How trains could replace planes in Europe
economist.com
economist.com
The Stuttgart 21 project will reconfigure the Stuttgart central station to create a direct line between Paris and Vienna.
Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link will build a new undersea rail tunnel between Denmark and Germany, allowing Sweden to operate night trains to Brussels.
In Switzerland, several new tunnels under the alps beginning operation this year will cut travel time to Italy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_Fixed_Link
I am from Italy that geographically is not very easy to connect to the rest of Europe because of the Alps.
Still, below a thousand kms train beats flight 100% of the time!
I travel a lot throughput Europe to meet my special other who travels a lot due to her job.
I used to fly to meet her but , pandemic aside, I discovered that traveling by train was a much better option, mainly because you're on the ground and everything works almost like you're not moving at all.
internet connection is hit and miss of course, but compared to the very tight seats on a plane with no internet at all, it seems like a moving office.
Truth is I rarely work on a train, I mainly read, but having the option and the opportunity to book a solitary seat it's such a luxury that I gladly pay the extra money.
Other benefits include: no baggage limit, no early show up routine for no reason, no security or "show your face" checks, no packed up load-in load-out lines, being able to walk away if you need to (a phone call, for example) or because you simply need to stretch a little bit, but my favourite one is night trains where you book a bunk bed, sleep and wake up at the destination. A friend of mine calls it teleportation, you are not traveling between two places, you are waking up in a new place, far from the starting point, without even noticing it.
Trains are a great way to move, especially now that they are so fast.
They aren't cheap in general, that's true, but it's worth it, especially if you compare train fares with low cost offers that are undoubtedly cheaper, but don't even include a real baggage or the option to chose your seat for free (had to pay 6 euros for a seat just two days ago flying from Barcelona)
I can't remember the last airliner that I was on that didn't have WiFi. Is WiFi uncommon in Europe?
That depend on the quality of the rail and train. I have had nice experience in Germany, but here in Sweden it is the opposite. The side-to-side movement triggers motion sickness that is only compare to really rough ocean trips, and while the noise is lower than on a plane it is also less regular and higher pitch so it can be quite hard to ignore.
The problems stems from rails and trains here being 30-50 years old and long history of poor maintenance. To make matters worse, almost no lines has redundant tracks so if there is a problem (which there often is because to the issue of maintenance), the train get replace with busses. Night trains in particular tend to have a rather terrible experience with trains that are by now around 50-70 years old. Because of the motion sickness, the handful times I tried it has resulted in me basically being sick for a full day afterward. This doesn't occur if I take a plane or drive.
I don't know if they still do that but it is certainly something that could be instituted if governments wanted it.
2004 Madrid Train Bombings:
Not to disregard your example but from my perspective it is not representative to most of travelers in the Europe.
While taking train for me was more comfortable, most of the times it is not feasible and definitely a lot longer than taking an airplane.
Especially if you live in smaller city where you don't have a major train station couple bus stations away.
Let's take, for instance, my hometown in Asturias, Spain. There's technically a train sttation... which will get someone to Madrid in about 8 hours. If someone wanted to go to Barcelona, the fastest route is still via Madrid! Going to Bilbao via the northern corridor by train is a whole 10 hours: The route is prohibitively expensive to tunnel for high speeds.
However, let's look at plane options. There's a single runway airport about an hour away with direct connections to Madrid, Barcelona, Las Palmas, Malaga, Valencia and Tenerife. Pre covid, it also had direct flights to Paris and London. The typical planes that land there aren't private jets, but just the typical narrow bodies that do short routes everywhere in the world: A319 or so.
So yes, there absolutely are plenty of cities in Europe where the train doesn't even begin to be competitive, in either price nor travel time.
Well, and that's about it. I don't care for Paris that much, there are about thousand other places I prefer visiting. Its not that exotic to Europeans compared to Americans, and Paris' painful and obvious drawbacks (its a mega tourist trap, rampant crime, french are often rude if you don't speak perfect parisian french etc.) remove a lot of its allure.
Currently we travel to nearby islands with small kids (balearic, canarias, sardinia, corsica, greek ones etc.). We travel home which is 1500km away (1:30 flight to +-nearby airport, or 15h+ multi-train galore), we travel exotic (0 options for trains).
Heck, being Swiss, we use practically 0 Swiss trains. They are super expensive even for us since we don't commute by them to work every day, and Geneva being border town literally at the edge of confederation surrounded by France has little use of rails for us. France has pretty bad rail situation in comparison - our usual way to Chamonix takes 45mins by car, and 2+h by train. Family of 4 with 2 tiny kids? Never, ever, with all necessary luggage, even for free.
You can't have cheap good reliable railway network even in dense Europe, unless its heavily subsidized. Its a pipe dream, nice one but unless they tax flights into oblivion they will remain as easier and cheaper option for most. Options will be different for rural living and different family settings obviously.
If you want to go with train from east Germany to Amsterdam you still have to go to Berlin. It still takes ~6.5hr of train ride from Berlin to Amsterdam. Where flight is ~1.5hr - of course getting through security and all it is at least 2.5hr and then depending on which side of Berlin you live transfer from your place to the airport. Which I would say does not matter because for train you still have to get to Berlin HbF. You might have direct connection to Berlin HbF but as well some people might have direct connection by bus or train to the airport.
So these small cities don't have train stations, yet they have airports?
To get from Poland to Germany or from Netherlands to UK you have to go to major city. Some towns have luck being on the way of such train and you could benefit from it but it is rather exception than rule.
Which in the end makes it basically the same as getting to the airport for most of the people.
