The train that shrunk France and Western Europe
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Even before the quarantine made everyone reconsider why the hell they were also confining themselves to Paris, wealthy and mobile Parisians saw the opportunity to make Bordeaux home and commute when they needed to. I credit that almost entirely with the arrival of the two-hour TGV. It's as if three hours was too much time, and two hours was the magical threshold that made living between the two cities feasible.
Now it is teeming with Parisian opportunists, and I totally understand why. Paris has been crowded, polluted, and unreasonably expensive, and Bordeaux was quite literally the opposite: laid back yet sophisticated, beautifully framed along the Garonne river, and with easy access to nature and the ocean. But now with the sudden influx of Parisians, there is some malaise among the Bordelais that the city has fundamentally changed not only in demographics, but in cost and culture.
The before and after effects are palpable. I saw Bordeaux before the boom started. In 2016/2017, it was sleepy and still cleaning the blackened grime off the building façades. The rents and cost of living reflected a city still growing, but the city itself has long been wealthy and home to a UNESCO world heritage site. Now there are cranes everywhere. New developments are cropping up around the city, and the costs of rents and living have soared. It even feels louder. The housing stock is depleted because the newcomers have purchased everything. That's not all bad for landholders and property owners, but it really sucks if you're just trying to make your way into the market, let alone a student trying to rent something.
A part of me feels like it's a lost treasure that's now been overrun by the same people who make living in Paris so exasperating. I guess this is the nature of change, and I attribute it almost entirely to the TGV line. French life will always be centralized in Paris, and so without these high-speed lines, there is little reason to think Bordeaux would have grown so much if not for the reduced travel time.
However, the city has been developing heavily before that and Parisians who wanted a nicer place to spend their quarantine have plenty of other places to go to, either in the west part of the country or the south.
In my opinion what needs to be done to further decentralize the country away from paris is to improve the connection between the other cities, eg Bordeaux Marseille is 6h by train!
But yes
So it's easy to see that the effect on the receiving city can be quite pronounced.
Suddenly, your swimming pool in Provence was 3 hours away from central Paris, with cheap tickets if you started early.
In the words of Roy from The IT Crowd:
> People, what a bunch of bastards.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZHLkTHuPJs&t=52s
:)
Ruffec is about 2/3rds of the way between Paris and Bordeaux. The TGV that goes from Paris to Bordeaux used to have a stop in Ruffec. Not any more, because they had to build a completely new line for the last leg of the trip, that goes through the countryside.
In fact there are now ZERO direct trains from Paris to Ruffec; to get there you need to change trains at Poitiers, which can be complicated if you're old or you have lots of luggage. The train from Poitiers to Ruffec is a regional one that stops everywhere. Going from Paris to Ruffec used to take less than 2 hours and now takes at least 3.
So high speed train isn't about helping transform urbanites into country people; it's about moving urbanites around.
Brilliant observation.
Now it's not possible anymore because the new line avoids the towns.
To this day, if you want to travel between south-east and south-west france, you can go straight through using intercity trains (which takes 6h between Marseilles and Bordeaux) or through Paris on the TGV (which… also takes 6h).
The distance between Marseilles and Bordeaux is about 650km, about the same as Paris - Bordeaux and significantly shorter than Paris - Marseilles (800km), both of which are about 3h TGV from Paris (resp. 2:30 for Bordeaux and 3:30 for Marseilles).
But at least it opens up France to people from Paris and London (region), the two biggest cities of Western Europe.
Is it really the 'historical and technocratic notion' which influenced it, or just the raw fact that it is the hub of the country, the place from or to which most people want to travel?
Sure, that fact may itself have been determined by all kinds of historical and/or technocratic notions, but I see no reason why the TGV builders need to have been musing on history.
The former, concentrating state power in Paris, and limiting (or even outright suppressing) the importance and influence of the rest of the country (especially the southern half) has been a constant theme since the Bourbons: they underwent the project of moving france from a decentralised feudal state to a centralised absolute monarchy.
