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Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

Was in Germany, can confirm many locals were opting for trains. Not to say many small towns were getting long needed boosts in tourism after Covid downturn.

I don’t know how small compared to overall German government balance sheet to withstand to support a program like that indefinitely but it was definitely a pleasant surprise for me coming from North America where train services are generally pretty bad. It was difficult to get seats in regional trains over the weekends though but overall trains were clean and right on time.

As much as I think this is a great model for Germany, it is not optimal to apply for places like US and Canada. I remember we took a regional train from Nurnburg to Leipzig and it took us close to 6hrs. For less than 200km distance. Now imagine US where that distance can quadruple depending on the state you are driving to.

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It's a common myth that Canada is not a good fit for train, yes it is large and low density at a country level but it has pockets of very high density.

Almost half of Canadian population is within the Windsor-Quebec City corridor (which includes Toronto and Montreal), which is just about 1100 km. You can definitely have a viable train considering the millions of people that live there and the many dozens of daily short flights that happen in that corridor.

The current GO Expansion to turn the greater Toronto area commuter rail into a true regional rail is a great project, and is using knowledge and expertise from the German rail network. It will electrify the trains and provide all day frequent service throughout the network that will mean not really needing to bother checking the schedule. It also flies in the face of statements that say european style rail isn't possible in north america, since the basic plan is modelled on German S-Bahn.

Just this weekend I drove 1 hr to the edge of Toronto, then got on the subway to downtown for a Blue Jays game. Once GO expansion is done I'll be able to make that same trip on a single train in less time then it takes to drive.

High speed rail from Quebec City to Windsor is a project we should absolutely be funding as the population and travel patterns of the corridor would easily support it. Start with Toronto->Montreal with a spur to Ottawa, then as phase 2 extend to Windsor and Quebec City.

Yup. Both US and Canada are good fits for mass transit. The Bos-NYC-Phil-Was-(Rich-Raleigh-Atlanta?) corridor represents around 30% of the US population (well over 100 million for those counting).

The distance between those US cities represents maybe less than half the high speed rail network in France but easily almost double the French population.

> Nurnburg to Leipzig and it took us close to 6hrs

The 9 euro ticket only worked for regional trains. With the ICE, the high-speed intercity trains, that would have taken 2 hours and 6 minutes if you leave right when I write this comment

EDIT: cost is important of course: DB says that would cost about 80 euros, which is a crime IMO. [0]

Taking the car would take about half an hour longer and currently cost about 44 euro in fuel [1]

[0] https://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/dn?S=8000284&Z=8...

[1] https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/routeplanner?area1=EU&area2=EU&d...

Also: hot damn, ugly URLs

DB is very expensive when travelling spontaneously and really cheap if planning well ahead. I regularly go from Berlin to Frankfurt for 20 Euros, which is around 500km. Often times, they offer me first class upgrades for 10 Euros, too.

Huh, did not know that. How well ahead is well ahead?

At least 2 months in advance. If it is later, the first or last connection is often times really cheap still, too.

> it took us close to 6hrs

That's just the regional trains, though. The Intercity Express from Düsseldorf Hbf to Frankfurt Airport is 1h 15 mins (for more than 200 km).

China has nearly the area (9.6m km^2) of the US (9.8m km^2), and has plenty of railroad.

China’s population density map is very different from the US’ . One can hardly compare these countries when it comes to transportation infrastructure for people.

The US has pretty terrible public transport even in dense areas.

Karlsruhe - Hamburg (~600km) -> 5 hours with ICE (the Basel - Hamburg connection) or 6 hours with an IC.

Karlsruhe - Paris (~550km) -> 2.5 hours with TGV (and it's mostly cheaper than traveling with DB).

Out of curiosity I checked it a bit deeper - The ICE has 6 stops, while the TGV only stops once.

Spiegel also has an article about these exact two trains[0]. To summarize, in Germany the trains have a couple dozen kilometers where they're allowed to go faster than 160kp/h, in France the TGV travels at around 320kp/h for quite some time.

Considering all this it's not that surprising that the TGV is that much faster.

Apparently the problem is that the fast trains in Germany have to share the tracks with the slower trains, in France and Japan as an example they apparently have their own tracks.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/reise/deutschland/ice-versus-tgv-waru...

France operates on a "periphery-to-Paris-and-back" model, so the goal is quite clear – you build a radial line towards Paris and voilà, you've sped up that relation. "periphery-to-periphery" traffic is mostly ignored, so you get the somewhat curious situation where the geographically direct connection between two cities might be slower (or only marginally faster) than going all the way into Paris and back out again.

Germany on the other hand doesn't have a single city that's as extremely dominant as Paris, so to capture a similar amount of traffic on your high speed network you need something more like a mesh, where any single route might only capture a smaller fraction of the total traffic, rather than the simply radial star you can get by in France.

Of course that's not the only reason for the differing evolution of high speed rail between France and Germany, but it definitively is one of the reasons behind that difference.

tokyo - osaka 500km -> nozomi shinkansen 2.5hrs, hikari shinkansen 3hrs, ~EUR 100-150 one-way

The normal trains are two hours from Nürnberg to Leipzig. The thing is, the 9€ ticket was limited to regional trains, which stop in every village on the way. Munich/Berlin is 4 hours by train, hard to beat by car, and if you go centre to centre even by plane.

2 hours is ICE which isn't a "normal" train to me, but even with regional trains it should only be around 4 hours. I'm not sure if the OP took the scenic route.

200km was also a very optimistic guess, it's 300km. It looks close on the map but even in a car it will take you 3 hours. It's actually faster to go from Dresden.

> I remember we took a regional train from Nurnburg to Leipzig and it took us close to 6hrs. For less than 200km distance. Now imagine US where that distance can quadruple depending on the state you are driving to.

Pretty sure the distance from Nurnburg to Leipzig, or 'less than 200km', would not quaruple in the States, or indeed anywhere else.

practical or not, the size of a country (which, should that be reminded, is a man-made construct) should not have a say on whether or not some can be “pardoned” to fly.

If your country is poorly equipped in efficient rails, how would that give you the right to fly for convenience? This question comes from everyone in every other country.

20 miles per hour sounds like a great model for 1880.

Its a local train making many stops, the technology of the train makes no difference to how long it would take to do the schedule. I imagine almost no one rides the full length, they'd take an express train instead.

Because it's local trains with multiple stops. It's like comparing an average speed of car trips inside a city with multiple intersections (around 12-20 km/h) to a motorway average speed (100+ km/h) and saying that cars driving in the city are from the 1920s...

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