Where can you go in Europe by train in 8h?
chronotrains.com
chronotrains.com
There used to be a similar service between Toronto and Montreal (both directions), where the train would pause for several hours midway so passengers would arrive at around 7:30 a.m. well-rested.
I’ve taken that route as well, and it’s remarkable how much you see while traveling by train. You pass through countless towns, villages, and beautiful scenery—experiences you simply can’t get from flying.
Since Europe has a liberalized market in the rail sector, some startups are trying to fill the gap.
European sleeper operates a night train on the route Brussel-Amsterdam-Berlin-Prague, using old rented rolling stock.
I’m involved with Luna Rail (in Berlin), which is trying a more technical approach around rolling stock design to improve unit economics to make Night trains profitable.
There’s also a startup in the US, dreamstar, whose primary effort appears to be about getting track rights for now (something that’s not such a big concern in Europe - here the barrier is rolling stock).
The situation is a lot better today than 10 years ago or so, largely thanks to ÖBB Nightjet. But yep, it's not only state railway companies anymore, as can be seen on the map
Night trains are not like normal trains. They carry far fewer passengers per car. That doesn't make them as bad as flying on pure CO2 emissions, but night trains are not as efficient as "trains" generally. They are more comparable to luxury busses. But ... if the other option is an electric car, or even an electric aircraft, then even an electric night trains will likely no longer win on CO2 emissions.
The comparison is more complicated though isn’t it? It isn’t a comparison with a plane, it’s a variable comparison with a plane, a taxi, and a hotel etc.
Flying has around 10x the co2eq emissions of trains (300g/km, including infrastructure, occupancy). Cars are still pretty bad, but also don’t compete well for 1000km trips in Europe. It’s basically only aviation at those distances.
Electric airplanes that can do 1000km trips don’t exist. They may exist one day in significant quantities… but perhaps only after we’ve used up all our carbon budget on the path to a 2-3C increase.
It also helps if you're generally going city center to city center and aren't lugging large suitcases around. (Which you might think would be a better fit for trains but really aren't for the most part.)
It’s difficult to just do a startup on general in this space (it’s sustainable mobility, but involves hardware, an old industry, old tech).
The state railways can afford rolling stock, but it’s extensive and takes a long time. They are not too innovative either, so may not solve the economics issues with new approaches, because they are too conservative.
As to finance, it does suck that we throw billions at economically, socially, and/or globally destructive, unprofitable startups and yet something that is a net good for society and environment can't get that funding. I guess that's where government steps in or private/public partnerships.
Good luck though!
Unfortunately the Oil industry won over the politicians in the USA with donations, legal bribes, and they prevent the building of quality train travel. Bet that if majority of the USA left and spent time in countries with quality rail system, they attitudes would change dramatically and push for better. They would experience how much time they waste in traffic and queuing for boarding and de-bordering.
The PNW has been unable to build it from Portland to Vancouver.
The US is many times larger than any European country or Japan. There are US states similar in size to EU countries with comparable rail networks.
The US literally invented air travel, which made traveling long distances by train largely obsolete.
Aircraft aren't limited to where they can go by rails.
So please explain with all these concrete examples of failure how it's a corporate conspiracy and not general purpose government ineptitude?
Can you cite the reasons that these large countries are capable of building high speed rail while the US is not?
Where is the recent innovation in US air travel? It has gotten considerably worse over the last 30 years. Supersonic passenger flights stopped in 2003 around the same time that TSA added hours to every flight.
Should Acela be faster? Probably! But people should be clear-eyed about what the reality of the situation is.
Everyone should be mad that we dug this hole and then climbed out of it, but people shouldn't pretend that we're still in the hole.
Train stations and airports are where they are. Lots of them are quite close to downtowns. Others aren't. Nobody's changing their locations in existing large cities.
There are plenty of cities where the nearest airport is closer than the nearest long distance rail station. There are plenty of cities where they aren't.
Billy Bishop is pretty convenient, I think it's quite unusual in that respect. But for the same reason, it's rather controversial and limited in the airplanes it can take, and its future is often in doubt.
The US has many areas with suitable population density to be served by high speed rail, and with more accomodative geography than Japan. It's just that in the US, it was considered fine to use government funds and authority to bulldoze land for the interstate system, but not for high speed rail.
It costs money and time to build HSR. Fine. The J(N)R director who ran the shinkansen project literally lied to multiple levels of government to shield the (2x+) budget overruns. He resigned and then within a year of it opening he was given a medal for extraordinary contributions to Japan.
> Because nationwide high speed rail isn't as easy - or practical - as you think.
Who is claiming that it is easy? However, it is practical! It takes 6 hours to drive Tokyo to Osaka; it's 2hr by train. Trains leave every 5 minutes.
