In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way
nytimes.com
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If Europe would just spent more money on infrastructure.
We have trains in Germany that can do 350km/h but I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be.
Then we have the Germany Ticket. A 50€/month subscription to all regional trains (not the fast ones). Which removes the hassle of dealing with local subway and bus companies.
But the trains are often late, which sucks, especially if you want to ride in the evening.
If Europe could get on Japan's level, that would be a dream.
My main gripe is the price (I am poor by european standards). For example going from Paris to Napoli only by train is currently above 300 euros whereas you can find a flight for 40 euros. I am ready to pay around 100 euros for that. Recently there was sleeper car train from Paris to Milano which was affordable but the company did not last alas. I am personally ready to pay more in order to avoid a flight, I don't even care about the time it takes, I like being on trains. Sleeper cars are even better. The only thing is the price.
That is to say, that if we subsidized train travel, then there are benefits (open trade, comms, etc.) that are easily realised but that we don't see.
I feel it is so elastic (sorry, I'm misusing this term somewhat) that you can subsidize to an extremely high percentage without net cost (if all externalities could actually be known and costed in)
I want train journeys to be 50Euro Athens-Stockholm. 10Euro Paris-Hamburg. I want my taxes to pay the difference.
I can either - go for a train trip to the 2nd largest city in Denmark (Copenhagen to Aarhus) for 230 eur (2 adults + a kid) and it takes almost 3 hours. - take a Ryanair flight to Alicante for 240 eur (2 adults + a kid), flight takes 3.5 hours
The weather will be much better, the food and accommodation cheaper by a long shot (not to mention Spanish cuisine). It’s not even comparable how much more value you get when flying.
My impression is that Air travel to touristic destinations is just too cheap, for a reason. Selling airplane sits for pennies is probably just part of a bigger business. Tourists typically will spend money on services and hotels that could be owned by a sibling company, etc...
In Spain is often discussed how UK tourists can came to Spain for ridiculous prices, while we can't do the same in the opposite direction (or when flying inside the country). Tour-operators altering the market could be the reason for that "magic" IMAO.
Trains are nice in any case (but nobody is armed here, so just copy the system could be more defiant in other places)
I don't think so. Railway lines are the epitome of lost fund subsidies by the state. You need to build and maintain a new line for each direct connection you want to create. The construction cost of a railway line, let alone a line that supports high-speed rail, eclipses the cost of a brand new airport.
Once a railway line is in place, getting a train to travel from point A to B costs peanuts.
See this Greenpeace study (in German) about how much cheaper flying is than train rides and why:
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/regional/nordrheinwestfalen....
So exempting tax (equivalently not charging for externalities) is indeed a subsidy, a transfer of wealth from government (and so society) to the airline operators.
Trains in Poland work great, trains in Germany work pretty well but every train I've taken between Poland and Germany has been delayed. The standard thing is that while you're in Poland they claim the delay is because of previous delays in Germany and while you're in Germany they blame delays from Poland.
If you're trying to do something more advanced like get across Germany to Belgium or France & eventually the UK the it gets quite annoying.
My experience of German trains is one train arriving on time, to find my connection is delayed, but actually leaving earlier because the same train 1h before was 54 minutes late and I could get that instead.
I'm rather skeptic of this take. Railway operators provide services by reserving track sections and train stations in specific time windows which take into account travel speed and scheduling. Rail track capacity is typically reserved for periods of over a year. If german trains run on time in Germany and swiss trains run on time in Switzerland, then it sounds like germany's trains being delayed when entering swiss lines is an impedance problem caused by the way the swiss infrastructure manager is handling german trains.
A train that never arrives is not counted as delayed. About 30% of German trains do not arrive at their destination.
In Switzerland, the stats are single low percentage digits.
After multiple ultimatums, Switzerland stopped allowing German trains into Switzerland. The most popular connection between Switzerland and Germany (Zurich-Munich) has been kept but is now operated by Switzerland even though most of the ride is in Germany.
This is shameful and a lose-lose for all parties, but necessary.
This can be a lesson on how to run complex systems in general.
> This can be a lesson on how to run complex systems in general.
