Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

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After spending a lot of time in Europe, the grass definitely isn't greener.

Trains in France are not vastly cheaper than the UK, but the service pattern is awful outside the very main routes. Often huge gaps in service for parts of the day and non-clockface timetabling. Seems to be very poor utilisation of rolling stock, with a lot of the stations having trains sitting for hours doing nothing (which should really be operated more intensely to give a better service pattern).

DB has horrendous reliability problems, basically the entire network gets something similar to TPE on time performance (the worst performing TOC in the UK). ICE/IC trains are also not particularly cheap for on the day travel.

Spain's high speed lines are excellent and very cheap. But outside that the network is incredibly limited and slow, so much so that buses will almost always beat the train in journey time.

Netherlands is good, affordable, frequent services and reliable. I think NL is the only country I've been to where the system is noticeably better than the UK across a lot of dimensions.

> DB has horrendous reliability problems

As a regular train traveller in Germany, it averages out. It's almost exclusively the intercity connections which are delayed, but those usually run on an hourly clock. It's actually not that uncommon that I can save half an hour of travel time because I can catch a delayed ICE from the previous time slot instead of waiting 45 minutes for the next train ;)

> Netherlands

You cannot possible rate the Netherlands good on comfort. It's cattle class, even on 'long' (for Dutch standards) haul routes. They _just_ started to operate carriages with power sockets! I rode better trains in Poland 10 years ago than in NL.

I take el cheapo French TGV (Ouigo) over any Dutch rolling stock any day.

> el cheapo French TGV (Ouigo)

from the handfull of times I've taken Ouigo, it's just normal TGV, just without first class and sometime less convenient train stations (like outside of Paris instead of close to the center)...

IME, seat comfort on Ouigo is far less than e.g. Thalys or TGV Lyria.

Haven’t been on regular TGV to compare, but it can’t be much worse than Ouigo…

That really depends on the train you were taking.

Intercity trains have had sockets for a while, but YMMV if this wasn't on the most used tracks.

Short distance or trains that stop at towns (called sprinters) didn't. Haven't ridden a train in quite a few years so that might have changed.

The trains are mostly on time though, which is something most countries fail at. Granted Dutch people still complain about public transport, me included. Most people think it's too expensive and it takes too long to really get anywhere that isn't a direct connection. These days it is often cheaper to go by car too, especially if you are going somewhere with more than one person.

Depending on the article the Netherlands seems to be either high in the top 10 or low in the top 20.

Checked the latest WEF report I could find (2021), and it's ranked 14 on there. But that includes much more than just public transport. So not that useful. (Travel & Tourism Development or T&T index).

NS uses a wilde variety of materiel for intercities, only a handful of new ones now that finally come with sockets. Never had a single one here at Maastricht. I did have a sprinter on intercity duty last time I went up north.

It's abysmal.

Ouigo comfort is far less than any Dutch IC-class stock. Maybe the Ouigo is on par with Sprinter-class stock, but even then it’s a stretch.

Compared to German stock — yes, the German stock is nicer (mainly has to do with different usage patterns, though — Netherlands train network has been said to resemble a country-sized metro network).

Outlets — who cares, just bring a power bank — again, compare to networks like London Overground or Paris RER.

That's so obviously incorrect that it'd be funny if those sprinters weren't so mightily uncomfortable. I guess it takes a Calvinist to prefer them.

France doesn't get clockface timetabling because the topology of the network doesn't allow it - to mamy chokepoints.

(Of course when I say doesn't allow it, I mean they could, but it would be very impractical and require major tradeoffs.)

That doesn't make any sense. The UK runs 2x the services on a network of less than 50% of the size of France - so 4x the services per route km. Believe me the UK network is riddled with horrendous chokepoints too.

Most of these routes have about 1-2tph running on them max. The UK (and I'm sure many other countries) manages to run clockface timetabling (for the most part) with a lot of routes on 10tph++.

It's not the lack of clockface timetabling that is the problem per se, it's the constant huge gaps in service. Eg approx 1tph, then a big gap of 3 hours, then 1tph. It's all over the place.

But France is on the "continent" so has to manage transcontinental traffic, especially freight trains - which are very long, very heavy and very slow.

But no, it's so easy for you to just shout "it doesn't make any sense" without first wondering if you had the complete picture. The French are incompetent and wasteful, that's obvious isn't it?

I took a French TGV (the high speed one) a few times last year, and it was still pretty nice. Tickets were quite reasonably priced too.

Yeah, it's subsidized by taxes on French people and runs at a loss

That's true of most transit and also true for roads.

Two wrongs don't make a right. If a particular taxpayer-funded road was one cent per mile for the end user as opposed to other higher-priced roads, you wouldn't say, "wow, this road is reasonably priced!" Unless you're literally just doing a travel blog

Is it a wrong?

There's a lot of externalities around transit that aren't directly priced into costs vs ticket revenue.

If France decides "We want high speed national rail connectivity between cities", I'd look at it more of an entitlement / service than a profitable enterprise.

Nobody expects national healthcare services to be profitable.

(Also, both France and Germany's relatively recent experience with their national rail networks being the reason their countries are still independent sovereign states)

They want it so much that they're unwilling to pay the actual cost of a ticket lol. They have to launder the money through an intermediary and offload the cost to people who don't use the train that everybody supposedly wants

Germany and France were on the verge of collapse or being conquered but government trains saved them? Do tell.

But also, they're maybe not very sovereign when a foreign body drafts, ratifies, and enforces their laws

That's the way all government services work.

Public libraries don't run as profit centers, and yet everyone generally agrees they provide a social benefit and are worth funding.

Ref: world wars, part I and II.

If everyone generally agreed that injecting messenger RNA into the eyeballs of infants provided a social benefit you would go along with it.

So you're saying that if the Nazis didn't have subsidized train rides for tourists they would not have been able to collapse the Soviet Union in 1991 and regain East Germany? Interesting. Very interesting, sir.

The UK is part of Europe, too.

In the UK the word “Europe” is commonly understood in certain connected to mean continental Europe or the EU, in contrast to the UK.

It's really not. There was a little falling out that occurred in 2016, you might have heard of it.

EU and Europe are not the same thing (one is an organization, the other is a continent).

Yes and everyone understood what was meant from context without the pedantry.

Do you really think people don’t know which continent the UK belongs to?

Do you think people are in danger of thinking the UK is actually in Africa or Asia when the colloquialism of ‘Europe’ is used?

  Do you really think people don’t know which continent the UK belongs to?

Have you heard of americans ?

Touché!

What better place to be overly pedantic than the HN comment section ;)

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