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Comment by jschwartzi | Hacker News Reader

In the US I would take a sleeper train from Seattle to Chicago instead of a plane provided the sleeper train runs 180 mph on average. That would put me in Chicago in about 10-12 hours, meaning I could get to Union Station in Seattle, get on the train, sleep a full night, wake up, eat breakfast, and disembark in Chicago.

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.

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"airfare-level prices"? In Germany and Austria my experience was that flying was generally cheaper than the train, and sleeper trains more expensive still.

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.

> where as a flight would have been about €50.

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.

>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.

A bit over €3 for a Berlin ABC ticket I believe.

Berlin AB ticket (for Tegel airport), EUR 2.80.

Berlin ABC ticket (for Schönefeld airport), EUR 3.40.

The joke is that airfare is way too cheap compared to the damage it causes - be it noise, exhaust gases or land usage for airport infrastructure.

In addition jet fuel in Europe is tax-free which enables these ultra low prices.

Air travel is comparable in fuel usage to trains [1]. Which surprised me a bit, as I expected much better mileage for the air travel, thanks to the exceptionally low drag of the rarified air up there as compared to wheels on rails.

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-...

That's a misleading statement. From your linked article:

"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.

Physics gets removed from the conversation when we start to view trains as endlessly more efficient than airplanes. They aren’t, and in the US part of that equation is the requirement to make passenger trains able to survive a full collision with a freight train, adding a great deal of weight and removing much of the physical advantage of low rolling resistance. Other examples are the overly prescriptive regulations for trains, which is a situation that the aeronautical industry has recently been able to make major gains on. Trains are great, but they’re not necessarily better for the environment or the users than airplanes because of their physics.

Trains are amazing when they are built for people to take. Unfortunately, trains in the US were built for industrial transport.

Trains for people have a few cars and go really fast. Trains for cargo have hundreds of cars and go really slow.

Physics is on the airplane's side [0]. The drag of rolling over rails, and of going through the dense air at ground level pressure is naturally much worse than that of flying up high for any non-trivial speeds.

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

A 3 passenger car at 25 MPG significantly beat airlines in fuel efficiency per passenger mile assuming reasonably direct routes.

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.

>In addition jet fuel in Europe is tax-free which enables these ultra low prices.

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.

> This kind of Orwellian double speak is amazing. Lack of tax leaves too low prices for the consumer!

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.

In Germany, jet fuel is untaxed, whereas train companies have to pay tax on electricity, in particular renewable energy. Also, VAT is handled differently: if you buy a flight from Germany to another country, only a portion of what you paid for your plane ticket is taxed at German VAT rate, but for train tickets, 100% of the ticket price is taxed with the German VAT rate. These are several factors that make it quite a bit harder for the railway to compete with short-distance flights.

>These are several factors that make it quite a bit harder for the railway to compete with short-distance flights.

Main factor for journeys within Germany though is the lack of competition for DB. Compare Lufthansa prices on MUC-TXL vs. STR-FMO.

Taking the night train between London and Edinburgh used to me and my partners absolute favourite way of making that journey. If you get yourself into a deep enough sleep (admittedly I didn't always manage) it can feel like magic to wake up at your destination having wasted no useful time; having not been irradiated or felt up; and not being subject to enforced retail operations.

Yeah generally I used to find a sleeping pill mandatory for sleepers, the downside being that one tends to leave at least one possession behind in the cabin the morning after.

In the US I would take a sleeper train from Seattle to Chicago instead of a plane provided the sleeper train runs 180 mph on average.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

It's not every day you see someone bemoaning the sorry state of their European rail lines compared to the US.

Not bemoaning at all, it's a matter of size, geography and topology why HSR does not make much sense in a country like Switzerland.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling

In Austria if you're traveling between big cities you're probably traveling to a neighboring country (very common to travel to Germany, Czech, Hungary, etc by rail).

Unfortunately Germany is the only neighbor with an extensive high-speed rail network that Austria has.

> Not really doable for a lot of Austria and generally the Alpine regions.

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.

TBF the Rockies are no easy passage either. Amtrak runs on the Hi-Line year round, over 2200 miles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Builder

This is a good 3-4 days of constant train travel to get to the destination. The thing I'm complaining about is that the plane is almost too fast for what I want to use it for, while the train is incredibly slow.

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.

The railway from Beijing via Xining to Lhasa in Tibet passes over the Tanggula Pass at 5,072 m (16,640 feet) above sea level (apparently the world's highest point on a railway) before dropping you at Lhasa at 3,490 m (11,975 feet) [1].

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinghai–Tibet_railway

[2] https://www.yowangdu.com/tibet-travel/tibet-train.html

I grew up in Central Europe and used the hell out of night trains. It is really one of the best ways to get around, if available.

Knowing the fate of the California HSR project, what makes you think this is realistic in any way, shape or form?

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.

I'm not an expert in large-scale civil engineering projects, and I resent the implication that I should be before I'm allowed to express any desires.

For those that don't know the route, this route is currently >40 hours, with something like 45 stops along the way. (almost every congressional district, imagine that)

Note that Montana and North Dakota, which provide most of the mileage of the route, each have just one congressional district.

I guess you are right. But those 7 stops in ND, and 12 in MT, are there really enough people there to justify those stations? Maybe have an 'express' and a regular train?

Probably. If you look at the sensitivity of passenger traffic to travel time, the graph is roughly a logistic curve with the inflection point around the 3 hour mark. On a 40-hour trip, the number of people you'd add to the train by cutting out 4 hours of stops is probably on the order of 10-100 people per trip. If those stations collectively serve more than that number of people, then you're losing people by cutting those stops.

It's a question of demand really and maybe driven by a chicken and egg problem. Trains are slow and expensive so people prefer to fly leading to a lack of demand to support both a slow every stop train and an express point to point train. Also I imagine prices would increase on an express train compared to current trains because it will be picking up less passengers from those intermediate stations. It's tough to setup a lot of different trains because tracks are afaik one per direction in most locations and lines so you're very harshly limited on the scheduling side of things.

I don't know about this route in particular, but Amtrak generally runs on freight lines. It's quite possible that the time lost to stopping to pick up a couple passengers is dwarfed by the time spent sitting on a siding waiting for freight trains to pass (I've spent many hours of my life here).

You would have to pay 1st class airfare level prices for a such a thing, maybe even more.

In Europe it is standard to have silent cabins, especially on first class.

or just dont try to get sleep for 3 hours and arrive at your destination in 3 hours?

how are these comparable

If US had high speed rail I would have a different answer, but it doesnt

I believe the OP's point is a 3-hour red-eye isn't a great travel option. But, it's a fairly common flight when traveling West-to-East in the US. He'd prefer a 10 hour trip (via train, or blimp, or anything else) if the pricing was in the same ballpark.

The 10 hour over-night doesn't "waste" any time - you're eating and sleeping those hours regardless.

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