A west coast HSR network is just obviously practical! Beijing-Shanghai HSR is 1300km; SF to Seattle would be the same. It'd be 4-5h on a train. Right now it's 2.5 hours on a plane plus a recommended 1.5 hours for security and boarding plus transfers on each side--I'd rather take a high speed train If I could! SF to LA could be ~3h. 90 minutes on a plane plus lead time and transfer times and it's competitive. Again.
> There are US states similar in size to EU countries with comparable rail networks.
Oh, which ones?
So just to be clear you are saying at best the time difference between flight and HSR would be minimal - so where is the payoff for the billions the infrastructure would take to build. If it's purely capacity couldn't you spend a fraction of the billions you'd spend on the new infrastructure to bolster the existing system?
For example, the Shinkansen in Japan (which I totally recommend!) is usually over $100 USD. Which is pretty similar to a flight price. This pattern repeats in Europe as well.
My friend just traveled London -> Edinburgh in the last few weeks, and found the train 2x the cost compared to RyanAir or EasyJet.
Even in the US, this pattern holds. Seattle -> LA costs $50-150 by plane, depending on the airline (3hrs). By train, it's 35hrs and $150. Its a lovely train ride, if you have a weekend to dedicate.
Spain, outside of the lines connecting Vigo, Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, axis.
Greece, anything outside Athens - Thessaloniki.
I went by train to Germany during the autumn of last year and oh man, what a pleasure it was. I got there about 5 minutes before the train, got in, dumped my suitcase and had room to spare.
During the trip I sauntered between carriages, bought some (mediocre) food to scoff down in the restaurant carriage, which I opted to do at my seat rather than right there because I felt like some quiet time rather than the buzz.
Later I traveled by plane to Spain in the spring and as nice as Barcelona was, I couldn't say the same about the plane trip, which was a necessity rather than a pleasure.
Sure, the automotive industry stood to benefit from the decline of rail travel in the US. But they didn’t really need to do anything for that to happen on its own. Reality is far less interesting than that. Turns out when you have tons of fertile land, even pre-industrialization your population tends to spread out a bit (the vast majority of Americans used to be farmers). Today the US has 3-5X less population density than any country with high speed rail. Autos saw massive success in the US due to this fact, and their prevalence reduced the demand for rail travel as a side effect, it wasn’t some top down evil conspiracy.
It’s fun to blame everything on evil big business or evil big government, but it’s also important to look at the first principles and base properties of the issue at hand first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
"Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.[a] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland. NCL often converted streetcars to bus operations in that period, although electric traction was preserved or expanded in some locations. Other systems, such as San Diego's, were converted by outgrowths of the City Lines. Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry."
This history also plays a large role in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," as a bit of fun bonus lore...
Also I'd argue street cars are way worse than busses which have route flexibility.
The bigger problem is Americans don't like being around other Americans and really don't like public transit.
It's not some giant conspiracy.
I don't like bad public transit either.
"Americans don't like being around other Americans "
There could be the option of having personal cabins for yourself.
No, but the two feed into each other. Intercity rail loses most of its advantages if you have to hire a car at the destination.
> Also I'd argue street cars are way worse than busses which have route flexibility.
They're better for that very reason. You can move somewhere with a decent commute and know that the streetcar isn't going to disappear at the stroke of a pen.
There is a different section in Oslo where the streetcar and metro share a stretch of track using a clever interlocking.
Manhattan may have high population density, and the public transit that goes with it; but building passenger rail thousands of miles to the other side of a sparsely populated continent just doesn’t add up in the same way.
At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train.
He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. It was more that he wanted to show people that more creative ideas were out there for things that might actually solve problems and push the state forward. With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me [Ashlee Vance] during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.Trying to convince internet leftists that a cabal of Evil Capitalists are not behind all of the worlds ills is like trying to convince internet right wingers that most vaccines work.
An influential person admitted that he had interfered the development of the high-speed railway at US with a vaporware project, which reported to him juicy economic revenues generated by investments and subsidies from all over the world. Just with vaporware.
Should people think that this kind of interference does not happen with influential pockets because you call it a conspiracy, while they call it just business?
Buses are a joke. We cannot have public transit here without security to match, like at airports.
Quite unsurprisingly Americans end up isolating from each other in suburbs, often gated neighborhoods with private schools, cars and live overall miserable and unhappy lives.
This may be true when averaged across the entire country (or even just the lower 48).
But it is absolutely not true if you consider various zones of the country as candidates for good rail service.
Several such zones exist, among them:
1. the north east corridor, perhaps one of the largest and densest conurbations in the world
2. the roughly rectangular shape formed with the NW corner in Minneapolis, the NW corner in Milwaukee, the SE corner in Detroit and SW corner in <wherever the hell that is>
3. The triangle in Texas formed by Dallas/Ft. Worth, Austin and San Antonio
All 3 have higher population densities than those found in non-urban parts of Europe; the latter have good to excellent train service, but none of these 3 do.
