Why are cross-country train tickets in EU still so complex? | Hacker News Reader

Why are cross-country train tickets in EU still so complex?

euobserver.com

95 pointsTrombone1256 comments

Sometimes this complexity can lead to nice loopholes. Some time ago I wrote a comment [0] which explained how we once tricked ourselves into a 1,500 km, 7 day train trip for 39 EUR:

> Deutsche Bahn had (and still has I think) a "Europe Special" where you could buy a ticket from any town in Germany to any town in Europe for 39 EUR flat. Our idea was to travel through Croatia for a few weeks, starting from Zagreb. Sure enough, bahn.de (the journey planer of Deutsche Bahn) offered us a ticket for a train ride of around 16 hours from our home town to Zagreb, through Austria and Slovenia. We would have had to change trains 2 times.

> Then things escalated.

> We discovered that we could book the same trip, for the same price, but with a different route, making a 500 km detour inside Germany over my parent's town. Then we discovered that bahn.de allowed us to specify a minimum time to change trains. We set it to 24 hours at my parent's town, letting us stay at my parents for a night. Then we found out that we could set an additional via option in such a way that we had to change trains in Ljubljana. We set the minimum time to change trains there to 24 hours. Then we found out that the ticket price was the same if we travelled not only to Zagreb, but to Split (at the coast), which required a change of trains in Zagreb. But we wanted to stay a few days in Zagreb, and the maximum minimum time to change trains on bahn.de was 24 hours. But thenw e discovered that (at least 5 years ago) all foreign tickets were valid for 30 days in Croatia. Effectively, this meant that we could stay in Zagreb for 30 days, and our ticket to Split was still valid.

> We got the ticket. After a week of visiting my parents (1 night stay), Ljubljana (1 night stay), and Zagreb (5 nights stay), we arrived in Split without problems. It was a 1,500 km, 7 day train trip for 39 EUR.

> The only minor problem we had was the German conductor in the first train after we visited my parents. He just stared at the monstrous ticket in disbelief and had to finally conclude that it was valid.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26982370

As a train loving Dutchman the German bahn.de website is my go-to destination for any travelling from the Netherlands to Germany. It's just so much more convenient than the Dutch NS website.

Fun loophole with those minimum transfer times, was it patched since? It's not something I would use; I don't mind paying a fair price for what is a form of transport much more sustainable than air travel, although I do like to figure out economically frugal routes.

Having to have an argument with a conductor isn't my idea of leisurely travel either. I could manage in Germany, but I once had an Italian train conductor who didn't understand the (valid and very popular) Interrail tickets we had and just got annoyed. She gave up thankfully and move on in a huff.

> loophole with those minimum transfer times

I have to ask why it’s a loophole. OP consumed just as much train with long stops as someone that travelled directly.

It’s odd, in aviation, you’ll pay less with longer layovers and more for direct, even though direct is the least miles in the air.

I get it that suppliers like to charge more for more convenience but really, the cost of provision is the same (or less!).

> It’s odd, in aviation, you’ll pay less with longer layovers and more for direct, even though direct is the least miles in the air.

What’s odd? Supply and demand. More people want direct flights so they cost more money.

No, that's odd. Supply is not much restricted per route.

There's simply a pricing model where a more convenient or luxurious travel intiniary is more expensive. Only temporary popularity shifts could do a supply/demand price run, otherwise larger airplanes generally lower costs per passenger, and running more flights on the same line is likely a reduced effort and risk than having more lines.

Low-performance or high-variance lines could be higher priced due to having to pay for empty seats (on the same line of flights) but I believe this is not usual. The remaining passengers would be fewer.

I should think air travel would greatly improve with better customer-risk-treatment (e.g. no security - more like busses) and a 'ticketing model' that's as complicated as buying train tickets. Perhaps then we will see some more imaginative forms of air travel.

Airlines actually make it kinda difficult to get longer layovers, and a lot of them have gotten rid of open jaw itineraries. I think the reason that some indirect flights are cheaper is that you're picking up excess capacity on underutilized flights (which, like you said, let's them charge a premium when direct flight seats are scarce)

It's a loophole because they can put a cap on these low early reservation, fixed itinerary prices because of the assumption that only people travelling on a shoe-string budget will do more than six hours of travelling in a single sitting. This keeps the number of travellers who do Norddeich Mole – Zagreb Glavni kolodvor (eighteen hours of train travel) to a minimum — essentially just some students and people on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. A negligible number of people.

Once you start allowing extreme transfer times of 24 hours, you are basically inviting people to exploit that system, which will drive prices up eventually, because those people would otherwise have bought multiple tickets (one for each stage of the journey).