I remember my wife (who I'd just met back then) being somewhat surprised when I told her there were no train stops nearby.
I had two airports within an hour drive though, so we managed.
well personal experience is not always representative - but anyway isn't one of the ways how trains could replace planes by increasing number of connections and speeding them up so that it does become feasible?
I've never seen any situation even remotely insecure in the years I have been taking the train regularly, either in Europe or in Asia.
Unless you conflate 'urban' train (like subways) with long distance train ? But in this case it seems like an unfair comparison : I cannot take the plane to go to work.
I do wonder how the railways justify that even people who are paying first class tickets (which are really expensive) only have, at most, a single attendent for possibly 50 passengers. First class on the airplane and you might have a ratio of 1 to 10.
In Germany, they always seem to have at least two Ticket Collectors so the chance of not having your ticket checked is very low. On many services in the UK, you could get away without a ticket travelling later in the evening when many ticket barriers are left open.
Kerosene must be taxed because it emits a lot of CO2 per flight.
Average ICE bus consumes order of magnitude less per seat than planes. The only reason planes win vs cars is that cars aren't public transport and planes are. So you divide by many more seats.
It seems like you are comparing fuel per seat for planes with fuel per vehicle for cars. At five seats, that would be equivalent to 11 l/100km, which almost all modern cars should beat. Even if you only count four seats for the car, it would still be 8.8 l/100km, which many cars can beat.
not really efficient.
I'd imagine the emissions would be infinitely greater than an electric car. For an ICE car with two people, you'd be closer.
I'm Italian, I thought "our" trains were bad, but in the UK it's much worse. Barely 40% of the network is even electrified, in 2021!
What I find particularly funny about this, it that Maggie Thatcher was a strong proponent to keeping the trains in public ownership, believing that privatising them was a bridge two far, even for her. Her successor on the other hand, they weren’t so bothered.
However the recovery of passenger number after privatisation is undeniable. While the private model wasn’t great, the previous public ownership was even worse. Hopefully our second stab at public ownership goes better, this time we have very successful models like TfL to work from.
When Sweden privatised rail traffic, it still kept the track ownership in a single entity, and train operators bid for slots on the existing rail network.
This gets you into a somewhat healthy competition between operators, hopefully (longer-term) driving down the price and driving up the quality for consumers.
Comparing air and rail, a first class train ticket between Malmö and Stockholm (most direct car route seems to be 613 km) is (with the ex-monopoly train operator) 895 SEK to 1 735 SEK , and is about 4.5h city centre to city centre.
A flight seems to be between 862 SEK (RyanAir, one carry-on luggage, 168 SEK with nothing, they say) and about 300 SEK. Listed flight time is 1h 20, airport would either be MMX or CPH (the latter has really good rail from the same rail station as the train in the previous para, taking about 21 minutes, then maybe 3-10 minutes at the airport). On the Stockholm end, you have either the fast airport train (ca 15 minutes), the slower (but cheaper) commuter train (ca 40 minutes) or airport buses (probably similar price as the commuter train, about the same speed at no traffic at all).
Total travel time for "same start, same destination", train 4h 30m, airplane maybe 3-4h. I don't, genuinely, know what "class of service" the plane would be, ut short-haul you get pretty much the same seats and you may have the middle seat unoccupied for "business".
And for reference, London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley is 645 km by car, using the same route planner
Rail should not be a for-profit business, it is a public service and a natural monopoly. 100% of the money the public pay to make a journey should go back into maintaining the network and running the trains.
I'm happy for a few execs to get their 100k+ salaries and for it to be justified by all the "hard work" and "value" they bring. But taking money from ticket sales, calling it profit and handing it to shareholders has to stop, it means the public get a dysfunctional rail service because there is no investment. Or it works, but the ticket prices are stratospheric.
The Transport for London corporation is a good example of how it should be done.
The main benefit from privatization was a significant reduction in fares combined with massive growth in availability (people take for granted things today that were huge problems then: punctuality, safety, etc.). The rail network in the UK is publicly-owned, what is private is the franchise to operate on a certain route. The lack of investment, if any exists, has come from the govt...and I am not sure there is a lack of investment either...HS2 is going to cost £100bn...£100bn is a large number (as ever, I think people mean...London and the area around me isn't getting enough, this is also false, London receives obscene amounts of investment relative to the rest of the UK).
Also, trains in Europe aren't really cheaper. Tickets are subsidised in Europe, in the UK passengers pay. The main constituency for subsidising the travel costs of wealthy commuters is...wealthy commuters. I am not sure why that idea is inherently attractive (and again, it is worth mentioning...our safety record is best in Europe, there is no real difference in punctuality, our fares are marginally higher but the ecosystem we have is far more robust).
TfL is a great example: sucks down tens of billions in public money to subsidise the wealthiest people in the country...the North-East is still missing motorways and we are spending £20bn on the Elizabeth line...okay. The cost of a fiber roll-out for the whole of the UK is less than the Elizabeth line. The problem is that this has no end because the more infrastructure you build, the more agglomeration, the more infrastructure...London had this problem in the late 19th century with slums, the solution wasn't more density (also, we had to bailout TfL twice I believe, they are not an example of the system working, tbf there isn't a lot management can do with the workforce).
TfL no longer receives any central government funding (beyond COVID money, but every aspect of public transport in the U.K. got buckets of money for that), this is despite being required to maintain a significant chunk of London surface roads and bridges. Something that councils normally receive central subsidies for.