This sounds like cargo culting. Japan has great train system, it has to be because of separate gauges!
Jevon's paradox [1] probably. The most profitable part of the rail system will grow to crowd out and interfere with the rest. By keeping it different gauges, they all operate independent of each other's incentives.
People read too much into this, it's mostly just historical reasons. Most slow Japanese rail has a quite narrow gauge which is less suitable for high speed trains. The interoperability benefit is limited since you typically won't want to operate both Shinkanzens and local trains on the same rail.
Having different gauges provides no real benefit. It's just that unifying gauges provides too little benefit to justify the massive investment required. I expect this to be the same for most other countries. (and for similar problems like different railway electrification systems within/across countries)
> Having different gauges provides no real benefit.
The only place it would be beneficial to have the same gauge would be at stations, to have fewer, more flexibile platforms and smaller train stations.
Unless you live in the Europe of Napoleon or Hitler, when they were built. Then the benefit is huge and obvious. Imagine how much easier the life would had been for Ukranians if the Russian trains that transport heavy army stuff would operate by default in a different rail width
Building a whole new infrastructure from the ground up, would not only be absurdly expensive, it would also be absurdly impractical and take literally 50 years if it would ever happen.
Yes, Japan is correct that sometimes, more separation is a good thing if your network can be simpler.
But at the same time you can't just reverse that and then conclude that 'lets make everything as different as possible' and believe that's somehow going to turn into an efficient system.
We can not just simply ignore 200 years of train history and evolution each countries system has. I'm all for learning from Japan, but we also can't and shouldn't just copy Japan.
This is what Rail Baltica is going to be. The Baltics are using the Russian gauge, but RB will be using the standard gauge. And it won't be connected to the existing railway system. So if it all works out - we'll finally have a high-speed rail line from Tallinn to Warsaw,
Good thing I left early in the morning because the later trains to Germany all got stuck in heavy snow downfalls. \o/
https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/berlin-to-warsaw-by...
The EU seemed (2021) to be working on it https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
Apparently, railway companies cannot make sites.
Both can be true at the same time.
Developing enough capacity to avoid non-blocking train systems and bunching is a difficult issue.
Spain and France have extensive high speed rail and regular rail networks. There's an EU level initiative to connect all the national rail networks and facilitate the creation of robust pan-euorpean rail services.
Germany is also years behind on putting cargo onto trains for transit through the Alps. Even Italy was faster.
That aside, some could do 350kph in theory, but there are no tracks anywhere which are certified for more than 330kph in regular daily operations. With the additional constraint of limiting that to 280 kph max after several fuck ups, which I don't know about if that limit was lifted, or not.
And if you think you could board the Japanese fast ones at Deutschlandticket prices? Dream on! :-)
Anyways, it was fun to use one of the very first ICEs on the runway right side of the Rhine from Cologne to Bankfurt and back at 331kph, sometimes parallel to the A3 at a distance of only few 100meters, and watching the lichthupenden and warnblinkenden Nieten in Nadelstreifen trying to overtake the Normalos, while they seemingly stood still. Some sort of parallax-effect, I guess.
At that times I've thought: "Wozu brauch ich noch mal 'nen scheiss Transrapid?"
Thank you, made my day. Austrian btw.
Aber bei 330 war das als würde man an einem Diorama vorbeifahren.
Unvergesslich :-)
My hypothesis is that planes are just as often late but people complain less because :
1. They have already taken the whole day because getting to the airport, booking, security... so they don't care as much about a two hours delay.
2. They have some respect for the fact that we are allow to fly and see that as big technical challenge depending on weather and good security practices. On the other hand a train *seems* trivial when in reality it's not. Psychologically for most people it's just putting some cars on rails and it will basically drive itslef to its destination.https://www.dw.com/en/germany-november-train-punctuality-wor...
Unfortunately that is not the case, the security theater seems to be slowly contaminating rail too.
The Barcelona->Paris connection has some bullshit security on the Barcelona side (luggage x-ray & plastic trays for laptops), and I think the Eurostar had some of this on the London side too.
Dude wasn’t even looking at the xray machine screen.
