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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Here in Germany, for as long as I can remember, the government praises itself every year for investing as much in rail as never before. I have not noticed the service quality to change for the better over the last 15 years. The ever-rising investments seem to be only enough to keep the status quo of the crumbling infrastructure.

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It's different in Poland. Here, everyone always complains about the rail and it was shit like you wouldn't believe only like 15 years ago. I've been using trains only sporadically but the improvements are absolutely immense, I couldn't believe my eyes. Not perfect of course but holy shit did it improve, especially regional rails

Of course we had to improve from much lower standards than Germany, I guess, so I have no idea if our expectations of good are the same but nevertheless

I use trains here in Poland and although there have been big improvements, a lot of them are only a facade.

Long distance PKP trains are still late everyday. The regional trains in my city tend to be over-packed, and from a technical pov they’re more like larger diesel buses than trains.

However, in response to the earlier comment and this one as well, I would have to say that investment doesn’t always mean immediate visible effects. The biggest investment to make in rail is in the infrastructure. You don’t feel as a passenger which parts of the track are old and which are new, and they are pretty expensive to build and maintain.

I also would wonder how much freight rail is in that investment, because that we don’t see or feel at all.

Even a diesel bus on rails is much more efficient than a diesel bus on roads. It's also much easier to electrify than a fleet of buses, an much more ecological when you do (because no significant battery). Thus, anything on rails is a win.

Agreed - especially in the context of how unbelievably clumsy the US is at doing trains.

Here in western Poland however it was a bit easier - lots of tracks remained since 19th century. And with these diesel buses popping up, an opportunity presented itself to go relatively low investment and lots of political bang. Those trains are usually way too packed in my personal experience.

Similarly, Pendolino high speed rail was developed and implemented to huge fanfare. Only the tickets ended up being so expensive that basically only the upper-upper-middle class wants to take them. Why take the high-speed train at double the price to get you there twice as fast, when all you need is to get there?

Well. In Germany the middle class flies or drives, the lower class takes the bus and the upper-upper-middle class drives teslas or takes ICEs

So who takes the train?

I think: ICE = Inter-City Express (train)

(As opposed to Internal Combustion Engines, which may have caused the confusion)

Indeed it was what confused me. I'm Sweden our vocabulary is: Train, Commuter train, Subway, Tram

Then again, our fastest train does 200 kph, so we only have "old shitcans". I reckon this is because we're 12% the population of Germany on 126% the area. It's not worth the investment with high speed rail.

Then again these numbers are a bit exaggerated, you could essentially cut Sweden in into 2 pieces just above Stockholm and you'd end up with one relatively densely populated area and something that would more or less resemble Alaska in population.

What's great about the north is it is our own little Alaska in the sense that we have a metric shitload of iron ore so pure you can put it straight to the furnace, keeps us southerners afloat for sure.

American rail is hyper optimized for freight, not people.

Poland made a huge step back when it comes to trains after 1990 - there is a good book by Karol Trammer "Ostre cięcie" about disastrous cuts.

On the other hand - Pendolino is a real step forward, and at least Cracow is trying to improve general quality and invest in intra-city trains, which maybe not the fastest, but still much better than buses or trams.

I highly disagree on Pendolino and I am quite angry about it. It has been around for what, >5 years now? I have still yet to take it because it is so expensive. It’s basically the Concorde of Polish trains - it cost a fortune to build and only rich people take it because it speeds up travel time by ~30%. Meanwhile, standard speed trains, which are still capable of covering the same distances in reasonable time, are late, are underinvested and are overcrowded. What we would need is an affordable high volume train network, not trains that cost the same as planes and look cool.

That’s my rant on that subject. On the other hand I do think the one great thing we got out of the previous system is a well developed train network. Even with all of it’s faults and issues, trains remain a great way to get around Poland. And that is something to be grateful for. I’ll check out that book, thanks!

> the one great thing we got out of the previous system is a well developed train network

Amusingly enough, most of this is something we got from the systems before that, or simply other countries :-) Just look at this map: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_kolejowy_w_Polsce#/m...

See how the rail network is much denser in the western regions? Now compare it to this map: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziemie_Rzeczypospolitej_pod_za...

Poland A and B, you can see it on a lot of maps, not only rails

I can't help but feel much of this argument is relative. From my experience (I'm no longer a European resident) almost all of the European rail network that I've traveled on (and that's quite a lot) beats much of the infrastructure in Anglophone countries—and I'm referring to both track and rolling-stock).

(...Perhaps my view has been formed by the fact that I've come from a low base in Anglophone countries, so everything seems much better in Europe.)

___

Edit: I must be fair, there was one European route that I traveled on that was truly substandard and that was the single-track Kaiser Franz Josephs Bahn (Emperor Franz Joseph Railway) from Vienna (Wien Nordbahnhof) to Prague via Gmünd — not the good two track route that goes via Břeclav and Brno (which I've also traveled on).

The railway track of the Kaiser Franz Josephs Bahn was in dire—most desperate—need of maintenance when I traveled on it and that was a few years before the Iron Curtain fell and Czechoslovakia was still communist.

There's no doubt that's the worst track I've ever traveled on (it's one of those experience one never forgets). The train traveled so slowly that we passengers thought we could get out and walk faster, moreover the carriages rocked wildly from side to side and we had a constant feeling that the train was going to derail at any moment (had it gone any faster then I reckon it certainly would have derailed). I have no idea whether that track is still in such poor condition today or not (at the time I was on the understanding that the track had deliberately not been maintained since the War because of Iron Curtain politics).

Nevertheless, it was by far the exception in my experience.

As a UK resident, I can't help but wonder which group you're including the UK in. We're both a European and an anglophone country!

Sorry, Brexit is clouding my judgment. I should have said Continental Europe! ;-)

That said, to be fair I found the UK track maintenance pretty good although trains weren't as punctual as they were in most of Europe. Likewise, the carriages/comfort was somewhat primitive compared to most of what I've experienced on the Continent.

I have to say it's quite some years since I've traveled on British Rail and I understand things have improved considerably in recent years (one only has to watch Portillo speaking to camera from a UK train carriage to realize that).

My worst (and repeated) experience on UK Rail was the horrible Gatwick Express which was often notoriously late (especially the time when it broke down midway to the airport and I missed a flight to New York and lost a whole day in the process).

Perhaps my most memorable experience—it's what always first comes to mind whenever I think of rail travel in the UK—it's the horrible apology for a cheese sandwich that I was offered (and at an enormous ripoff price) on an 'overnighter' from London to Edinburgh (I've witnesses, they suffered the same fate). I can't say I've ever eaten a worse one.

Presumably, the latest food offerings have also improved somewhat since then.

My subjective view is that punctuality and comfort have improved in recent years (especially the new rolling stock on the London-Bristol and London-Cornwall and London-Edinburgh lines is excellent), but the food is as bad as ever, and the prices are getting worse. If you want food on the UK railways then buy it at a station not on the train if you can!

