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Comment by andrewseanryan | Hacker News Reader

While flights are often cheaper than rail in Europe they are not always faster when you include travel time to/from airport/train station (airports tend to be outside of town and train stations are typically center of city) and that you have to be at the airport earlier. I lived in Munich and a number of times it was faster to take the train. Me and my GF both went to Paris; she flew and I took rail from Munich and my train was slightly faster or at least break even. Also, traveling by rail in Europe is a nicer experience in my opinion.

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Even if the train adds a few hours, I'll choose that option over flying any time. With a train you just go to the train station, board and sit in your comfortable chair with a nice desk to work on. Everything is stable, and so quiet you can even sleep. If you take a plane it's just maximum stress and discomfort. Waiting in line to check in, waiting in line to go through the security gates, waiting in line to board, waiting for the plane to take off, waiting for the plane to dock, waiting for luggage, etc.

spot on.

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)

> compared to the very tight seats on a plane with no internet at all

I can't remember the last airliner that I was on that didn't have WiFi. Is WiFi uncommon in Europe?

I think it’s starting to become a thing, but even in the US the last time I tried it just wasn’t working.

I haven't had Wifi in any of my flights between Thailand and Amsterdam (KLM). Maybe I've always had older planes on this route or something. I haven't flown between any other 2 destinations for the last couple of years.

It really depends on the airline, but it's fairly common to put newer aircraft with WiFi on more business-heavy routes, and put the older aircraft on more tourist-heavy routes where passengers are more cost conscious and probably won't pay for the WiFi or other amenities either.

Is WiFi uncommon in Europe?

It's pretty rare, and when they do have it it is incredibly expensive, limited or both. On trains they basically always have it and it's free.

(with the caveat that it's been 2+ years since I was on a plane so I don't know how things have changed)

Also worth noting that cell phones work normally on trains, what with them being on the ground, so you're not even at the mercy of the operator - you can just use your normal service.

Yes it's because there's no pan-european ground network yet so airlines are limited to expensive and slow satellite internet.

However this is coming soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Aviation_Network

There is one aspect where flying beats trains: checking luggage. If you have big suitcases it's a PITA to get them on and off the train. And changing trains means taking the bags with you, unlike flights where bags are (usually) transferred.

I had that issue last time and I used a service to send my luggage to the destination. They came to pick it up at my place and delivered it to my other place.

I disagree; taking whatever bags you like and having access to them through the whole journey is much, much nicer than having to hand them over and hope they arrive in the right place, and potentially paying extra or even having to book ahead if you've got anything other than a standard suitcase.

Well, that’s European airlines which have the worst customer service. In most of the rest of the world luggage is never a problem.

What? In the US you have to pay for your checkin luggage.

Not typically for international flights, and even for some US domestic carriers. Same goes for most of the rest of the world (e.g. Asia) which is what I was actually thinking about. Brazil has free luggage mandated in law.

Even when you do have to pay in the US it is typically very generous. Larger size and weight allowance, and you won’t get dinged for being even a few kilos over. And the bottom tier of frequent flyer programs (which is usually trivial to get and keep) waives all these fees anyway. I can’t remember the last time I paid for luggage allowance outside of a trip to or through Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

(It's a song called United Breaks Guitars that you may remember from over a decade ago).

Specially love those tourist traps, who "loose" your bags so they can sell you cloths and "find" it, upon your return trip.

You were the local shopping stimulus all along.

I wish that service was more widespread. The Swiss SBB will pick up your luggage at your door before your trip and deliver it at your destinations door afterwards. For a few of course, but still.

Wish there was a hack for this.. like selling them to yourselves with same day delivery on amazon.

That is the dream, the reality given the way DB allows for overcrowded ICE trains, is fighting to get the booked place, not being able to move anywhere, noise depends pretty much the neighbours, and if it eventually becomes easy enough to manage to go to the wagon bar, it is a matter of luck if they are there at all.