Additionally for Crossrail, the Dft only provided £5b in direct funding. The remainder is either loans TfL will have to repay, or has come from locally collected taxes like council tax, and business rates. All of which only impact London residents and businesses.
> also, we had to bailout TfL twice I believe, they are not an example of the system working, tbf there isn't a lot management can do with the workforce
That’s hardly fair. London is the only capital city in the world where it’s public transport get zero subsidies, and costs have to be covered entirely by fare collection and advertising. The central government told people not to take public transport, then forced TfL to run a full service, despite there being 60% fewer passengers. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that isn’t going to be financially possible, despite TfL always having 6 months of emergency operating capital on hand. Additionally TfL’s status as a local authority means it can’t operate in a deficit, ever. So it can’t borrow to cover short term cash flow issues. Long story short, government rules and requirements placed TfL in a position where it was either getting a bailout, or collapsing. Nothing short of 3 years of spare operating capital, approximately £30b, would have prevented this situation.
Also worth mentioning that every other public transport operator in the U.K. also collapsed, and needed to be bailed out as well. So it’s a little unfair to single out TfL.
It would be the same story if it were the government operating the trains and private company maintaining the network: of course you're not going to get one organisation to put in more effort when it's a different organisation that sees the benefits. The big success story of privatisation is Chiltern, where there was a long-term arrangement with a single operator that took responsibility for the integrated system of trains, stations and so on. (Though it's notably also one of the few cases where there was real competition between rail lines).
> London and the area around me isn't getting enough, this is also false, London receives obscene amounts of investment relative to the rest of the UK
A smaller proportion of London tax revenue is reinvested there than anywhere else, and projects with a lower objective outside London BCR get funded while higher BCR projects in London get delayed.
> The main constituency for subsidising the travel costs of wealthy commuters is...wealthy commuters. I am not sure why that idea is inherently attractive (and again, it is worth mentioning...our safety record is best in Europe, there is no real difference in punctuality, our fares are marginally higher but the ecosystem we have is far more robust).
The amount of public subsidy going on rail is trivial compared to the amount of public subsidy that explicitly or implicitly goes to roads (such as the huge amount of public land taken out of productive use), and that's even more biased towards the wealthy and carries much bigger negative externalities (pollution, much worse safety record).
> The cost of a fiber roll-out for the whole of the UK is less than the Elizabeth line.
No it isn't, you're comparing the concrete realised costs of Crossrail with the made-up estimates for fiber rollout.
> The problem is that this has no end because the more infrastructure you build, the more agglomeration, the more infrastructure...London had this problem in the late 19th century with slums, the solution wasn't more density
Density is the solution; it's the reason why London is so much more productive and ends up subsidising the rest of the country.
I agree on the "density solutions" however. This just isn't viable, we need other solutions and getting rid of individual transport is a fantasy.
While I did meet one person who regularly flew Manchester/London he lived very close to the airport so it wasn't too much extra hassle for him. It's only 200 miles / 2 hours on the train so the flights were mostly for connecting at Heathrow to international flights. Flights tended to be more popular London/Scotland where you're looking at 4 hours on the train.
Rail has several advantages, time-wise. Airports are far from city centres and security theatre takes a lot of time. Cheap flights also tend to use smaller, more remote airports because they are cheaper to use than big hubs close to large cities.
As a European who has taken more than one 16 hour train ride where I could have taken a 2.5 hour plane trip, I really think night trains done properly could be a game changer.
If we charged $100-200 per ton of CO2, which is supposedly more than recapture would cost, that would only be about $1-2 per 50 miles. From the numbers being quoted here, it sounds like that would do very little to bring prices in line.
Either charge for all the carbon, or start harshly dropping the quotas.
Even after carbon tax, electric aircraft is still a technology in its infancy, compared to electric trains. Are you proposing that the government should spend billions of $$$ on an experimental technology when a proven alternative exists?
I'm 'commenting too fast' to reply, but show me any of your examples in flight please.
500+ miles range. Building it right now. Plus Wright Electric, Bye Aerospace’s eflyer 800, etc.
Why do people so easily and confidently claim something can’t be done?
We can? Present tense, certified, operational aircraft in service? Or do you mean that people are working on building them now and hope to have them in service at some point in the future?
And CO2 is good for plant growth, right?
It's entirely possible the externalities of having people (and goods) unproductive for longer periods of time is worse than simply getting them where they need to be.
Markets are not efficient at considering externalities at all.
Am I misunderstanding your position?
Air travel is blamed for up to 3.5% of climate impacts; it's not an insignificant contributor...
1) All people share one atmosphere 2) Well-reviewed science shows that individual decisions like taking a flight make the atmosphere less hospitable for all.
That type of problem is literally the reason the term externality was coined.
Maybe we could train more experts to avoid them needing to fly all over; buy and serve local.
A lot of efficiency options are left off the table sticking with the status quo.
When we count externalities such as the carbon footprint, trains easily beat planes.
Finally, TGV and Ryanair are not comparable experiences.
Capacity also means flexibility. When the service is frequent enough, you don't have to plan in advance. You can buy the tickets just before departure for a reasonable price. You don't have to adjust your schedule to make it to the specific train, as you can also take the next one 30 minutes later.
Different modes of transport have their own strengths and weaknesses. Switching to another mode never makes things unambiguously better. If you want to switch to another mode, you also have to change your habits to take full advantage of the strengths of the new mode.
Also... Business travel should be entirely eliminated in favor of Zoom and video tour calls. Only when someone needs to vacation or do actual physical work should they travel by plane.
