In nearly all bigger countries it is possible to reach most bigger cities within the 5h. But journeys in this time-frame seldomly go much beyond the border. There is still much optimization potential for transnational travel in Europe's train network.
For a short summary, the basic problem is that rail infrastructure is paid for by national funds, so there is a bigger incentive to connect two places within the same country than to connect one place within the country to another place within a neighboring country.
Wendover theorizes that the decoupling of rail networks from rail service operators (as pushed by the EU-level government) can lead to new demand for international routes as budget operators spring up that are less tied to the demands of a particular national government.
And yes, you can.
EU co-founded projects can be forced to operate only domestically too. For example polish high speed railways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendolino#Poland
> certification for international operation is not seen as a priority, as the trains are restricted to domestic services for an initial 10 years under the terms of a grant from the EU Cohesion Fund which covered 22% of the project cost.[31]
Oh, the irony.
There are initiatives like ETCS which partially improve the control situation, but even that has lots of national variations and takes ages to rollout.
Historic systems with little funding (relative to need) are fun.
There's also a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel plan, which is more like in an exploration/planning phase, but that should connect those cities and make them function almost like one. Instead of a two hour ferry ride it would be more like a 30min train ride. Øresund Bridge basically did that to Copenhagen and Malmö.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE#Lines_under_construction
Some problems with that approach are
1. It doesn't take that many different operators before you start running into capacity limits of the network and get into a situation where additional services (when you want even more competition) cannot be scheduled without actively worsening the services offered by existing operators (including operators that might not even be competing within the same market segment, i.e. like long distance operators vs. regional and commuter service operators or freight operators).
2. In principle connections are a core part of railways' service offerings (especially in countries that aren't as centralised as e.g. the stereotype of France), but attractive connection times are only possible between a very limited number of trains, so with multiple competing long distance operators who gets to decide which operator gets the path with the attractive connection times and who doesn't? Attractive connections also require through-ticketing in terms of passenger rights, so you won't be left stranded if you miss a connection because of preceding delays, and both scheduled/coordinated connections and through-ticketing run counter to the mantra of absolutely free-for-all competition.
3. For the wheel-rail interface to work well, you definitively need to take a holistic approach between the needs of the infrastructure and the needs of the vehicles running on that infrastructure. Introducing a hard legal split between infrastructure owner and train operating companies in the name of free competition unfortunately tends to turn that interface into a legal and bureaucratic quagmire that is anything but efficient for the railway system as a whole.
For example in Germany construction works (outside of emergency repairs) are required to be scheduled several years (not just a year plus a bit so its known in time for the next timetable, but some years more) in advance. At that point you already need to specify the exact and precise length of any required possessions, but at the same time due to the rules for tendering construction works, you're also not supposed to specify the exact method of doing those construction works, so for anything slightly more complex how are you now supposed to calculate the exact length for the required possessions if you aren't actually allowed to specify how the construction works are to be executed?
Or for another example: Within the wheel-rail interface you cannot avoid a certain amount of wear and tear, especially on more curvy stretches of line. This affects both the train operators (wheels) as well as the infrastructure operator (rails). Ideally you'd work out some compromise that is tenable for both sides of the interface, and normally somewhat more wear and tear on the wheels is to be preferred, because wheels can re-profiled and/or changed in fixed, covered maintenance facilities (i.e. better working conditions) and while the trains are potentially out of service for regular maintenance anyway, whereas rail renewals need to potentially brave the elements and either block rail traffic or else need to be conducted at unattractive times (for workers, i.e. on weekends and especially at night).
The legal separation between train operating companies and infrastructure owners nevertheless has led train operating companies to possibly try optimising the wheel-rail interface for their own benefit, which has meant that on some heavily used routes with tight(ish) curves, due to excessive wear rails now have to be renewed every year or two, which longer term absolutely isn't sustainable in terms of the demands placed on the maintenance personnel of the infrastructure operator (and never mind the costs, too). (Normally, rail life before a complete renewal is measured in decades!)
So now "the empire strikes back" and the infrastructure operator installs hardened rails in order to return to a somewhat more manageable and sustainable maintenance schedule, but because the vehicle operators haven't been prepared for that switch, they now suddenly find themselves with excessive wheel wear (and unfortunately at a point in time when due to outside political events there isn't much excess capacity in the market for railway wheels). In the end, it's ultimately the passenger who suffers here.