Ns.nl: in English button Bahn.de: English what's that?

Try bahn.com, it is English by default. There is a language selection menu in bahn.de as well.

Hanging out in hostels is a good way to find these loopholes

but I'm sure internet forums can help too

Apparently there is little current economic incentive (or regulatory push) to streamline the process and take on airlines in cross-border travel:

Railway companies are national in nature and by history. The share of cross-border travelling is small; the income mainly comes from national rail.

Obviously if they streamlined the process to take on airlines their revenue would increase. But perhaps the cost of streamlining would outweigh the revenue increase. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to create a disruptor in the train space due to rules, regulation and the capex nature of it. Whereas the airline space is easy to enter as a competitor even though it is capex heavy because the core asset (planes) are mobile. You can move them from very competitive market to another one that has less competition if the laws (and airport slots) allow for it.

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

Also revenue comes from freight, passenger transport is just a subsidised public service.

Really depends on the individual countries. Some countries subsidize the tracks for everyone (including freight), others just the passenger rail companies. Heck, in the EU there's even quite a few open-access operators who are fully for-profit.

knowing the cost of a bullet train railway, and the fact that freight trains don't use them, I'm skeptical, as far as I know, it's tax money and debt that "pays" for it.

This and the kerosene is tax free, which is impossible to compete with.

The problem is if you do tax it, airlines are going to fill up in places like Dubai and drag tonnes of fuel across the world, leading to more fuel burn in general. For the environment it'd be a bad thing unless the tax were imposed globally.

This would have been an ideal point to agree on at Glasgow but of course it didn't happen.

Rail services in European countries are not covering their costs in any country, as far as I know. Speaking of Switzerland (which is notably at the extreme end in terms of costs) public rail services are run a lot like infrastructure projects / economic booster packages by the government. Whether or not ticket prices or capacities are increased is more down to politics and economic perception than actual demand. So it's fairly obvious that there are no incentives to make cross country traveling more attractive. Politicians decide about the rail services and they are only interested in the opinions of their constituents. More crowded trains due to tourists might as well hurt their popularity. It's a broken system in certain ways.

The fact that a lot of the money for passenger rail in europe is coming in from regional bodies for running regional trains also means that fast intercity trains don't get priority when there is congestion, and that the planners kind of assume that people who miss their connection can just take the next one which is true for regional trains but not always cross continental express routes.

If we actually had a high speed rail network that linked the big European cities it would pay for itself like in Japan. Tax kerosene and nobody would fly from Amsterdam to Berlin.

The infrastructure is subsidized, local transit is subsidized, but long distance and high speed rail operations can be profitable, even including the capex of rolling stock (In fact EU rules stipulate that they should be unsubsidized).

Also, the EU mandates open track access, which means technically it's possible for private companies to compete (and they do, there are several private operators like Flixtrain, RegioJet, LeoExpress, even a high speed one in Italy, Italo).

It's also possible to have rolling stock that is fairly usable all over Europe (RIC carriages, usually 200km/h). There is even a bit of a market for used vehicles. As for locomotives, traditionally they only work in one country, or perhaps two. Now there are more and more locomotives that work in multiple countries, e.g. TRAXX and Vectron. It's possible to rent carriages and trains. It's also possible to rent traction.

In some sense it's getting close to possible to do a startup in European rail. I'm thinking about the problem a lot.

Additionally, a lot of countries in Europe view their airline as a national pride.. And so do anything to put it ahead. Trains are not as glamorous.

There's also very little capacity on the rail network and if they sell short trips as opposed to one long one they can sell the same seat multiple times over the same international trajectory. And in those short trips they don't have planes to compete with so they can ask higher prices.

Cross-country used to be very convenient before kerosene production increased, got distributed and aeroplanes range increased so that taxation of the fuel became impossible.

You could book one nighttrain ticket from Stockholm to Paris straight and that had been possible since 1930 until ~1970!

Now when the Swedish governement tries to revive the service they say they encounter resistance from the Germans who apparently don't want to let traffic just cross their territory for some reason? Political blame game?

"In this case, one of the objections has been that the final destination of the traffic is not German. There are similar challenges with other countries. But if we are to have train traffic in the EU, we must accept and let traffic through, says Minister of Infrastructure Tomas Eneroth"

https://www.dn.se/sverige/tyskland-stoppade-svensk-nattag-ti...

Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnie_Internationale_des_W...

Oy, swedish link behind paywall...

View source, then remove hidden tag... works sometimes... I translated the only content worth reading.

