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Comment by te_chris | Hacker News Reader

The thing that I find most humourous about British Rail - as a non brit, former colonial subject, who lives in London - is that they literally invented high speed rail, then lost the ultimate prize to the French (i.e. France ran ahead with it, electrified it then rolled it out. I find this incredibly amusing as there's still a certain portion of English society with a huge chip on their shoulders vis a vis France).

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There's another humorous aspect about the British rail system: It really is mostly state owned and operated.

Just not (mostly) the British government (though the UK government also regularly has to step in to take over for failing operating companies...)

E.g. the Dutch, German, Italian, French, Quebec (via Keolis; a joint venture between French owned SNCF and a Quebec pension fund), Hong Kong governments all have significant ownership in UK rail franchises. Only a handful of franchises are run by purely privately owned operating companies.

It also runs with a third to a quarter of the relative subsidy compared to France and Germany, so maybe the UK is getting the better end of the bargain!

Also, these are only the train operating companies, the rail and infrastructure itself is owned by Network Rail, which is state owned (and by the UK, not France!)

Having used the rail systems elsewhere, I'd happily see an increase of subsidies far more extensive than that if it got us a rail system more fit for purpose.

Alas, no government since privatisation has wanted to increase subsidy, hence the continual above-inflation fare rises (though admittedly smaller than under BR!).

If by “the UK” you’re including the citizenry who use the rail network, then we are quite clearly not getting any kind of bargain whatsoever.

Not really, the TGV network makes a profit and the fares are about half the price of our shit trains. Also their most expensive line has about 50 bridges and tunnels through much more rugged landscape than the midlands and cost 5 times less per km than HS2.

It's purely semantics, but I think in this case it would be the "Quebecois" government. A side note, does anybody know what the name for that form of a country/culture/language is? ex: French for France or Italian for Italy.

Demonym

Differences in geography, making it harder to effectively lay down HS tracks? Further complicated by old rights of way, surrounded by built up environment, especially in the cities?

It's not like the French TGV/Thalys or the German ICE would run HS right into and out of the cities either.

Maybe in China and Japan, but hey, they are different.

Also as a non Brit who lives in the UK, I've always felt that the massive chip on the shoulder was regarding the Germans not the French but maybe it's just the people I've met

We like to make fun of the French, but it's mostly a joke.

Mostly the English love to hear jokes against themselves.

Brits only have chips on their shoulder about two things: Countries they've won battles against, and countries they've lost battles against.

No chips against Andorra, Belarus, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Guatemala, Ivory Coast ,Kyrgyzstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mali, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Mongolia, Paraguay, Sao Tome and Principe, Sweden, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Vatican City, then?

So there's a (small) list on Wikipedia of "countries the UK has not fought"? Do they have a shorter list than anyone else?

(Am Brit)

I can't think of a country that would be even close.

Previous world powers came to pre-eminence when less of the world was known and later world powers are nuclear and haven't really directly invaded, fought or attacked like the British did.

This map brings it home more than most https://i.redd.it/75nqzhfp42r21.png and it only covers a single instance for many of those countries, the British (English first, rest of UK later) and the French spent most of a millennia beating each other up when they had no one else to fight - I mean Churchill gave orders to shoot French military if necessary months before the end of WW2 (between VE and VJ day) during the Levant Crisis.

Usually anywhere with a favourable tax regime for non-doms we're pretty ok with from a government relations perspective.

The UK makes fun of basically all Western European countries, the problem is about half of the population think it’s a joke, and half think it’s insightful analysis.

all the European trains lost out to the Chinese trains

https://www.railway-technology.com/features/feature-top-ten-...

Am not impressed with the Transrapid-derivative they listed first. In Germany it failed for a reason. In Shanghai it's operating at a loss, has impractical cabin layout for the purpose (Airport shuttle, luggage/baggage) and hasn't been expanded as initially planned. Why is that?

Let's see how the Japanese do with their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCMaglev on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen in a few years.

It's not awful if you'd need to build new rail links into the city centre anyway (e.g., due to capacity) and you have little onward long-distance travel. Tokyo–Osaka may well be a viable route for that, but there certainly aren't many.

(In the Shanghai case it's practically laughable, because it's such a short journey the top speed is practically irrelevant: it spends half its time accelerating/braking)

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