Hacker News Reader

Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

As someone coming from a country (Italy) with nationalised railway I always found the trains in the UK to be pretty great.

Sure, you have a few delays but it's eons better than what I had in my country. I never understood why people were complaining about trains in the UK.

Italy added a private offering some time ago, which I personally never tried, but my friends back home always praise them for working - unlike Trenitalia.

It's sad the government imposed lockdown killed another industry - but I certainly won't rejoice for this nationalisation.

View on HN

Not sure when you last traveled by train in Italy.

Yes, it was shite a decade ago. But all my journeys by train in Italy have been great in the last five years.

My sample size is certainly limited though. About two to three long distance journeys by train/year in that country. But still. A decade ago there were always delays and serious hiccups. No more.

Trains were clean and on time. Mind you, this is long distance. I.e. Milano–Firenze.

I guess the private company, Italo, may be responsible indirectly for this as they generated pressure to up their ante on Trenitalia?

Your mileage with short distance train travel in Italy may differ. I do not have enough experience to hold an opinion there.

In any case, it's much better than in my home country, Germany. Everything is a joke here when it comes to long distance rail travel. Punctuality, service, offering, price, ergonomics (planning, ticket purchase, app).

I travel long distance every two weeks, I feel the pain every time. Literally every 2nd time the train is late by at least 20mins.

Best experience in Europe for train travel to me seems to be France btw.

Italo is lovely. They got the ticket sales right, which has been really hard for the rigid former railway monopolies. It is nice onboard, too. Actually, I chose Italo over Trenitalia the last time just because of the nicer ticket sales system.

With Italo, I could buy tickets well in advance using PayPal, all in English. A lot nicer than some monopolies using some local credit card processing gateways with missing translations and connections.

I've ridden trains in Italy during a few different vacations. The local trains were hit and miss, but the long distance trains were pretty good.

All over the EU, the biggest issues I've had with train service always seem to be strike related.

The trains in the UK seem ok in terms of the number of services and reliability, but they're so expensive. It's almost always cheaper to fly or rent a car than it is to use the train for anything approaching long distance.

Yes this is the problem. Using the train is often a non-option. What’s costs £25 fuel will cost £70 for a rail ticket and often take longer if you are not going between major cities. It’s even worse if there are multiple people. I would love to commute on the train (use your time more effectively, lower CO2, less stress) but it’s just too costly as it is.

> What’s costs £25 fuel will cost £70 for a rail ticket

Where are you planning on parking when you get there though?

I'd rather pay quadruple for a ticket to London, than drive into London and then try to park a car. I can't imagine driving into a city - seems insane.

If visiting a city centre location then trains are great. If you need to get to a place near a city then trains are the worst, at least airports tend to be outside of the city near the arterial routes.

I am originally from the outskirts of Glasgow and now live on the outskirts of London. For my partner and I to get to my parents house by train takes about the same time (assuming all 4 changes go according to plan), costs 6x as much and is far less flexible than driving. We tend to stop at a cheap hotel midway so we can set off after I finish work.

One trick to driving into London is finding a parking space at a station outside town and continuing on TfL services. E.g. if you are coming from the M40 park at Hillingdon Station.

But often the reverse is true - if your meeting isn't in the middle of London, it's much easier to drive directly to the place than get there by changing trains. This applies even more if your destination is a smaller place.

They couldn't agree more. [1][2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190912051032/https://www.stand...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210225224745/https://metro.co....

It's very strange. In the UK you often pay a fortune to sit on a nearly empty train. This doesn't even seem like pricing optimized for profit, let alone general carbon reduction across all modes of transport.

And it's often cheaper to buy 2/3 separate tickets, for stops along the way of a long journey, than just simply buying straight from A to B.

This is to profit-maximise.

Under the rail franchise agreement during the bid process, the terms might mandate that journeys from A to B cost £10, and that journeys from B to C cost £5. There might be no obligation to price travel from A to D via B & C at a particular cost, so a rail operator might make that more expensive.

It’s silly from the consumer perspective, but it makes sense for the rail operators to do this in order to maximise profits.

Thanks for the explanation. I had the wrong idea that it could be due to, for example, if A->B belonged to a different provider than B->C, providers not reaching an agreement on what % to take each, for the journey from A->C - hence increasing the overall cost for covering demands from both.

No, there's long been a centralised system to attribute the costs to different companies (IIRC, the system is ultimately the descendant of what the British Rail regions and later sectors used to split fare revenue between them).

There's no negotiations between the companies here, though they could ask the regulator (the ORR) to intervene if they believed the algorithm gave unfair results.

No problem! You are right that it’s silly though, you shouldn’t have to split your ticket to get the lowest cost.