"...but the food is as bad as ever,"

Right, I suppose the quality of food has always been one significant differentiator between the UK and Continental railways. As mentioned, I haven't been to the UK for some years now but over the many times that I have (I'm actually a UK citizen), I've noticed a steady improvement in the food, especially so in London. Over the years, I've noticed lunchtime and takeaway meals improve out of sight and the number restaurants serving foreign food multiply manyfold (I've found London's Indian restaurants pretty much second to none—reckon Indian must be pretty much considered an endemic food by now).

This begs the question why hasn't the food on UK rail improved. Perhaps we should send the executives responsible not to the Continent but to Japan to see how it should be done: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-train-food.

(I can attest firsthand at the accuracy of that article, the food on Japanese trains is truly excellent. There's only one drawback: if you're going to some obscure destination that you've not been to previously then don't let the food (or anything else) distract you. Whilst stations in big urban centres often have station names in both Japanese and Roman scripts outlying ones often don't. You either remember the hiragana or kanji scrips accurately for the station names or you count the number of stations accurately from where you embarked—or you do both. Luckily, I've never missed a stop but I've had a few narrow escapes.)

My take: It depends on the line / company. But generally I think the UK is sub standard and extremely expensive compared to continental Europe (expensive, even compared to Switzerland).

Good experience: Virgin first class from London to Manchester. That said, it would have been prohibitively expensive if we hadn't booked the tickets well in advance. Pre-booked and restricted to a specific train they were around 50 quid each. If we would have bought the tickets before boarding the train they weould have been well over 200£ each.

Bad experience: The company that makes my blood boil even thinking about them is Northern. Whenever I have to use them I seriously consider travelling by couch. They are just such an appalling experience and a real sorry excuse for a train company.

Overall I don't think privatization of the railways were a good idea. Not when specific lines are dished out to specific companies and don't allow competition on them.

Yeah, around that time I was still in college and used trains a lot. I remember we had a running joke about everything inside the trains we traveled in had some sort of sticky, yucky film. When you grabbed something and then let go you could kind of feel the train clinging to you. The heating in the winter was always either broken or turned to 11. My friend once, by accident, melted a big chunk of his shoe on the radiator under his seat.

I've recently traveled by that same line. The train has changed a bit, the film seems to be gone but the ~100km trip takes 5 minutes longer than it used to, averaging <50km/h... So still ways to go.

edit: spelling

> My friend once, by accident, melted a big chunk of his shoe on the radiator under his seat.

This happened to me while on a train to Warsaw 20 years ago, as a high-school student. Ironically I travelled to the Parliament where Buzek, the at-the-time PM, came back from Athens having signed the EU Treaty of Accession to give an impromptu press release. Crazy how much progres we had seen since, and how many set backs.

Yeah. On the flip side I've traveled to Warsaw some time ago on the Pendolino (?) train. I splurged on a first class ticket (~$35) and it was real nice. No "film", separate seats, great service, clean, real fast. Of course, the bubble burst when we approached Warsaw - the train slowed to a crawl just as we were entering the city and I was late like an hour :P Baby steps I guess ;)

edit: Damn spelling again

Here (southern Poland)

I do believe that trains are really good in compare to what we had like decade or so ago

Quiet, looking modern, clean, reasonable seats and their "placement" strategy

For comparison: monthly ticket price is like 10% of minimal wage (or 50% of that for students) for distance around 100km/day

The fleet is in much better shape(especially refurbished, compartmentless carriages - these are great at limiting antisocial behaviour), but the infrastructure is disappearing in favour of car traffic.

Some cities, like Łomża, lost access to rail entirely (although IIRC it's going to be restored after an over six year hiatus).

I still drive between Wrocław and Warsaw, even though I would rather travel by train, but there's no dedicated track between these cities, so it has to take a long detour, ultimately making the trip take 6h vs 4h point-to-point by train and car respectively.

That seems wrong. New high speed lines are being built and have recently opened (e.g. Berlin-Munich, soon Stuttgart-Ulm). The number of passengers using high speed trains (ICEs) is steadily increasing: from 75 million trips in 2009 to 99 million trips in 2019. To increase the number of trips like that, lots of investment in rolling stock / signalling / lines is needed. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/162877/

The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita it's moved from ~0.91 trips per person per year to ~1.19 trips per person per year. Not to say there is no progress, but rather that the number of trips is low to begin with. If you contrast the money spent with the end result of roughly one trip per person per year, things are not that rosy.

The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita it's moved from ~0.91 trips per person per year to ~1.19 trips per person per year.

I mean, if the goal is to make the smallest number, why stop at "per person per year"? If you instead reflected the number as "per person per second" then you would see that the improvement is barely measurable.

Per capita is a standard way to contextualize things in statistics and since the original measure is per year, per capita per year. The point is not to "make the smallest number". 99 million trips per year alone doesn't tell us anything. If it was made by 1 million people, the scale is big, if it was made by 100 million people, not so much. That's why contextualizing per capita is important.

But that seems like a reasonably understandable number? For all that everyone talks about how amazing trains are in other countries, I'm a little surprised to learn that I take Amtrak more in the US than the average German citizen takes DB, which is generally a much better system.

That said, that seems like a pretty good improvement, percentage-wise, but a lot of folks talk about trains in Europe as if it's so amazing that everyone is taking it all the time. I'd be curious of that number relative to the number of flights taken per year per capita.

Looks like in 2019 there were 200-250 million airplane trips starting or ending in Germany. So maybe the surprise is how little average people travel rather than how little they rail.

Also all international trips are irrelevant for comparison as the ICE traffic is national.

Give or take. There's plenty of trains between countries in Europe that would also be within driving distance.

In my mind, the optimal realistic situation is to have rail for longer distances (1-8 hours), but not trans-oceanic obviously, and then either ICE or local light rail for smaller trips

The relevant point is that there are no (or very few) international ICE trains. Cross-border are usually slower Euro-city trains that shouldn't be included in the ICE statistics.

Yea, that doesn't seem like that useful of a number, since Frankfurt is a fairly major layover airport for international travel.

I guess the more specific question would be how many Germans fly to elsewhere in Germany or Central Europe vs. taking a train. I generally have to either do a long car trip or a flight to get around in the US outside of some specific corridors. Presumably most of Europe has the option to take the train instead, but are they?

And yet layover flights are decreasing since the 2 engine restriction was "lifted". A 787 can fly non stop for as long as would be comfortable for someone to be on a plane.

According to Wendover Productions.

But there’s still a connection/hub-and-spoke system. You could fill a 787 with enough fuel to fly from Columbus, OH to Venice, but you couldn’t fill it with enough people to make it make sense.

And airlines usually charge more for direct flights (price discrimination), so for leasure long-haul travel it's fairly common for Europeans to have a flight with stopover, even if there's a direct connection available.

> I take Amtrak more in the US than the average German citizen takes DB

Its more than ICE trains not more than the whole of DB. Its 100m ICE trips per year but 2600m DB trips per year in 2019 (c. 31 per capita per year)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/936254/deutsche-bahn-pas...

