Europe's Rail Operators: A Comparative Ranking
transportenvironment.org
transportenvironment.org
I have to give kudos to Eurostar for standing up against their classification. Eurostar is definitely expensive, probably too expensive for the quality they provide. They also have special challenges with serving the Channel Tunnel and border checks and there is certainly room for improvement but I think the ranking doesn't treat Eurostar fairly.
Deutsche Bahn on the other hand, proven as guilty, I'd say.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/09/eurostar-the-w...
There are two problems here. 1) why does it five hours with a "high speed" ICE train (avg. speed ~100km/hours, pathetic). 2) why is this so expensive that taking a plane is actually cheaper?
Deutsche Bahn is a good example of everything that is wrong in Germany. Inefficient, overstaffed, under performing, customer hostile, bad infrastructure, overpriced, too slow, and often failing to do its job entirely because of mechanical failures, poorly managed cascading failures resulting from other delays (trains waiting for each other and them piling up and causing more delays), or its staff going on strike every month or so.
It's not that they are lazy but they have a lot of people doing very unimportant things very poorly and not enough people doing the important things well. There's a lot of very comfy management that can't seem to manage anything. A bloated IT department responsible for making mediocre apps/websites (their payment system is absolute shit and UX disaster zone), and layers and layers of bureaucracy doing god knows what.
I've had some professional dealings with them as a startup without much success. Nobody you talk to can decide anything, they have a hopeless not invented here syndrome (they want to do everything in house and they just can't), and you are competing with professional grafters and consulting companies milking them for many millions for silly shit. It's easy to see how they are bleeding cash.
Subsidies aside, an airport network is much easier to fund than a train network. Each new airport you open brings you network effect benefits, whereas opening a new train station is worthless if you don't also build new train lines, with all the associated infrastructure costs and eminent domain issues.
Upgrades, certainly, but even a new airport like in Berlin replaced an old airport which was shut down, right?
I'm pretty sure in the US there were a lot more airports back in the 1950s when war surplus prop planes were cheap, jet service wasn't available, lots of vets had flight experience, and back before the interstate system was built. Some became general aviation fields, with no commercial flights these days. Basically, the network effect wasn't enough to keep up with the cost savings of using bigger planes and bigger hubs, given that people could more easily drive to the airport (on roads 'with all the associated infrastructure costs and eminent domain issues').
Don't know about Europe though.
Mostly based on the after effects of cold war wanning, and EU.
As things are, maybe they will invert trend and focus on military only again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_Germany helpfully lists airfields in Germany which don't have regularly scheduled commercial passenger service. The first I picked was Kiel Airport, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel_Airport , which fits my description of how airports don't benefit from a simple network effect.
It had "27 national and international destinations" back around 1930, then was mixed military and civilian. The first terminal was built in 1965. In 1987, "Lufthansa began offering scheduled flights to Frankfurt, and later to Cologne/Bonn, Munich, Copenhagen, Kaliningrad and Riga." The last commercial scheduled passenger flight was in 2006.
I'm curious if any of the military airports you mention once had passenger service, reflecting how airports used to be more common as technical limitations prevented them from carrying many passengers or going all that far.
- Weeze, civilian since 2000 (https://airport-weeze.com/company/history)
- Frankfurt Haan, since about 2000 as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt%E2%80%93Hahn_Airport)
- Beja, since 2011 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beja_Airport)
I don't think those really support the idea of there being network effect benefits to opening a new airport. The Wikipedia entry for Frankfurt Haan makes it sound like it's been a money loser for at least 15 years, and the one for Beja says "the airport has no scheduled passenger flights".
Deutsche Bahn is def. not over- but understaffed. It used to be the case that there was at least one person on each platform, they had signal boxes all over the place, and (very probably) many more workshops and train depots distributed all over the country. Now they're running (trying to run, or trying not to stand still really) everything from a few centralized places. Add to this that they have dismantled ALL freight yards in the cities (Berlin, Hanover, Frankfurt, everywhere) and Deutsche Post switched from transporting mail in special night trains to clogging the highways with their trucks and it becomes apparent that the decades-long mantra of each and every politician "we must encourage more goods to be transported by rail" was a stinking lie all the time.
Compared to what DB used to be up to the 1990s, and especially before the 1980s, the state of DB can only be described as heavily damaged, partially destroyed. Destroyed also because of the many, many thousands of kilometers of tracks that have been dismantled since some time in the 1960s.
Fares from London to Paris are almost always higher on Eurostar vs flying. And this is even when you compare traditional airline "Economy Plus" service with convenient flight times operating from Heathrow, not no-name budget airlines operating at far-flung budget airports with no baggage allowances.
Obviously it's working for them though because the Eurostar trains always seems packed and Eurostar posted 2B revenue this year with near 25% profit margins.
I basically had to buy another ticket for the second leg of the journey (I took a bus, it was reasonably cheap) because my ticket was only valid for the French part and I was supposed to have printed the Dutch part at home, with no way to do it at the station.
https://www.eurail.com/en/eurail-passes
However for $300 you get 7 days of unlimited travel throughout Europe (not just the EU), because the UK is included and as stated in this report it is one of the most expensive in Europe.
Those 7 days can be spread out over a month, so you only use the days where you are actually travelling on train.
[Edit] If you are only going to be in one country, then it does make it cheaper. $200 for 7 days worth of travel over a month for France, for example.
Also I'm not sure how much they factored in the ease of purchase and the reach of reduced fares. With DB you can buy a yearly 25% reduction card; when you do so, you do get cheaper prices, but you have to be sure what journeys you will do in the next 12 months, you have to pay upfront, you're implicitly on a subscription plan that requires you to cancel, and also now Deutsche Bahn knows where your picture, your name, your street address, your birth date is on their network.
You can also save money by buying a ticket weeks or months in advance and buying a ticket for a specific train. Both conditions are inconveniences.
People who travel with public transport are made to jump through hoops and are encouraged to constantly look for new ways to get a cheaper ticket. Deutsche Bahn management probably likes that because "engagement".
They say the booking experience is worse, but you don't have to book NS trains at all, you can just tap in and out with your credit card or OV chip card, can't be much easier than that.
> All operators, except NS, provide adequate information on compensation policies for delayed trains in English or another foreign language
Huh? https://www.ns.nl/en/customer-service/refunds/refunds-for-de...
NS is quite expensive, but the service is way better than say, DB. In my last trip from the Netherlands to Germany, officially 2:45 hours, I had a 45 minutes delay just on the German side, on both ways, at least they are consistent.