When you factor in that you need a car in both your departing city and destination city (except for NYC), AND the fact that nearly every household in those regions owns one or multiple cars (which is not true in higher density/higher urbanization countries)...it begins to not make sense especially given the massive upfront cost of construction.
Rail is not going to happen until you don't need a car in those cities. Chicago you could do, but the others are not pedestrian friendly. Anyone traveling within that region will have a 95% chance of already owning a car. Unless the train gets you from Chicago to Minneapolis in an hour, people are just going to drive. The risk with car rental and money spent on Uber's isn't worth it.
I feel like these types of comments come from people that live in NYC or LA. The rest of the country is so fuckin sparse. Your "walkable cities" idea doesn't make any sense and is completely unfeasible outside of major metro areas which land wise in the US is like 99%.
Also for the record, the overwhelming majority of the US population lives in metropolitan areas, not rural ones.
I've done Chicago -> Madison by bus, and honestly prefer it to the plane at least (even from the airport). More comfortable seats and I get out just at a station. High frequency bus lines feel like good indicators of where some trains could work, and it's not like bus services are dead.
(Similarly, I did Portland -> Eugene on Amtrak and it was nice and chill! I roadshared to my final destination but I had to get from A to B somehow)
- For France, rural areas don't really have that good of a rail network. Instead there are several trunk lines that are reliable. But it means that east-west stuff is nearly non-existent. Lots of "drive me to the station and drop me off please". Good enough to put France at number 2 in numbers of km ridden per passenger!
- For Germany, the network is much more evenly spread out. But ever German I've met complaints constantly about the unreliability of the trains, combined with the low rate of service. So you end up with stations everywhere, but if a train gets cancelled you could be stranded for hours.
Anyways I do think the French model makes a hell of a lot of sense (prioritizing train frequency over coverage), but it might not be what people are expecting if they just look at a map of trains.
Instead you build rails between major hubs (those that got the biggest airports usually) and add stops on some medium cities that happen to be on the way. It serves those living close enough of the connected cities that want to go close enough to another connected city. _close enough_ depends on the local connection options like regional trains, bus, bikes, trams… and if there’s nothing you just grab a cab or rental car. The city of departure can be reached with your own personal car which is usually a bit cheaper and faster (therefore more range). Most travels destination are big cities or close enough (business, tourism…).
Rail planing is a Pareto game.
I know we have a lot of rail enthusiasts here, but the average person tends not to like being stuck in a tube for 14 hours...even if that tube is substantially nicer and more roomy than an airplane.
Let's not even talk about the cost of constructing that route.
The vast majority of every agricultural society used to be farmers.
A decent high-speed rail system would be cool!
But a decadent high speed rail system would be awesome!
That trip is 1h 15m by air with 30 flights a day each way. That train doesn't exist anymore because it's impractical and people's time is valuable. We stopped taking Conestoga wagons from New York to California for the same reason.
Maybe you can but none will recommend that you do, for example Paris recommends at least 2 hours [0]. And if you need to check luggage you have no chance if you're only 20 minutes early, on a train you just carry it onto the carriage.
[0] - https://www.parisaeroport.fr/en/passengers/flight-preparatio...
It was called iDNight, by iDTGV, a former low cost high speed train operator in France. The idea was to run high speed trains at a slow speed during the night, turning a 3 hour trip into an 8 hour trip so that you can get a full night, and also so it can leave as the departure station is closing and arrive as the destination station is opening, therefore exploiting downtime, I guess.
These were not sleeper cars but regular high-speed train cars, not ideal for sleeping, but since most seats were vacant, at least in my experience, you could easily get two seats for yourself.
Aeh, where were you travelling? Many countries did not have sleeper trains. Don't get me wrong. I did the same, travelling at night in trains, and it saved me a night in a hotel. But I did not arrive well rested, I arrived train wrecked.
I've not heard of any age requirements.
You don't have to be younger than 26 to buy one, not anymore, but it is cheaper if you are. If you are a EU citizen, it gets you free, unlimited travel by train in most European countries. If you are not a EU citizen, there is the Eurail pass that is similar.
But that's the theory. In practice there are important limitations:
- You can't use it in your home country, except for a single round trip: in and out.
- If you make a reservation, you will have to pay reservation fees, and many long-distance and high-speed trains only have reserved seats.
- Not all seats are available to pass owners, if you want to travel in these seats, you will have to pay full price.
And considering that the pass itself is not that cheap, you really have some planning to do to see if it is worth it. In many cases, it isn't.
