train in Spain for an extra $10 and ended up with bottomless wine/champagne and a several course dinner for 3 hours. Would I ride a chicken bus for 7 hours through Honduras? Sure, but there are points for style too.
Increasingly, people want to avoid flying if reasonably possible. A sleeper train is ideal, because you spend most of the trip asleep, and end up in Munich, Paris, Vienna, etc. early in the morning, in the middle of the city.
Sure, it's not as comfortable as a hotel, but it beats the torture of flying (I'm 200cm tall), and train stations are just a lot more pleasant to be in than airports.
These trains looks really nice.
Timewise this would've been fine, but price is not competitive. I'm not sure if the problem is too cheap flights, or too expensive trains.
I'm always comparing the travel times between train and plane. I even account for the time going to the airport, airport transfer etc and if it's roughly the same (which it sometimes is) I'll get on a train but if Ryanair can offer 9 Euro flights (Berlin -> Brussels) this is not going to be a real competition.
I'll take Austin's local light rail train as an example to illustrate what I mean. I once looked into the finances and financing sources to get the system stood up, and I worked out that it would be around a $30-$35 trip from one end in the middle of the city to the outskirts of Austin's Leander township if the actual cost of the system were paid for by the rider.
It is immensely deceptive and rather dumb that these realities are simply ignored, especially by seemingly otherwise rather intelligent people that congregate here.
At the very least, there should not only be the direct cost per ticket if it were not heavily subsidized by taxes of Europeans, which non-Europeans should have to pay, and the price that is subsidized that Europeans pay. It is really rather immensely immoral to ride on the train at a cost that is heavily subsidized by wildly immoral tax levels (e.g., 100% on gasoline, 20% on sales of goods, ~35% of income that is also 70% of what it is in places like the USA).
Tourists pay 25% VAT on everything, so it's not like they pay no taxes. I think literally having to prove residence (or citizenship? or tax-residence?) sounds like the sort of bureaucratic hell I'd rather not encounter at the ticket machine. But note that some countries find a way, e.g. Switzerland has 50% discount cards which are far too expensive to make sense for tourists, but make it cheaper for locals.
City transport is a different game, and harder to calculate down to individual levels -- you need all those 10%-full 11pm trams so that people can get home, on some days.
I really don't think European public transport is the major force driving young Americans to the left. I hear a lot of young Americans who (quite rightly IMO) look at socialised healthcare in the EU and wonder why on earth they can't have it back home ... but that's a separate issue altogether
It's difficult to do a true apples to apples comparison, especially when highways are also justified in part as a national security asset. But it's a little much to clutch pearls about subsidies for rail ("immoral", really?) without acknowledging how subsidized the alternatives are as well.
free trade is hardly a subsidy.
Cutting taxes in any form is a subsidy relative to what went before, whether or not the end state is above, at, or below the zero point.
More concretely, if an automaker previously bought widgets from a local supplier for $10, but now buys them from overseas for $8 because of free trade, that's effectively a $2-per-widget subsidy. You can argue that it's a market efficiency and that most of the benefits are passed to the end consumer anyway so whatever, but when you get far enough down that path, then there are no widgets being made locally any more, which is the real cost of having subsidized the import of them by cutting taxes to zero.
Rather than being some low tax paradise, the US is around the OECD average in most categories.
As for things like vat, they look far worse than they are when you realise a lot of goods are zero rated, and most people spend only a s portion of their income on good due VAT. Last I checked in the UK it adds ca 3 percentage points to my tax overall tax burden. I don't pay much more tax here than I would in any number of US states at my income level.
When factoring in health insurance, it gets even closer. Having spent time both places, I'd pick European tax levels over 'US conditions' (a term frequently used to scare voters in many European countries) any day.
As for being immoral: we've voted for these tax levels. Surveys in the UK often show us prepared to accept increases as long as they go to the right things, like the NHS.
Feel free to enjoy our trains - I've never met a European that is as concerned with subsidising foreigners travelling on them as you are on our behalf.
