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Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that.

To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300.

Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against something like a bus or shared car. The economics of trains should be able to be better than just about anything.

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Coming from Asia, I have always been shocked at how expensive trains are in Europe vs. here and how flights are cheaper. I would suspect someone is profiteering in the value chain... probably the construction and maintenance industries which tend to be the usual means of political graft... And that cost gets charged to passengers.

It's a lose lose situation... Bad for environment, bad for people, bad for economic efficiency. The whole point of a rail network in a nation's economy is to be an economic force multiplier, not to be a profiteering entity

> To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300.

That's because you are comparing standard railway companies with low-cost airlines. I believe that it would also cost around $300 to fly from London to Barcelona and back with British Airways or Iberia.

The era of low-cost railway companies in Europe is just beginning: FlixTrain[1] (Germany), OUIGO[2] (France), RegioJet[3], and LeoExpress[4] (both Central Europe) are now all offering long-distance train tickets from 10€.

[1] https://www.flixtrain.com/

[2] https://en.oui.sncf/en/ouigo/fares

[3] https://www.regiojet.com/services/services-on-board-of-train...

[4] https://www.leoexpress.com/en/services/our-fleet

Jet fuel is tax free, energy and diesel for trains is not. https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/

Wrong explanation. Jets still use more energy dollars per person flying and you're not taking account of subsidies for trains, though there are others for planes as well.

Aren't EU trains electrified yet?

Yes, most of them are electrified.

I see a lot of good explanations for the status quo, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned the more fundamental problem that you simply can't overtake a train. Airplanes can fly relatively independently of each other, compared to trains who have to share tracks and more limited train stations.

This means you just can't compete on the level that budget airlines can. Spirit, RyanAir, etc: they helped bring down prices across the industry. Flying used to be $300, but after relentless competition, even the more expensive airlines are now far cheaper than they used to be.

The inching down of leg room, saving pennies on drinks and food, paying for extra luggage; that kind of brutal cost saving just doesn't happen without merciless competition. And it's comparatively impossible to start a RyanRail: you can't just dump your trains in between the other ones. It's an inherently hard field to compete in. Even in the UK and NL, where different private companies compete, they do so by winning bids for sections of tracks, and exclusive access to those tracks. That's not the same as airlines. If only one airline could fly LDN->BCN, it wouldn't be $25. (case in point: KLM & SLM had a monopoly on flights Netherlands <-> Suriname for a while. The day they lost it, prices dropped >50%).

Most of the other things (salary expenses, track upkeep, etc) would follow if they could compete harder. We could have said the same about flying two decades ago; nobody would have predicted a $25 LDN->BCN, yet here we are.

(this is just my theory, and it's hard to conclusively disprove, therefore quite a weak one..)

Airlines do one hop, and revenue optimise by having the aircraft near-full on that hop, which entails an aggressive pricing model especially since there's usually direct competitors showing up in the same flight search. They also make a lot of ancillary revenue from charging you another $30 for your luggage.

Long distance trains usually have several intermediate stages they can sell tickets on, often with no public transport competition, and there's really no incentive for them to price-cut on a London-Barcelona route involving several other companies and very little customer interest.

This is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I'm not sure what the fix is - having multiple companies sharing the same track seem dubious but maybe that's answer. Either that or let a bunch of companies put down redundant lines.

EU intervention. It worked for getting rid of roaming prices for mobile phone carriers in Europe, and that also requires cooperation between different carriers. Why wouldn't something like that be possible for rail?

EU intervention solves nothing. Forcing roaming prices down just pushed up other tariffs, which didn't matter to the Commission because their ideological goal is to unify Europe into a single country, not get people the best mobile deals. It was only possible at all because the phone industry already built all the infrastructure for roaming on it's own.

The problem is lack of demand. The article posits there is huge untapped demand for night trains but there isn't. Rail companies can and do run services on each others tracks but rail lines are frequently at capacity, timetabling wise, so it's not always easy to just drop in and run extra trains in the same way many airports have free slots for extra planes. And of course airlines are still mostly national too.

Indeed it's best kept away from the EU. It has a habit of suspending transport and trading rights as part of unrelated political disputes with its neighbors in order to pressure them to obey Brussels. If you want train connections to be mysteriously severed because of some dispute with the UK or Switzerland over fishing or trade unions then asking the EU to organise it is the right way to go. If you'd like train timetables to be set taking into account what the railways can do, leave it to the private sector and get governments out of the way.

