Hacker News Reader

Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Back to the old days of having quick boarding without a crotch scan, having plenty of legroom, normal-size restrooms, and a restaurant car.

And you travel from city center to city center, rather than middle-of-nowheres named after a city.

View on HN

Assuming you actually don't miss the connection and are left in the middle of nowhere, if lucky to be able to travel wihout changing trains that it doesn't get one hour delay, or enjoying standing up three hours in a high speed train, because it is overbooked, or getting additional passegers from another high speed one that broke down.

like that can't happen with planes?

i missed a connection because a plane was late by half an hour. (it departed an hour late but caught up some time). the connecting flight was by the same airline. we absolutely could have made the connection, but the airline decided to reroute us anyways which added 6 hours and an additional transfer to our trip which meant that i was awake for 48 hours by the time we finally reached our accomodation and i got sick and had to rest some days from the exhaustion.

i absolutely would have preferred a multi-day train trip over that experience.

Except in most European countries, unless you went with the more expensive train ticket option there is no reroute done by the train company, you get to buy new tickets for everyone.

i do not believe that is true. do you have an example where this happened? at least in germany if you miss a connection you can take any other train that follows with the same ticket.

what doesn't work is, if you have a regional pass, and you buy a ticket from outside that region, but you are late for the first leg of that ticket, then your ticket may no longer be valid. it would be the same for flights.

Portugal, Spain, Greece for example, when talking about fast trains.

Germany it used to also be like that until around a decade ago.

I definitely remember time lost in Reisezentrum arguing for new tickets and how I wasn't to blame for an ICE to be parked 1h outside Frankfurt.

I travel by train in Europe since late 1980's, while interesting alternative, let's not forget the not so nice parts.

well, this will hopefully change or has changed already. the EU has laws on this which these countries should implement:

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...

In my experience across the US and the EU, most of the time they're late so there's a lot of idle waiting.

meh apart from the Deutsche Bahn, I never had to wait around in Europe and I lived there for a year.

In a lot of ways, I understand why Deutsche Bahn sucks, a lot of politics ruined the company.

Crotch scan doesn't happen in the EU, and the rest doesn't matter if you can get there much faster.

>And you travel from city center to city center, rather than middle-of-nowheres named after a city.

When you land you can rent a car... when you arrive on a train you are forced to either pay for a taxi or take pub... pu... public transportation

I for one appreciate bar cars.

Also it's not always much faster. Italy's high speed network eventually won with their national airline. And no wonder - a trip going halfway across the peninsula takes roughly as much time, but is generally more pleasant.

Public transportation in most Western European capital cities is excellent.

Do you think the Barcelona metro is only for plebs who are below you in the pecking order?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com