Sure, but then the better US comparison includes things like the Chicago/NYC/Boston/DC/Atlanta train systems, which I'd imagine a decent number of folks in those cities take more than 31 times a year. Heck, I think I've taken more than 31 MTA rides per year and I don't even live in NYC.

City train systems are not offered by Deutsche Bahn AG, but by local city carriers, so they are not part of that statistic. E.g. Munich is mostly run by MVG and had 596 million passengers in 2018 [1], which aren't included in the numbers above. DB only runs the S-Bahn in Munich.

But yes, the 2600m DB passengers probably mixes long distance and short distance service to some degree.

https://dewiki.de/Lexikon/M%C3%BCnchner_Verkehrsgesellschaft

> I'm a little surprised to learn that I take Amtrak more in the US than the average German citizen takes DB

Amtrak had 31.3 million passengers in 2016 [1]. That's 0.095 passengers per capita. And that's on all Amtrak trains, while the German number is just for the ICE high-speed trains. Amtrak's high-speed Acela trains only had 3.5 million passengers in 2019 or 0.01 per capita. [2]

Per capita is just not a useful number for this discussion.

[1] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155658/acela-high-speed...

Sure, but Amtrak is a weird comparison since its "real" service area isn't anywhere close to the full population of the US. There's plenty of whole states that don't have an Amtrak station in them. Most EU countries have a much lower median distance to a train station than the US does.

I'm not expecting to have them be similar numbers. My original point was purely anecdotal - I usually take 1-3 Amtrak rides a year and I don't even live in a part of the country that has good Amtrak service. It's odd to me that folks in a country with much better service use it less than I feel like I would use Amtrak if I could.

You probably just travel more than most people. Also, America is much bigger than any given European country and that leads to greater travel distances.

America is much bigger, but there’s also something to be said about size and perceptions.

As a general example, the Midwest is roughly the same size and population as France, so if we made the investment we could reasonably have a regional high speed network centered on Chicago. We’ll never have coast to coast high speed rail, but having a few regional networks is certainly doable.

My point wasn't to dismiss your anecdotal evidence, but just to highlight that the number per capita can be easily misleading. Yes Amtrak doesn't serve a lot of the US and IIRC has effectively only a single high-speed line. But the average German citizen is using high-speed railway 100 times more often than the average US citizen (for the obvious reasons we both mentioned). You're just not the average citizen.

I'm pretty sure many Germans don't use the ICE at all. While service is a lot better, the way to and from the high-speed train station often makes it inefficient, especially because the German autobahn is also world-class and doesn't suffer from a "last miles" problem.

There are only 4 states with no Amtrak stations

Well it could be per capita in decade for a ten-fold increase, but given that a human career lasts around 4 such periods, this metric would not be too useful.

> The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita...

Which is still an absolute number. Just in another context.

It's a relative improvement of 32% which is approximately 3% per year. Not ground breaking, but a nice steady improvement.

ICE usage is also much higher (~6x ) than in-country plane usage to give another point of context. [1](percentage of domestic flights) [2](total air passengers)

I think trips per capita is misleading as a high percentage of the population isn't doing much in-country long distance travel to begin with.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/06...

[2] https://knoema-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/knoema.com/atlas/G...

32% is a remarkably large change in a demographic behavior. Of course the majority make no trips, and a relative few take it frequently.

More meaningful numbers would be how many use it 5 times or more in a year, and how many miles they traveled. Anybody who doesn't use the train at all doesn't really count, unless there was a likelihood of enticing them aboard.

> Here in Germany, for as long as I can remember, the government praises itself every year for investing as much in rail as never before.

Unfortunately, that's not true (the investment part). In preparation for the IPO (that never happened because of the crash) Deutsche Bahn was heavily tuned for profit since the mid 90s which led to a massive decrease in investment. As rail infrastructure has a rather long service life, a lot of those cost-cutting measures have only beginning to be felt rather recently. Now not only do the investments that have not been made have to be made up for, but the funding gap has caused the infrastructure to decay even further.

Also, a lot of money has been spent on vanity projects like Stuttgart 21, instead of much-needed extension of freight lines like the one in the upper Rhine valley.

Also, construction prices have gone up a lot. Rail investment depends heavily on steel and concrete, both have skyrocketed over past years. And as you said, undoing a decade or more of underinvestment is extremely costly and leads to more delays in the short term.

At least they're speaking into a culture that wants to hear about investment in rail, regardless of whether the work being done feels like it's yielding tangible improvements or not.

Here in Canada, it sometimes feels like they're almost ashamed of what little they're spending and even try to hide it away, or spread the big capital expenses over multiple years to make it look like even less.

I have had only trouble traveling by train in Germany. It happened so many times that I believe it becomes statistically significant. In comparison, I can't remember the last time a train trip in France was anything but smooth.

A few examples, all of which have in common that we arrived 3 to 9 hours late to our destination:

- The train leaves earlier than planned (!), but they tell you by email at 7:00 in the morning for a train leaving at 9.

- The AC on the train is not running perfectly. They offload everyone at a random train station, and you spend four hours sitting on the stairs of an overcrowded commuter train with kids and luggage, instead of one hour on a mildly hot train.

- Stoerung auf der Strecke: twice (!) the train stopped for hours in the middle of the tracks. Once the train had stopped in the middle of a bend, and we spent hours tilted to the side. The other time we missed a flight even though we were on the regular shuttle from city center to the airport.

And in addition to that they also removed a lot of rail lines, especially goods traffic. It would've been a boon to have fewer trucks on the motorway and probably better for the environment.

European trains don't really do that much freight though. They tend to be optimized to carry people. America is actually way ahead of Europe in terms of rail freight, something like 10x depending on the measurement.

Having commuted with both american and german rail systems before, my educated guess it's likely due to who owns the rails. American rail freight companies have far more control over prioritization than european freight companies.

DB Netz owns the vast majority of german rail and therefore prioritizes what makes them the most money. Historically that's been carrying people due to all the government and company subsidies they get for supporting commuters and students. During COVID times the rail freight increased dramatically because the personen trains were offline. I suspect that will have generated some inertia towards freight, but it will take years to see and only if the right folks at DB crunch the right numbers.

On the american side, I've sat for 20 or 30 minutes regularly (up to an hour on the worst days) while our commuter train had to wait for the rail owner's freight train to roll through. And that's a regularly scheduled commuter!!

But why couldn't DB Netz do both people and freight, if both are profitable (after subsidies for passenger traffic)? i.e. why does it have to be a choice?

Because things which are designed to be good at one thing will not be as good at other things. There's only so much rail network and given a conflict either freight is a priority or passengers are. You can't have two number 1 priorities.

I'm pretty impressed with India opening dedicated freight corridors. It's double-track that is optimized for longer, heavier freight trains. It seems obvious that the different operational patterns of freight and passenger rail means they each should have their own tracks. The only thing they did "wrong" IMO was to have level crossings where cars & trucks can get hit by the trains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd6EW9QsRto

I think they do. The Dutch railway definitely does. But a lot of freight is actually transported over rivers, which is very efficient. Though also still by trucks, sadly, which is not.