If you don't have luggage. Modern trains have cutted costs with luggage space.

For all those saying that there are no security checks on trains: perhaps you have never been on the Spanish Alta Velocidad from Zaragossa to Barcelona. When I took that some years ago my luggage had to go through an X-ray machine and I had to go through a metal detector.

I don't know if they still do that but it is certainly something that could be instituted if governments wanted it.

I had to go through security and customs getting onto the Eurostar in London, but that makes sense considering they weren't part of Schengen.

There is of course some history and justification for that.

2004 Madrid Train Bombings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings

> Everything is stable, and so quiet you can even sleep

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.

That is nice if you travel between big cities having direct connection via rail and big airports.

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.

I'm not sure I follow - if you are in a smaller city, chances are you live far from an airport, but still very close to a train station. Unless, of course, you fly private charters to minuscule landings.

I live in such smallish city (Geneva, 500k folks in central part). Yes its nice to get to Paris in say 3.5h by direct TGV, faster than plane if you count center-center, although more expensive.

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.

> we use practically 0 Swiss trains. They are super expensive

I guess you know that, but if you live in Switzerland you're supposed to have the discount card ("demi-tarif") which makes the train way more affordable. It's still not cheap, especially if you compare with a car trip not taking the price of the car and maintenance into account (which is reasonable if you need the car for other reasons anyway). But in my case at least, without kids, it's really worth being able to use my time to do something productive rather than driving.

Also curious about the Chamonix example: I've never lived in Geneva, but aren't there a ton of other options in Switzerland that are way more connected than the French side? Why choose this example over Swiss resorts?

Any mountain in Switzerland is minimum +1 hour compared to France, when looking for comparable awesomeness as that Chamonix for example, that would mean Zermatt, 3.5h. Or Grindelwald, 2.5h. Why do that to yourself for weekends?

Besides there are pretty places much closer in France. France is also much cheaper, food better. Not that many reasons to chose otherwise for short weekend trips.

Car is unfortunately a must for family of us, any alternative is world of pain and limitation, even ignoring the prices of trains (just like any other family we know). You need so much equipment for whole family and small kids especially, that using trains means we wouldn't be traveling at all. People we know that don't own the car rent it out every weekend they need and waste tons of time and energy on chasing lower prices. Even with demi-tarif/halb-tax (which makes you waste 200 CHF/USD per head per year for no services), the prices of Swiss trains are properly bad. It still is marginally cheaper to take one's own car even if driving alone, and often much faster.

Frequent experience from times before when I was using Swiss trains for commute/traveling around - you end up standing for quite long amount of time during normal times, many people travel everywhere. Not nice if you are ie tired after long hike/skitour. With small kids, just a horrible experience.

All this ignoring current covid crisis and the fact that in trains here you are stuck in long narrow tube with 100 other people, few coughing, few sneezing, few not wearing masks on nose, or at all because they hold that can of beer for 2 hours to have an excuse, kids not wearing anything at all etc.

Also if you do commute to work every day by train, it probably makes sense to buy a GA (a yearly ticket that gives you unlimited travel on all swiss public transport for that year) for 3800chf. Almost anyone I know commuting some distance does this.

Of course if you work in Geneva that's a different matter. There aren't any trains in Geneva as it just isn't big enough, but unireso's tram network is widely used.

This is particularly timely because right now there's a hole in the line between Lausanne and Geneva. Consequently you can't currently take a train either way and have to use a replacement bus. The autoroute is seeing stupid levels of traffic right now as a result as all the people who usually take the train get in cars instead.

Chamonix is almost certainly slower by train unless there are traffic issues. This is also likely true of the Swiss resorts too because personal motorised transport avoids the inconveniences of waiting and changing that trains inevitably have. But the article is about eliminating short haul flights in Europe, not this.

3800chf is an amazing price for that.

By contrast, that's roughly the same price as an annual ticket between central London and a town about 30 miles away.