You are aware that most of Europe produces electricity by burning fossil fuel right? So by all logic we should apply a strict carbon tax on rail as well.
Though I don't think most trains are electric, and I think they do have a fuel tax.
For example, in Britain "In 2006, 40%—3,062 miles (4,928 km) of the British rail network was electrified, and 60% of all rail journeys were by electric traction (both by locomotives and multiple units)".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Gre...
Also, anyone else get annoyed with tons of shops at airports? I think of airports as mega malls with some planes attached to them :(
I love it. Frankfurt duty free is pretty much my favorite shopping mall. The shops also give you something to do when you're waiting for connections. Duty Free in Dubai is also a lot of fun. Those shops also bring in revenue which goes to running the airport (your airline ticket is indirectly subsidized by those shops.)
The London - Edinburgh sleeper train (Caledonian Express) has been running pretty much since 1873 and is an amazing way to get between the two cities. You arrive at the station in London between 10-12pm, depending on if you want to have a few snacks or glasses of wine, then wake up in Edinburgh around 8am the next day.
For the opposite, the most uncomfortable one to sleep in was the Hong Kong to Shanghai one. I paid extra for the Deluxe option, can't even imagine how hard the bed would have been on the lower classes. Still, was a pretty cool journey.
I've only taken a sleeper train once (from Paris to Marseille), but i found it difficult to get quality sleep on that. There's noise, there's movement, and the mattress isn't terribly good. Train schedules don't necessarily fit well with your normal sleeping schedule. I'd much rather to the trip in a TGV and then spend the hours saved having a shower and a rest on arrival.
https://www.seat61.com/deerstalker.htm
I have chatted (T-bars being quite sociable) to people who had come up for skiing on Cairngorm on the sleeper as well.
Edit: Replaced "stop" with "terminate".
You can see the Caledonian Sleeper timetable at [1], it's also reasonable to catch it at Watford. It then stops at both Edinburgh and Glasgow (they have split the train in two further south). You can see the Highland train stops at many towns and villages.
You do need to be a bit more alert if you're getting off the train before the terminus, but the attendant will almost always wake the passengers who are due to alight.
Excited for our first overnight train ride in their new hotel-room style sleeper cars (with a private bath and shower) later this summer. Even for a family of 6, when you factor in the (saved) cost of overnight acommodations in either London or Edinburgh, it was one of the most affordable ways to travel between those two cities.
If you're travelling on it in the next few months, hope for the best – but plan for the worst.
Epic discussion thread: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/caledonian-sleeper.1763...
I traveled in sleeper trains in China, and while the experience was interesting, I can't really say it was comfortable or even pleasant. People would keep moving around at night, making noise, and the train would stop now and then and create noise on its own. It's slow and it only works if you are not too far from where you want to go anyway, unless you are ready to waste a long time to get there.
Not in the US! I would love to travel by train whenever time permitted, but it is prohibitively expensive to travel by sleeper car.
It was an enjoyable experience tough, and we'd probably do it again on another route. While it would have been nicer to have a sleeper, the coach seats were pretty comfortable.
Not at all. London-Edinburgh is £65 on EasyJet and a 1 hour trip. A regular seat on the Caledonian Express is £45 for an 8 hour trip. The Caledonian Express en suite twin room is £280.00
> when you consider that you spend time travelling when you would otherwise be asleep
I could fly Easy Jet for 1 hour for £65, and have money left over for a very comfortable hotel and a nice meal.
I think that they were a solution looking for a problem. They could reboot the concept to use Apple Carplay/Android Auto. Train info is useful to have on hand and it should be possible to do upsells.
Currently the Intercity/RailJet trains are more like a downgrade to what was available before. They look nicer, but provide quite uncomfortable seating and offer no possibility to change the seating inclination; due to the air condition it's very noisy; there's no place to put your feet in an elevated position; there's no compartments, the whole car is one big room; and the only option for children is an open place with a TV, you have a lot of fun chasing your small children through the train.
I strongly disagree with this. I really like the railjet. My issue is that it's still on an elevated platform which is super annoying if you have strollers. But in terms of comfort I think it's their best product yet. I definitely prefer that over the compartments that were there before.
https://www.priestmangoode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Pr...