They could but german rail is already ridiculously crowded when factoring in all the safety regulations. Automation on the speed control already lets them pack the lines pretty tightly, which may be one reason why they've removed so much rail already.

Germans, in my experience, tend to be pretty rational folks. As much as the public likes to ream the decision makers for poor choices while armed with the perfect clarity of hindsight, my guess is they've gotten to this point because all the other choices seemed worse at the time they considered them.

Typically everyone does both freight and passengers, but it'll be better at one or the other. Passengers want fast trains with few delays that get close to population centers. Freight doesn't care about speed as much but cares about the overall throughput and wants to end up in distribution centers.

Anyway, about "distribution centers" - just have an optional turn when approaching some town, choosing between the central train station and the "distribution center" location. That in itself does not sound like much of an issue.

However, other comments suggest that freight needs _slow_ speed and must avoid tunnels. Maybe that's the reason?

On high speed lines, you often can only run either one of those. Not only that freight trains are slower, but they often aren't allowed to use tunnels at the same time as high speed passengers trains. So on some of the most direct and modern tracks, freight can only be run at night.

Russia is ahead of the US, even in absolute tonne-km terms. And I don't know about other EU countries, but we (Czech Republic) seem to be transporting almost exactly as many tonnes per capita per year as the US, despite the fact that we have mixed rail traffic. The US just wins on tonne-km since it's larger, so the average distances are larger as well. But purely the volume of freight seems to be about the same, despite heavy passenger traffic.

It's really worth looking at freight modal share by transport type. The US does do really well. As does Australia.

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

In the Australian case, that percentage is heavily skewed by bulk freight of coal, iron ore, wheat, etc. That's often using dedicated tracks, direct from mines to ports, and not connected to the general freight network.

The mix of road and rail for more general freight has been heavily in favour of road for a long time, and only getting worse as Internet shopping, etc, increases the role of last-mile home delivery.

Back in 1996 Switzerland and Germany signed a non-binding agreement (Vertrag von Lugano) to increase the capacity for freight trains. Now in 2022 the Swiss part [0] with two 34km and 57km long tunnels through the Alps is basically finished meanwhile the German part is expected to be completed in 2042 [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe%E2%80%93Basel_high-s...

Same game on the other end. Compare number of tracks:

[·] https://goo.gl/maps/gnrqGEdz3H7vz8V99

Context:

[·] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betuweroute

I went to germany a cuple of years ago, and my experience was delightful, here in chile in the years of the coup, the rail system was almost completely dismantled in favor of trucks and buses, I dream the day I could travel in train to the north of the country in a moderate modern train :)

I disagree: Travel time from Berlin to Munich went down from 6 hours to about 4 hours.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrsprojekt_Deutsche_Einhe...

That is a massive change. Subjectively, how a train trip feels on that route went from "quite exhausting in the end" to "oh I just opened my laptop, couldn't even finish what I had started".

Note that it's still four hours compared to one for a flight - and flights are still cheaper. Even if we assume two hours for arrival, boarding and an hour for local transportation in Berlin, flight would still win on price.

(I just checked for "Munich to Berlin next monday": 120€ cheapest for trains unless I want to sleep in them, 105€ for a flight, with more choice of time.)

Aside from skipping the added bureaucracy of airports, the major advantage of trains is that you usually arrive in the centre of the city while air travel usually takes you to the outskirts.

With a train you get 4 hours of laptop time. on a plane you get two stints of about 20-30 minutes each.

Realistically, it takes an extra hour door to door for the train, and around 3 hours for the plane. In my experience you do save a bit of time with the plane for Berlin-Munich.

> Even if we assume two hours for arrival, boarding and an hour for local transportation in Berlin, flight would still win on price.

It is 50€ if you look for the Monday in 2 weeks. For quite a bit of my travel, I am booking 2-3 months in advance, and it is usually around ~30-40€, first class, for a 600km trip. (This site is quite helpful: https://bahn.guru/) Some other things to consider: Trains (ICE) are substantially more comfortable and "freer"; you can walk around, don't have to pretend to listen to a safety choreography, keep your data on the whole time etc.

Trains also don't restrict the amount of luggage you can take with you. In fact when my grandma died, I transported a ~2x4m persian rug by ICE, and while I got some comments on it, and switching trains was a pain, it was a very cheap option for a poor student with a big rug.

On another note, there will be a 9€ Ticket for summer in Germany that allows you to use all non-high speed trains within Germany, which will be a really interesting experiment.

Agree with all of that. Though with flights, you can also optimize a lot if you have enough lead time: I recommend https://skyscanner.com/

Trains are nice if you need to transport anything of volume, especially bikes, if you stay longer than a day or two so you can amortize the travel time, if you have lots of run-up time, and probably cheaper if you travel a lot. They're definitely competitive, it's just not a slamdunk, and planes do straight win sometimes depending on requirements.

All the Germans I've met like to complain about the quality of Deutsche Bahn. But it is important to keep in mind that from the perspective of an American, Deutsche Bahn is a miracle.

Based upon slight experience of both, I would say rail in a third-tier German city can compare favorably with the Metro in Washington DC.

And for 90% of the US, the DC Metro is a marvel.

Exactly.

A youtuber explained that Italy overlayed high speed rail routes now and that it's pretty brilliant. Things are moving.

I live in Italy and can attest that the high-speed rail running along the backbone of the Italian peninsula is really nice: it's clean, faster than a regional flight (no need for security, etc.), quiet, and it's fun to watch the hills roll by out the window.

I only remembered the regional one which was so strange.

I went from Rome to somewhere like Florence by train. Fast, easy, reasonably priced, and it was a short walk from my seat to a café car where a team of sharply uniformed gentlemen made me an excellent espresso!

Absolutely loved taking the train in Italy, fast, convenient, cheap, good amenities. Of course the country very much lends itself for rail (more or less an elongated territory that can run a very fast high-capacity north/south backbone, with slower but more ubiquitous horizontal offshoot rail to the various smaller cities and villages), but it was still very well done. Especially considering how much tunnelling was required.

My big concern is that we're not really moving towards a single european market nor a single european train infrastructure system. I'm not sure if it can thrive as a patchwork of different ticketing systems and different rail systems. Without it it can't compete for international travel. And without it it's hard to get the right economies of scale.

Just solving urban transport with train would be a huge thing here in Croatia. Rails are so shit that if you need to commute it's faster to travel through peak rush hour with a car than ride a train. It's depressing really because good rails would really connect less developed places near the capital and offload the pressure on city.

As tourists, we got a Eurail pass, and international travel was as seamless as you could expect (at the time, the Italian trains were slow, the French trains stank, and the British ticketing offices were full of useless queues. The German trains were a little nerve wracking because the conductors were in a blind panic because the train was 30 seconds late).

Anyway, some computer figured out the transfers for us, and the itineraries were fine.