The few times I have done it - lowest class with an actual bed - it was pretty minimal as a hotel experience but great to be able to wake up, step off the train and go to town!
What is also missing from your list is the fact that the main feeder line for the Gotthard base tunnel, and one of the most important railway lines in Europe, the Rhine valley railway [1], is extremely overloaded with over 300 trains per day, and the ongoing extension, which was planned in the 70ies and 80ies and for which construction work started in 1987 will not be finished before 2041 (!) [2]. It was originally planned to be finished in 2002. In 2016, the line was capped for days because the rail company (DB) chopped down some trees which were specifically planted in the 19th century to stabilize the ground (which DB was unaware of), resulting in a massive landslide [3]. In 2017, it was capped again for 2 months because of a collapse of a tunnel under construction by DB and crossing the existing line underground [4, 5]. In 2020, it was capped again because a bridge which DB planned to replace with a longer one crashed onto the rails and into a train, killing the driver [6] and nearly missing a high speed ICE train.
If the embarrasing engineering failures continue at this rate, I doubt they will finish the extension in the 21rst century.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_Hauptbahnhof
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannheim%E2%80%93Karlsruhe%E2%...
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausbau-_und_Neubaustrecke_Karl...
[3] https://ais.badische-zeitung.de/piece/07/36/42/b1/120996529-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastatt_Tunnel#August_2017_col...
[5] https://bilder3.n-tv.de/img/incoming/origs19996186/831279596...
[6] https://www.schwaebische.de/cms_media/module_img/12646/63233...
Some of the reasons: many people (including experts) argued that the project could have been done for half the price with almost the same effect by upgrading the existing station above ground instead of building an entirely new underground station, for example. Costs kept increasing – nothing new for big public infra projects, of course. But when a multi-billion euro project slowly triples its budget, people start asking questions.
That way it also took away funding from other smaller necessary projects. One should consider here that DB (railway operator) has been shutting down smaller, rural lines for decades making it harder and harder to rely on them, when you don't live on the main intercity network.
There were ecological concerns about the planned changes to Stuttgart's inner city layout and how it affects the already bad micro climate.
Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns. They acted completely tone-deaf to the protests and in one instance used excessive police force to crush a peaceful assembly. Just altogether bad topics, which did not make the project more popular.
In short, it's very expensive and it will quickly reach peak capacity and need expansion.
In similar vein there are many smaller projects which are just waste of money for no benefit. There is even a whole tv-series of such obscure failed projects, as also regularly reports of the fails of Germanys Government in handling Money. So Germans have very low trust in public projects, especially when they are expensive.
I guess such views do exist in most countries to some degree, but this is something that specially triggers German mentally, which usually more composed and on the peaceful side. Similar behavior surfaced in the last year with the different pandemia-rulings, and now with the vaccinations.
The Baltics are terribly isolated from the rest of Europe and it would be great if there was better connectivity.
I would love to start contributing less to emissions and take trains even though they take more time but they gotta start taxing planes and making trains cheaper to make people start doing it.
You tie up the machine and staff for 7X longer, and need safely maintained local infrastructure every meter of the journey. It's tough to make that cheaper.
And then the service is less valuable since it's so damn long. I love train rides, but 14 hours costs a whole day, and 2h costs an early-rise morning.
You can get a coach (bus) direct to Heathrow from almost any town in England. Getting to Waterloo [1] (London’s international) station from outside London could easily be more time consuming and tough with luggage.
But of course UK is gonna be an outlier in European train value discussions. It’s an island on the periphery with a single rail connection. The mainland capitals are more competitive.
[1] edit: now St. Pancras, which is closer to other London rail stations so likely better on balance. Thanks user sbuk.
While UK train prices are an outlier, London and the South East are very much part of the high density economic core of Europe. A box drawn around London/Paris/Amsterdam/Cologne contains roughly a quarter of the pre-Brexit EU population (and a substantially higher proportion of economic activity.)
Rail is already very competitive between these cities - it's only 2 hours on the train from London to Paris or Brussels and since the tunnel was built Eurostar has captured the vast bulk of travel between the cities it connects. The bigger challenge would seem to be making rail competitive to more dispersed cities like Berlin/Vienna/Barcelona/Madrid.
Getting to LHR from where I was, it was always quicker to get to any of the major rail stations in central London than to either LHR or LGW, but LCY was relatively good (only really works that way if you're east of the centre though).
And those are on twinned, dedicated passenger tracks where you never have to wait on a siding for a freight train to go by in the other direction, like you do with the Toronto -> Vancouver train that takes multiple days end to end.
Anyway, they keep studying HSR for the route, so much so that a prominent Canadian comedian made a joke video about it almost a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W32klYkTxCQ
But it's definitely a chicken and egg thing; it'll never gain significant market share under current conditions, but no politician can justify the money required to properly build HSR with current ridership numbers. But of course billions [1] for a new toll highway directly through protected greenbelt farmland (Hwy 413)? Ram it all through! Will it lose money and eventually be sold off to a foreign interest for pennies on the dollar similar to how Hwy 407 was twenty years ago? Probably!
[1]: Even without accounting for a likely sell-off, the gov't of Ontario has been super cagey about the planned costs of 413: https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/10/08/the-hugely-contr...
It takes 3 days to travel the 4500 km of rail from Toronto to Vancouver because the first 1500 km are through muskeg and around lakes where building straight, flat, protected 200 km/h high-speed tracks is just not an attainable option. Even if you managed 200 km/h the entire way, it's still 2 days travelling.