> Forcing roaming prices down just pushed up other tariffs

I pay less than twenty euros a month for 10 GiB of data throughout all of Europe. What are you talking about?

The phone companies lost a lot of money when roaming tariffs were forced down and that was reflected in tariffs for the majority of people who never roam. There are studies about this. Did you think that in the relatively competitive mobile market price controls can be enforced with no impact at all? It was a form of wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

> The phone companies lost a lot of money when roaming tariffs were forced down and that was reflected in tariffs for the majority of people who never roam. There are studies about this.

Then show those studies, because as I'm pointing out, my "tarifs" have not increased in the slightest.

There's some discussion on Wikipedia!

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

In Norway, prices increased by 66% when RLAH was introduced.[20] The same argument was being used by Danish operators. In Denmark several operators increased monthly subscription prices by 10–20 DKK.[21]

Swedish operator Comviq removed roaming services on its plan “Fastpris mini” 15 June 2017.[22] The operator Hallon is doing the same to its smallest plan “LITEN” starting 1 October 2017.[23] In Denmark, operator Telmore introduced "TELMORE Home" without roaming services, even when travelling to countries outside the EEA.[24] Vodafone UK introduced "UK-only plans" that disallow roaming altogether.[25] This is possible because, while the Regulation disallows operators from charging extra for roaming when available, it does not force them to make roaming available in the first place.

Of course, price rises are very unpopular. History gives us lots of experience of price controls to draw on. The effects of price controls are often subtle and hard to anticipate. For instance, unavailability of new services for which the investment can no longer be justified, cutting R&D budgets, elimination of services to some customer segments entirely and so on.

If you look at KPN in the Netherlands, the cost of the price controls is estimated at being 100M euros or more.

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/nl/Documents/...

Their yearly net profit in 2018 was about 292M euro. So price controls aren't enough to cripple these businesses, they can absorb the hit. But obviously forcing people to spend money on something isn't free, even if the effects are obfuscated.

Because politics. Trains are very national in the EU and even after this many years that still gets in the way of effective train based transportation. Plus heavy rail is flat out expensive to put down and maintain and the cars are and engines themselves all contribute the initial cost of establishing a line as well as maintenance. Then the kicker compared to airline travel, you cannot simply reroute a train. It is stuck to its rail line, as in you cannot simply move a train to service a route that needs it now.

You could tax the airline industry into the ground but it will not fix the reality that trains simply are not flexible, similar to how light rail in cities is not ideal for the majority of cities that employ it; for many city transportation systems light rail eats away a disproportionate amount of the budget impacting bus availability as well - it is a money pit

A previous financial times article [0] explains some of the political problems but far too many still do not understand the logistical side of rail lines.

[0]https://www.ft.com/content/e77dc48e-7894-11e8-8e67-1e1a0846c...

Privatized trains are worse, in the UK they've just given the go ahead for a $140 billion high speed rail project, HS2.

A decade ago we build HS1, a 67 mile track between London and the Channel Tunnel, for a total of $7.6 billion ($112m / mile).

HS2 is longer but its 330 miles of tracks will cost $400m / mile.

The project costs make absolutely no sense: London is a special weird place in the UK where everything you build is twice as expensive as in the rest of the country. Considering most of HS1 was in London and most of HS2 is outside of London, this budget makes absolutely no sense.

What makes the whole thing even more insane is that the endpoints are not connected to the rest of the infrastructure. You have a 30 minute trip between HS1 and HS2. So if you're travelling from Birmingham to Paris you'll have to switch trains in London. For the money they're spending on this it's crazy that you're not getting it.

My understanding is that basically HS2 is massively over-specced compared to HS1. It wants high throughput and extremely high speed (80-100mph faster than HS1). I guess you could probably shave a few tens of billions off just by slowing the line down a bit - using ballast rather than concrete slab and such.

See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51415590

The only other thing I'd add is that Euston is easily within walking distance of St Pancras. But given all this already extraordinary cost it seems like you might as well connect St Pancras and Euston HS lines and have the odd Eurostar service run from Birmingham.

The Euston - St Pancras thing is OK if you're commuting for work distance wise - it's just adding 15 mins to your journey when it should be 30 seconds.