The only real problem was that we had to book weeks ahead. They physically mailed the tickets the US. I can't imagine it works like that now.

Either way, it's proof the patchwork of national operators can work well together.

In my experience, at least neighboring countries tend to be pretty good at selling you international tickets, and most people aren't interested in 17 hours journeys that could be replaced by a 2 hour flight.

bahn.de will sell me (through an international website to which they redirect) a ticket from Frankfurt to London via Paris, an 8h40m trip costing 182 EUR one way for a date ~2 weeks out.

The real issue is that I'm very unlikely to choose this option, no matter how convenient the booking, when I can get a round trip plane ticket for the same date for 156 EUR including luggage that will take 4-5 hours (including transit to/from the airport, security, boarding, waiting etc.) and gets advertised as 1h45m, 133 EUR.

> The real issue is that I'm very unlikely to choose this option, no matter how convenient the booking

It's broader than just convenient booking, it's also integrated servicing, scheduling and infrastructure. With integrated scheduling you can get better connecting trains.

> > bahn.de will sell me (through an international website to which they redirect) a ticket from Frankfurt to London via Paris, an 8h40m trip costing 182 EUR one way for a date ~2 weeks out.

Frankfurt to Brussels is 3 hours, Brussels to London is 2 hours. It could be a 5 hour trip if the trains connected, very competitive to the 4-5 hours you mentioned. (And with existing technology the durations could be cut down by 30%). But if there's no connecting trains between the German-Belgian track, and the Belgian-UK track, then it will indeed take 8-9 hours.

I'd definitely rather sit on a train. Relative to airplanes you typically get: - quiet - cheap/available wifi - spacious (leg room, work space) - large windows - easy access to your luggage (for work, food and recreation) - boarding experience that's less frustrating - boarding in a city centre as opposed to a peripheral airport

Price remains an issue, but it's also an issue of scale and value proposition. The Italian trains I've been on were simply vastly superior experiences to whatever flight I ever took and quite cost-competitive. Take Bologna to Napels, it's a 600km route that is 3h 20m by train for just 38 euros, central station to central station. Flights certainly don't win out here. By comparison, Frankfurt to London is 640km as the bird flies. It seems once things start crossing borders and you get into disconnected international tracks, scheduling, ticketing, infrastructure, prices and connections start to suck. But that's in part a solvable issue that can be largely mitigated. If Italy can do a 600km track for 30 euros in 3.3 hours, that should be a attainable across Europe with the proper strategy and investments within 20 years.

There's also the point of pricing in externalities for air flight, not doing so makes them unduly competitive. That's unlikely to last. Some countries are adding 10-20 euros to flight prices this year alone as a start, making 1-2 hour flights less interesting vs trains. Although I've read reports both ways (how flights are undertaxed, as well as how trains are already very subsidised) so I'm not sure on this point.

Some yes, others not so much. E.g. regarding France, using its regular online services DB will only sell tickets on the through trains from Germany, but nothing involving a connection in France, whereas conversely SNCF won't sell online tickets to stations in Germany not served by the direct trains from France.

> bahn.de will sell me (through an international website to which they redirect)

The problem with international-bahn.de is that what it sells aren't real through tickets, so if you miss a connection, you're depending on the goodwill of the operators involved to let you continue your journey without having to buy a (potentially very expensive) new ticket, or pay you a taxi respectively hotel accommodation if you've missed the final train of the day.

The only way to get proper through tickets involving connections both on the French and the German side (e.g. I luckily live near the Paris – Strasbourg – Stuttgart service, but technically I still need a connecting regional train for a few stations) is by buying them from a ticket office, but then again due to some obscure technical issues this hasn't been possible since the end of February.

I think there's two factors playing into this:

first, Germany has had a high level of sefvice quality with trains for the last 15 years, compared to much of the world, there's little to improve

and second, DB had become a HUGE holding company of many kinds of business endeavours and rail service is not in the states hand anymore, while the company "optimizes" for profit which makes travel aside of high traffic routes become worse and worse and coverage deteriorates.

> the company "optimizes" for profit

Well, if my single unit of university economics taught me anything, its that you have produced the most efficient possible rail system and Germans are getting exactly what they want. Congratulations!

Thanks for your perspective from someone close to the situation there. I believe many Americans have a picture of a perfect system in Europe, but the truth is likely different. Can you elaborate on the negative aspects of the train system, as you see it?

my short answer would be: bad at punctuality. Frequent delays bigger than 10min.

France for example is better at punctuality IMO. But granted: smaller population density, therefore less stops needed in rural areas. And lower population density made it also a lot easier to build many complete own tracks for fast trains (TGV). Also more centralized way of thinking, so if you are around Paris: good, if you live far away of big cities, not so lucky.

> Frequent delays bigger than 10min

Im an European having spent few years in US and also used to complain about this, until I learnt what delays mean in domestic US flights.

Not unusual to be few hours and already spent a couple of nights at the airport.

> smaller population density, therefore less stops needed in rural areas.

I see this argument regularly, but I do not find it very convincing. There are places in the US about the same size as France with much lower population densities as well. France is about the same size as Texas. Surely there are Texas-sized bits of land with similar densities as France in the US.

> Also more centralized way of thinking, so if you are around Paris: good, if you live far away of big cities, not so lucky.

The network is still very centralised, but it is much better than it used to be. Thanks to the Paris south and east bypasses, as well as progress on the high speed line in the south made things like Lyon-Lille, Lyon-Toulouse, Strasbourg-Nantes, or Marseille-Bordeaux quite nice. Lyon-Bordeaux is still a pain in the backside because of the mountains in the middle.

I haven't taken European trains, but Amtrak in the US is often atrociously late. They pay to rent tracks from freight companies and have to cede right-of-way to not block them.

Deutsche Bahn is a weird construct.

It's been separated into many subsidiaries in preparation for a privatisation. It never happened and while subsidiaries like Schenker work quite well and drive profits, others like those responsible for network or train maintenance create only costs and have been neglected. This results in delays in your daily experience with DB. DB's "punctuality" or the lack of it is actually a running gag here in Germany.

tl;nr: mismanagement.

It was quite similar in France. It was a step before privatisation, true, but the final step would have been the re-nationalisation of the infrastructure and maintenance branch, in a usual “privatise the profits and socialise the losses” that the European Commission seems to so love. Because efficiencies, or something.

I’m an American who recently took a train in Europe from Paris to Brussels.

Some brief thoughts:

- It was so fast! Under 90 minutes for a journey which would have taken a few hours by car. Clearly much faster than a plane on this particular route, due to extra waiting and security in airports.

- It was also a very comfortable mode. If you’re traveling with friends, it’d be very easy to socialize around a table. Quieter than a car or plane as well.

- Love being able to hop on/hop off without a huge ordeal or waiting in a long line.

- Too expensive for the route. I would have to book much further in advance to think it was worth it. I think maybe 6x the cost of driving, if I compared to a similar route in the US.

- Obviously this is a high speed route. That doesn’t exist between all cities.