I travel between Italy, Austria, Germany and Switzerland somewhat regularly, not rarely passing through 3 of the 4 countries for a given trip. I use the Austrian national railway‘s (ÖBB) app to book my tickets, I get a single QR code on my phone that is valid for all legs of my journey, gets scanned by the personnel of whatever country‘s railway company, and I‘m good. Never had any problems whatsoever.

I wish the Swiss SBB app would have the same functionality. While in theory it should work the same, they just prefer to complain "no location signal" when you're outside country.

One thing I particularly enjoy traveling by public transport within European countries is the use of a "travel card" - Rejsekort in Denmark and OV Chipkaard in Netherlands. They work as a simple card that you can "beep beep" whenever you use public transport and it works out the payment from attached bank account/card. It makes travel by public transport hassle-free. I only wish in this digital age, all EU countries co-operate and make these systems inter-operate so that for example, one can have a Danish Rejsekort, and travel to Netherlands by train, and go around the town in public transport using the same "beep beep". Now, make that acceptable in long distance trains as well, and imagine how convenient that would be!!

EU can clearly make a nice case for this because it will improve efficiency and usage (thereby netting profit) for member countries. There needs to be leadership and will to make it happen!!!

These cards are useful for commuting and local transport (OV-Chipkaart, by the way), but when travelling for leisure you do miss out on useful deals that way. In the summer season there are lots of discounts to be had on the Dutch train network, with savings up to 80% of the regular price depending on destination and availability of special discounts.

For international travel planning and booking ahead of time usually means you can get very large discounts as well that would not be possible with a check-in-whenever-you-travel type of card.

There's a thing in Switzerland called "EasyRide" where you checkin at the start of your journey and check-out at the end, and it will calculate you the cheapest option for what it registered as movement - day cards included. And even if you check-in again later the same day it will just calculate the difference for the entire daytrip.

Slightly related : I have discovered an hour ago this interactive map of Europe which lets you know, given your starting train station, all the destinations you can reach directly without changing trains.

https://direkt.bahn.guru/

(provided by Deutsche Bahn but not limited to their own trains)

This is so great, thanks for sharing. I’ve found some really amazing routes.

I didn't find riding the train around Europe to be complex, if anything it was a bit more straightforward than air travel in the US domestically because I didn't have to go through absurd security theater as part of the process. I have done many many cross-country train trips in Europe without issue.

You think that's bad? Spanish train operator Renfe's website [0] (which has been "redesigned" time and time again to much fanfare over the years) is incapable of offering tickets for any journey between two stations if there's no direct train between them, unless a specific option changing trains has been manually defined on their system. Neither will it display commuter train services, even though stations served by commuter trains do appear in the drop-down.

[0]: https://www.renfe.com/es/en

Really?

> When travelling from Copenhagen to Warsaw or Lisbon to Marseille

People pick the train because those trips are far enough to make the train a hassle

But I can enter the origin train company sites (or the operator) and buy a ticket to another country "pretty easily" (for the last couple of times I did this). In fact buying online was easy enough.

They even mention Trainline in the article, which spits me a next-day ticket from for both those trips in seconds. They hand wave it away by saying the are "unknown to consumers".

Those services are great. I used Eurail (a similar one). Bought X train trips for a flat rate, all I had to do was write in my To and From cities on the travel log. Reading this article, I took that for granted with how simple it was.

Eurail is only for non-European residents, tough. Europeans have to use Interrail, which in turn doesn't cover journeys in your home country (except two single trips if you buy the more expensive all-of-Europe Global pass).

If you want to do a holiday-by-train (and especially if you also plan on doing a few additional journeys while abroad, like a few day trips or staying a few days in one place, then moving on to somewhere different etc.) it can still be worth it, but for a simple back-and-forth journey this means that Interrail passes still aren't necessarily a suitable replacement for true through-ticketing.

(Also some countries require mandatory reservations for long-distance trains which in turn aren't necessarily included in the price of an Eurail/Interrail pass)

> They hand wave it away by saying the are "unknown to consumers".

There's also the fact (also mentioned in the article) that buying split tickets (which is what those kind of agencies will sell you if the respective operators don't offer through-tickets) won't give you the full protection of the passengers rights in case of delays, missed connections, etc.

This depends on your train operator. Deutsche Bahn won't even tell you prices to most international destinations (especially those DB doesn't itself service) and asks you to come in in person to one of the few remaining ticket sales booths OR call a hotline.

They happily let you select a train ride from Madrid to Wladivostok, including all intermediary stations ... but you can't buy the ticket. Same for Berlin to Rome.

Yes that's why I say, buy it on the operator of where you're leaving from. Doesn't make much sense trying to buy at a 3rd party.