For travellers who don't know London, who have to lug around baggage and small children it's a massive pain.

It's well worth the effort to connect it. It would already be way better even if you had to switch train in one station.

From what I understand HS2 was planned to become very similar to the tube with 18 trains per hour. This is more that one every 4 minutes. The trains would also run very fast. This allows for caring lots of passengers, but it also is very complex to achieve and accounts for a lot of the costs (as well as buying property).

Also inflation had to be taken into account when comparing projects that are decades apart.

So without knowing much about the details, it might well be that the costs are plausible to what was proposed.

>From what I understand HS2 was planned to become very similar to the tube with 18 trains per hour.

The comparison of HS2 with 18 paths per hour in each direction, on an overground rail system stretching over 320 miles, running at high speed (theoretical uppper speed limit of 250mph), with the London Underground, is laughable. I could not find any references to your claim in the official documents.

The project was never about speed, but rather about increasing capacity. It was packaged and sold to the voters as shaving off some time to get from A to B, largely due to politrickery. The aim is to free up commuter, regional and freight capacity on existing lines ─ which will also have an overall impact on roads and motorway nework used by freight carriers.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

I meant to compare mainly from a user perspective. If a train runs every 4 mins and takes a bit more than an hour to get to it's destination that's very similar to the tube experience. Very different to a typical train experience where you have to turn up exactly in time or wait another 30 mins for the next train.

The point I was trying to make was that a comparison to HS1 without accounting for the train frequency is probably not fair.

What does HS2 have to do with private rail?

Trains are privatized in the UK. Maybe this project is being built with public money but it will eventually be privatized.

Trains are privatised, not the tracks.

> Because politics. Trains are very national in the EU

Ah, of course, it's the 'free market' that's the solution. I mean it's complete shit in the UK, where I live, but am sure that's just an outlier. The U.S. healthcare industry is a strong proof that the private model for essential services works flawlessly and now there's Reds again running in the election campaigning for 'Medicare for All'. Outrageous.

Sarcasm can be a useful tool at times but it is very much over used these days. You'll likely find your point better received if you are just straightforward with it.

Trains in the UK got a lot better after privatisation, and of course we're discussing how they're not competitive against the airline industry which is significantly more free market again. So your point isn't landing. Yes. Globalised and freer markets are a solution to this. In fact it's what the article advocates, more or less.

> Trains in the UK got a lot better after privatisation,

I don't expect my point to be landing with free market Regonomists, but seriously? I mean even trains in my native country, which is generally fairly undeveloped are a lot more dependable. Trains in the UK are regularly late, cancelled, broken due to the slightest change in weather that's fairly typical of the UK, overcrowded, slow etc. etc.

Maybe it was even worse before, but if this is what 'a lot better' looks like, then the private industry has a long way to go.

I think there's plenty of room for private industry, but am not sure essential public transportation is one of them.

German trains are a lot better run, (have family there presently, so can speak to that) and while they're technically owned by a private company, the state is the single shareholder there.

Perhaps the problem was that in the UK, like in the US, there's a strong desire to underfund and underpower public programs to be able to then point to them and say how they 'don't work' - the same has been the case for the NHS as well, which btw now has huge contracts with private companies like Virgin Health, who sue and waste public funds if they don't get a contract rather than conclude that their offering simply wasn't good enough in the 'free market'.

That's besides the point that there's no such thing as a 'free market' for most people, because most of us aren't of means enough to simply pack up and leave if there's no good train/ISP... choices in our area for example, nor do most of us have the ability to start our own.

Yes, rail in the UK was significantly worse before.

If you look at ridership graphs for the UK they were in decline for decades. There was no investment because governments thought the railways had no future. Once privatised, ridership turned around and started growing again. Now there's lots of investment again. Usage figures show the story. UK rail is btw no worse than Germany. Look at data, not anecdotes. Or if you must use anecdotes:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/...

Railways have trouble with reliability in most countries that aren't Switzerland (which has 2x large subsidies).

You seem to believe only ideological people could possibly believe rail is better privatised. It's the other way around. Look at the quote from the leader of one of the rail unions in the UK. He praised privatisation. It's ideology to deny the turnaround so clear in the data.

Light rail may be more expensive than a bus, but it also tends to provides a higher comfort level (in terms of vibration/acceleration).