> It doesn't take that many different operators before you start running into capacity limits of the network
Don't get this. If there is that much demand, then clearly it makes sense to build out the system? More rails, higher speed, and/or better bypasses for trains that need to stop at each station for example.
It's usually a hard question to predict where public or investment money is best spent, but this situation seems like it would be quite clear.
Open access operators also often start running only a few trains per day – building additional expensive infrastructure for just a few trains per day might not be worth it, but conversely a few trains per day are potentially already more than enough to upset an exiting regular interval timetable and timed connections.
We don't even have anything close to regional rail, and highspeed rail would consume all public capital that would be used to improve regional rail systems.
could be used, but we all know thats not how it works ...
This lets the high-speed train serve a lot more places without losing much speed. Maybe the local train serves several towns in the area.
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Reliability
For a connection like this to work the trains have to meet, consistently, every hour or however frequently they run. This is pretty difficult, most rail networks are highly complex and delays cascade across a network. With station transfers this is okay, you can drop off anyone who needs to transfer to wait and let everyone else continue, but in this sort of moving transfer either people just totally miss their connection because it wasn't there, or the train loops around somehow and delays everyone else continuing on.
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Practicality
Let's say trains meet at 80 mph. Assuming you give people one minute to get their bags, walk to the door, take their seats in the other train (fairly aggressive for anyone who isn't a fit young adult) that means you spend 1.3 miles of distance traveling. That means 1.3 miles of parallel track where neither train can actually stop to serve local communities.
Station transfers in comparison are fairly compact (the length of a train) and they can actually also let people on and off from the surrounding areas with appropriate exits, whereas that's not possible with moving trains.
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Safety
We can't really guarantee two trains will move at the same speed parallel to each other. Trains are not automated to such a degree outside of self-contained metro networks, full automation is too complex to do in one shot and partial automation is still very complex and in its early days. Also whatever physical mechanism has to be tight enough to accommodate accessibility (wheelchairs can't go over large gaps) and reliable enough to work all the time; what happens if said mechanism breaks down while the trains are moving and conjoined?
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Finally there's the matter of actual need. If you need trains to not get slowed down, you can have some express services skip connecting to local regional services at all. It turns out demand for that kind of service is fairly limited; as an example, Amtrak has tried several times to introduce nonstop DC to NYC service, but it turns out that the additional passengers do not offset the loss of passengers from Baltimore, Wilmington and Philadelphia.
The idea is to drop cars without slowing down. These cars would have brakes, that's it. Before the station, drop the car, it slows enough to give safe time for switching, and cruises to a halt at the local station.
That's drop off, pickup is the slow train, which runs twice a day in each direction and assembles the carriage on the way.
Impractical for various reasons, sure. But what if.
The "moving platforms" concept seems to come up quite often, ala https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlhuHmVn4Ss
It's also part of the current hyperpoliticalization we're seeing.
I've known lots of both (more of the latter), none of whom believe anything like that.
Not just, no. But, looking at population density by states, you've got roughly:
(1) the coastal states way at the top (except Alaska, Oregon, and Maine), (2) non-coastal Mississippi River states, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona, and Vermont in the middle (3) Everything else.
They are very different environments for things like passenger transport economics.
> There are tons of big cities in non-coastal areas of the US.
Define “big city”? There are three (out of 24 in the US) metropolitan areas with a population over 2.5 million where the principal city is located in a state without ocean, Gulf of Mexico, or Great Lakes coast; 0 out of 9 of your cutoff is 5 million.
Plus, when it comes to daily "Pendlers" (people who cross the border regularly to work), often they cross the border in places where there is no extant railway connection. In Czechia, a lot of commuting people cross the German border using the D5/A6 highway, which has no nearby alternative. The closest potentially upgradeable railway is 40 km away in difficult mountain terrain, so even if it got upgraded to a reasonable standard, it would have to attract different customers going from different A to different B.
By far the most common demographics to cross the borders in trains in my country are tourists, who like to go from one capital or important city (Berlin, Krakow) to another (Prague, Vienna).
I wonder how much privatization has played a role in this.
If you take the biggest countries worldwide, this doesn't apply.