Enclosing beds to make them a kind of cradle is bad. The good design would add space not stuff. There's a reason older trains didn't have that.
Typical design made on computer that nobody tried to use (or not enough users to say how bad it is).
I've also traveled in the newer trains in Europe that were significantly worse than the older, again for having less space everywhere. It's a bad trend.
The foot end is a bit narrower than the overall bed, which is also a smart use of space and, again, makes getting into the bed easier.
This is also the first sleeper cabin I've seen where the window seems to be parallel beside the bed as opposed to orthogonal at one end.
- Tempeature: Having slept in a cabin where the aircon blasts from the bottom into those sleeping there, they inevitably have to turn it off to sleep, leaving those on the top bunks at temperatures of over 40C in the summer.
- Noise/Privacy: In the 4-bunk cabins, I don't want to hear anyone either. Why wouldn't they include the soundproofing curtains in those too.
- Space: There's a tiny gap between the beds currently. Look closely and this is also the case. It's impossible having more than 1 person do anything inbetween the beds and stepping out of your own pretty much puts you about 1foot away from the other person's face/legs.
Maybe someone can tell me why they can't just make lightweight carriages, and put a lot of them on the back of a train car (more than now). By having more carriages you can make the accommodation more spacious and comfortable. This is what stops me considering it as a viable option for European travel currently. Even if they couldn't fit in the station, what's to stop them letting half the carriages off first, followed by the second half?
the only thing that would work is to have two trains on the same route in a short delay from each other. say half an hour.
however, for all of this the real problem is cost. i believe germany dropped all overnight trains because they weren't getting used enough compared to high-speed trains. it's interesting that austria bought them, but i guess with austrias lack of high-speed trains, overnight trains are still useful.
I'd guess people weren't using them because they are so cramped and uncomfortable. I would bet they could be economical and comfortable when the whole process is designed from scratch. I don't think this exercise feels like that.
The beds with their own screens look nicer than the ones in trains I've taken (and at comparable density) and far far nicer than anything in the air I've ever had. (Also nicer than the airport lounges I've slept in between flights...) There are also private cabins which I'm sure cost double.
I would be very surprised if the carriages were any heavier than they had to be. Why would they waste energy costs (and engine size costs) on dragging around weight they didn't have to?
I'm sure that weight improvements could be made, but I'm also sure that it would cost money and rolling stock is expensive enough.
https://schienenradler.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/1130081-0...
https://schienenradler.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/1130082-0...
https://schienenradler.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/1130097-0...
One thing I don't understand is the private berths.
> Private berths are fitted in both First and Standard Class carriages and can be booked for business passengers or families travelling together.
They are completely transparent, nice for the lightness. But bad for privacy. I can see many reasons why a business meeting would not want prying eyes.
For me it has been a common issue in the past to be traveling while working on private files. But having a person sitting next to you doesn't allow for enough privacy... So usually I just stopped working, while that could be a big plus of train travel.
The train, by contrast, involves leaving from downtown near where I live, sitting on the train, and arriving in Manhattan a few blocks from my office. It's so much simpler and more relaxing, and much easier to actually get work done during the trip, so oftentimes it's worth the extra couple of hours the trip takes. If we could invest in high-speed rail and make the whole train trip even, say, 30% faster, there would be no contest.
[1] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/77/13/43/16562379/3/1024x1024.jpg
https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
The buffer cars would take up some additional highway area, but the passenger density of the convoy as a whole could still exceed private passenger cars.
Recently, the high-speed rail lines have started to shift things in favor of daytime trips between large cities (Beijing-Xuzhou used to be 7 hours by sleeper train, but it’s now 2.5 hours by bullet train). But, the train remains the best way to travel within the country. It’s smooth, quite cheap (esp. for an American traveler), and increasingly comfortable.
We used to have luggage vans back in the olden days!
Makes me wonder if these Austrian train designs are already set in stone or just a proposal that might or might not happen.