I flew from Amsterdam to Dublin for €19. I then took the train from Dublin to Cork for ... €60. The distance from Amsterdam to Dublin is about 750km, three times as long as Dublin-Cork

(you can also take the bus for €15 or some such, but last time I did that I got rather carsick, so I figured I'd take the train, not knowing how expensive it was!)

You can go from one side of The Netherlands from the other for about €20 on the train and you can have unlimited train travel for €350 a month (and considerably less for a given route).

Yes, but we're kind of unique in our standardized national public transport system. Undoubtedly our small size as a country helps there.

Well, Ireland is just 6.5 million people, not exactly a large country, and I think Germany's DB is more or less similar to the Dutch NS?

I lived in the UK for a while, and things are really complex there with a patchwork of private companies. Either way, I stopped complaining about the Dutch trains very shortly after moving there :-)

We have one transport card that works for all public transport providers. You cannot book trains in advance - all distances have a fixed price (not counting international trains). In many other countries there are regional commuter trains like that, but with national trains the prices vary on how early you book, like with planes.

The thing is the UK trains used to be much better. Then the Tories privatized them and we ended up with this mess of private companies owning different regions of the country. Apparently that leads to competition because if taking a train from the City to Luton is too expensive they can just take a train from Leeds to Glasgow.

It's not just the cost. Coming from India, I'm used to sleeping my way in any 6+ hour journey. In fact, for business travel, we prefer overnight trains or sleeper buses (yes, sleeper buses) because you don't need to book an unnecessary stay. I'm not going to compare INR vs EUR, but this mode of travel is pretty affordable and common to the mass market here.

European trains are way more expensive AND I have to sit my way through long hours with not even pushback. Ouch my back hurts even thinking about it. Sleeper berths are extremely rare and even more expensive.

I just don't get how my fellow european humans consider this mode of travel plausible.

Well firstly, you don't need to do any work on the terrain that the plane operates on. Meanwhile a train will require contiguous tracks. That might not be a huge hurdle if you need to get between two places with flat land between them, but add water, mountains, forests and whatnot, and that makes it much harder to get a train from one place to another. An airplane just needs two airstrips.

But once a track is built, it doesn’t take much maintenance to keep it running for decades or even a century.

There are places in this world that can’t even manage to repair streets, but have trains operating daily with little trouble. It seems like costs would come down at some point in first world nations, or it’d be worthwhile to subsidize the creation of railways more significantly. I know governments do try to to some extent, but riding trains is expensive almost everywhere. It doesn’t make sense to be cheaper than even roads, which need constant maintenance, intense infrastructure, and cleanup.

It takes quite a lot of maintenance unfortunately.

Rails need constant work to keep them in good condition. So does the ballast. Signalling involves miles of cables, lights, radio towers and motors that also degrade. The stations need staff, gates, ticket kiosks, displays.

A frequent need is to add capacity. Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty. It's essentially just about scaling air traffic control systems. Adding capacity in a rail line can involve major earthworks, rebuilding bridges, totally replacing the signalling and so on.

Roads are easier to maintain and pay for themselves without subsidies just via fuel tax. There's no station infrastructure. No stations means no expensive employees. People drive cars themselves and cars can be driven safely even on quite degraded roads. Signalling is entirely local and so doesn't require much cabling, on high speed routes (motorways) there's usually little or no signalling required. Laying tarmac is much cheaper than laying rails. Finally of the few people needed to maintain and run the roads, many are private sector and un-unionized e.g. gas station employees. The government employees only do repairs and so don't have much strike power. Contrast to the railways which in Europe are frequently shut down for weeks at a time by strikes of drivers or crew.

The capital investment in trains is worth it for only one reason - it's the highest capacity form of transport in seats per hour. It's got nothing to do with greenness which is at any rate a very ambiguous case to make when you consider all the factors. Trains can be less green than planes in many ordinary situations.

> Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty

Adding capacity to airports, however, is much harder. Heathrow is at 98% capacity, for example, and it's difficult to add a new airport, or even new runway, for London. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport , which discusses the major earthworks, etc. involved.

> Roads are easier to maintain and pay for themselves without subsidies just via fuel tax.

In the US fuel taxes only cover about 25% of "State/Local Road Spending", says https://taxfoundation.org/statelocal-road-spending-covered-u... .