This theme of centralisation of power remained a constant until very late in the 20th century e.g. regional languages remained pretty actively suppressed until the 50s (Loi Deixonne which allowed some of them to be taught at all). Even then that allowance remained limited until the 80s at the earliest.
To this day, france has signed but not ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
> I see no reason why the TGV builders need to have been musing on history.
Because even if they had considered the idea (which they probably had not) it would have been shot down as completely useless by pollies.
This is a great call, and it should be noted that the same pattern has also been adopted in Spain, with the nation's hub in Madrid and the spokes in regional capitals. The notable exception is Spain's stretches of the Mediterranean corridor, which is a part of the trans-european transport network. Still, notably these stretches do not add further connections through Barcelona.
And OFC the Basque Country being a industrial powerhouse makes Spain overall a more balanced country than France.
Consider ICE, the German equivalent to the TGV. Germany is not centralized, so you find ICE connections all over the place.
But few are as good or as high speed on the whole track as the ones coming out of Paris. Here, centrality made it easier to build and expand a high speed net that is much less piecemeal.
In Germany, you can go with ICE from any midrange town to another. And yet, only a handful of sections are 300kph
Do not head down here to Spain, because you'll get a mountainous nightmare.
This is a series of railway maps of Europe from the 1870s through 2000. Local routes eventually in-filled decentralised waypoints, but the main lines and high-speed (TGV) lines continue to operate with Paris as a major hub.
https://europeanrailroads.blogs.wm.edu/maps-and-graphs/railw...
This proved problematic for France during the world wars, when the railroads improved the capacity of invading forces to focus in on the capital whilst defenders were unable to mobilise between other points other than by travellling through the (variously: under-attack or occupied) central hub.
I'm not sure how true this is when you factor in getting to and from the airport, or if you for some unaccountable reason want to bring anything larger than a laptop bag with you.
By high speed rail the same trip costs around 400, takes 12 hours and in most cases you have to transfer somewhere in Paris from one station to another by metro.
There's simply no point in this. And there is no incentive for the rail companies in making this work. They fill up all their high-speed seats for in-country travel already so why bother making good deals for international through travelers? Better sell the same seat on the journey several times for a local commuter than once for long distance.
For national travel you have a point, sure. In Europe national air travel is really rare. Even the biggest countries use their rail links for that. But on a European scale rail is not working at all.
So now the fast track is used once per hour for a TGV (Thalys). Besides that it's used by the same slow trains that used the regular track before, because nobody wants to invest in another fast train since the Fyra disaster.
It's been a huge failure.
We drive from our home in DK to Hamburg, loaded our car on the train (8:45 PM after having dinner). Slept comfortably in a cabin for the night. Drove off at Vienna the next morning from the train off to Salzburg.
It was a joy to
1. Not worry about packing light to lug around all the stuff in a airport, or to worry about checking in luggages. We have a 2 year-old. So, these things are a source of stress. We just packed everything we wanted in the trunk of our own car.
2. Have our car with us during the trip so that we got the freedom to go wherever we wanted to and not have to rent a car in Austria.
3. Pay less. The cost of the train ticket can be seen also as including what would’ve been a night stay at a hotel.
4. Sleep comfortably. No driving over night or sitting in a cramped airline seat.
I will happily pay extra for such car train trips. It’s a pity they very few.
Didn't consider car trains yet, there might be a trip coming up next year where this might fit really well. Just the other direction, Munich to Hirtshals. When a train, over night, can cut the German leg to Hamburg out that would be cool!
The train shakes a lot (possibly only a problem of older cars/rails that is not present in richer Western Europe) and wakes me up. On some stretches of the track my head is lower than my feet, and even if the tilt is slight, it makes falling asleep hard. Whenever we arrive at a station, sharp white-bluish artificial light penetrates the curtains and a loud, long announcement for passengers wakes me up.