Planes travel about 800 km/h and can go in a relatively straight line without fear of a moose or a washout. It's 5 hours Toronto to Vancouver and 4.5 hours the other way because of tail winds.
In Europe passengers trains have priority over freight trains of which there are very little anyway. Freight mostly goes by road while trains are mostly used to transport passengers. It is very different from how the network is used in North America.
Or the whole night with sleeper trains, which is a decent workaround for that problem.
The train is pretty much a full day. I've done it when schedule allowed but going down the day before, working on the train, and spending the night in a hotel as opposed to doing an out and back in a day doesn't work for a lot of people.
Of course, shorter segments of the Northeast Corridor work pretty well by train. I pretty much never fly Boston to NYC unless I'm under unusual constraints.
We could honestly skip these checks for no-risk travelers.
And it also assumes that you are headed downtown and not to an adjacent town.
> flying is cheaper and quicker...
In Europe, notice how it's a bunch of private businesses competing with one another vs state ran rail monopolies?
How to decide who is a "no-risk traveler" and how do you identify them?
We should stop subsidizing fossil fuels, and start taxing them by how much they pollute.
You probably hit over night travel. If you leave early enough the time goes down to ~9 hours.
> You tie up the machine and staff for 7X longer,
You also cover over a dozen stops in one trip instead of two.
> and need safely maintained local infrastructure every meter of the journey.
The German rail infrastructure is so outdated that it probably is at least partly responsible for the last big train crash (no automatic lockout).
The last big airplane crashes on the other hand were caused by much needed efficiency upgrades that forced Boeing into using engines that were way too large for the half a century old frame they needed to remain compatible with on paper.
If DB updates infrastructure, that's on their budget (and while 100% publicly held and lots of politicians involved, it's nominally private). If it breaks down so much that it needs to be repeated, that's coming from federal funds. We have some perverse incentives in infrastructure maintenance.
You have exactly 1 destination with a plane flight, right ? A to B. But with a train you have A + all stops along the way + B so if done correctly you could potentially serve a lot more passengers with a single trip than you can with a flight. It could be that monetarily doesn't work out still, but it could be because of an inefficient market.
And you should also think in terms outside of just transportation. I imagine plane flights have a centralization effect on where people choose to live while trains allow them to be more spread out.
The train is several times cheaper than a plane, seats 10x more people and some of machines used in UK were built in the 70's. How many airplanes keep flying that long?
Infrastructure? Hs2 is the first track of rail in UK in over a century! Most track is 200 years old, so it has paid for itself a hundred times over.
The UK does have plenty of track: 20,000 miles worth, along with 6,000 level crossings, 30,000 bridges and viaducts, 2,500 stations...
Track needs constant maintenance through ballast redistribution and compaction to maintain track geometry; the rail itself needs to be ground regularly to maintain its shape; points systems need to be maintained, as well as signaling systems, earthworks and embankments, even vegetation.
Network Rail spends billions of GBP every year maintaining the railways.
Many.
> Most track is 200 years old
And have been relaid about 30-40 times since then.
About the only thing that dates to 19th century are the rights-of-way.
No, it's zero. Commercial airlines last about 30 years, they have metal fatigue from pressurisation cycles.
"And have been relaid about 30-40 times since then."
Are those expenses comparable to earthworks and contraction involved in laying down new line?
And agents onboard do absolutely nothing upon them. Last time after my complaint for noise, he asked them if they had a fare, they said no, and the controller didn’t even give them a fine (on a 2hrs Paris-Lyon).
I’m over with train and I’ll ride my diesel as long as they mix us with them.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, for very short flights, we still used planes once they convert to electric (which is relatively viable for short flights now).
"Vertical and Heathrow Airport partner on air taxi services" https://www.airport-technology.com/news/vertical-heathrow-ai...
Not to mention the ethical implications around sourcing oil-derived fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_war
As lover of flying I might have my feathers ruffled but there's certainly other pros to flying (the view, the feeling of takeoff).
Maybe I'm just trying to justify my love of flying, still though.
> For fuel and electric, trains still have to pay full taxes. So not suprising that planes a cheaper with better tax conditions.
Aviation is heavily taxed in Europe and Rail is heavily subsidized. One fact taken out of context shouldn't be used to paint a picture that is the opposite of this basic reality.
The problem with taxing aviation fuel is that EU directives make it hard for a country to tax fuel on cross border flights[1] (you can tax domestic flights, but almost all flights in the EU are cross border).
Therefore what European nations do instead is apply exit charges to flights as a special aviation tax. They still collect the money, but as a departure tax, not as a tax on aviation fuel. Those exit charges were just increased in 2019. It's just a lot easier to add a departure tax than go through all the bilateral tax-agreements with other EU nations to impose a tax on aviation fuel for all flights out of Germany, so this is really an issue of minimizing paperwork rather than not taxing aviation. And Aviation exit charges are higher in Germany than in any other EU nation - each passenger pays an average of 33 euros per flight leaving Germany[5], from 13 euros for short-haul to 60 euros for long-haul. (Britain has higher exit charges, and because it's not in the EU, it is able to tax aviation fuel pumped in its own borders).
And of course there are already taxes on carbon in the EU, so not sure why there should be a special singling out of one particular use, just because it gets some people riled up. Those taxes have to be paid by aviation fuel producers, so they still go into the cost.
Deutsche Ban, on the other hand, is heavily subsidized -- they are getting a special covid subsidy 6 Billion euros[3] atop regular subsidies over 11 billion[4] and an extra 50 billion euro subsidy for long term capex[2].