> Finally of the few people needed to maintain and run the roads, many are private sector and un-unionized e.g. gas station employees

That's in the US, right? Fuel-tanker drivers in Portugal went on strike last year - https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-portugal-strike-fuel/portu... .

Fuel-tanker drivers in France went on strike 3 years ago - https://www.thelocal.fr/20170531/french-petrol-stations-begi... .

> It's got nothing to do with greenness which is at any rate a very ambiguous case to make when you consider all the factors. Trains can be less green than planes in many ordinary situations.

Care to elaborate?

For many ordinary situations, train CO2 production is 1/2 or even less than planes, on a per-passenger basis. Quoting https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49349566 "Train virtually always comes out better than plane, often by a lot. A journey from London to Madrid would emit 43kg (95lb) of CO2 per passenger by train, but 118kg by plane (or 265kg if the non-CO2 emissions are included), according to EcoPassenger."

Of course, London-Madrid by train is about 24 hours, or 2.5 hours by flight.

And of course, London-NYC isn't a train trip away, and there are unusual situations like Bergen, Norway—Aberdeen, United Kingdom where there are direct flights while Google Maps just laughs at me for asking for a train routing.

But I'm curious about the ordinary cases where flights are more green than train - that is, where both are reasonable options to consider.

>Adding capacity to airports, however, is much harder.

Is that somehow different for train stations?

... no? I mean, of course not - it costs money to maintain and upgrade train stations as well.

But I am confused about your comment. There are two distinct statements. X = "Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty. It's essentially just about scaling air traffic control systems." and Y = "Rails need constant work to keep them in good condition".

I don't believe X is correct, and I gave a counter-example about adding capacity to London.

But that doesn't mean I think Y must necessarily also be invalid. While it seems you interpret my comment to mean that Y is correct? And I don't understand how one can draw that inference. So I don't understand the point of your comment.

And I don't really understand the point of talking about scaling airports when the issue was about scaling the number of airplanes that can move between places, since that's an universal problem with it comes to any method of transportation.

If you want to move more buses, you need more bus terminals. If you want to move more planes, you need more airports. If you need to move more trains, you need more train stations.

The point about scaling air traffic and scaling trains is that you need far less infrastructure to get a plane from place to place. You don't actually even need a huge, expensive airport to do so, since there are much smaller ones and even just tiny airstrips. And unlike trains, once they leave, they have pretty much unlimited room. How many tracks would a train station need in order to accomodate the same number of passengers leaving from Heathrow?

The point is that most people don't want to simply go to some arbitrary small airport or tiny airstrip.

Again, thu2111's statement was:

> "Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty. It's essentially just about scaling air traffic control systems."

ATC systems are not the only relevant part of infrastructure - airports are also important.

You write "you need far less infrastructure". Sure. But airports are also needed for scaling, even if small/tiny airstrips are included, and my point was that airports were omitted from the infrastructure cost.

You write "since there are much smaller ones ... tiny airstrips". That doesn't solve London's capacity problem, which is why a capacity question must include the cost of airports.

You ask "How many tracks would a train station need in order to accomodate the same number of passengers leaving from Heathrow?"

Heathrow has about 80 million passengers per year says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathrow_Airport .

London Waterloo has about 94 million passengers per year says https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1668/estimates-of-statio... , with 24 platforms says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Waterloo_station . Looking at the aerial photo confirms there are 24 platforms, and it appears from Google Maps' satellite view that they are served by 7 rail lines, splitting into 24 platforms.

So, 7 tracks are enough to accommodate the same number of passengers leaving from Heathrow.

However, that answer doesn't make a whit of difference to my point, which is that if ATC is important cost facto to bring up when discussion air transit capacity, then airports are also an important cost factor.

Heathrow is a rare case. Very few airports max out for such long periods whereas being at capacity is pretty journal for rail lines. That's why the argument for HS2 is capacity oriented.

My point though is that the capacity of the sky is rather irrelevant since most people are interested in the capacity across the entire trip, not just the air part.

All of the biggest airports have had extensive and expensive work done to increase capacity. SFO is about 90% of capacity, if I read https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/profiles/medi... right. And it's worse if the weather is bad.

That's why I argue that you cannot ignore airport capacity in your estimates.

We can look at the inter-war period to see how capacity calculations had to consider more than just the sky. Pan-Am famously ran flying boats in their transoceanic lines. "Their advantage lay in using water instead of expensive land-based runways, making them the basis for international airlines in the interwar period." (Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_boat ).