- Looking at other tickets, connecting between two routes can be tricky. For example, if I wanted to go from Amsterdam to London, I’d might transfer to a different train in Paris. That adds a huge amount of time.

I mean, compared to the US, it’s a delight! For a similar city-to-city distance (Portland to Seattle), I’d love a 90min transit mode, especially if it was relatively cheap.

Obviously there are still some route and cost drawbacks, but there just isn’t much comparable in the US. It’s a much better system, obviously, even if it’s not perfect. At least they have high speed rail!

On this specific example

> Amsterdam to London

Eurostar runs a direct route, with passport control in Amsterdam. But looking at any link from Europe to London that isn’t directly served by Eurostar (i.e. any city except Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels) is going to suck.

I've taken Eurostar from London and changed in Paris for Grenoble and Brussels for Amsterdam (before the direct train.) It was completely fine. No different from any other train journey with a change.

I think it may have taken a while to get from Brussels to Amsterdam because that line hadn't yet been upgraded at the time but the journey time wasn't far off what it would have been getting to and flying from Heathrow/Gatwick/Stansted.

Depends what you optimize for. I used to travel from Germany to London and had to change in Brussels. Yes you have to wait a bit, but not like at an airport. The walking distances and wait times are very small and the trains connect timewise so it is fairly stress free.

If you want to play it super save, you can stop for a good meal in Brussels as you are taking a break in the middle of a city, rather than hanging around in an airport.

> I mean, compared to the US, it’s a delight! For a similar city-to-city distance (Portland to Seattle), I’d love a 90min transit mode, especially if it was relatively cheap.

Fully agree. Years ago, I took Amtrak from Minnesota to Seattle, and it was 36 hours. I enjoyed most everything about it except that it took. So. Long. I rarely drive down to Portland, but if we had a ~1.5hr train, I'd probably do it several times a year. Same for Seattle to BC.

I may have a rose-colored perspective of Europe's rail, but I also really enjoy Paris <-> Caen or <-> Versailles. My kids loved the night train from Paris to Venice, too. And having just flown from the Midwest to Seattle with a layover, I would GLADLY trade that ~11 hour travel day (from arrival at the airport to getting picked up at SeaTac) for an ~18 hour cross-country TGV. It'll never happen, but I can dream.

Minneapolis to Seattle is around the same distance as Madrid to Warsaw. And for that trip you’d need ~4 transfer and it would take ~30 hours in total. So it doesn’t seem that much better.

> It'll never happen, but I can dream.

Sorry, but people give up too easily. This isn't a fusion power plant. We only have to vote for it.

You also have to persuade everyone else to vote for it

Yes! It's been done, many, many times.

> Too expensive for the route

That's the one that surprised me the most. I shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose, given that even Amtrak is quite expensive compared to air travel, but I was a little shocked at just how expensive trains in Europe can be. Especially the good ones.

If you are a german resident, and you make two or more long distance rail trips a year, then you a buy a bahncard 25 or bahncard 50 which give you (respectively) 25% or 50% ticket discounts.

The capital of the EU to the capital of France in an adjacent country is pretty much the definition of good train travel in Europe. Also anything TGV in France. As sibling noted, Eurostar from London is also great. Various other routes are pretty good.

Prices are pretty high by and large especially if you haven't booked well in advance.

As someone else mentioned, very fragmented in Europe generally. I actually try to take trains in Europe but not always a great option especially when traversing multiple countries.

Eurostar runs direct trains from London to Rotterdam & Amsterdam, 3.5 and 4 hours respectively.

You can't really compare to a similar route in the US because there are hardly any and hardly anybody uses them. The train routes in EU are busy and frequently full, just like planes. Obviously booking ahead is cheaper, how else could you do it?

Top tip, plan a head and read up a little bit on seat61:

https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/london-to-amsterdam...

Top tip 2:

Overnight trains is one of the best ways to see Europe as a backpacker on the cheap. The routes are often scenic and the cost is frequently cheaper than anything else since you don't have to pay for accommodations.

Buses are a thing too. And they are not greyhound bad, but definitely not as good as trains.

We have the same buses as you these days. Megabus exists to connect many larger metropolitan areas. More or less the same vehicles as you'd find for similar services in Europe. Sadly, none of the "sleeper bus" variety that have existed (from time to time) in Europe.

I took a Megabus from Houston to Austin one time, it was honestly the worst bus journey I have ever taken in my life. A man sat down next to me, talking to himself, rocking back and forth holding a screw driver. There were a lot of other "interesting" characters on the bus as well.

When I arrived in Austin and told the story, my colleagues told me that the different cities would buy bus tickets for homeless people to move them from city to city. I don't know if that was the case here or not, but my guess would be that at least a large portion of the passengers had mental health issues.

At the time, I was concerned with my personal safety, but afterwards I was wondering if there was something I could have done to help :(.

Long distance trains in the US are frequently full, they just don’t run as often. And the US does the same thing where it’s cheaper in advance.

A short answer for Germany would be: the system is operating at its absolute limits. The results are employee burnout and bad reliability.

An example: a few years ago, they introduced a new way to reduce delays caused by trains arriving so late at their destination that they cannot make their scheduled return trip. This is the so-called "Pofalla-Turn", named after the manager who supported it: if a train has a delay of over 30 minutes, the train will often just stop at some station and the passengers are told "the train ends here". They then have to figure out their journey using alternative trains.

Just imagine this happening on a flight. I often witness completely helpless tourists lost at my local rail station who don't speak the language and cannot understand why the train they have an expensive ticket and reservation for just stopped, drove back, and left them stranded here.

If you are meeting/visiting someone in a city more than 200 km away, and if you tell them that you plan to take the train, the usual response is: "Oh, good luck".

> if a train has a delay of over 30 minutes, the train will often just stop at some station

I've seen that happen in London, sadly, although it's less of a problem given the general frequency and other alternatives (bus, etc.) Also the "if the train is going to be delayed enough to cause payouts, just take it out of service before the deadline" trick.

In London it's often done to try to stop the "no bus for an hour then 3 come along at once" phenomena and even out the service. Personally I think it's a big improvement over the alternative.

> the train will often just stop at some station and the passengers are told "the train ends here". They then have to figure out their journey using alternative trains.

In the Czech Republic, what would happen in that case would be that the railway company would shuttle the passengers to their destination using buses. This doesn't happen in Germany?

The typical scenario is that passengers can just take another train. Depending on the ticket, the railway is responsible for refunding cost for alternative transportation (EU law), but there can be frustrating edge cases where people are left stranded, because there is no alternative, but a lot of bureaucracy. The railway may be responsible for refunding accommodation then, but I think this would not necessarily be the case for monthly tickets, student tickets and so on, when there is no explicit booking for a canceled train like with a regular ticket.

What I meant was that the buses are provided if there's no other option, like another train.

In some cases, but not always. Probably depends on multiple factors.

