Hacker News Reader

Comment by meerita | Hacker News Reader

Trains are great for no more than 600km range trips. I live in Spain, and it's great to get into the train without doing all the procedures you do with a plane. I arrive to the station 10 mins before departure and I never had troubles. With airplanes I need to be there 1 hour before. Then you spend another 30 mins getting into the plane, following the instructions for just only 1h trip. The same trip Barcelona -> Madrid can be done without all the hasle and even faster than in airplanes, in addition, you arrive in the center of the city, much better connected than the airport, where you spend another half an hour to reach the city center.

In my experience, airplanes are worth once you talk about trips over 800km. Trips that you cannot do in less than 2 hours of train.

View on HN

I used to do Cologne-Munich _all_the_effing_time (~600km, door-to-door 6-7h, depending on connection). You can save about 1h by taking a flight, but then you'll never have a solid chunk of at least one 1h to do anything within.

And that's given the current shitty track system. The only bit of genuine high-sped rail on that connection is Frankfurt-Cologne, maybe a quarter of the trip. Top speed is around 300 km/h on that bit; otherwise around 200, sometimes less. One point of comparison: The fully modernized Berlin-Munich track is about the same length; some trains take less than 4 h and that's with stops along the way.

This is a trip that I'm very familiar with, but it's very typical [0]. Note that some countries have chosen different tradeoffs - e.g., France and Spain with their ultra-fast point-to-point connections, eschewing a more dense high-speed net.

The point of all this being: Trains already work great, and can still get quite a bit better with investment - certainly quite some ways above 600 km trips.

I wouldn't look at trip time alone, but uninterrupted time during which you can do work. On most brief flights there barely is any. By contrast, for a business traveler, a long high-speed rail trip can simply be the first part of the day.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/High_Spe...

Yes, I have bias due in Spain you can use AVE and other lines who are +250km/h average and a 600km trip is like max 2hs.

I completely agree, except I think trains have a much higher competitive range, possibly up to 1,000 km .

With a plane 1,000 km trip including all things you mention like arriving at the airport in advance, boarding, finding your way back to the city center, etc. would come easily to 4-5 hours when you calculate it door-to-door. This could be comparable to a train at 200-250 km/h.

Also, trains tend to be more punctual and less prone to delays compared to planes. And arriving in the city center as opposed to 40-50 kms out is a big advantage indeed.

I agree here, some lines and trains in Europe go up to 300 kmh (last one I've tried was actually in Spain, on par with French TGV).

Plus airports have this pesky habit of losing all your luggage, even on fairly trivial flights. Recently my journey was Geneva -> Barcelona -> Seville, and they lost my big luggage with complete paraglider (4000+ euro) and other stuff (cca 1000 euro). For a week, they couldn't even locate it, had to buy tons of stuff and rent basic paraglider from school and I started saying goodbye to all equipment. No real compensation for anything. Then it just showed up in place I told them to deliver to, not even apology (vueling airlines, but I blame airports for this more than airline).

That's just one sample out of quite a few on how to ruin your dream vacation by flying.

They can go even faster, but it's not as efficient.

I think it's really difficult to average 200-250 km/h over 1,000 km with a train. I would guess the trains that average that speed would be much shorter trips.

Various Shinkansen lines average that much or higher for long stretches. To be fair, there isn't a 1000km line in Japan, but ~500km at those speeds should indicate that it's possible. Sanyo runs at near maximum operating speed (300km/h) for most of its >500km run.

We don't have such train lines that do that much kms. We have fast lines, like max 600km. Longer lines have trains who are +180max. And each trip is like 7-8 hours.

I did 1000km in airplane (also i was private pilot) and it's a 1h trip. Barcelona -> Santiago is max 1h. I can spend another hour getting into the airport, the total trip will not go more than 3 hours, but in Train it will take me 8hs.

Im French rail planning, rail is considered competitive with air travel up to 3h. In German planning, up to 4h. With 250km/h average, that would allow up to 1000km.

Plus, one could try to revive night trains. Arriving at 9am in the morning in some far away city, we’ll rested, would be useful both for vacations and business trips. And could easily allow distances of 1500km even without having high speed rail lines everywhere, or somewhat longer distances with.