Chamonix is just an outlier in many ways though. Overly touristic but fantastic off piste and mountaineering. Rail networks always have some poor journeys and this is definitely one of them, in student days I remember once having to bivi by one of the stations and wait for tomorrow's train

International trains don't stop just anywhere so you still have to go to a big city to get such train.

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.

Where East Germany? From Erfurt, Dresden, Leipzig, the train is either over Magdeburg/Hannover or over Frankfurt am Main.

> Which I would say does not matter because for train you still have to get to Berlin HbF.

Most trains/ICEs will stop at 2-3 stations in Berlin. Usually they stop at least at Spandau and Hauptbahnhof, and sometimes Gesundbrunnen as well. You should be able to reach one of these stations in at most thirty minutes regardless of where you start.

All of these stations are major transport hubs and thus easy to reach.

Airports not so much: It takes me more than 90 minutes to reach BER[1], meaning I should probably depart from home at least 180 minutes before takeoff if I want to catch my plane most of the time. Note that it is usually recommended to arrive at the airport two hours prior to takeoff (or even three hours for international flights).

Following all the best practices and accounting for delays in public transport would mean I'd have to depart almost four hours prior to takeoff for a domestic flight.

To catch an ICE I usually depart from home about 40 minutes before it leaves Gesundbrunnen, which gives me enough time to grab some sandwiches at a bakery and a coffee that doesn't suck (DB is clearly taking their inspiration from airline food).

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/MTK64gv.png

Heh. Funnily enough, My partner and I missed an FEX from Gesundbrunnen a couple of weeks ago (it's 3 stations from where we live). Because the transition time b/w S-bahn exit and FEX entry was 1 minute, clearly not enough time to find the correct platform and arrive there to board.

Of course, one guy was prepared and literally _ran_ to the FEX. We walked and then waited 30 mins for the next one to arrive. :)

Not at all: Secondary airports are easy infrastructure to build: They don't take all that much land in the grand scheme of things, and from one of those, you can connect to 3-5 nearby hubs. Trains, on the other hand, require infrastructure to go all the way to your destination, so even if you do have a train station, it's quite possible that it's not going to take you even in the general direction of where you want to go.

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.

You need a minimum number of high speed lines (high speed =300 km/h, about 200miles/h) for trains to be competitive with planes - it sounds like you do not have any around.

> Especially if you live in smaller city where you don't have a major train station couple bus stations away.

So these small cities don't have train stations, yet they have airports?

No international trains don't stop in the smaller cities.

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 wouldn't be surprised if there are more airline connections among cities than train connections.

At least in Norway there might easily be 5 hours drive to the nearest train station. In the northern parts I guess there might be 8 or more unless (and maybe even if) you drive into Sweden or Finland.

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.

>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.

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?

Never mind the miserable experience that is flying. Even more so with the cheapo airlines. And airport security. I’ll take the train any day but it’s sadly not always practical because too slow or requires a million changes. But when it works it’s amazing.

Opposite view here - am I gonna get mugged on a flight? Have my things stolen while I sleep? Are there homeless junkies in the airplane? No? Alright, airplane it is then.

What kind of train are you talking about ? Where is this ?

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.

Sounds like an American subway. I never had any concerns about safety on German U-bahns. Although the undercover ticket police were a surprise.

The stealing was rampant in Poland when I lived there, but muggings or drunken fights happen on trains here in Germany too.

I have taken a lot of trains... and I've never ever experienced what you're saying. Junkies or homelesses on trains? What?

I think you raise an important point though about the safety of the environment. On some trains (mainly local), they can be no staff on at all apart from the driver. Even on larger express trains in the UK, you are likely to have 1 Train Manager and maybe someone at the buffet. They even sell a lot of alcohol and won't keep people off the train if they are drunk leading to various unsafe conditions (mainly late at night tbf)

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.

Only time that happened to me was in Bulgaria / Romania, 10 years ago, on a sleeper train. Not homeless, just a grifter who we suspected paid off the conductor.

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