ICAO or whomever audits airport security would shit their pants if the Barcelona rail station had the same scrutiny.
Europe the continent is 7% larger than the US. It's not that small. The population is just comparatively evenly spread out
Europe isn't microscopic. Paris to Amsterdam is about 300 miles, which is the same as Chicago to Cleveland. This is for intercity travel, and of course in the Western USA, except for the Pacific Coast, it is really not very dense.
Santa Barbara to San Diego
Bay Area to Sacramento
Sacramento to Bakersfield and on to LA
Portland to Seattle - or paralleling I-5 through Oregon.
All reasonably dense.
Traveling on Deutsche Bahn in the hopes of making a late Eurostar connection was nailbiting for this reason. I hear that Switzerland is strict about cancelling late trains so as not to interfere with the overall schedule, and as a consequence most DB trains from Germany don't make it past the border.
To be fair Germany could at least reach France's or Italy's level first.
For our summer vacation, we travelled from Amsterdam to Switzerland. We had first class seats with one layover in Frankfurt. Frankfurt was a mess, the train was sent to a different station, our connecting train was cancelled, we had 5 layovers instead of 1, and had to stand. When we finally got to sit, we had no reserved seats and were split up. On the return trip, similar problem, though with less extra layovers.
A few months later, I went to Essen by train. The ICE stopped at Düsseldorf and the connection to Essen was delayed or I missed it because the UCE was delayed. Still best train experience in Germany that year.
The return from Essen, the train from Essen back to Düsseldorf was cancelled, and the connecting bus would guarantee I'd miss my last ICE and I'd have to spend the night at Düsseldorf. Instead, I paid a lot of money for a taxi to race me there. Got there in time, and at the last minute they sent the ICE to a different platform without clear notification, and I'm pretty sure a lot of people still missed that train. I fortunately noticed some people leaving the platform and informed some others who hadn't noticed.
Trains in Netherland and Switzerland are absolutely perfect, but to get from one to the other you have to go through Germany, and that's a problem.
Iberian gauge allows trains to run faster without losing stability. The more narrow the railway, the cheaper to build, but the less stable for trains crossing hairpin bends for example at a decent velocity.
The climate is also very different, so is not really fair to compare both, but Europe saved a lot of money when building their first railways (and have more problems with ice and snow now for this reason)
I'm not sure Germany should be looking to Italy for advice on getting the trains to run on time.
The problem is that (like in many areas) our collective subjective memory of things lags behind reality, sometimes by decades.
Things get enshrined deep in culture (not only films, but day to day jokes and mechanical repetition of cultural self-flagellation).
I'm living in Italy for almost 20y now, coming from Switzerland. I came here in part because I wanted the experience of a more chaotic place, coming from the extreme order in Switzerland I found confining and suffocating.
Central Italy in the 2000s was a good mixture of chaos and infrastructure that worked ok in order to have a civilized life. Roads had potholes but they did exist, it's wasn't Madagascar level bad.
Yet italians complained and complained and kept saying that they were backward country and looked up at Germany or the Netherlands or whatnot.
Over the years everything got incrementally improved. Roundabouts got built, green grass inside roundabouts got actually cut, parking spaces started to be delimited and you no longer had to park your car in the mud alongside a road (but now you had to pay for parking in more places) ...
And also trains got better! Objectively better. And more expensive. They were incredibly dirt cheap 20 years ago, now they are not too expensive but it's an entirely different ballpark.
20 years ago my average experience from Pisa to Florence was to suffocate for 50 minutes because somebody let a puddle of vomit uncleaned in the train and there was no physical space to go to escape that because the train was so packed.
Now trains are much cleaner, more frequent, bigger, faster, ...
Occasionally you get stuck in a tunnel for a couple of hours because something breaks but hey it only happen to me once in the last 10 years and it happened 10 times the decade before, so improvement!!
Yet, locals still think nothing improved. Yesterday I had a conversation with Italians who thought they were the country with the worst infrastructure. The thing is, most people here live in an imaginary world.