Indeed, floatplanes are still important in bush flying for the same reason.

I don't know what "pretty journal" means. None of the dictionary definitions seem to make sense. I know the rail lines serving my city are not anywhere near capacity. The train between Santa Fe (my former home city) and ABQ is also nowhere near capacity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_Rail_Runner_Express ). A couple of years ago I took the train from San Diego to ABQ. It was also not at capacity.

Sorry, "pretty journal" was just a bad autocorrect I didn't spot. It was meant to say "pretty normal".

The problem with rail is the capacity issues affect the entire line. If one station has busy platforms and the rest are all quiet, you can't put additional trains on that line (unless it's a terminal station and there's a turning circle before that station and you are willing to run trains that don't go there). Also if one line shares fast and slow trains, that kills capacity.

One airport can share fast and slow planes, and capacity problems at one airport don't affect other airports.

I guess I'm writing mostly from the British perspective. My comment about fuel taxes paying for the roads is (or was) true for the UK.

Since privatisation at the start of the 1990s decades of decline in ridership turned around and now more people use the railways than ever. In the UK there are lines everywhere that are not only at capacity but drastically over-capacity, e.g. there's a train departing from Euston on a Friday night that carries more than 2x the number of people it was designed for. Despite that Crossrail - one of the biggest civil engineering projects in Europe - isn't even open yet, the country just committed to an even more eyewateringly expensive new rail line that won't be open for over a decade. Primarily justified on capacity grounds.

Heathrow expansion is also very expensive of course. But there's really only one airport in the entire country that has such severe capacity issues, and the expansion is difficult primarily because it's surrounded on all sides by urban development like motorways and villages that have to be demolished and relocated. In the case of the motorway, it's also carrying such large capacity that it can't actually be closed for extended periods, so it has to be moved whilst "live".

I think the USA has a different set of issues because the railways are used mostly for cargo rather than passengers. The large distances involved means air travel is the only feasible mode of transport for many routes, and Americans take internal flights all the time whereas for most Brits I know, internal travel is almost always car or train. Business people take internal flights, and even then only quite rarely. I've traveled Acela and indeed it also wasn't heavily used.

Ahh. I was thinking that "journal" was either some new slang or a region term that I hadn't heard of. Thanks for the clarification.

Regarding "kills capacity", aren't passing loops meant to help that exact scenario? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_loop has many details. At the very least, it's not as dire as you describe.

I know little about the UK rail system -- or any country's rail system, for that matter. I do know your rail enthusiasts despise the Beeching Cuts, and that just saying that term is a hot button for some.

There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult. The railways are surrounded on all sides, almost everywhere, by urban development. Homes and businesses have to be relocated, earthworks have to be done, and it all has to be broken into tiny pieces done in 4-5 hour spans in the middle of the night or over Christmas, because the railway is live and too economically important to shut down for long periods of time. Doing any kind of upgrades at all on a live line is horrifingly expensive and slow. That's why HS2 is a completely new railway. The UK has reached the limit of adding capacity to the West Coast Main Line; further upgrades are possible in theory but can't solve the fundamental issue of the same rails being shared by fast and slow trains.

As for Beeching, it's not quite that simple. The roughly 25-35% of the country that's pretty left wing hate the Beeching cuts for the same reasons they hate all government cuts.

Despite my negative view on trains above, I'm actually a train enthusiast. I love taking the train. I love reading about how they work. There was a story on HN some days ago where a rail engineer talked in detail about how the high-speed rail record was set, I absolutely loved reading about it. My girlfriend had to tear me away from the screen. And I've often wondered about how to really scale up the railways in a big way.

In a way, railways are kind of the ultimate nerd dream. An ideal railway is a huge, smoothly operating and very safe high performance machine, entirely coordinated by engineers and planners. I think perhaps that's why it's such a political hot-button issue: a nationalised railway represents a very tangible instance of massive state planning and control. Decentralising it is difficult for various logistical and technical reasons, not only the politics of it.

Despite that the Beeching cuts have never been rolled back, even under the 3 terms of Labour government. Many of those lines made no sense, especially in the context of continually declining ridership and the ever rising traffic on the roads. It'd have been a very irrational government that continued ploughing money into rail instead of building motorways given the expressed preferences of the population at the time.