(for DB specifically it seems that international-bahn.de can determine the price for some trips)

The problem with international-bahn.de is that it might sell you what is technically several independent tickets instead of a single through-ticket, which can subsequently be problematic in case of a missed connection.

Portugal in particular seems difficult to travel out of by rail. Lisbon to Madrid should be straightforward, but you have to get to Porto first, then to Vigo on the Spanish side, and THEN you can get to the rest of Spain. This also takes 24+ hours of travel. Meanwhile, the bus is only 10.5 hours and direct.

There’s the Alfa Pendular that goes Lisbon Madrid direct but there’s only one per day. It’s relatively rapid and comfortable, about 50 euro last time I rode. It’s a night train.

Most of the interior lines got shut down when they privatized CP and handed the state railway to one company and not more. The first thing they did was close many train lines. The lamentable decline of the Portuguese railway systems has happened on many levels, including local trains and trams like Coimbra shut down all east side lines and that entire mountain gateway area sits in decline with rotting properties and population flight and business closures etc…

If it is just to a neighboring country, it usually works well. Or if it is a direct connection through several countries. But if you have to change in a country you are just passing through, it all breaks down. Best to install the apps of all train operators you are going to use. Trainline et al would be great if they didn't mark connections as sold out so often that are perfectly available through the train operator's app.

Just in case people haven't come across the excellent https://www.seat61.com

It is indispensible if you want to plan international travel by train. A true work of love.

The trick to get an flexible affordable ticket between European cities is to know that interrail tickets(https://www.interrail.eu) is no longer limited to youngsters on a multiweek backpacking journey.

Back when we were still allowed to travel i spend a fair bit of time traveling between non-airport cities which meant that an 8-10 hour cross border train ride was often the only alternative to even more time spend waiting at airports, which still required muiti-hour train journeys to the final destination, and i really did enjoy that mode of transport, but it does take some mental adjustments as delays are pretty common on the railways so if you have a "must meet" every connection as scheduled schedule where you cannot just jump on the next train out things will get messy.

This is incredible, how is it that I have never heard of this service?

That would require some detail about where you grew up to answer, I think Interrail is fairly well known in Europe. Or do you simply mean the latest changes to the terms?

I grew up in the Netherlands. I remember there was a service like this but that had a different name, was before the age of the internet and was limited to young people only.

https://www.interrail.eu/ is providing good bundles to travel across Europe. Plus, there is a black friday promo ongoing.

If you are interrested by this problem Trainline is hiring and my team is working on connecting the Train carrier API to a single backend like what you have in the airline world.

https://jobs.lever.co/thetrainline/9743f1ec-253f-46ec-a144-1...

And somehow I'm able to buy a return ticket from Paris to Prague on my national railways' website without a single issue.

There are some very useful hyperlinks in this article to website that negate some of the hassle of booking cross-border tickers

Wow, I assumed that the EU was created to simplify things like this. Still better than Amtrak I suppose.

Try booking a train ticket from Brussels to Riga. Still quite a bit of work to do...

Most of the time, you buy fewer than one ticket per leg. Often the interfaces or forms are more fancy or extensive; perhaps implying security.

Hindsight /km payment for international travel would not readily take your mind off of distances beyond the travel time; you'd never know how much to pay. Every international card has recognition issues in some countries/places, or limited ticket stations serve special deals. Countries probably vary in their use of smartcard gates etc further complicating such deals.

I was wondering about train pricing and train pricing ideals. There's a large factor of involvement of the cost of finance, as they're expensive projects. The market-technical pricepoint relates to alternative modes of travel, but the nature of mobility does not. This relates to hyperloop etc.

It would be neat to have fast-train New York - London/Paris/Amsterdam - (... more stops, have skip-trains ...) Bejing - Seoul/Busan - Tokyo, maybe Australia would even pay to have one next to a brand new city in the northeast of the country.. But the scale implies enough industry to have issues being expressed in regular currencies - and it should have fargoing implications to live so proximate; in one of the world-cities.

But how many people would you expect to make the journey? And whatfor? Is the economy of it the leading choice, or is prestige a factor? What is the balance of advantages at different price-points, or at different expectations of traffic volume. It might be added value for tickets to be ~20 euro's (cheaper even per hour than 'typical' train fair, probably impossible without large volume and subsidy), instead of the 'serious hassle' <300 that a "regular international intercity" tends to go for. In fairness to potential comfort, fares could be 2000 euro's, but this would greatly reduce the potential volume and application range.

Another question could be, why are countries ran 'retroactively' nowadays? I'd rather the news stated there was debates about future trains, proactive regulation of automation and small electric vehicles, something to tie science like a horse for improvement, rather than to consider (promoting) improvements indirectly; through a market.

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