Even when they do travel abroad, they don't update their beliefs about that stuff. It's a bit like identity politics. They watch TV journalism shows that show how well executed (cherry picked) public systems in other countries work, and bask in self-flagellation. While the other identity group declares how Italians are the best in the world and that nothing approaches their virtues etc. these two camps (I struggle identifying them as left and right anymore) affect each other and make their position even stronger.
Just matching the Netherlands in punctuality and connections would be more than enough (using the word 'just' here does not do their rail network the justice it deserves).
Short trains, cancellation of 75% of scheduled services for random reasons, regular failures on key links (Amsterdam CS/Zuid-Schiphol, HSL-Zuid, Delft-Rotterdam etc etc) leading to widespread network disruptions.
NS wasn’t perfect before, but it sure seems that they and their evil twin, ProRail, aren’t even trying any more.
Trains aren't really about the region's size. They are about the region's population density and the volume of travel demand between somewhat close urban centers (max 600/800km).
> Flying always comes with security hassle.
Nowadays trains also come with security hassles. For example, Spain's RENFE enforces security checks, complete with baggage scanning and metal detectors, to board high-speed lines.
The key difference is where train stations are located vs where airports are located. Due to historical reasons, nowadays most european cities have train stations essentially in their city centers, whereas airports tend to be >50km out of the city. This means that the door-to-door travel time for any flight must include a >50km trip to the outskirts of a city for then to way out the mandatory 60 to 90 minute boarding process.
Then you are riding odd routes because the ICE hits 250 all the time. Piss poor infrastructures governance notwithstanding.
no, they never built high speed rails in germany simply. a decision that baffles me. whereas france has been at it for 30 years for example.
Cause European trains are for the most part just fine, its only german trains that very famously suck. So no need to extrapolate here.
Trains are late because they run a demanding schedule, trying to serve every big city (this is not like France where everything is supposed to go through Paris, this is a country that unified late with many powerful regions who all want direct connections between them).
There is not one single issue with the German network. Yes, the multi polarity you mentioned is one of them. But that's not the main issue, really more a feature.
One of the issues is that early on DB wanted to continue to make money with cargo, so they insisted on having cargo (and other trains) use the same lines. Rather then building new lines that nobody else uses. This choice over long term degraded to a situation where lots of high speed lines are just major upgrades of existing lines.
That leads to the network not having as much capacity as it could have had. And you have ICE trains blocking lots of the tracks for other trains, and the other way around. And even if the ICE can go, it can't go full speed because some parts aren't upgrade enough. You constantly go from a speed line, to an upgraded line, to a normal line, to a city approach.
While its great that in Germany the ICE goes to the main station, unlike in France where Paris doesn't even have a real main station. It also leads to ICE trains having to use an excessive amount of the old city network. And there are always issues there. Just last week our train was lolligaging around the approaches to Hamburg.
There is also just a general maintenance issue, personal and so on.
That all said, having traveled threw Germany a lot with the train just in the last couple months, overall, I think its amazing. But could be so much better still.
Of course Stuttgart 21 is objectively a mess but Germany is big, there's more than just a handful of engineering projects at any given time. We brought a pretty substantial amount of LNG capacity online in just two years but that never gets any press compared to the latest airport chaos.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
What's small about the scale of Europe in this context? Even taking the extremely conservative measurement of Madrid to Berlin, that's 1200 miles/2000 km, which is comparable to the entire length of the Japanese isles, or the distance from Beijing to the South China Sea, or the distance from Boston to Minneapolis and/or Miami. Speaking as an American, I'd be over the moon if our passenger rail was half as nice as Europe's, and we can't even use the scale of the country as an excuse.
The USA still can and should do better, but there are important geographical differences to the EU.
And as an aside, I don't think many Europeans are taking the train from Madrid to Berlin ;-) most people still prefer to fly rather than take a multi-day journey on the train. Maybe that will change if more sleeper carriages are introduced.
Isn't that a misleading statistic, though? It's not like the USA is an evenly spread wasteland in comparison to Continental Europe. It's more like pockets of high population density throughout, which trains can handle perfectly well. Russia and Ukraine are similar in that they're pockets of cities separated by miles of steppe. Both are known for heavily using rail travel.
