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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

Yep. If you have an hour to kill, there’s always good street food, or just exploring a bit. It’s not a waste.

It's fun once or twice a week. If it happens almost daily (maybe even multiple times a day) it get's much less enjoyable and way harder to meaningful fill with work.

And if you have an every minute counts life style or career you can get work done while traveling.

This is the biggest thing to me. When I’m on a train, I can text, call, and even get some work done. When I’m driving, it’s actually quite dangerous to attempt those things; and not only for me, but the other people driving around me.

In theory you can, but reception is notoriously bad in german trains. They know about it though and are constantly looking for improvements, e.g. the change a few years ago to allow for free wifi, or developments of glass technology. Links in german.

https://www.golem.de/news/deutsche-bahn-wlan-im-ice-wird-kos...

https://www.golem.de/news/statt-repeater-bahn-holt-5g-durch-...

Yeah, I can testify that cell coverage is pretty bad, at least in the northern parts. ICE usually offer free wifi and the signal is a bit better, but still not really comparable with what I get in the North of Italy, for example.

Dutch trains almost all have wifi, it isn't fast tho and then, on busy trains, you get to share it with 100 people which is rather hilarious. Most people have cellular plans now and coverage is better than one would want it to be.

edit: it is funny how youtube thinks the person on this IP address is waaaay into trains.

Same in the U.K. a colleague drove me up the motorway a couple of days ago and I was in the passenger seat sshed into a server for the trip and didn’t have any issue with dropped connectivity.

Can’t do that on the train, there’s a ton of “not spots”, even excluding the tunnels.

It’s crazy the phone companies don’t have better coverage on the train line.

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