Last summer Spain’s Renfe offered huge discount for a pass for people under 31. Only for paper version though which is slightly less convenient but worth it anyway. I guess other eu countries could have similar seasonal discounts.
There are some home country limitations for Interrail, but I’m not really sure why the passes are still kept separate beyond that. It seems Eurail and Interrail are mostly identical beyond the residency/anti-residency requirements.
No mobiles, only lifeline home being a pay phone call every week.
Not the same stores in every city as it is today.
Life was beautiful back then and we did not know it.
Times have changed, and now like it or not, we are in the internet and smartphone age. The best travel deals are online, the cheapest accommodations are also found online. The Interrail pass is a bit of a relic, it can still be useful, but if you have no plan and limited cash, you are probably better off chasing last minute deals on your trusty smartphone.
And yes, I think we have lost something, disconnecting is hard, and stores tend to be all the same these days, and finding something interesting to bring back home is becoming a difficult task now that you can order everything online.
But I also think we gained something. The language barrier is breaking down. More and more people speak decent English as a secondary language, smartphones come with pretty decent translators, plane tickets are ridiculously cheap if you are not too picky. Getting in touch or keeping contact with people on the other side of the planet is almost too easy, great for exchange. When travelling in a group (even a temporary group), having mobile phones cuts down on the time waiting for people to gather, and offers more freedom than "let's meet at a precise place at a precise time", which is one of the most annoying parts of travelling in a group.
Now, I talked a lot about "cheap". That's because while travelling, I consider using money to be like cheating. You can do everything (well, almost) with money. Want to do a smartphone-less trip, randomly hopping into trains? You can, with money. Finding a ho(s)tel without price-checking online first? Sure, with money. Cheapening out is a good way to keep a "no plan" travel unplanned. But yeah, now there are smartphones involved.
And life is still beautiful. In my opinion, more beautiful than it has ever been, but in different ways.
Is that really something that was gained? As we lose more and more languages we start to lose unique cultural features right? It’s like “we gained McDonald’s in every city - my comforting home food is available everywhere”.
> When travelling in a group (even a temporary group), having mobile phones cuts down on the time waiting for people to gather
Kind of the same thing. It’s a focus on efficiency. Speed run through life experiences. Why even go to the Louvre when you can throw on your Meta headset and do it from your couch?
I’m not a travel elitist or anything like that, I just think these “benefits” come with a lot of drawbacks too. As the world gets smaller and more efficient it becomes homogenized and travel starts to become pointless.
Connectivity/smartphones do make things "easier" but they also tend to make them less spontaneous and serendipitous. And, yes, while a lot of it is that I'm trying to declutter my house and I like to travel light, I also find that I have pretty much zero interest in shopping abroad.
Not really a gain if you ask me.. The melting glaciers are agreeing with me and they are not impressed by the downvotes I'll receive for this opinion.
And even on the cheap, let's keep in mind that money is central to the luxury that any tourism is. In my 90's youth, I figuratively littered the map with pushpins in countries off the path beaten by Westerners, impressing family and friends. But really, I just happened to have the privilege of taking a few months for clueless wandering with no worries about means and the knowledge that if the affair turned sour I could at any point arrange a safety net. Sure, I was a fairly cheap backpacker, but still there was no glory in such adventuring - just money. I still recommend it to anyone who can, and that experience has shaped a large part of my later life in unforeseen ways, but I have long stopped gloating about it.
If I follow the link there, it costs 239E for a 5-day pass, where each of the 5 days must be used in a 1 month period. That's not "gratis", that's 47.8E per day the train is used?
I ordered one to my parents' house in the US and had them FexEx it to me in Europe.
The definitely ran between Germany and the Netherlands in the 00s because I took at least one trip that way.
* couchette (6 couchettes per cabin, less comfort)
* 2nd class bed (3 beds per cabin)
* 1st class bed (same as 2nd class, but 2 beds per cabin)
* 1st class private bed (same as above, but without roommate)
Both times I'd say well rested would be a stretch. The first time felt a bit like a magic carpet in that I got somewhere while using up no useful hours but it still wasn't perfect.
I suppose it’s the novelty of sleeping in a moving vehicle, my flight attendant friend said it took them a while to start sleeping well on long haul flights.
Perhaps with a lot of benzodiazepines or drowsy anti-histamines I could attempt to sleep well in a sleeper train, but not normally. Happy for those who can of course.
Do you think it's the noise for you, the movement, or something else (like lack of privacy)? I started taking earplugs with me for any kind of trip now, they are a godsend.
Most sleepers also offer cabins with proper beds (for a premium).
So as an individual traveling alone, you know your limits and can pretty much figure out if that way of travelling works for you. For a family, you are pretty sure at least one member of the family will have a rough night and complain in the morning.