> With 250km/h average, that would allow up to 1000km.

Sadly going through the alps at that speed is not that simple. But I'd love to have interconnected cities.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31000124

There are several connections through the alps being built right now. Gotthard base tunnel through Switzerland, Brenner Base Tunnel through Austria/Italy, and a connection Italy/France. Not all connections through Europe go through the Alps, and u can get a decent average speed even if occasionally dropping below the maximum speed for some rough areas.

I am from the alps, so I am quite aware of this. Still, I can go from Berlin to Munich in the same time it takes me to get through half of Austria as of now. The Brenne Base Tunnel is a needed thing (my grandparents live in the area where traffic is currently going through) but by my judgment it will be too little, too late.

I'm up for investing in faster trains, like Magrevs or even faster japanese who can reach +600km/h, that would be a game changer, you can transport four times more efficiently.

> Plus, one could try to revive night trains.

The linked article talks about this:

>New sleeper train connections are cropping up across Europe. The Austrian operator ÖBB Nightjet has overnight services to cities like Rome, Milan, Brussels and Amsterdam, and recently initiated a Vienna-Paris overnight link.

German trains rarely go 250kmph, let alone averaging that. Between Cologne and Frankfurt, sure. But most of the country, no.

Taking the night train is a common way to travel within Finland. By train, it takes around 10 hours and 1000-1100km north to Lapland (taking Helsinki-Levi as example). It's possible to take a local flight at vastly higher prices and no room for the equipment people tend to take along for such trips, such as skis and hiking gear.

In central Europe, commuting by train is also pretty common. You might get packed pretty tightly at the most busy commuting times, but you avoid the huge traffic jams in and out of major cities which can waste hours of your day.

The problem at least in parts of Europe is that trains are not always competitive in terms of pricing, especially when it comes to fast connections. Airplane tickets are sometimes just stupidly cheap.

Also, in Germany trains are very often late or have other issues.

Nevertheless, I agree that it's more relaxed to go by train most of the time (unless it's super crowded) and I'll sometimes pay extra for that comfort.

> Also, in Germany trains are very often late or have other issues.

Wait, what? I am really surprised to read this.

Yeah, small delays are happening constantly, bigger delays very often, you will always see a few ICEs running 120+ min late. Many malfunctions and building sites. Some tickets are horribly expensive or straight up overpriced and then knowing the arcane system behind pricing is required to pick the right ticket for the right price.

It's also a dense network with lots of passengers and I do manage to get around so there's that? But you were probably thinking of Switzerland, not Germany :o)

Germany tried to privatise rail transport but kind-of half-assed it, so now you have a system which is basically the worst of both worlds: Not customer-centric at all, but at the same time investing more money in high-prestige projects (sometimes at the other end of the world) than in fixing the problems with badly maintained infrastructure at home.

> Also, in Germany trains are very often late or have other issues.

Yeah, try to travel by train in Germany during any of the christian holidays, and you'd think you're in india by how overcrowded and chaotic it is.

> it's great to get into the train without doing all the procedures you do with a plane.

Well, if they just let go of the security theater and phobias, we could theoretically have a situation where you just board with no procedures, like on a train: Ride a local train/metro/bus up to the larger train station, flash your card or pass or what-not, maybe flash your passport, put your suitcase on the baggage cart or beltway going up to the cargo hold, and get on the plane. No queues, no checks and no nothing - basically like a train.

I realize it's not that trivial to switch to that way of thinking of air travel, but again - not impossible.

Barcelona-Madrid vía the "Puente Aéreo" (air bridge, freely translated) is the closest I have seen. There are departures every half hour, you buy one ticket and can take any of them. Boarding is also very fast.

Exactly. Arriving to the city center and skipping all the airport hassle is huge.

Have you been in a "Mediterranean corridor" train? It can take 6-4h to get from Valencia to Barcelona. Maybe the AVE is an outlier. And it isn't available everywhere exactly. Curious that the 2nd and 3rd biggest cities are so badly connected. The fuel it took driving alone in a car was cheaper (2018) than those trains also.

I was in Spain recently and while the trains were as pleasant/convenient as I expected, I was definitely surprised by how expensive it was. Even more so, given how (relatively) cheap the rest of the trip was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com