Italy is betting big on train travel

That's one think the UK does almost right. Getting money back for a trip is relatively easy. You can do it online.

I say almost though because a) every operator has their own web page to submit refund requests through (why??) and b) a train has to be 30 minutes late before you get anything. What a joke.

I'll never forget that time my SNCF train was about one and a half hour late, which was extra annoying because it was planned to arrive just before midnight, and it was a long ride to I had been looking forward to bed. They have a tiered refund system, where delays or an hour or more qualify for a full refund. But this is SNCF. I took a picture of the clock at arrival. Next day, they reported the train to be 59 minutes late and I could claim my 50% refund.

I don't entirely understand why you need tickets for a particular train at a particular time.

Here (Israel) you get to a station, open an app that finds which station you're at and gives you an entry ticket (a QR code), you scan that ticket at the gate on the way to the platforms, and take whatever train(s) you want, and when you're at your destination station you use the app again, which creates an exit ticket and charges you according to the entry and exit stations

I ride the Frecciarossa from Lyon to Paris recently and loved the experience. Reservations are online. Show up to the train station 30 minutes before departure. No airport like security. Plenty of leg room and space for carryon luggage.

This spring/summer we’re experiencing floods, frequent and intense thunderstorms, and extreme heat. All together, depending on the day and the region. Last year we suffered an absurd drought.

A couple of week ago the south part of the country was dealing with near record high temperatures, while the north was dealing with floods.

I mean... the author might just assume that most readers will be aware of recent events in Southern Europe; it doesn't really seem necessary to belabour the point. The curious can look it up fairly easily.

If every news article had to go into full detail on every point that most people know anyway, they'd end up kind of ungainly. "A train is a large motorised vehicle which runs, generally on a regular schedule, on steel tracks. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. An alloy is..."

Beyond people who actually still deny climate change (they're still out there, though, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the developed world they're concentrated in the US, Canada, and Australia, all big fossil fuel producers... "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"), I don't think many people would argue that it's not a _fairly significant issue_ for Southern Europe.

This will be the case until trains are cheaper than airfare. AMS to FCO is around $100 by air. The train from Frankfurt to Basel alone is that price and about a quarter of the journey.

For trips of that distance train will never make sense, flying is too much faster. Trains work great for shorter trips and Europe would be served well to focus on those trips. (In particular Europe has a problem with trips that should be in train range but because they cross a border they don't work well)

There is one exception, trains as a land cruise can go that far, but riding the train is the point, not where you are going.

From my own experience, trains only make sense if you're traveling less than around 1000 km. Beyond that, it's a long, boring journey, and often more expensive than a plane to the same destination.

It's not a problem that tourists arrive and depart by air as it still is very helpful if they can move within Italy by train.

Part of the issue with public transport is also very much a service issue.

Switzerland has a fantastic "Easy ride" system where you swipe a button in an app to check-in and swipe it at your destination to check-out. It automatically combines trips and applies any relevant discounts. In The Netherlands you can check-in using a bank card so you don't even need an app.

If we want to encourage people to use public transport more, we need to have such a system Europe wide. Grabbing a train should be more convenient than booking a flight, for a family with kids, making a reservation weeks in advanced , at a specific time isn't always reasonable and it's definitely not convenient.

It's not like they don't build them, it's just that it takes a long time. I know about the French plans, an order for 115 trains takes ~18 years (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_M).

And if you check the requirements, it might be worth it to take long, for example: "the new trains be at least 20% less expensive to purchase than their predecessors while possessing lower operating costs as well."

The Freccia trains are the ""Standard but Luxury"" trains.

If you need just to move and the speed is not that big of an issue the "treni regionali" are the main way of transport. Fixed and resonable fares.

Saying this as an Italian, we never had so much choice and fast, reliable trains.

Also non-Italian here. In my experience of a few years ago local trains in Italy are quite cheap, certainly much cheaper than the UK.

As an Italian lving in the northern part of the country:

The trains are used pretty extensively and they works.