A sure way to spend good night while travelling is to be very active during the day. You sleep much better if you have walked for 15 to 20km around a city to visit it than if you have been idle most of the time and taken taxis and buses whenever you could. Most lazy people don't understand that rest has to be earned.
And, yes, especially when time zones are involved, sticking to a schedule and getting exercise helps.
But then again some sleepers (Shiki-Shima in Japan) are like being in a luxury hotel. Rather enjoyed having a soak in the tub in my suite.
Actually Spain seems to have more to offer according to this map http://www.night-trains.com/europe/
edit: Nope, Spain is pretty almost void of night trains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trenhotel
I did a similar trip in the late 90s. Not 20 stays in train, but well above 10. Paris-Madrid, Rome-Paris, Bordeaux-Paris, to name a few.
If you were just sleeping in a seat then yes I can believe you felt awful the next day.
The closest I've been to a sleeper in recent decades has been five hours on a cold station because cancellations & delays have meant missing the last onward connection of the day so waiting for the first morning service (there are supposed to be provisions for that by way of providing accommodation or replacement taxi service, which do sometimes work, but at that time of night there isn't always someone available & reachable to enact such policies).
In the case you couldn’t reach someone, doesn’t every platform have a phone as well?
So I go for couchettes. One time in Sweden I found that the sleepers were only 10 euro more than the couchettes, so then I took one.
It wasn't threatening or anything, just a wild experience and insightful lesson in cultural differences
Indian railways changed the base sleeper cars into free-for-alls by changing sleeper cabin classifications and stopping verifying tickets. Now you have people buying the cheapest tickets (unreserved general) and swarming the "reserved" sleeper cabin berths. [0] They're just over-cramming the trains.
[0] https://www.tripsavvy.com/indian-railways-trains-travel-clas...
Oh man this has definitely not been my experience! Last I tried this I booked a "VIP" sleeper car with a private bathroom/shower, and it was anything but. The constant shaking of the train side to side coupled with a bunch of young American girls running up and down the halls screaming to each other all night meant I didn't get any sleep at all. To make things worse, the same girls making noise all night used up all the water, leaving me covered in soap with no way to rinse it off, and still 8+ hours until my hotel check-in. I can usually sleep anywhere regardless of noise or light or mattress quality, but sleeping a train is a new category of difficulty.
Likely a bit more. Also there is maintainance, the extra weight, the extra cost of buying more waggons .. but still I agree, thay this should be the direction.
Still, a 5 mile train will have problems at most train station ..
And you're right, you'd probably have to designate a section of the train as the "getting on and off" bit, and make it easy for people to move from car to car.
1. It appears Amtrak sleeper cars accommodate between 30 and 50 people.
2. An Amtrak coach car seats up to 80 people (fewer than I expected).
3. So to switch everything to sleeper cars would require trains to be 2-3 times as long.
4. A typical Amtrak train is 11-12 cars long, and each car is about 85 feet long.
5. So Amtrak trains are currently about 1,000 feet long, which means they could be 2-3x as long and still be *well* under a mile long.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Russia
edit: traveled with the transiberian as a tourist, it was full of workers, business man, students, whatever, hopping on and of in different places for connections or destinations. Best human experience ever in all three classes.
Edit2: definitely not high speed. I think that’s a better way of life.
I don't buy the "wealth" argument. A nation's wealth says little about how wealthy, in practice, its residents are.
Local trains even in these major cities do get delayed (around 2-5 minutes is typical, very rarely up to 30 minutes) or cancelled. Delays are in the moment, cancellations are typically announced a day or two in advance, as I was told.
"11 trains are late for at least two hours" makes regional news.
The take rate of air conditioning in subsaharan Africa is far lower compared to similar-climate places like Florida, but I wouldn't use that fact to posit that sans-AC is somehow better.
Of course the US is far larger than any single EU country, but the cities aren’t evenly distributed. There are many clusters of decently-close cities, and vast areas with very few large cities at all. Salt Lake or Denver may never have much useful intercity rail, but lots of regions could have it if we chose to build it (and learn from those who build it well, unlike California HSR).
If you pick Paris, most major cities in Western Europe are within 8 hours.
Pick Madrid, far fewer destinations are marked.
I also went through that investigational phase. Needing to do that is a very clear sign of a UX that's suboptimally designed, IMO.
I haven't seen the site you're describing, but that's a brilliantly optimistic spin of a line!
I lived in Madrid for a few years... It's hard to get anywhere from there by train outside of Spain, though it's definitely easier now than it used to be thanks to the high speed train to Barcelona.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid%E2%80%93Extremadura_h...
3 switches but still doable, overnight direct train was shut down after COVID unfortunately
just booking a train and getting a quote crossing multiple borders (without interrail) is just a nightmare :(
It does miss some regional train tickets which could be found on local platforms but major lines are covered fine.