For unknown reasons that are still debated today (but which align perfectly with privatisation), the decades-long decline in train usage reversed and so now new lines are needed again. But they're different routes to the ones closed by Beeching. Those were mostly small rural lines.

> There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult.

While trains are touted as very efficient modes of transportation, and generally beloved by nerds, I'm skeptical, largely because train tracks are so under-utilized.

Train tracks take up as much space as many multi-lane highways. On highways, dozens of cars go by every minute. But a train car only passes through at best a few times an hour. I suspect that if you took one mile of train track and one mile of a highway with the same overall footprint, far more people/goods will move through the highway-mile every hour than the train-mile.

Don't have data to back this up, just a hunch. But if it's true, then even though trains are far more energy efficient than cars, they're likely far less real-estate efficient.

(Also, I do suspect that this is not always true. A heavily trafficked tunnel in/out of Manhattan's Penn Station is probably more efficient real-estate wise than an equivalent tunnel. But that's a very extreme case with super high densities).

> especially in the context of continually declining ridership and the ever rising traffic on the roads

One point of "unease" (to quote the Wikipedia entry) is that Marples was pro-road; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#cite_note-50

> A more critical interpretation is that after Macmillan named Marples as Minister of Transport, Britain’s transport policy swerved to the right, and became motivated by the kind of conflict of interest that Thompson notes can be loosely regarded as a form of corruption (9). Actually, in this case it may well have been a rather tight form of corruption. At the time that he was named minister, Marples owned 64,000 of the 80,000 shares of Marples Ridgeway, a civil engineering firm that specialised in building roads"

I as an ill-informed outsider cannot disambiguate how much of the shift to roads was from "expressed preferences" and how much was from "a form of corruption".

You wrote "nationalised railway represents a very tangible instance of massive state planning and control".

But .. so is a national road system. Your country spends billions on roads, which is pretty massive.

To add, I recall that the Netherlands also followed the post-war system of adding more highways/promoting cars, so I know it's not simply a corruption issue.

In the 1970s, protests against the increasing number of children deaths caused by cars resulted in the more pro-cycling infrastructure they have now, rather than prioritizing cars first, second, and third like they did in my country (the US) and, I believe, the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic... for background.

I can't help but also note that post-war UK manufactured cars, while the Netherlands did not.

It's very dependent on obviously the nature of the power source used to power the trains, how loaded the trains are, how fast they go (so route dependent etc).

The BBC can't really be trusted to get complex topics right. They're just quoting some activist organisation there. Note that the figure is "per passenger" but that turns to assume fully loaded vehicles. The airline industry is much better at keeping seats full than train operators are. A nearly empty train will be much worse for the environment than a full plane.

As for trucker strikes, yes, but that happened mostly because they were allowed to blockade refineries. In the UK at least laws have changed since and there are mitigations in place. If you look at the rule changes around unions coming up there, they're motivated by rail strikes because those are a common occurrence whereas strikes taking it out roads are not.

I used to work in rail engineering. Our projects were all reliant on explicit government subsidiary. We as a company basically watched the national transport budget for the next 12 months to predict whether we'd make a profit in the coming year.

There are a few factors to rail that make it unsuitable for long distance.

First, there is 10s of 1000s of miles of track, all of which has to be laid, maintained, controlled and signalled. It has to be inspected and repaired and monitored and upgraded. Plus, you can't go directly anywhere. You can't take a train to Barcelona from London. You have to go via Dover for the tunnel, then lille because its a city and there's not track not via lille.

The air maintains itself and you can fly basically direct to wherever.

Plus a shit tonne of political interference (here in the UK we have stations basically next to each other no one will close and HS2 take a huge diversion to avoid politically sensitive areas, and that's just in one nation, try getting them to agree on train safety standards). For an airport, you basically just need a mile of tarmac and a tin shed. I don't think you even have to have radar anymore, just transponder tracking...

Plus, as you point out, the plan can carry 7 loads of people in the same time that the train can carry 1. So all things being equal (which they're not) you'd pay only 1/7th...

Plus, the costs for the Barcelona London route are basically fixed. The fact no one wants to make that journey in the winter just means the assets are unused. If no one wants to fly London to Barcelona in November, you can just switch the route and take people to their ski holidays instead. So planes are more versitile and has much higher utilisation rates than most trains.

Trains make sense but only over shorter distances. Anything over about 200 miles and planes win.