Hell, wasn't the USA built on the back of continental rail travel during its industrial revolution?
Chicago
Detroit
Cleveland
Cincinnati
Indianapolis
Pittsburgh
It’s not for lack of rail lines we don’t have good passenger service it’s a priority and preference issue.
If you got a fast train between Indianapolis and Cleveland what would you do with it? Neither has reasonable public transit and aren’t dense cities that are good for walking. They also are only 4.5 hours away from each other by car, something residents of both largely own.
Example: I am not the biggest soccer fan in the world, but I might take a train down to Cincinnati and get dinner, stay the night, and watch Columbus play Cincinnati. I'm not doing that with a car because of parking and it being a big hassle. If I can take a train down there, I'm way more likely to go. Once I get there the very first time I'll just arrive in the downtown area, plenty to walk around to see and do. The same is true for the reverse trip. Someone coming from Cincinnati can arrive in the Short North in Columbus and walk anywhere they want from German Village to Downtown to Ohio State's campus.
I'm not entirely sure about Cleveland (haven't been in a while) or Indianapolis (haven't been maybe ever?) w.r.t to walking around, but in the example I gave you can see there is plenty to do with a train that gets you from one of the example cities to another and it only improves as more and more people use the service.
Funny actually. What you were saying kind of applies to cars too. You'd just drive through or around Indianapolis. After all once you park there's nothing to do and nowhere to go.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
Not to sound too flippant but this is the most American thing I've read that doesn't involve guns. Being in the UK, the idea of "only" being 4.5 hours away by car is unreal. This is exactly the kind of thing getting the train should be perfect for.
For context: that's longer than Manchester to London, essentially opposite ends of England!
You have identified a part of the USA with a decent density of cities - nice! That is exactly what I think. There are pockets where rail makes sense, and should be built up. But even this area is not nearly as dense as Germany, England, Belgium, Italy, etc, so I fail to see why it makes sense to compare this to the EU.
It always really funny when American point at some place, and say 'look how not dense' and then there is like a city of 200+ people there. Sure maybe not close to other cities. But any city that size should have its own S-Bahn system at least.
> But even this area is not nearly as dense as Germany, England, Belgium, Italy, etc, so I fail to see why it makes sense to compare this to the EU.
Why would you compare America to the EU anyway then?
-edit-
Sorry I also wasn't trying to disregard your comment, I just thought it wasn't a great argument (you're a great person though I'm sure! :) )
To address your points I think it's a much more nuanced conversation. I'd argue that car-only infrastructure is actually a gigantic financial disaster as well but it requires additional examination.
As I said, there are areas of the USA that are perfectly suitable to rail, and there should be more.
My criticism is the notion of "you can technically take a train from Madrid to Berlin, so you should also be able to take a train from Boston to Minneapolis". Trains in Europe go long distances, but most importantly they connect a lot of medium-sized cities along the way.
MA: Springfield
NY: Albany, Buffalo,Rochester
Oh: Sandusky, Cleavland, Toledo,
IN: Fort wayne
IL: Chicago, Rockford,
WI: Madison, LaCrosse, Eu Claire, Milwaukee
With some fairly minor deviations on the path. (Assuming a fairly straight path that stays in the US, going south of the lakes). Depending on your tolerance for minor deviations from the straightest possible path it could be all or a subset, but not none of those. They are all medium sized or larger cities.
There are ton of small cities too, but the train doesnt have to stop in each one - there's lots of through trains in Europe to that skip towns/cities they pass.
I added up the population of all those cities: 6.13 million. The population of Berlin and Madrid alone is 6.86 million, and our theoretical journey would take us through several cities of 1m+ along the way: Cologne, Brussels, Paris... The dense parts of Europe have 500k+ cities basically overlapping.
As someone who grew up in the Midwest, I would absolutely love this theoretical train, but I'm not surprised it doesn't exist (yet)!
I agree that Europe is more densly populated than US, so there would be longer stretches without a stop in the US. But that's OK - the long-distance trains in the EU don't stop at every station along the way anyway, it would just be a different structure of "locals" and "through trains" to service the poulations.