Other than that it was quite good and on schedule. I’ve used railpass so it was also cheap enough.
My longest voyage was Moscow-London back in the days when Moscow-Berlin and Moscow-Paris trains existed (pre-covid).
1. Enter my route at ÖBB (Austrians), DB (Germans) and Trenitalia (Italians) and see who is cheapest
2. Book one ticket for the whole trip
The fact that there might be a wage difference between different countries might be interesting, but it us utterly irrelevant to the fact that there is a price difference between tickets sold for the exact same train. Not an Austrian vs. a Polish train -- literally the same actual train with the same finite, exact seats for sale.
It can't book the Eurostar as part of a larger trip and there might be similar limitations.
I guess it may be more expensive but I don't mind, I find the booking experience very clear cut as to what is refundable, what is nonrefundable etc, easy to pick which class for each segment and so on. no complaints.
There is a legislative proposal but that will take years and operators are going to try and get around it: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/spotlight-J...
Is this a problem of the operators within each country not wanting to be unified with each other because then they'd have to compete more directly? Or is this actually the operators between countries fighting over it for some reason?
The whole torture is accompanied by awkward excuses like "unexpected staff shortage", "technical disruption", "signal repairs", or "delay due to earlier journey" which you can look at in an app that tends to not work while you wait and freeze.
Bonus: If all else fails, you can play "Bahn Bingo" while you reflect on the experience of your trip: https://www.bahnbingo.de/
But delays are fairly common on that particular route (Berlin-Amsterdam). They use really old trains and they break down once in a while. Or the track is down for maintenance. Or whatever. Most of my journeys in the last three years there's always something. Before that it was more reliable.
We need to get essential services such as public transport back under state control or the quality will continue to deteriorate
Learn the lesson from the UK, who did privatisation first* and have witnessed things much worse than the current state of German trains (which are still *excellent* in comparison, and I say that as one who moved from the UK to Germany in 2018).
* or "harder", to the extent that German rail privatisation never went as far as in the UK. I understand there's a constitutional requirement here in Germany for government majority ownership of the rail system — I wish it were so in the UK
And like, if one's model for maintaining a system depends on having a sensible government in power, _regardless of which particular political party you think is least competent_ you are going to have a rail system being run incompetently at least half the time. That's also what we got with "privatisation", of course; why would we expect any different?
The main joke (there have been many smaller ones) for the last ~ decade has been the Brighton-London route, and two decades ago my trains home from Aberystwyth were getting cancelled every time a few stops before the Birmingham, with people saying that was to avoid getting counted as late.
* https://www.alamy.com/one-of-posters-from-the-conservative-p...
We should actually identify the actual technical problems and focus on spending the money to fix them.
It's really good we have Italo in Italy.
Prices are down, service quality is up.
Under nationalisation plans were afoot to close Marylebone, today Chiltern is one of the highest rated services going
It's all just a lack of investment. If the budget for rail and other infrastructure matched the budget for car infrastructure rail would be way better than cars.
That is only possible with fully standardized train units. Which is why you will see this in subways and dedicated high speed networks, but not on the common rail net. Platforms on a larger railway station have to accommodate a range of trains, from metro services (many doors at shorter intervals), to intercity trains (fewer doors, longer carriages), to special trains like night trains (a bunch of carriages from different ages strung together) and rented locomotives with spare carriages to fill gaps in the roster caused by late delivery of new trains.
> Making sure the rails are not accessible with fences around them.
There will always be spots where the rails are somewhat accessible outside of built-up areas.
Besides, all of that is fighting symptoms. Spend the same money on prevention and you'll have much more impact.
I agree that there will always be spots where the rails can be reached. As with many parts of human behavior, if there is more friction less people will do the thing. Since there are many instances where this is a temporary state and seeking and finding help can always be difficult I think creating that frictions is also worthwhile. Making sure people are prevented from feeling suicidal and being happier is something I also fully support.
CW: suicide
Coming from someone who has spent considerable time thinking about and planning suicide by train: lol no
Unless you put up walls higher than the highest ladders available (so at least 5m I guess) or completely enlose every train track with a roof and everything, people will climb over things. There's either no space for large fenced areas around tracks (pretty much everywhere near civilization) or you're too far out for somebody to respond before a determined person can reach the track. And of course, nobody will permit the construction of the necessary infrastructure (call them NIMBYs if you want).
Every escape door can be used to enter tracks. Make them as secure as you want them - keys are easier to get then you think.
Rebuilding train stations to completely secure access to the tracks would involve standardizing all trains in every country in all of Europe.