In real terms the main reason is to protect commuters and capacity - as a theoretical made-up example during the bid process they might be aware that lots of people travel from Milton Keynes to London so the council wants to put a cap on increases for that route. They might also still have lots of capacity on the route from Banbury to Milton Keynes on a morning, so that is priced much lower than Banbury to London. So if you go Banbury -> Milton Keynes you might get a “discount” for not a lot of people using the line, and travelling from Milton Keynes -> London you get the rate that’s protected for commuters, but if you go between Banbury and London then part of the route is already at capacity and there is less discount on the rate.

Because it isn't.

The pricing, timetables and services were basically all centrally controlled. The train operators put in requests to change them, then the government (or Network Rail or whoever they delegated the power to) would approve/deny them. Since they're sharing access to the underlying infrastructure, they can't do what they want.

Additionally, there are many trains that are unprofitable but the operators are required by law to run them for public interest reasons. When they designed the franchising system, they tried to "balance" each franchise so it had roughly the same number of profitable and unprofitable routes.

The idea that our existing franchising system was anything remotely resembling free market is absurd. Then on top of that, because decision making and control was distributed amongst 40 or so different corporate entities, trying to make a change to the ticketing system was damn near impossible.

If anything, this new concession-like system will likely be more competitive, even if the government is acting as an intermediary.

>The idea that our existing franchising system was anything remotely resembling free market is absurd.

As was the idea that this was even possible.

It was never set up to impose market discipline on the rail providers. It was set up to be a profitable investment. So Richard Branson could (as he put it), print money.

Prices fell with privatization (and efficiency went up).

The ownership structure doesn't matter. The UK has lots of publicly-owned and privately-owned transport systems that work well. The problem has been management. This is unlikely to change that.

I live somewhere in the UK that already has publicly-owned rail. Not as bad as the South-East, but it is still bad. I have no real idea how...but they manage it. EDIT: it actually hasn't transitioned yet...so we will see.

I drive to work because it's cheaper to pay for car insurance, road tax and diesel fuel than it is to purchase a season train ticket, not to mention it takes less time to get to work and the commute itself is more comfortable. UK trains are not a sane alternative to driving. Until the Gov steps in and fixes that only people who absolutely much use trains will continue to do so. With ever so popular and becoming the norm remote working, the train service companies are in for a big surprise.

EDIT: Also I wouldn't call UK trains reliable. I see a lot of stations having a fleet of coaches ready or sometimes in use because the trains are out of service. That's very poor.

My experience was exactly the opposite - nicer stations, high speed rail and vastly cheaper prices.

Please, do let us swap trenitalia for southern rail. I'm not such a fan of forking over 1/3 of a median wage for season ticket on a train that is delayed every other day.

UK trains are really variable.

If you're going from most major cities to London you get a newish train, on a fastish route. If you're going between major hubs you're probably going to have a nice experience.

But the local trains, the short trip commuter trains, can be very old and very very busy. People pay huge amounts of money to be crammed into old, slow, smelly, trains and there's not enough seating so they have to stand.

The carriage supply operates on a "trickle down" model. The new trains get used for London and those routes. The trains that are replaced by the new trains get sent to the South East and South West, who send their old trains to the Midlands, who send their old trains to the North, who send their old trains to Wales. Some of the carriages are really rough.

I'm really curious as to what route you were on, and also have to assume you've never had to ride the commuter trains.

I've had to commute by rail since 2014, I now have to head out half an hour earlier than at the start, purely to account for consistent 5-10 minute delays.

Atleast once a month the train is packed beyond standing room.

Several times I've had to say fuck it and use the slower, further away tram to have any hope of reaching the office.

And if your train is cancelled (dozen plus times a year) station staff are fucking useless and annoyed you interrupted their chinwag to ask how to get home.

on other hand I am amazed how good are Italian trains ehen I travel there- they are fast, cheap and go almost everywhere :)

Then travel more man. Trenitalia is pretty competent for whats out there. They even have boats to move entire train carriages with the passengers inside to islands? That's pretty cool! Here in Spain we have RENFE, and they are pretty good overall, but pricey.

I know that many lines run at deficit so they have to compensate with the ones that don't, but they recently launched AVLO as a low-cost service in response for OUIGO and private competitors coming to Spain, so there was probably ways to make it cheaper...

As an Italian living in Spain for a long while, I can say that 10 years ago the difference was abysmal in favor of Renfe and now the gap it's smaller (due to Renfe not keeping up) but I still think the average Spain's train station and service is better than Italy's. I can still see (refurbished for the 3rd time) trains from ~25years ago operating in Italy nowadays.

>I can still see (refurbished for the 3rd time) trains from ~25years ago operating in Italy nowadays.

If that's the problem, then do not try to use polish railways. You can still find non-modernized EN57 from 60s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKP_class_EN57

Long distance trains can be no better tho...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/973...

I don't see why that's a problem. Airplanes have a lifespan of 30 years.

OK, it's 2021 already, sometimes I forget, so we are probably already north of 30 years. Anyway as I said they have been refurbished and they are OK, at least on the comfort side (AC and heating, sits quality). I hope they are the same on the safety and mechanical side...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com