[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-to-inject-extra-50-billion-int...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-deutsche-bahn-bailout/ger...
[4] https://economics21.org/html/europes-flawed-addiction-to-rai...
[5] https://www.fccaviation.com/regulation/germany/aviation-tax
You can certainly argue that these beliefs are incorrect if you feel like it, and it's not as if there isn't a case to be made. But it's not just a simple matter of "we tax this, and subsidize that".
I was not making a judgement as to whether trains should be subsidized or not. That's a whole separate discussion. But since you bring it up, I'd say that in general, transportation of all kinds provides such massive positive externalities that it should probably be subsidized. Then we can debate how much more trains should be subsidized over airplanes, but both create massive net positive externalities, IMO.
If we really subsidize trains, we will induce enough demand to make investments look better in nominal terms and shift the culture/politics by normalizing way more rail travel. Easy victory.
A problem is the Europeans are prudish about printing money with their bad ordoliberal EU Constitution.
I don't think people realize how much more travel we all could do with good cheap comfortable HSR everywhere. Stuff like go to Miami from North Carolina every weekend.
The infrastructure alone for trains is insane. We don’t need rails in the sky.
Not only that - but we’re talking about staff for half a day instead of a couple hours.
What we could use are electric planes, for short distances. Plane usage isn’t going to stop. Only the select few with the luxury of time to kill are going to pick a 12hr train over a 2-3hr flight for the same distance, even at half the price.
Business travel alone makes the idea of increasing flights costs a serious no-go.
Airports past a single runway and hangar also cost a lot of money. Not to mention all the related infrastructure ( road, public transit connections), ATC, etc. Airplanes are expensive and need maintenance, luggage handling, etc. and fuel. Tons of it, to be stored, transported, refueled, etc.
This one is unlike the others because at 3 hours it's faster and more convenient than the plane city centre to city centre. Building that high speed line helped put Italy's national carrier out of business:
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/italy-high-speed-trai...
If that happens to discourage people from flying, well, that's just a side effect of having a properly functioning marketplace, where there are no externalities and the participants all have full information.
The grandparent comment of the one I replied to specifically mentioned taxing planes to get people to take trains instead.
Except it is now foreign governments that bought our rail on the market and are now creaming it.
https://www.rmt.org.uk/news/70-of-uk-rail-routes-now-owned-b....
I'm not so sure about that. British Rail was dire before it was all privatised.
So a 1 hour flight is comparable to a 2.5 hour train ride. However a quick check shows that, on average, it takes over 2 hours (133 minutes) to get on the plane after you've arrived at the airport. Then of course you've got to get off the plane, but we'll be generous and not count that time.
In summary, taking the train is about 30 minutes faster than flying. As for cost, well, the emissions from flying make the cost somewhat irrelevant. Any reasonable government would tax flying so it's more expensive than rail travel.
The benefit of trains (for what would be a 1 hour flight) is that you don't need to get to a distant airport and go through the usual airport nonsense. You just arrive 5 minutes early and board the train. You get off the same way, at the central terminal of a large city.
It certainly reduces the weight of the plane if it doesn't need to carry its initial propulsion system for the entire flight.
Still, there might be some weight gains that come from reducing the motor's peek power requirements, and those multiply across the entire flight.
I was wondering if it could worth implementing a two-stage system. The booster stage contains a lot of batteries, extra motors and a beefed up landing gear. The booster batteries contain enough power to get the aircraft up to it's cruising altitude before detaching and more or less gliding back to the departure airport. All the second stage would have to do is maintain cruising altitude for the rest of the flight then land.
The batteries are plenty powerful. We’re limited in energy to about 500-1000 miles unless we use better aerodynamics, etc.
Two weeks ago I traveled to Antwerpen from Nuremberg in Bavaria and back in three days. A plane might have saved me three hours in real time, but that is not worth the carbon emission or the lack of "place" for me.
Of course I would't take a 40 hour train trip to Portugal, but I took a one day trip from our home to Bordeaux with two small kids and that worked quite brilliant.
Next week I will go by sleeper train to Neapel, visit Pompeii stay for a night and go back by sleeper train.
I don't know, it has it's problems and there are a lot of things that go wrong but it also has feeling of "place" of change. Even on business trips I don't have the feeling of somehow switching between arbitrary grey meeting rooms with a plane.
I think there are a lot of things that can become better but the international lines have already become much better in the last years and one reason is just that you have Apps to navigate any kind of public transport.
Recently had to plan a trip from Germany to Portugal. It would have been a full 48 hours by train. I think I would have stopped at almost every significant Spanish city on the way there.
Going by the map in the article they are already working on some much needed additions to the rail network in that area.
Columbus, WI (CBS)
Portage, WI (POG)
Wisconsin Dells, WI (WDL)
Tomah, WI (TOH)
La Crosse, WI (LSE)
Something like "planes are point to point transit, trains facilitate a linear flow of people".
...and then politicians such as Ursula von der Leyen hop in their jets. This summer the EU Commission President took a 19 minute(!) flight from Vienna to Bratislava (the two cities are ~60km apart) in a private yet, but still managed to be driven ~60km by road during the transfers from central Vienna out to VIE airport and from BTS airport back to central Bratislava.
https://www.diepresse.com/6055894/kritik-an-19-minuten-flug-...
Where?
For TGV Inoui (the main brand) you have to be in the train 2 minutes before (written on any ticket, also here: https://www.sncf.com/fr/offres-voyageurs/voyager-en-train/tg...), and that's all. People flow through the gate up to the last minute. It has been like this for at least a decade.