My most memorable train experience in Germany was when Deutsche Bahn left me in Munich in the middle of the night. I had a connection there but my first train was ~10 minutes late, and my second train had already left. So I spent the whole night at the train station until ~5am when I could catch another train in the direction I needed. I've taken many train trips in the Czech Republic, and that has never happened.

I never take the last possible connection of a day, because of this risk.

DB will pay a Taxi or Hotel in such cases. Just had them pay my Taxi home last week.

The ticket you bought has a ToS attached to it, but basically it boils down to that DB is only required to get you from A to B, but you're not entitled to any specific mode of transportation other than "preferably by rail". While the train may have ended surprisingly, since other trains are still running, DB's opinion is that you can figure out the rest.

Amtrak does that sometimes (the train and/or crew die on the rails) but then they produce a bus from somewhere and get you to your destination.

At least in the US, once a company has accepted you on your journey they have to eventually get you to your destination, or get you to agree to give up. One time the train even stopped and told people trying to make a connection to get out; they'd called taxis to meet the other train.

I don't live in Germany, but I'm pretty sure they'll be another train available. Probably in about 30 minutes (or less if the train is so late that the next train has caught up with it). The inconvenience is having to get off of one train and onto another.

The crew dies on the rails!?

One bit that might surprise people is how fragmented it was (probably still is?). I'll see if I can find more sources, but e.g. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.67... illustrates some of the issues. Gauges vary. Voltages vary. Safety systems vary. Edit: here's a nice diagram from (of course) wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_system...

Europe doesn't have a rail system, it has dozens of systems; and they're not all compatible - which given this all originated in pre-EU times, is hardly surprising.

And that also means that it can take quite a long time to travel by rail, despite high-speed rail. If you need to cross rail-system borders - some of which are even intra-national like in France, you may need to change trains and/or take illogical routes. If, however, you're lucky and your route is on the happy path - then it can be quite competitive with short-haul flights both in hassle (if not quite speed) and cost.

Then there's the fact that operators are fragmented too, so booking a ticket or finding the optimal route can be surprisingly tricky once you need to cross several borders. I'm not sure this is worse than navigating airline booking systems, mind you, but it sure isn't efficient either.

The thing is, you used to be able to buy a ticket from, say, Lisbon to Copenhagen, from any ticket booth, and just take any reasonable train on the (multi-day) route. But nowadays many national railway companies use yield management, so that original price is now the full price which is a lot higher, and actually you simply can't buy such tickets anymore, you must use booking systems that just cannot book all trains. In some countries such as France and Spain reservations are now obligatory for long-distance trains.

At some international ticket booths you can still book complicated trips, but if you try to book them yourself over the internet, you will have to cut up the trip into separate parts which are treated as separate trips for the travel guarantee, so if you miss a connection due to a delay beyond your control you don't have the right to take the next train if it's not part of the same trip.

Learned about iberian gauge while taking a train in Portugal last month. The tracks were further apart than any that I have ever seen. Rail is much more complicated than people might think

Nothing is perfect, but also remember that people always find things to complain about, particularly if they don't have personal experience of less well functioning systems.

By that logic, no one should complain about anything, because we don't live in literal hell. But that is of course preposterous.

It's good to complain and improve things but having moved to the US I now miss even British trains!

Parent: people often complain because it’s the worst they’ve ever had, take it with a pinch of salt.

You: well you can’t complain about anything then can you!?

——

You can complain, but it’s good to have an understanding of what you’re complaining about, the parent is right. We are quick to complain about imperfection when a lot of what we have is truly quite good.

Sometimes it’s legitimate criticism, sometimes it’s being spoiled.

Any criticism that is not specific can (and probably should) be dismissed outright. Complaints and criticism should always be specific.

They're not saying there's no reason to complain. They're pointing out a very valid phenomena. For those of us on the total outside, it helps us temper bad feedback. Otherwise, you can end up with a situation like the following:

Person A from place without infrastructure X: wow, life with infrastructure X sure would be better. I wonder if we should invest in X?

Person B from place with infrastructure X: There's lots of problems and it annoys me daily.

Note that in this situation, the wrong conclusion is to say "well, then maybe infrastructure X is a bad idea". We want to avoid that line of thinking (since it's not an appropriate conclusion given the statements), so it's worth pointing out many tempering factors, such as those mentioned by the parent comment.

That’s not what I meant. Only that the fact that people complain about X in both A and B does not tell much about the relative quality of X in A compared to B because the expectations and standards may be very different.

As someone who uses UK trains semi frequently, and German trains less so....I'd take your trains in a heart beat

In the US, trains are seen as ancient cowboy technology. Trying to build more train infrastructure is surely an uphill battle.

It's hard to say. Trains have been chronically underfunded in the US for so long that I don't think the US even knows what decent train infrastructure is like. Amtrak hasn't had a guaranteed budget until the recent infrastructure bill passed and was originally designed to just be a publicly-funded holding company to sell off its rolling stock and lines.

We don't really want the trains (because of the way the US developed its cities). Let me give an example. In order to add a few more daily routes from Chicago to Milwaukee on Amtrak, a freight train would have to hold on a holding line for several hours in residential areas to let the Amtrak through. The increase in ridership, not just riders shifting their schedules, would have been at most a few hundred.

So in order to get a few hundred cars off the road, Amtrak would have to build a holding track (carbon cost), add more rolling stock to the route, burn more diesel, and a residential neighborhood full of children would have had diesel trains idling for hours a day.

The total economic and environmental value of the program was negative by most measures.

This seems poorly argued to me. You're making a number of assumptions here which I don't see why they would hold:

1. Amtrak ridership will barely grow, at most by a few hundred riders per day. If you're this bearish on trains then naturally you'll think nobody wants to take the train and you don't think Amtrak should build more trains. You're coming into this assuming that nobody wants to ride the train.

2. Building dedicated track between Chicago and Milwaukee would be cost prohibitive for Amtrak or otherwise infeasible. The majority of the cost for building track comes from acquiring ROW (so purchasing the land), grade separations, and utility relocations needed for laying the track. Chicago to Milwaukee in particular is one of the cases where these costs are probably _lowest_ as much of the ROW is cheap to acquire (outside of the direct Chicagoland area), the land is fairly flat so grade separations are rarely needed and utility relocations are cheap to build.

3. The opportunity cost in carbon for added vehicles on the road would somehow be less than the opportunity cost for rolling stock to idle. Even if freight rail continues to refuse to electrify in perpetuity, the added carbon from private vehicle emissions will quickly dwarf extra carbon emissions from idling freight cars.

I think you're coming at this from a "trains are stupid, here's why" perspective rather than an unbiased cost and carbon perspective. These arguments change in areas where ROW acquisition is expensive or grade separations and utility relocations are difficult, but Chicago to Milwaukee has very few of these problems. In particular the problem in this part of the US is that while rail works to move from city-to-city, most Midwestern cities (other than Chicago) have no actual transit to speak of. Once the Amtrak drops you into Milwaukee, if there's nowhere to go via train, then you're stuck, in which case you may as well drive the whole way. That goes back to the fact that rail/transit in the US has been historically and systematically underfunded, particularly so in the Midwest where Detroit had a lot of negotiation (read: money) leverage in the golden years for American auto companies.