I disagree however that population density is even all that relevant. All the cities in the US that I've mentioned have rail through them already. It's used profitably for freight all the time. I think the US doesn't have good passenger rail service because of a heck of a lot of other factors - subsidies favoring cars and planes over rail for transit, infrastructure having been created around getting everyone an automobile, a huge amount of FUD from various lobbies against rail (including arguments about population density), and a dozen others probably have more actual impact than "people per square mile is different on average".
There needs to be local public transportation infrastructure. This is where the US should be focusing efforts, no long-distance high-speed trains. It works in Europe because there are huge catchment areas (see population density) that funnel riders to regional hubs that are then connected with high speed trains. I don't think the first step to making rail work in the US is connecting metropolises with high-speed trains. Until there's a better local public transportation story, it's expensive and impractical once you arrive at your destination.
- Great Lakes
- North East
- Texas Triangle
- Florida Super City
- Bay Area
- Southern Cali
And of those the Lakes and the North East are perfect to connection. In all of them trains are massively underused.
Frankly some of these couldn't be more perfectly placed for trains.
But I do agree with your point. You need good local public transport. Or in more general terms, land use. Infill development, bikes and reliable bus system that is not designed to serve only poor people that don't have other options.
Really, what it seems the discussion should focus on is those shorter (but still quite long!) journeys that people would likely want to do. Train lines in California seem to make a lot of sense. A quick look on Google Maps suggests there's no train between San Francisco and Los Angeles which seems insane to me!
1. Walking (including wheel chair and friends)
2. Biking (including some slow electric stuff)
3. Rail based transport (trains, metros, trams as appropriate)
4. Buses
5. Private vehicles
But that not the point. Many of these borders are arbitrary e.g. it's like saying that Paris has a lower population Berlin even though such a claim would make no sense at all.
Spain has spent a decade building out its high speed rail network.
Well just Boston (where it would presumably start) is over 4 million (and whole Massachusetts is almost as dense as Belgium). Minneapolis is another ~3 million. Chicago is over 8 million. I didn't even look up the other cities... yeah it's lower but really not as much as you're implying.
Honestly I agree with your sentiment. We should connect all these urban areas with passenger rail. But I don't think that this is the first step. Most American cities have atrocious public transit, which needs to be fixed first. No one will take a train from Chicago to Minneapolis if they just have to rent a car once they get there anyway. It would be a shame to invest billions in connecting cities with high speed rail, only to have low ridership because it still doesn't compete with flying/driving.
I was just looking at the urban area. The official population of many cities in the US is almost entirely meaningless in this context.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but you can take a train from Boston to Minneapolis, with either one, two, or three connections.
The problem in USA is that the people making the decisions don't live in the cities.
Note that GP was talking about Germany with seeming no awareness that the situation is different in Switzerland, France, England and Spain. (of the 5 countries I named there are significant differences that are unique to each - Swiss trains run ontime, French trains are fast...) God help you if you are trying to cross a border by train in Europe - it is possible, but often much harder than it should be.
Often there is no border crossing at all where there should be one. Often nobody knows how to sell you a ticket for a trip that should be possible (or they will only do it with stupid restrictions). If you can find a train it may be a slow speed train despite this being trips where high speed is most useful. The trains may not be on time and you miss a connection.
there is a lot to improve about trains in Europe.
The EU approach to rail improvement is incredibly flawed.
And all the different monopolies have their own dumb as opinion about things. French system is run by a bunch of airline manager idiots. German can't make their IT work for shit. And so on.
The amount of "we cannot sell you that ticket, we can't even tell you the price" I have gotten when checking international connections is wild. It is slowly improving (I just checked a particularly absurd example where Deutsche Bahn was unable to sell a ticket to switzerland through if it wasn't bought a long time in advance - seems at least they fixed that), but still... it's absurd if your train trip starts with "figure out how to get a ticket, because the train company won't tell you."
There are not border controls which is nice. However there are a lot of other things that can go wrong. Some routes work much better than others. Europe is a big place with lots of different trains systems if you only went on the good routes you won't have a problem, but there are a lot of routes that are not as good - and many more routes that should exist but do not at all.
