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Comment by PopeDotNinja | Hacker News Reader

I recently took a round trip flight from Edinburgh to London and back. If I could do it over again, I would have just taken the train.

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I had been doing a similar trip (100km from London) very often in the past and always took the train, over the years the journey time has gone down to a little over 5 hours. I took a flight once two years ago and when you add all the waiting, security, getting to and from the airport it works out almost exactly the same, except you're more tired and can't take as many suitcases. Now, imagine we had fast trains in the uk.

I was furious when I read about the government subsidy/bail-out of FlyBe last month.

Many of their routes are very easily done by train -- Birmingham to Glasgow, London to Exeter, London to Newquay, London to Newcastle.

Faster trains would make more places in Scotland a reasonable travel time away from London and Birmingham.

London to X sure

Southampton to Leeds, Manchester to Cornwall, and of course Belfast to anywhere isn’t easy or fast by train

The poor state of the UK railways is due to a massive lack of investment for most of the second half of the twentieth century. A huge wasted opportunity where the costs of the closures were never properly considered.

Don’t conflate the majority of the beeching closures with a lack of investment. The problem was during the 80s when Japan and France were building new high speed railways, we weren’t.

We’re now trying to catch up with HS2, which is sorely needed to free existing tracks for more and reliable services, but we need to use that as a springboard for 50 years of investment. HS2, npr, midland connect, then high speed Birmingham to Bristol/Cardiff, Cambridge, and Leeds-Newcastle-Edinburgh-Glasgow

The key is to ensure we have schemes ready to go once construction winds up on the first parts, so the skills and equipment aren’t lost.

Curiuos how this changes for you if say you're carrying 2 pieces of large luggage.

Reasonable point. I'm usually traveling to Europe with carry-on or, at most, one piece of check-in wheeled luggage. Even dealing with the single big piece can be a bit of a pain on a crowded train and going beyond that would be pretty inconvenient.

I don't like checking luggage on planes for various reasons but the system is at least set up to accommodate it straightforwardly.

Thanks. I’m in a situation where I might be doing this trip annually with a large amount of luggage so I wanted a local’s take.

It takes 5 hours to go 100km? what route is that?

He goes from a city 100km from London, to Edinburgh.

e.g. Cambridge to Edinburgh (I haven't checked the connection time for this).

Was obviously including the 2 hour walks at both ends in the total travel time.

I took that train a long while ago. Walked to the train with our luggage. Got on. Sat in wide seats for 4.5 hours and then got off in London and walked to our hotel.

If when California finishes it's high speed rail line all they need to do for it to be a success is keep the TSA far far away from it.

I'd be quite happy to take the train if it wasn't routinely twice as expensive. Even allowing for the absurd cost of parking at Edinburgh airport.

That line became incredibly cheap since LNER took over from Virgin. I've taken several next-day return trips from London to Edinburgh for less than £100 return.

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