This to me just argues for separate lines for passenger vs freight trains.

Especially if we are talking about installing high speed lines anyways, doesn't make sense to turn a freight line into a high speed line and then share it (other than the fact that you wouldn't need to eminent domain as much).

Trains kill lots of people and the noise is excruciating. They also impede other traffic when at grade, and require massively expensive carbon guzzling infrastructure when not at grade. The stations are often designed or located more optimally for getting freight to and from, rather than people.

The bathrooms are less claustrophobic though.

> Trains kill lots of people

Vastly fewer, per passenger mile, then passenger cars, comparable to busses, less than scheduled airline flights.

Yeah, this seems like a weird argument against trains. Every mode of transport will kill some people. Trains just happen to be one of the safest there is. Heck, if you think about heart attacks, walking likely kills more people than trains do.

> require massively expensive carbon guzzling infrastructure when not at grade

If you think that building rail viaducts and rail grade separations are carbon expensive, wait till you learn about the carbon used for roadway viaducts and roadway grade separations.

You can argue that rails usually run on much more consistent of a grade than roadways but that's only to decrease the amount of acceleration that's required by train cars and to increase top speeds. Freight rail is a special case because freight companies try to avoid as much wear-and-tear on their train cars as feasible within their delivery windows, unlike passenger rail which necessarily cares more about speed and less about wear-and-tear.

> Here in Germany, for as long as I can remember, the government praises itself every year for investing as much in rail as never before. I have not noticed the service quality to change for the better over the last 15 years. The ever-rising investments seem to be only enough to keep the status quo of the crumbling infrastructure.

And the ticket price inflation is twice as high as regular CPI.

I live in Berlin, but I am not from Germany, nor from Europe. I never understand the complains on the quality of trains (or the public transport in general) in Berlin at least. And I am from Buenos Aires, where we have great transport system (subway, buses, trains). Still, Berlins is much better.

"The ever-rising investments seem to be only enough to keep the status quo of the crumbling infrastructure."

It's quite a while since I've traveled by Deutsche Bahn but I found it very efficient and on time when I did. What do you reckon is the reason for the crumbling infrastructure? There was huge reinvestment after the war to renew war-damaged infrastructure and rail infrastructure usually has a very long life (many rail bridges and viaducts built in the mid 1800s are still in service today).

Was that war reconstruction rushed/not well implemented or what?

I've used trains many times in Germany and they are far far from crumbling.

Deutsche Bahn is a disaster. Extreme delays up to 2 hours more often then not. Rude staff. Forcing moms with kids out of the train by police. Travelled for 3 summers through germany, now just take the plane.

At least your trains run on time, or at all. I guess your criticism is based on the level of service you have become accustomed to in your country, which is incredibly good by world standards.

Is it possible that the investments are targeted at improving rail service for regions that you don't live in?

At least you have that option!! Sounds better than unmaintained "crumbling infrastructure."

Trains are incredibly expensive to maintain. The US still relies a lot on manual operations when running trains. I wonder if they will ever be able to fully automate their travel.

Not so. The whole point of trains is that expenses are largely one-off. Building the infrastructure is expensive. Recurring costs are much lower than other modes of land transport, ceteris paribus.

Land transport yes, but the operational cost of long distance trains is quite a bit higher per passenger-mile than planes

Is it though? Or is it the fact that airlines are able to externalize their environmental costs, and are generally both under-taxed and subsidized.

[edit] I'm not saying that rail isn't subsidized - it usually is, and often heavily, to be clear. It's the environmental impact that's the thrust of my claim.

> externalize their environmental costs

It's that + Every step of the aviation industry is subsidized by state actors. oil companies are also incentivised to support as airlines are a massive consumer of karosene that would otherwise be a cheap byproduct of oil refining

This. Rail lines don’t need much maintenance once installed. Compared to a hwy which starts to fall apart immediately. Trains are a relatively simple and robust transportation method. I wonder what the insurance costs look like between the different methods of transportation

Rail is much more expensive to maintain than roads on a per-kilometer basis - where are you getting your numbers from?

Do you have a source? I'd expect rail to be more expensive from a capital expenditure perspective (laying rail, ties, buying cars, etc) but much cheaper to operate (coefficient of friction is lower between train wheels and rails than with rubber tires and roads, optimal speeding and slowing causing less wear on tracks, less downtime as rail repairs are much simpler than road repairs, etc)

In the UK, Network Rail spends about £150k per track kilometer per year on maintenance and renewal. 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.

Maintenance costs for major roads in the UK (trunk motorways and A roads) is something about half that.

You need to factor in the cost of moving goods for each.

I really don't, if my point is to rebut the statement "the whole point of trains is that expenses are largely one-off."

I love trains. I used them all the time when I lived in the U.K. and in Japan. I've ridden Amtrak from New York to San Francisco, and the Orient Express. They are, however, very much not a one-and-done investment as is being suggested elsewhere in this thread.

People are largely familiar with road maintenance, but most of them have no idea at all about maintenance of the railway.

All Network Rail railways: £4479M / 20,000 miles of track = £140000/km

Strategic Road Network: £700M / 4,436 miles = £98000/km

Not included: cost of pollution, injuries and deaths on the roads.

Not considered: potential and actual capacity of the roads vs the railways, potential for historic underinvestment meaning higher current costs, whether these statistics mean a single track/road lane or all the tracks/lanes, usage costs for passengers and freight.

A breakdown of the railways costs would be useful for a better comparison, i.e. major lines only.

https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Ann...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

You need to divide maintenance by the actual usage of the infrastructure. Railway can handle much larger usage of the infrastructure per km than a motorway can. You may need 4 motorway lanes to support the usage of a single train track in order to handle the same capacity. Per capita, rail costs tend to be a lot lower as rail can handle much more than 2x motorway throughput.

High speed rail is much more expensive to maintain than ordinary rail. Motorways are also more expensive to maintain than normal roads, but I think the railway has more capacity than both.

The comparison for a freight railway vs. an equivalent road is obvious: private companies who need the entire capacity, like mines, build railways.

(I will leave it to someone else to find figures for high speed rail vs. an equivalent motorway.)

Rail infrastructure can be expensive (especially when done as inefficiently as in the US) but the actual economics of running trains are fantastic. They're the second-most efficient way of transporting goods and people - after marine shipping.

A freight train can move 1 ton of cargo 480 miles using a single gallon of diesel. [1]

Even city rail, Bart trains in SF average 249 miles per gallon equivalent.

Not to mention you only need what - one or two people - manning a train carrying the average equivalent of 700 truckloads. Once you commit to putting it up, it's super cheap and efficient, which is why we do it.

[1] https://www.aar.org/article/freight-rail-moving-miles-ahead-...

[2] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/GreenSheet.pdf

Rail networks have a lot more potential for automation and electrification. It is way too underestimated.

It would be cool to see when Amazon gets into Rail.

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