And (not applicable for high-speed trains) unless you want to spend billions and years to rebuild every train crossing to bridges, it will be impossible to completely secure the tracks.
Most train suicides are impulsive decisions and can be prevented with better infrastructure. But if suicide by train is too difficult, I'll just jump on front of a car instead, or from a bridge, etc. "It's all just a lack of investment" so is terra forming Mars. But spend a fraction of this for better mental health and you can prevent many more suicides.
I mostly figured the same as what you said (way too much infrastructure needed to mostly eliminate the possibility), though if you say most suicides are impulse decisions, wouldn't preventative infrastructure in a few key spots be sufficient to shave, idk, 10+% off the number of suicides by train?
Sure, you get a little bit of money back, but at that point, I understand why so many people prefer to fly or go by car.
Removing a body from the track shouldn't take long, of course. The problem is if you need to do detailed forensics because it might have been a murder. At least, I am guessing that's the reason that sometimes a line stays closed for a long time with a lot of police vehicles parked in the vicinity (here in England), whereas on other occasions there is a death but only a few trains are delayed and for only 10-30 minutes.
Interestingly, I have on at least one occasion heard about trains being held up because of a dead body on the track that wasn't hit by a train. That definitely sounds suspicious. But of course no further information is given to the general public. (Body placed by criminals but reported before it was hit or the train happened to be slow enough to stop in time? Or suicidal person drugs themselves before placing themselves on the track?)
> not really something anybody can do much about
Good video surveillance might help eliminate the need for a detailed investigation of the (perhaps) crime scene. But, yes, not an easy problem.
Sometimes the front locomitive gets uncoupled earlier so the train can continue on a different track. But the rule is that passengers in the train should not be exposed to what happened outside the train. It's bad enough that the machinist had to witness it.
As an aside, I was once on a train that hit a deer-sized animal while going through a cutout, which caused the now dead animal to bounce back and hit the side of the train. The first car had blood smeared all over. When we rolled into the next station, there was a collective dropping of jaws among the people waiting to board. Yes, there was an announcement once they had boarded that it wasn’t a person.
Flakiest trains I’ve experienced anywhere in Europe were in Italy - rolling strikes among train workers are crazy frequent and cause so many delays and cancellations.
I jest a little, but it's so bad here we've started to call it "bus replacement service" when the train is not cancelled, rather than "rail replacement service" when the train is cancelled.
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/full-togstans-i-hele-norge-grunnet-...
The gov't hasn't allocated enough for maintenance for several decades, and we're paying the price now.
The National Audit Office recently released[1] a scalding report about it.
[1]: https://www.riksrevisjonen.no/rapporter-mappe/no-2023-2024/s...
Ah yes, the german approach.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276017 (439 comments)
In my view the previous version easier to use and more fun. Some similar projects:
FWIW the city straplines/blurbs were in English for me but the discount details [adverts?] were in French.
Seems to be based on https://github.com/juliuste/direkt.bahn.guru, the issues of which note quite a few missing stations.
The connection to Vigo happens a few times a day, with regional trains, and to Madrid it is at most twice a day, if it runs.
Then the regular CP strikes, delays and canceled trains.
It isn't by chance that most families have cars, if we rely on trains and bus alone, better have enough time for travelling by land.
We could already have good connections with Alpha Pendular trains, it would be a matter to extend and improve existing infrastructure, not build a new one from scratch.
Same goes for the never ending story of the new Lisbon airport, it will make very happy everyone involved into its construction.
I don't mean that to be mean, but there is so much improvement possible. I hope it will improve. I live in Switzerland and I cannot use public transport most if the time because there isn't any.
There are a few cities with reasonably good commuter-rail service which might compare with some of the European cities. Other than that distance/hour will be a small fraction of that in the EU.
Comparisons with China and Japan might also be illuminating.
There are historical isochrone travel maps of the US, also ironically strongly influenced by railroad development, see:
<https://railroads.unl.edu/documents/view_document.php?id=rai...>
<https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2...>
My experience with rail travel in the us, is (outside the NE corridor / Acela: 1) trains do not depart/arrive at convenient locations, 2) go too slowly[1], and often are not very price/time competitive [2].
1. I believe the Pennsylvania Railroad Congressional train averaged about the same speed as the Acela DC>NY in 1940’s -1960’s 2. DCA>LGA 12/31 is $202 ~2:40 door to door time, Acela is $255 and is ~3:15 door to door.
Ti might also be missing how new companies have recently caused speedups in other routes by skipping stations altogether: A stop on a high velocity train can be over 20 minutes if it has to go from full speed to zero and back again
Yeah, I know German trains occasionally are late, but I remember standing on the platform in Munich, envying those who could travel to Madrid or Brussels without going to the airport—security checks, yada.