For TGV Ouigo (low-cost brand), it seems to be 30 minutes according to https://www.ouigo.com/faq?question=ai-je-pense-a-tous-avant-...
I never understood this constraint with Ouigo though; it's obviously possible to skip it as shown by Inoui trains... and both are operated by the same company from the same train stations.
For me, the are two international airports ~20 euro by cab away, while the rail stations are like ~30-40 euro away through unpredictable traffic.
Compare it with flight where you spend half of the time not using your laptop or without connectivity.
After COVID, how many people can do remote work? Don't underestimate the percentage of population that can use the time on a train in good ways.
That said, Europe already has quite an extensive high-speed network - especially in its Western parts. The French TGV, for instance, has comparable speeds to the Japanese high speed services, and there are similar (if less complete) networks in Spain, Germany, and other countries. So a high-speed network between major centres is entirely feasible and, in fact, currently being built.
If anything, putting Brussels in the centre of the high speed rail net is a good reason for it to succeed.
Trains are a lot more convenient in that regard.
That said, at least when you get on an airplane and it leaves the gate you have a pretty decent chance of making it to your destination when you expect to.
Certainly with British trains it feels like your chance of arriving on time (to 15 minutes or so) are about 50/50.
> Then there is ticketing. Because systems are incompatible, only a few agencies sell rail tickets across the entire continent. As for refunds, operators are responsible only for the portion of the trip on their own trains.
So if your DB train to Frankfurt is late to your french TGV to Strasbourg, then your TGV won't be compensated. And you'll have to buy a new ticket.
Some guys tried their hands to be a European train ticket reseller (Captain Train, now owned by Trainline and way less effective than it was before), but it is not an easy feat.
You can of course point at the fake "bendy bananas" UK tabloid bullshit pushed by the likes of their current PM for easy laughs, or at the cookie banners prevalent on every site that collects more than a service level log of visitors to be skeptical, but I still think improving the situation of rail in Europe can be done in reasonable ways.
Jungan weird how I came across this tweet yesterday: https://twitter.com/Signez/status/1458054003795939332?t=FtMB...
If you want to do some more extensive train travelling in your holidays, they can certainly be worth it, but for a simple there-and-back-again journey those passes tend to be somewhat on the pricey side and I wouldn't view them as a satisfactory alternative to real through-ticketing.
A simple there-and-back-again journey should easily be able to be planed ahead, which usually gives the most affordable ticket choices. Many countries even offer weekend passes for those needs, tho they will not always cover all and everything, particularly not more exotic privatized public transport.
But on regular there and back again tickets, the pricing ranges there can be extreme; As long as you are willing to book some days in advance and stick to a specific connection and specific trains. Savings on that directly translate to international routes, and those savings are usually quite extreme.
We've been lucky enough to visit the tunnel system just south of Innsbruck, it's really impressive. We were taken in by bus(!) and allowed to explore on foot during an open day. Amazing stuff, the kids were blown away... :)
On the positive side, the Austrians are pressing ahead with expanding the rail lines through Tyrol towards Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Lower_Inn_Valley_railway
On the negative side, the Germans seem to have done nothing much to expand the railway on their side of the border. Once you cross over the border from Kufstein(AT) to Kiefersfelden(DE) heading north you're back down to a pair of tracks...
I met someone who managed a local train station (network) for a few years. He told me a story of hilarious bureaucracy, metric gaming (mostly for evasion of sanctions for missed deadlines), people just not showing up while being covered by their union, construction firms delaying construction because it's just "Die Bahn".
Then he quit and was paid for months despite expired contract. Later he got a legal threat for owing them wages...
Although pay seems quite good and you get 40days vacation, well good for them I guess.
[1] You might even call it a slow-motion trainwreck badumm-ts
Just now found there's yet another public transportation-related money sink in Berlin currently: https://www.schwarzbuch.de/aufgedeckt/steuergeldverschwendun...
It's a frustrating affair quite frankly and bad for my heart.
Sure on paper it makes sense, but neither Japan nor Switzerland went that way and those are the best rail systems in the world (at least as far as my personal experience goes).
HSR routes that connect all of the major cities in Europe together is a completely feasible proposition, although obviously the extremities of that route aren't going to be viable for thru traffic. Most of the population of Europe happens to live in a relatively compact region, and so most of the intercity traffic could easily be captured by a conventional HSR.
Which, per your numbers, is nearly twice as fast as the plane.
IMO we're thinking too small. Properly fast trains are a significant QOL improvement.
Are these train plans outlined not bullet trains?
I love trains and I'm still a little afraid of flying and I would love for this advent of train transport all over the continent to be true, but the reality of the matter is that the physics go against it. What will probably happen is that the lower-income people will be forced to travel way less while being promised (through articles like this one) that the incoming changes won't be qualitatively different from what we used to know before the pandemic came. The same goes for car transport, which will also start to become more and more a luxury.
Problem for the first part (no straight way): rail in yugoslavia is dead except for CCP construction. Problem for the second part the alps.
Still, one could probably do Bucharest-Belgrad-Zagreb-Triest-Verona with a very cheap nighttrain (there are rails, so there's no insurmountable problems: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/38581/train-from-...). Should be fine for travelling, I think noone should need to commute such a distance anyway...
I know it sounds like a first world problem, which in a way it is, but (very) cheap flights combined with no roaming charges were one of the few, concrete things that were actually helping make the European Union an actual distinct political entity. Almost no-one here in the EU actually cares about the European Parliament or about the European politicians and the like, but we greatly appreciate that we can go from Bucharest to Madrid or from Prague to Stockholm almost at a moment's notice and without paying an arm and a leg for it (or at least that was how things were before the pandemic), all this while using our phone in all those locations like we were on our couch at home.