Railways do have single points of failure. A single disruption on a key piece of track can disrupt service for hours, even days. This is less of an issue with air travel, there’s usually other airlines, and alternative routes.
If you’re going from the northwest to the southwest, it can be faster to drive than the high speed train that will dogleg through Paris.
(It’s getting better though)
This is changing, at least in France. Enshittification of train travel has begun by SNCF/ouigo. I traveled last month, now (at least for some trains) you must have a ticket at your name to travel, you must register big suitcases. It is becoming less and less get in / get out, unfortunately :-(
And yes, figuring out what exactly you have to pay for on public transit is an especially big hassle, but that's a problem that's solved technologically in many countries, where you just have to swipe a card at the entry and exit.
So yes the railway is a lot better in Europe and the rest of the world than the US, but it's almost always a question of politics and interests of different groups. I also think it's poor framing to say people do it because of climate change - I do it because it's the best way to travel. During early corona time I went with a car on a typical 2-3 hour trip I usually take and it was just horrible in comparison. In the one case you can sit in comfortable seats, walk around, get something to drink an eat, and in the other you are usually stuck in a cramped seat, can't get out and can only take a break on a gas station or a similar place.
We'd do that every year. There were both 2nd and 1st class cabins.
You'd save 1000 kilometers to the car (and in gasoline), times two.
I miss that a huge lot: apparently some european countries, including France, are planning to reintroduce these.
The reintroduction of that type of service would mean you no longer thad to worry about your electric car's range when going on a road trip. The car could even charge while in the train.
Oh that's a good point. Cars got comfier too: nowadays with AC and they're quieter etc.
> The car could even charge while in the train
Oh that'd be completely amazing!
And its not actually useful or effective outside of a few specialized situations. Like in Switzerland where you only have 1 tunnel and no actual car tunnels. So all cars have to get on trains.
Works with all types of public transport and in the entire country.
SNCF is the absolute worst in term of customer service. They even consider that a train is on time if it's less than 15mn late on almost all TGV lines [1]. And if they provide a bus as an alternative to your cancelled TER (local train), they won't refund you at all whatever the time – that's from personal experience.
A Shinkansen is late from the first second behind schedule, and Japan Rail will apologise if a train leaves a couple seconds too early.
PS: A bit bitter I'll admit, reading any kind of praise for SNCF always triggers me.
[1] https://ressources.data.sncf.com/explore/dataset/regularite-...
They’ve been talking about a high-speed route from Melbourne to Sydney — one of the worlds’ busiest rail corridors — for decades. God knows how much has been spent on feasibility studies. And yet we’re decades away from progress, and that’s optimistic.
Can rail be that hard? You acquire the land by compulsory acquisition — not popular, politically — and then you lay track. 99% of the land from the centre of both state capitals is farmland. Tracks exist to the outskirts of both cities. Actually, track exists between the cities! Agh fuck it makes me angry to even think about.
I live in Canberra, the capital. I can get a delightfully quaint train to Sydney. It takes 4 hours. It’s 245km by road. The only plus is that it’s fairly cheap.
Oh and the cost. How did we allow rail to cost BETWEEN SIXTEEN AND ONE HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION DOLLARS PER KILOMETRE? Excuse my French but: fuck me. [0]
It’s pathetic.
[0]: https://www.bitre.gov.au/sites/default/files/other_001_a_pro...
Everyone knows why! Its called "Schuldenbremse". (And Schroeders liberalisation, and 16 years of CDU surely didnt help either)
AFAICT trains scale pretty well in terms of space and environmental impact, and point-to-point latency decreases as more trains are run (and transfer times decrease), so it's pretty nice to induce demand for it.
I'm aiming to break my record with 11 countries, but we'll see.
The problem is that even though the balkans are a lot of countries, the rail is very slow compared to going north and east towards Slovakia and Poland.
To every European posting the piece - it’s superficial PR guff from the rail industry, semi formed into an article. You can do better!
https://gruene.social/@jon/111714851047117612 follow his account for why trains in europe need help
I was quite impressed by the system. A simple Tap on/off with your credit card works for payments. Trains were on time within the minute, which was very comforting. The trains were clean and well maintained.
