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Comment by tbabej | Hacker News Reader

Europe has quite a few high-quality, high-speed rail connections. If I may suggest a feature, in order for the tool is to be faithful to its mission, alternative mods of transport could be supported as well.

Personally, I am more than happy to take an overnight train than a short-flight, given the additional overhead of travelling to/from the airport. An overnight train can take you pretty far within continental Europe.

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That's what I'm going to do this August with my 3yr old as we'll be visiting friends and family etc.

I'd be taking a train to London (about 3h), then EuroStar to Paris (2h 15), then to Berlin (about 8h). Total time ~13 hours.

Flight time for me to Berlin is ~4h, but to get to Airport and the wait for boarding brings it probably close to 8h, but then I can't visit the relatives in Paris that easy.

Actually I don't like flying that much these days (the eco reasons aside).

This is the ideal case. However, I have been involved in quite a bit of European projects and it is not that easy. Last meeting was in Poznan and I could have used the train via Berlin from south Germany, but somehow I have not been able to book any night trains lately and traveling over the day would have taken a whole day of my work week instead of half. Next trip is the other direction to The Hague. I will take the train but last time I had to replan my trip 3 times while traveling due to cancellations and delays. I don't want to fly but I am always totally stressed after long train trips. To a typical meeting people from like 10 countries come in a European research project. Traveling from Germany to Spain or even Greece is not really feasible by train until we get better night train connections (only Austrian rail is actually operating them, but there seems currently no chance to book them)

Do you have the option to use the train seat as a work space? That way daytime train travel is still useful.

I don't travel for work by train but for fun, so my experience is probably different to yours.

Some EU countries (Greece, Poland, Portugal) still have terrible, slow trains. Paris-Berlin takes 8h (fastest one) for about 877 km. Berlin-Gdansk takes 8h for about 400 km (!!).

I last traveled by night train about 20 years ago throughout Germany and Poland. It was terrible experience. But great if I was looking for a companion to beer, or surprise sex with random folk.

Also night trains are non-existent in some countries. For example in the UK, most trains run from 6am onwards on week days. Forget if you need to travel from York and be in London for 8am. We have some night services[0] that go out of London to Scotland/Cornwall but I see them more like touristic offer than for any economic reason.

[0] https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/on-the-train/sleeper-trains/

Considering the size of the cities and how close they are, I'm surprised train transportation is so slow. Paris has 11 million people (comparable to Los Angeles). Berlin has 6 million people (comparable to Philadelphia). As the crow flies, they are 545 miles apart. By road the distance is 650 miles. Assuming you average 60mph, that's 11 hours by car. And when you get to your destination you have a car, so you can easily travel outside the main city. Using a car also means you don't have to worry about transportation to/from the train stations, nor do you have to do anything special to transport bulky items such as bicycles.

Some of my friends have greatly praised European trains, so I thought they'd be far more compelling.

Europe's train network is often excellent within a country, but lacking when it comes to crossing country borders. That's starting to be addressed now, but it will take some time for the effects to be seen.

I was working on an app as a side project similar to this. Basically each traveler would fill out a form saying I live in X and I have access to car/train/etc. transportation. The idea was to match people and then find a central location for remote teams to meet up. For example, 2 people live in Chicago, 3 in NYC, and one in SF. Where is the best city to meet up; however, I was optimizing on cost.

It turns out several people on HN had similar ideas (Villagers app was one but it seems to be offline now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33344734). I stopped working on it after reading this HN thread where several people linked to various articles like https://blog.garrytan.com/travel-planning-software-the-most-....

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