I can manage about 2-3 hours of tired sleep in such conditions and the next day I zone out regularly until I get into a real bed.
But yes, these days I have both, so I might try the next time. I only found a good mask in 2018, though, and I had it imported from the U.S., it had to go through the customs. IDK why, but locally available masks are mediocre.
Probably for the same reason you mentioned – they are hardly used by anyone in Europe, whereas overnight flights are very common in the US – think West to East coast, for example.
Also, see my other comment just above on the plugs. And mind sharing which mask did you buy?
However it's not the noise. A plane rarely has turbulence - you can board a plane at midnight in Singapore, put the bed back after a nightcap about 2am singapore time, get a good 8 hours, and wake for an early breakfast, with no disturbance as everyone else is either asleep or sat in their seat.
On a sleeper from say London to Aberdeen you are woken by various stops and the noise on the platform (Crewe, Preston, Carlisle), and then again by shunting and banging at Edinburgh as trains are coupled and decoupled.
That's because you haven't tried the wax+cotton ones - or if you did, not the good ones. You just should not feel them, at all. Like they don't exist. My personal favorite are Mighty Plugs (https://mightyplugs.com). I tried all different ones but nothing comes close.
Timetable and ticket booking link for one of the first Wien-Paris trips: https://fahrplan.oebb.at/webapp/?language=de_DE&storageRecon...
If we in the US magically changed all the technology from Europe's or Japan's rail system with ours, but not the people running them and their culture, in Europe and Japan they'd have their now crappy trains on crappy tracks to dilapidated stations running on time and the US would have its now super-advanced trains running late and missing stops. If we changed the people instead but not the equipment, the US would start running its trains on time and Europe's and Japan's would run late.
Think of that next time someone tries to solve a social problem like the environment with technology. If I had to pick one, I'd take a culture of stewardship over technological solutions any day. I'd rather have both, but regarding living sustainably, American culture needs fixing, not technology. Our technological innovations exacerbate our cultural problems because technology augments the values of the people and culture wielding it. In the US, that means waste.
Move towards the east, and there's also dilapidated trains to talk about.
I'm not going to judge whether the complaints are a reflection of some objective truth. It could be that the outliers are more visible.
There was a bar with beer on tap and whilst traveling with 300km/h, you would lean on the bar, standing, and enjoy the (for that time) incredible speed.
Never used it again, we enjoyed the freedom of the car too much.
Only thing maybe cooler was standing on an original GWR platform when a diesel InterCity 125 HST went through at speed.
More recently took the Hikari from Tokyo to Kyoto and back on my JR Pass which was a blast.
[0] http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2017/12/how-time-can-ben...
All those things are self imposed, and they are strangely only enforced on airplanes.
Like the 300+ lives aboard a train are worth nothing
Planes are much more sensible to all of those potential threat. That is why we ended up with such drastic security. Although I have to say, in a lot of places, security is way more relaxed. If you travel from the E.U to the E.U you have way less check and queue time.
This was attempted on the TGV during the terrorist wave of the mid-90s in France but, fortunately, it did not detonate.
That being said, I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs.
Nope.
And I really don’t want to live in a country where boarding a train is as painful as boarding a plane. Millions of people are using train to commute, adding security checks would totally kill the train.
I think what many people seem to be missing is that you don't need to kill 3000 people. If you kill 1000, spread out across 10 cities, you're going to cause a lot of fear and chaos.
Trains are left to themselves, there is no surveillance.
Ill intentioned people can change dynamic of the attack, instead of needing 2 planes and use them as kinetic projectiles against buildings, they'd need an armed guy on 10 trains
The end result in terms of human losses is the same because a guy with a gun can go through each and every compartment and off everybody before the police would even know what's going on.
Multiply that scenario by 10 or 20 or 30 and you have the worst national tragedy in the history of the nation.
I am thankful because if people on HN can't conceptualize that, then the odds of some goatfuc*er in the mountains of Afghanistan doing it are even lower....but still people thought they could not conceptualize the attacks happened in the 2000s. Everybody remembers the first, but there were also London and Madrid.