I would assume they are pretty much set in stone. I was in a mock model they had standing around at Vienna central station. They got the budget and are currently ordering the trains.
They're currently due to enter service in about five years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Tube_for_London
It's an impressive sight to look from one end of the interior to the other when it's not full of people (and going straight).
I'm glad to see on the other reply that the plan hasn't been scrapped. Some of the lines could really use new trains (with proper air ventilation/filtering, especially).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Albert_Bierst...
While they state its for luggage and design purposes, I just think: Its so much easier to clean. Even automatically ;)
My guess: Ease of installation and for stability reasons. Bolting the seats to the outer frame probably requires much more consideration than simply bolting them to the floor.
It was very convenient when it worked, for example from the US to other cities or ski resorts in France. But that was 10 years ago, and I haven't looked into it recently, so I'm not sure if they developed it or not.
The red-eye to Chicago, which is a comparable trip, really sucks because you only get about 3 hours of sleep in the most uncomfortable position imaginable. This means that you arrive in the city groggy and discombobulated.
I would even pay airfare-level prices for that kind of service. And extra if there's a way to segregate families with small children from my cabin so I don't have to try to remain asleep while a toddler is screaming for 3 hours in the same cabin.
Not really doable for a lot of Austria and generally the Alpine regions.
There are not many high speed tracks in Austria and Switzerland, the reason being that the countries are relatively small and that building high speed tracks through the alps is insanely expensive.
Switzerland built two base tunnels through the alps: The Lötschberg[1] - and Gotthard[2] base tunnels, which are geared to a top speed of 250 km/h (ca. 155 miles/h) and a normal travel speed of 200 km/h (125).
That's why it takes roughly 10 hours to get from Zurich to Vienna, but only 4 to get from Zurich to Paris (after Mulhouse the whole track is high speed capable and trains run with up to 320 kmh (200 m) on that track.
Edited to add: Of course night trains make a lot of sense on that route.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6tschberg_Base_Tunnel
The country is roughly 300km long and ~200km high, add to that a lot of cities, which need to be serviced with relatively small distances.
HSR only makes sense, when a train can travel big distances between nodes.
Instead a different approach was chosen:
The trains are dispatched by clock face scheduling[1], which makes much more sense. Trains leave nodes by the (usually) half hour and deliver passengers to connecting nodes within the time required to connect to transfer. This guarantees scheduled connections, even when there's no direct train.
For example: If you want to get from Zurich to Lugano there are trains leaving at 5:10pm, 6:10pm, 7:10pm, etc.
The first and the last are direct trains, with the 6:10 you need to get out at Arth Goldau to connect with another train, which leaves 4 minutes later.
For a small country like Switzerland this concept makes far more sense than HSR.
It's probably one of the most efficient train networks with the exception of Japan. So bemoaning generally happens on a very high level, if at all.
Unfortunately Germany is the only neighbor with an extensive high-speed rail network that Austria has.
On the other hand that distance is a lot smaller than Chicago-Seattle (4x) so the lack of high speed in the alpine region isn't as noticable for a night train because the distances are much shorter. The thing about sleeper trains is that you need the distance to be 8-15 hours. If it's less than 8h you'd get uncomfortable departure or arrival times. 10h for Zurich-Vienna is perfect for a sleeper.
It would be cool if there were a way for me to leave Seattle on Sunday night and arrive in Chicago on Monday morning having gotten a full night of sleep.
It takes two days at around 100 to 120 km/h over 675 bridges, though some recommend [2] that you spend a day or so in Xining on the way to acclimatise to the altitude.
Every train carries a doctor and oxygen to increase the concentration of oxygen in the carriages from 21% to 25% (but no pressurisation), plus a separate oxygen supply for each passenger.
I'm not a fan of China, but its rail network is something to behold.
I'm on a (day) train between Berlin and Vienna this very minute and it costed me €99 (one way!) where as a flight would have been about €50.
You can get cheaper tickets if booking well in advance (months) but the same applies to budget airlines.
To be fair to travel betwee Berlin and Vienna City centres you'd need to add at least a €10 in each end for ground transport.