I don't know about usage during normal days, but it's likely used quite a lot. Might be used a lot more if the trains were a bit faster.
Pre-Covid, often at full capacity during morning/evening rushes and never “sold out”, you could always stand if you couldn’t get a seat. And flexible as no scheduled/reserved tickets.
Credit card tap on/off is very new (last 12 months maybe).
Nice that they have bathrooms on every car (looking at you Paris RER!!!).
I just don't understand how that makes any sense, how can a train be more expensive than a plane.
Then the planes don't pay their full cost as they emit a lot of CO2 but aviation fuel is not taxed so you get planes that already have quite a lot of structural advantages getting even cheaper.
Budget airlines are probably also run a lot more efficiently than most train systems
The final big hammer is of course competition. Airlines have lots, rail companies don't.
Trains here are full because cars are super expensive and parking here is more expensive than anywhere else.. >$8/hour, 24/7
Their "Morbo and Linda" there was a train crash today, the governor lady said send in more trains.
This attempt at spinning it as people being motivated to use trains out of concern for the climate is hilarious. Almost nobody thinks like that. Trains are just a hell of a lot more convenient than alternative modes of transport for long distance trips.
> 91% say they want to replace short-distance flights by fast, low-polluting trains in collaboration with neighbouring countries
See how a train being fast was bundled into the question.
Let’s forget about environment for a moment. Going by plane is a lot less convenient, when you can take a train, due to needing to show up a lot earlier at the airport, going through security and all kinds of overhead. So when trains work, i.e. they’re fast, reliable and affordable, nobody needs environmental concerns to use them.
For me to be convinced that someone is taking a train for environmental reasons, the train would need to be more expensive for them than going by plane. Because otherwise everyone likes to see themselves in a good light and say how much their choices are dictated by ethics, when in reality the wallet is often a more potent motivator than environmental concerns. Just like every employer likes to say that they hire and promote based on merit, but then it turns out that on average taller people get hired and promoted more often. And the employers will still believe that they weren’t influenced by that. Just like travellers will overestimate the influence of environmental concerns on their choice of mode of transport. In both cases it’s because people like to see themselves in good light. And same way most of the people who say they’d prefer to buy products produced in fair worker conditions, won’t actually buy the products whose prices reflect that. Declarations are cheap. Particularly feel-good declarations.
Fast doesn't entail faster than a plane.
> the train would need to be more expensive
In my experience international train travel in Europe is always more expensive, sometimes 3-4 times more expensive, than airtravel. Due to subsidies and externalities. https://stay-grounded.org/privileged-position-revealing-the-...
Against your "almost nobody thinks like that" I and others described that we do think like that and personally know others who do too. I also posted two links that has some more general evidence against your claim. Your reply has some reason to lessen the weight given to that evidence, but not enough to cancel it. I rest my case until you present empirical counterevidence.
Your speculations/prejudice about motivations of others is not evidence and such stories can be made up in almost any direction e.g. maybe you delude yourself into thinking no one takes trains for environmental reasons because it makes you feel good and superior in thinking you know their motivations better than they do.
Not necessarily. Look at this itinerary e.g.: <https://thesavvybackpacker.com/cheapest-travel-europe-train-...>. With a few exceptions, train was cheaper than the plane, often several times.
And now for what happens when it’s more expensive and inconvenient to be concerned about the environment: <https://www.thelocal.no/20230125/why-cross-country-flights-a...>
I have no data but I personally think like that and I have had conversations with friends who think like that. Why do you think demand is increasing then -- the convenience you mention isn't new?
To me it just sounds like a marketing spin. Don’t get me wrong: it’s cool that people are choosing a cleaner means of transport, but I doubt this is the reason.
People taking the train to Amsterdam is incredibly common. Taking the train for Vacation to Northern Italian (like Venice) is super common. Visiting Paris is super common by train.
Trains are use for all sorts of reasons both professional and not. And a wide range of different people is on the train, you see bushiness people in suits and you see fucking stoners going to raves you see families you see tourist from outside of Europe.
And the waste majority of people I talk to prefer to go by train and only use planes if it really a major improvement.