Also, your hypothesis is that a single person could kill everybody on a train, but in reality they'd get assaulted with suitcases, the doors between carriages would be barricaded, somebody would pull the emergency brake and people would flee, etc. This was actually tried once in France, and the attacker managed to kill zero (0) people before they were overpowered.
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20201217-thalys-train-gun...
The amount of people per square foot surface, the fact that there is no way out and the fact that police cannot rush to the scene
There would be zero risk for the terrorist. There are no baggage check, and no one makes sure the owners of each luggage are on board. In theory each suitcase should have a label with the owner's name and address, but that too is not checked (and even if it was it would be the easiest thing to fake).
I just don't understand why it doesn't happen. I think the main reason is because there are very few actual terrorists, contrary to what everyone wants us to believe.
Pre 2001, there was more than 10 hijack almost every year.
Should the first car of a TGV explode at 350+ km/h I think it would work as a terror attack.
Yet, although train security is nil, it never happens [0]. I'm not sure why. My first guess is there are not that many terrorists. We probably could ease the security on planes with few ill effects.
[0] There has been train attacks or hijacks but no bombs AFAIK.
I didn't get checked for metal objects etc, but there is no point. You can't get to the cab from the train anyway. And the impact of knifings/shootings is the same as in a busy shopping centre. We don't do metal detections there on every visitor.
So the main terrorism risk really relevant to it being a mode of transport rather than any other crowded place, is bombing and thus derailment of the entire train. And that is something that is checked for, at least here in Spain.
It is true that it is "checked" in Spain; I experienced it this summer while going from Sevilla to Cordoba. However the check is (in my experience) quite superficial; also, as it creates long lines of people that get upset that they may miss their train, it is expedited and many things do not in fact pass through the X-ray machine. And finally, it is not checked on all trains; we were checked from Sevilla to Cordoba (the train was going all the way up to Barcelona) but there were no checks on the return leg.
So, while it would be trivial to bring bad things aboard a train in France, it seems that it wouldn't be difficult in Spain either.
This is a really strange take - security on airplanes was introduced due to hijackings, in which case the airplane can be used as a very lethal weapon to attack most anything, really. You are much more limited in what damage you can cause by hijacking a train, since trains are limited by where the tracks go. Worst you can do is probably derail the train by going to fast in a curve and potentially hurt people living near the curve, or worse, slam into a station and cause damage in and around it. Still, a fraction of what a hijacked airplane can do in terms of damage.
There are 100-200 people on a train, some have 300.
No security at all. You only need an ill intentioned guy with a gun and it's over for all those on board. They'd move across compartments and off everybody.
Multiply that by the amount of trains which travel everyday and you'd get a pretty chilling scenario.
Put a bomb in a TGV, and you'll kill people nearby, but not in the other wagons. So it's not a particularly attractive target compared to say, a shopping mall.
Terrorists planned to derail one in the 1990s by destroying rails, they were thwarted beforehand. But even if they succeeded, TGV is designed specifically to resist derailment and not fold on itself like a regular train, so it's unlikely most passengers would have been killed.
So I stand by what I said and I claim once again that you only need one ill intentioned person with a firearm and everybody on board is basically done, they'd move across compartments and off everybody.
There are thousands of trains which all have that same vulnerability, so a coordinated attack would have a toll much higher than everything seen before.
People have a blindspot, they'd claim that such attack would never take place because the "production value" is not the same as explosive attacks.
I don't think hoping that ill intentioned people hold "production value" as rigorous parameter when planning an attack is a valuable strategy
It's not like a mall
> There is no multiplier effect
Your multiplier effect is the initial factor advantage of how easy it is to pack a firearm on a train.
A depressed kid could do it, easy target to recruit online, and doesn't even need firearm training considering that it would be as easy as shooting sardines in a barrel given the physical space in a train.