Vienna should be less than 5€ for the airport + VOR ticket.
Berlin ABC ticket (for Schönefeld airport), EUR 3.40.
In addition jet fuel in Europe is tax-free which enables these ultra low prices.
However the railway ought to be more expensive overall due to the other costs: requires build-out and maintenance of extensive ground based network, including some prime real estate; requires much longer occupancy of vehicles; requires much more man-hours for each vehicle crew. Sadly in most settings (like continental Europe) the fixed costs of rail are barely visible to our considerations due to the governmental funding. Meanwhile airplanes only require build-out of the end-points, and the crew required is minimal.
The only meaningful way of fixing the problems with rail is 1) high speed (Mach 0.5 ... 1); 2) de-coupling from wheels-on-rails as the source of noise, drag and speed limitation; 3) de-coupling from expensive on-the-ground infrastructure as cause of high costs and NIMBYism; 4) high automation, little to no amenities; 5) smaller vehicles, more frequent departures. All in all, going in the airplane-like direction. Hyperloop may just be the thing, if it ever becomes large scale commercial.
[1] per passenger * km. Example: https://www.theprch.com/this-vs-that/fuel-efficiency-planes-...
"Trains in countries like Japan are predominantly electric and transport a much larger number of people per cabin than trains in the US. While it’s difficult to broadly compare trains between regions it’s safe to say that trains in European and Asian countries are far more fuel efficient than those in the US, making them a leading option for travel.
In most cases outside of the US, trains are probably at least as efficient as buses and are much more efficient than cars and planes."
Yours, Physics.
Trains for people have a few cars and go really fast. Trains for cargo have hundreds of cars and go really slow.
Right now the trains may be ahead in some regions thanks to their slow speeds, and thanks to the electrification - with the assumption electricity is generated from sources other than fossil fuel.
But if you tried to set up railway at travel time comparable to airways, you'd quickly find yourself doing away with rolling in favor of maglev or maybe air cushion, and also trying to lower the air drag as much as possible. Both are non-trivial engineering challenges - cue the Hyperloop languishing in protracted development. Both have been solved by air travel decades ago.
Meanwhile electrification of the air travel is already underway. Quiet SSTs[1] are up next. And yes, SSTs are rather fuel efficient, thanks to the even higher operating altitude, and also the natural efficiency of the jets at high speeds.
I will miss the railways. It used to be a great adventure back when I was a kid.
[0] well if you disregard travel time, then the sailing ships would be the kings
[1] relevant: the X-59, and the Boom
Busses and trains both crush aircraft from a physics standpoint assuming similar occupancy. Though of course with very low occupancy per cabin things can shift.
This kind of Orwellian double speak is amazing. Lack of tax leaves too low prices for the consumer!
If you really feel that this tax is important, you can always tax yourself! Anyone you can persuade can join you, voluntarily. Just estimate the tax you owe (through this as of now not yet enacted tax) and send a cheque to the national treasury, with "Gift" as memo. They will take it!
I hope this voluntary taxation idea catches on.
The point of the tax is to tie the costs of externalities (pollution, climate change, etc.) directly to the usage.
Not taxing fuel means the population as a whole winds up subsidizing the air travelers and their impact on the country.
Main factor for journeys within Germany though is the lack of competition for DB. Compare Lufthansa prices on MUC-TXL vs. STR-FMO.
I mean, I would pay airline-level prices for an autonomous electric air drone taxi from my house in Seattle to my destination in Chicago, and as crazy as that sounds, it still might be more realistic than what you're asking for.
how are these comparable
If US had high speed rail I would have a different answer, but it doesnt
The 10 hour over-night doesn't "waste" any time - you're eating and sleeping those hours regardless.
* For people exact height of 160cm
For example, a fairly recent British coach is 2.73m wide, but a German ICE is 2.85m wide, and a Danish/Swedish passenger coach is 2.97m wide.
The difference is noticeable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_gauge
(Coach widths taken from searching "<Country> railway coach Wikipedia" and finding an infobox with the width.)