Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Problem is you need a destination that is 7-9 hours away. There are not a lot of those. Europe doing away with customs inspections at all the borders made it possible.

View on HN

Nah, you can conveniently stop the train in the night so that it arrives at breakfast time.

Edit: There is also a system called "Through coach" or Kurswagen in German, where you enter a coach in the evening, it starts as part of one train, and then, during the night, the train stops and it becomes part of another train - possibly with another change, and in the morning it arrives at your booked destination. (Of course you check the number of the coach well before you enter it, heh.)

Yup, the Nightjet from Munich to Florence stopped for a while in Austria when we were travelling a few years ago.

That's probably because they split the train and/or attach another half train from another departure.

From my experience my Nightjet left Düsseldorf to Salzburg or Vienna. It split in Nurnberg and merge with the train from Berlin (which also had 2 destinations).

IME they also let it sit around for a while. We were stationary for more than an hour. Sadly still not long enough to make my 05:30AM arrival time bearable for a night owl like me.

It also conveniently gets the train out the way of rush hour commuter traffic.

In theory it would work well in the US as many major cities are spread roughly that distance from one another.

There are a few city pairs that are linked by Amtrak overnight, for example Pittsburgh->Chicago, Buffalo->Chicago, Omaha->Denver, Flagstaff->LA, Salt Lake City -> Reno.

As an aside, I used Amtrak to travel from Rochester, NY to NYC and it was totally weird when I asked people in Rochester (which has a population of about 200,000) for the train station. Most people literally didn't know where the train station of their city was! And it turned out to be as small as a regional rail or European sub-urb S-train stop. Only two platforms with no people on it.

For context: medium sized European city will have anything from 12-30 platforms - and often several main train stations and several dozen local ones in the city. E.g. Brussels, Paris or Berlin have several huge stations.

12-30 is a bit overkill.

Kraków, Poland with 780k inhabitants has "only" 10

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/50.06881/19.94768&laye...

A terminus needs at least double the amount of platforms to sustain the throughput of a regular station.

Rochester Native here, and yep: I've never been to the rail station. Probably because the frequent, short flights to NYC are relatively cheap. Checking amtrak vs delta for a random date in january, your options are a 7-9 hour train ride for $54 in coach, or a 1hour flight for $64 in economy basic.]

It will never work in the US until cities get their public transportation act together. Even if I can get to my parent's city, I can't get to their house (without walking many km). Since there isn't good transit (and never has been), they need a place with plenty of space to store a car, and there is no downside to getting way out where transit is hard to serve since transit doesn't serve the types of places they go anyway.

The fix is not easy. But building taj mahal type trains isn't helpful. (simplistic trains might be - using the lower cost to build more is useful). Those of you watching local politics need to scream "NO EXTRAS, only the cheap reliable system done fast" at all local meetings to counter those asking for beauty.

Sleepers often wait outside cities for a couple of hours if the journey is under 7 hours

In 70s - 80s there was custom inspections in every european country, and it's still the case in Switzerland and UK.

Pre-Brexit, those in the UK were immigration controls, to be precise. In Switzerland they are in fact customs controls (and not typically immigration controls barring Schengen restrictions such as those during COVID-19).

Even Pre-Brexit the UK was not part of Schengen, so you had border controls even when inbound from a EU country. On the other hand, Switzerland joined Schengen some years ago, yet you still have border controls as they are not in a free-trade/customs agreement.

Right. My point was that the UK controls were (and are through the transition period) immigration and not customs controls while the Swiss ones are customs and not regularly immigration controls.

Before the EU you had the border inspection on departure/before going to sleep/

Or you gave your passport to the conductor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com