I'm afraid that taking that all away will greatly reduce the little European spirit cohesiveness that had managed to get built as a result of what I described above (cheap European flights, no roaming fees), and we certainly need the best and greatest European spirit cohesiveness in these interesting times.
> Trains are such an indispensable motif in Atlas Shrugged, that, when some of Rand’s acolytes produced a slavishly faithful film adaptation of her book set in the present day, they had to invent a convoluted rationale involving resource shortages and industrial disasters to explain how railroads had once again become the dominant form of long-distance transportation.
Well… that aged… interestingly.
Taking a train from Stockholm to Málaga or Athens won't be realistic for years, if not decades. Taking a train from Stockholm to Tenerife is out of question entirely.
Without tourists, these places will become a very, very bad periphery of the EU. Already the nominal unemployment is high, but lots of locals are employed "under the table" in catering and accomodation.
Way cheaper (especially for EVs)
Faster for flights under 300-400 miles (especially if you need to get a rental car on the other end).
More cargo/luggage
Leave when you want
Have a car (your car) when you get there
Once highway driving is sufficiently safe to sleep at night, look out. With convergent evolution of infrastructure, good AI, it will be pretty safe.
And if you have a small RV so you don't even need a hotel on the other end? With Starlink and a fold-out solar array so you can charge without even being hooked up?
The taxi from the airport to my hotel, less than 5 miles from the airport, was US$27.
They'd all gladly sell me a pass, but none told me what station to leave/arrive from what time the trains were, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_d%27Ambin_Base_Tunnel
- Electric cars will very soon have a lower total cost of ownership, and dramatically lower cost per mile.
- Self driving cars are coming. They may have restrictions at first, but they're coming.
- The Boring Company is quietly working on fast tunneling. This doesn't get nearly enough press, but it's the last very important ingredient. Not for the whole way, but to solve congestion in and around cities.
So when I picture the future I don't think we'll be taking trains. I think we'll take cheap, save and extremely convenient driverless ubers as far as a few hundred miles away. As for farther away? We'll take the same uber to an airport. Sure, you can fuel the planes with carbon neutral fuel, but we're still over 30 years away from replacing jets as main transportation for longer distances. Nor should we - it simply makes sense to fly that far.
Trains are and will be the most efficient way to transport lots of people. There is not enough space in big european cities for everyone to use their own vehicle. (And in my opinion that is good).
What clicked it for me was seeing price comparisons between a train and a bunch of Teslas of equals capacity - they're about the same. Yes, subway trains are hugely expensive - either because they need to be, or because it's all government contracts. And Tesla is pretty much a luxury vehicle so we can easily expect an order of magnitude of decrease.
I'd rather have that than a 50-70mph journey in a toilet-sized space. Rolling resistance of tires is a limitation here that won't go away with electric/self-driving cars.
I compared trains to airplanes recently - from Vienna to Swizerland by train because a plane was a bit too expensive. I like trains, but it was not a pleasant experience:
- boarding was about as fussy as with airports, maybe a bit more so since I had to stow my own luggage.
- I had to change trains 3 times, moving a 20 kg luggage and a 10 kg backpack with often as little as 8 minute leeway in an unknown train station
- did not have significantly more room, surprising enough. A seat is a seat, and you can go to the bathroom just as easily in a plane
- did I mention it took 8 hours?
I don't think cars will be a contender for the long range, not soon. You're right with rolling distance, and also air drag. They don't go well over 100-150 mph. But if their range increases enough, they might just squeeze trains out of their niche.
Trains lose hard to ubers on short trips, and to planes on longer ones. They're already subsidized by the government. With any less passengers, and a strong need of upgrading to very high speed, it may start to make sense to drop a lot of them and focus on the rest.
It varies between "not easy" and "not possible", certainly far away from a "no brainer". High-speed train routes are very sensible to curvature and have to be built as plain as possible. Second problem: if other, slower, trains also use high-speed routes all kinds of ugly things happen and the high-speed trains are not so high-speed in anymore - it is one of the main reasons why german DB trains are so slow and unreliable.
In practice, countries with good high-speed train networks (Japan, France, China) have separate high-speed routes which are used only by high-speed trains. Which turns the necessary investment up to 11.
Tunnels already exist around most cities in the EU, it's nothing new. The ground is already swiss cheese from 20+ rail/metro/tunnels there, a small tunnel isn't going to help in any way.
I can walk, go to toilet, buy something to eat on a train. Can't do in in an uber
Remember that Europe is not US - it's pretty much urban space next to urban space, not hundreds of miles of nothing.
And for longer distances you fly (or yes, you get a high speed train)
Different things are good for different people. I can get in an Uber and take a nap or take phone calls and know that I'll arrive at my destination, eventually. No need to keep track of connections or transportation to and from a station or anything else.
Having all options presented robustly grants everyone the best of both worlds.
Planes not only are faster, but they require far less infrastructure, and we can stack vertically and spread horizontally their routes, having multiple parallel trips without sacrificing precious land.
How many hours does it take to travel by train from Italy to the UK accounting all of the stops? A multiple of the 4 hours trip that a plane does.
It’s like asking whether bicycles can replace airplanes for continental travel. Theoretically yes, practically no.
The writing has been on the wall for some time already but it is time to consider other options.
There is an increasing amount of policies that decrease quality of life.