The Trenitalia has fixed fares on the low speed lines (so no need to buy them weeks before) and are resonably priced.

I the south...EH.

Would use them only for an extensive trip (from a big city to another big city)

But by nature Italy HAS to use a lot of air travel as the country is very long and that's problematic.

(don't forget than Sicily has 5M people and the 2 main airports see 9M people transit a year)

Sadly, in the era of non-existent budgets this is what counts for journalism. It might even be that it was just LLM generated and then just touched up.

Why do regional trains need to be spacious?

Air travel is almost as subsidized as road travel, I don't think 'cheaper' is a good argument for it (not even counting externalities).

Convenience though is a great argument for air travel.

No infrastructure needed? This must be a joke. Have you heard about the concept of an airport? Airports are humongous and contain a ton of infrastructure, compared to a train station.

Gare de Paris-Nord, the busiest train station in Europe, is planned to have a floor area of 120 000 m² after the next renovation. I couldn't find the number for the ground area, but it's obviously smaller than the floor area. Dulles airport, in Washington DC (a relatively small city by all standards), has an area of 47 km². That's 47 000 000 m², for the unaware. Meanwhile, its annual traffic (about 20M passengers) is approximately a fifth of the Gare du Nord (about 100M passengers).

And then you obviously have to take into account everything that goes into an airport. How much infrastructure to carry fuel and equipment to the airport? To carry passengers to the airport? Most airports aren't in city centers! Do the roads and rails that lead to the airport count? Most certainly. Runways, terminals, air control towers... All this is infrastructure.

So no, you don't need to lay out rails in the sky for planes. That's pretty much where the list of pros stop, in terms of infrastructure. The cons, on the other hand...

> In many cases air travel is more convenient and cheaper to operate than rail (no infrastructure needed).

This is like saying flipping on a light switch, turn on a tap, or flushing a toilet is very convenient because there is no infrastructure needed.

There's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in the background that you may not be aware of. See also "Dependency" comic:

* https://xkcd.com/2347/

Air travel is cheaper because in Europe at least, we have achieved near perfect competition between many low-cost airlines. This isn’t like dictated by laws of physics.

Trains, on the other hand, are a natural monopoly, and Britain’s privatisation efforts have been a failure. These companies contribute nothing to infrastructure investment, most of our rail is 150 years old and trains between Britains largest cities don’t have access to electricity.

For like 70 years western governments did not take train infra seriously. This created huge problems - stations in UK are designed for small population, platforms are short so you can’t have long trains. the whole point of a train is that it can be long, longest trains in the world are measured in kilometres. Eurostar is 400 meters long. British trains are often tiny.

the new Elizabeth line in London uses 3 different signalling systems because it runs across some track that’s new and some rail that’s prehistoric.

But if you look at physics of it, trains are the only vehicle that does not need fuel or batteries, it feeds on electricity directly from the grid. Electrification of aircraft is both fantastic and fantastically inefficient

I think a lot of short haul flights make less sense than people think when you account for travel time to the airport, security, boarding, taxiing, etc.

Trains suffer from intermediate stops of course, but overall it's really important to do a comparison of the true door to door time.

If K99 turns out to be real in any sense there’s a strong chance all transport moves electric/battery opp.

I spent a month travailing in Europe this Spring and while not horrible, I can see why most people want to take planes or drive. If you are traveling between countries nothing matches up. You land in Europe and decide to take a train from Frankfurt to Prague and the schedules don't sink up. You spend an ungodly amount of time waiting or sitting on a train in the dark. Then if you want to travel to Poland from Prague you end up arriving to your destination 10 hours later in what would be a <4 hour car trip. I can understand why most Europeans I spoke to would much rather fly or drive and leave the trains for tourists. Tourists also don't have time to burn adjusting their schedule to the train schedules. With the Schengen Zone you only have 90 days every 180, where as before you could spend a year travailing across Europe you're now screwed because you have 90 days instead of 90 days for each individual country.

> Trains are fine but also very expensive

But why is it expensive