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Comment by eigenket | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion the main "low hanging fruit" Europe has with trains are international birders, especially if they're trying to compete with flying.

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.

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German trains wishing to enter Switzerland need to wait at the border so the DB’s, err, _erratic_ scheduling doesn’t perturb the much more rigorous Swiss system.

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.

> German trains wishing to enter Switzerland need to wait at the border so the DB’s, err, _erratic_ scheduling doesn’t perturb the much more rigorous Swiss system.

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.

70% of German trains that arrive at their destination are “delayed” (30 min or more).

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.

I doubt your stats, where'd you get them from? And there are multiple connections per day from Germany to central Switzerland. Take the Hamburg-Interlaken ICE for example.

Just built a separate international network, with its own separate system and tracks. The way Japan handles complexity is through redundancy. Japan runs both really old trains, hyper modern high speed rail and everything in between. Each system runs on separate tracks, are from different companies, and are not interconnected.

This can be a lesson on how to run complex systems in general.

Enaaem: It already works that way. The Iberic Peninsula has a different rail gauge from Central Europe, but - in parallel to Iberian Gauge - is building and expanding its TGV network, which is in the Central European gauge. So, a secondary network.

Thus was seen by many as a waste when built, but really it works better than in Germany in terms of quality of experience.

Why not build parallel tracks, but with the same gauge?

> 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!

> Why not build parallel tracks, but with the same gauge?

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I don't really see this dynamic working in rail. In Japan, many of the companies operate trains on two gauges.

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)

> 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.

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.

I can see other advantages like having same maintanence rail cars, emergency rail cars, ability to divert traffic in case of accidents. I guess there are even more such minor advantages.

>Having different gauges provides no real benefit

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

Because different countries might have different gauges. Japanese system is great not because they have different gauges, but because they don’t see it as a problem if there are different gauges. In general, Japan has many train companies that run on totally separate systems.

Many of this tracks cross big cities. Doubling the rails in those places would need to demolish thousands of extant buildings

Do you know how politically complex it is to build a single high speed rail line? In one country? Its so mind blowing complex politically, its almost unfathomable. And even then often it only results in an upgrade of an existing line, rather then a new line.

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.

> Just built a separate international network, with its own separate system and tracks.

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,

Just

Did Prague to Brussels in one day (~ 12 hours) in 2010 and everything just worked. One connection in Frankfurt airport (it has a train station) and it was cheaper than flying. Will need to check how I bought the ticket but do know it was bought as a single ticket.

Good thing I left early in the morning because the later trains to Germany all got stuck in heavy snow downfalls. \o/

In December I could not even buy tickets online to a train from Berlin to Warsaw because DB website is terrible. Had to cancel my trip — this is really a shame, that EU cannot fix cross-border connectivity.

I think everyone complaining about DB should be forced to live in the UK for a short while first. My 15 yo daughter has just come back from her first trip to Koln to stay with friends. She was wide eyed with how well everything worked, and how nice the trains were. It was interesting to me to see that she saw it too and it’s not just jaded politics that makes me think the UK is going to the dogs.

My experience is at UK trains are a bit more reliable at turning up on time than DB. German trains tend to be cheaper though and you sometimes have to do stupid ticket-splitting stuff in the UK.

You can buy from Polish Railways too.

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_...

Oh, login here specially to reply. Not really, pkp site is an old slow garbage with bugs, it makes everyone cry. So, you can buy, just do not expect it would be a good experience buying.

Apparently, railway companies cannot make sites.

Couldn't you book with another ticket seller? Like trainline.eu?

I tried Omio and one more, but this specific direction was not available there via train. DB website was simply showing an error at the last step. A month later, by the moment error was gone all tickets appeared sold.

If you run into the problem again try the website of the Polish trains pkp.pl. You'll probably have to Google translate some stuff but it works well.

There is an english version. But pkp site loves to give you errors and timeouts too.

>Germany and while you're in Germany they blame delays from Poland.

Both can be true at the same time.

Developing enough capacity to avoid non-blocking train systems and bunching is a difficult issue.

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