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 any case, I don't think anyone has ever seriously suggested HSR for the train out west. VIA has simply embraced that it will always be slow and impractical, and they market and price it accordingly— it's supposed to be an experience, like going on a cruise, not a practical means of getting to a destination.
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.
However, according to statistics i found, rail freight in the EU is at 17% for 2019[0], while in the US it's at 9%[1] for 2017.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://www.bts.gov/topics/freight-transportation/freight-sh...
Or the whole night with sleeper trains, which is a decent workaround for that problem.
But, while I've done it, Boston to DC doesn't really make a lot of sense unless I'm looking for an excuse to do some reading, etc. for a day.
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?
My fastest check-in was in Phoenix. I think it took me 11 minutes from curbside drop-off to sitting in my seat at the gate, including dropping off a checked bag (Southwest Airlines). I don't think I ever stopped moving forward from the moment the machine printed my bag tag until I hit my gate. This was pre-Covid too, so the airport was somewhat busy.
I'm not aware on any European wide unified airport security structure. The closest to that would probably something EU related [0], but I couldn't find anything related to "pre check" type programs being a thing.
My personal international airtravel experience, living in Germany, has been rather limited in the last decade; I flew on vacation to Turkey for a few weeks. There was pretty much zero security theater.
The biggest time waste was the slowness of everything, waiting in lines for luggage, pass/ID clearance, traversing the long distances across the different airport wings, really long time window for boarding.
Apparently the same airport also offers an "evening before pre-check in", but the website for that seems to have become another pandemic victim. It seems to be the biggest thing that skips is luggage check in and formalities/getting boarding pass, by allowing passengers to do that the evening before.
[0] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/security-and-em...