So basically an ill intentioned group would need to recruit 20 depressed kids , put them on 20 different trains departing at approximately the same time and they'd cause a toll in excess of everything seen before
A train is not a mall.
What if the train stops? This can be done by any personell quickly. Doors and windows of trains can be opened everywhere, they are designed that way. Stop the train, intercom and tell people to leave the train and the situation is over.
Chances are this will turn out differently than you assume
Not sure about that. In 2015 they did a demo of a new TGV line and the train derailed just by going a little too fast in a curve [0]. It killed eleven people on board and injured 42 others.
The number of dead and injured is so low because there were very few people on board. If a bomb exploded on the first car of a TGV the number of casualties would be high.
Is it, though? There are a lot of trains where you can't even get to the locomotive while the train is moving, and I couldn't find any train accident in modern history[1] where all passengers died.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...
The TSA does not seem very effective [1], and terrorism via plane hasn't killed very many people since 9/11. Cockpits are re-inforced, passengers will fight back. It's hard to highjack a plane.
Abolishing the TSA in airports and slightly increasing vaccination requirements would be a net win/win for life and liberty.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...
One important aspect is that China needs capacity: It has a very large population and also has two peak periods during which literally hundreds of millions of people want to travel during the same week. I think they've concluded that planes alone are never going to handle that demand and that trains offer a much larger capacity.
But hight speed rail down either coast, why not? You'd share the same infrastructure as slower commuter trains, have large towns from N to S to stop by, and surely there's a market for people who want to travel in comfort from Seattle to SF.
On the East Coast you’d need to exercise eminent domain to make it work. As it so happens, a high speed line would run through a lot of seriously wealthy neighborhoods. These are the wealthiest and most politically-connected areas of the country.
On the West Coast, you have A LOT of big mountains and rugged terrain, the likes of which you don’t see in the Northern European plain, and also, some other seriously wealthy (and NIMBY) neighborhoods. There are a lot of people who resisted building the BART through the peninsula and Marin. Caltrain’s already got people suiciding on it all the time, and they needed to build the high speed line through it. The commuter infrastructure isn’t really there.
Well, you may get your NY to LA route because the midwest area is quietly building out their passenger rail capacity for their own needs and desires. Everything they are doing is discrete, incremental projects that have an attainable budget and timeline. They are using normal rolling stock so speeds are limited to 110mph, but they are laying the groundwork to allow for faster speeds later on.
To be fair, it was Chicago to LA ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Los_Angeles_(train)
There is a market, if only they could figure out how to serve it.
PS - if they added the ability to take your car along with you it would open up an even larger market.
I was approached about a job in the US recently but I declined.
Even a lot of the more recent European high speed routes were built primarily for political reasons and carry little actual traffic. The high speed line between France and Spain has just 2 trains a day.
In the US, the distances are so much greater and the population density so much lower that it just doesn't make sense apart from a few small regions.
Covet the Urban Transport networks, the pedestrian-friendly cities, the mixed use suburban districts, yes; but long distance high speed rail is one thing that just doesn't translate.
The population density in several parts of the country is the same as Europe, Spain for example.
According to Google, the road distance between New York and San Francisco is 4670.6 km. The travel time means that the train will take 15 hours (12 hours + 3 hours difference between the time zones).
This means that the average velocity of the train has to be 311 km/h.
At least in Europe, there exist few train lines that even allow such speed (only in France and Spain):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail#/media/File:Hi...
We're stuck with limited capacity, grossly different rail systems in each country.. I was on an international chartered train from the Netherlands to Germany recently and while the locomotive supported both systems, they had to change drivers at the border.
As a result intra-EU train travel is far more expensive and more hassle than air travel. With air a low-fare airline culture has developed, with rail this can never happen without massive infrastructure investment. All the seats are already full so why reduce their cost?
So rail in Europe is more of a national phenomenon. It's not like it's a serious alternative to flying. Most countries in Europe are too small to make national flights a thing so rail is mostly used within countries.