200 miles is way too short for the break-even point.

If you take into account the time overhead for airplanes, the break-even point is about 4 hours. For modern high-speed rail (speeds of over 200 mph), that's about 800 miles (NYC to Chicago, or Paris to Vienna). Most European high-speed rail lines outside France and Spain don't operate at that speed yet, but it's not uncommon for newly-built high-speed lines (which is why it's common in China).

4 hours at 200mph is 800 miles. But no train does that over distance. Even the Japanese, with dedicated infrastructure for bullet trains and minimal political issues stop every few hundred km because they're at a city people want to get on or off at...

The fastest Beijing - Shanghai trains take 4:18 to travel 809 miles.

The maximum speed that trains operate at in regular commercial service is 350 km/h (217 mph), so average speeds of nearly 200 mph are possible nowadays.

And that's in spite of most railway lines being subsidised and most airlines not. I guess if you think of the stuff involved going London - Barcelona, for flying it's a plane with maybe 10 crew, and some tarmac at either end for runways, for train it's 100s of miles of track, goodness knows how many staff along it, plus the train of course.

The UKs new HS2 line is looking at costing £750m per mile while airspace is free.

I’ll add to all the other comments good explainations that as trains use tracks, it all depends on where are all the other trains and when.

So fast trains (at least in France that you should have cross to go to Barcelona) must have very specific time tables and get along with local trains, when airplanes don’t and can go straight.

It adds constraint.

(Ok, I know planes have routes too, but it’s much easyier to do timetables)

Last I looked into this: maintenance of rail >> maintenance of runways. There's a lot of manpower in rail maintenance, which is costly in Europe.

But subsidies also play a role. France subsidizes rail as much as air travel is subsidized, and there rail is much more affordable.

And what about the price of time? Going from e.g. Denmark to Spain or Italy isn't cheap in terms of time..

> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that.

I recently watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA which covered much of the cost breakdowns - especially for American passenger rail. TL;DR:

* Labor is expensive. That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train. The faster speed of an equivalent plane ride means you're not paying pilots for as long, or allows them to make more trips.

* Rail is expensive. You have to buy the land between point A and point B. You have to build the rails, bridges, crossing guards, with lots of labor to build and maintain it all, with plenty of regulatory burdens to work through (ecological, safety, eminent domain, ...). The sky between airports, on the other hand, is free.

I've seen some suggestions that the sweet spot for trains is in medium length routes ("too far to drive, too near to fly"), with short haul routes being dominated by road vehicles (cars, taxis, buses) and long haul routes being dominated by airplanes (fast, don't need to buy/lease/maintain rails across thousands of miles)

> That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train.

A driver, a ticket inspector, and someone to run the café? Three people? Shared amongst a few hundred passengers? Is that really a significant cost?

If they're each pulling down $100k/year (this is slightly bellow amtrack average!) or ~$50/hour in total comp, 3x50x10 = $1500 right there for none of the support staff - managers, staff back in the control rooms switching signals, staff on call for maintainence issues - and none of the associated costs of putting the staff up in hotel rooms on account of being 10 hours away from home when their shift is over, etc. Spread it out over 300 riders and that's perhaps only $5 for the trip and your 1:100 employee:rider staffing ratio. Not so bad!

Of course, there are also 44 hour routes. Or less popular routes without 300 passengers that are run for political reasons, or because they feed passengers into the more popular routes. Or the popular routes when run off-peak, so passengers can still use the route even if they may occasionally need some flexibility in when they travel. The video suggests amtrack employs 1 person per 4 riders, not per 100! For a route half the distance (DC to New York - 3.5-5 hours) they attribute $25/ticket to labor costs.

You've got stories like this where Japan is keeping open a train station for a single passenger - do you think that route has 300 people on it there? And this is in a country where trains are popular and some routes are packed to the brim in the middle of rush hour: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/01/japan-keeps-t...

> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive

They’re more expensive because they’re better.

No, they're more expensive because they have higher infrastructure costs. Building and maintaining hundreds of kilometers of track costs a lot.

Prices are set by what the market supports due to the value the product provides, not what the product costs to deliver.

Yes and no. The market has to at a minimum cover the cost of operation otherwise businesses will stop operating.

Not true, many industries don't return profit and are yet subsidised by the government out of necessity anyway, eg: farming.

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