"derweil is an interactive video installation correlating time, space and big data to provide tailor-made instructions on how to get lost. Materials: Google Directions and Streetview APIs, JavaScript, NW.js, cables.gl, Involt, Arduino IDE, computers, thermal paper, plastic, metals, wood."
(I doubt I could still run this today, though. I used some kind of 'hack' to bypass Google Streetview API limitations and I'm pretty sure they fixed this ages ago… ;D)
I would accept if Via rail was cheaper. I have been looking at those cross-country trips and it's literally $4k CAD per person. I get that it's accommodation, too, but still.
Truth is that there are millions living in areas which rail makes sense but it doesn’t happen because they don’t want it.
4 hour journey in peak time from Maastricht to Gronigen for 30 EUR without advance purchase? Incredible.
40% discount in off-peak times and weekends for 67 EUR/year? Bargain. We have a 33% discount option which is available to everyone but it is only for trains in the south of England (there lots of others for young people, elderly people, disabled people etc)
Very, very simple fare system in comparison to ours.
Great connections from Schipol.
I know it's not perfect - there are strikes, very busy trains etc.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/537619/auckland-rail-shu...
Some numbers people from other countries can only dream about:
punctuality less than 5 minutes: 89.7% punctuality less than 15 minutes: 97.0%
Yes, there is a train service to Germany, but the majority of the connections from Enschede are to/from the Netherlands.
> In fact a lot of trains in this region of the world are operated by neighboring countries
If a service to Germany causes the whole station to be labeled as German, the website might just as well label Berlin as Czech, or Brussels as Dutch: CZ (Czech national railway) has train services that extend to at least Berlin, and NS (Dutch national railway) has trains to Brussels.
The official reason, some powerline issue.
[Edit] https://withinhours.com/ seems easy to use
Anyway, the shared feature is neat, but seems to be somewhat iffy once you get out of the bigger cities. If a route has 2 or more connections, it seems to struggle to show them. While true to its message, I still feel the restriction of 8 hours misses sleeper trains, where travel time is less essential compared to daytime trains.
It's cute for discoverability, but for a specific train search, I would definitely defer to bahn.de, which basically includes all train stations in Europe.
I think when you share anecdotes like yours, its good to share anecdotes like mine, to balance it out :)
Added: GP is probably talking about a train that didn't cross a border.
This was like two years ago or so, so still exists probably
Second best might be Portland, OR to Sacramento, though I might have liked it if had been more like travelling to the past (I miss proper dining cars).
European ones have been cheap, cheerful, and uncomfortable, but this was 15 years ago for trips like Florence to Prague, IIRC.
You mean most distance you can travel in X hours?
That would not be very interesting. I live close to a train station that's less than 5 minutes (by train) away from the nearest other train station. The other train station is the city hub with many connections to other cities. There is nothing interesting about this connection, it simply replaces a 20 minute bike or bus ride. There are many such connections.
It was very disappointing. We had to wait on an exposed end of the platform away from regular commuters. When I boarded it was no more luxurious than a regular train. I got a meal which consisted of a sandwich which was, I swear, a 1" x 4" sliver of bread with broccoli pesto on it, and another piece on top. not even a full sandwich. I also got a lukewarm cup of coffee and a yoghurt.
I know it’s not an ideal way to visit Europe, but just humor me please.
What’s a good city to make the base, which has good connectivity with as many different cities in different countries as possible, and is a good destination in itself?
Driving your vehicle is the best way to go if you want to enjoy the sights on the way.
Boarding an airplane ends a long time before the planned departure time. You need to go through security and border control. Airports tend to be in remote locations.
Most trains you can board up to the departure time. There no need to be there more than 5 minutes before. The also take you to the city centre, which is probably both where you are coming from and where you are going to.
True, but 6:50 is plenty early enough depending on if you know the station and the size.
Getting to and from the stations are a wash because it's not like the airport drops you at the door either. Though, many EU cities have the train station near the city center which makes it easier for people to get to than the airport.
I don't think so. That gives you a 10 minute margin, which can get uncomfortable quickly if there are any delays in getting there.
If I can walk to a station and I know the route, 10 minutes margin is plenty enough. But if I have to drive+park or take public transport, I won't trust a 10 minute margin.
As soon as you have transfers in the mix (as you often would if travelling longer distances) or stricter tickets, not making it to the train is usually a really bad option.
When searching a journey, it's easy to see if the route with connections repeats every 20, 30, 60 minutes or something else.
Stricter tickets mattering or not depends on the country.
IMO booking strict tickets (e.g. booking a seat) makes sense on only a small handful of routes in the UK, for example, and may even result in you being offered fewer possible options.
There are some quite infrequent routes in rural areas where missing a connection is a bigger problem, but on those journeys I tend to consider my arrival time at that connection to be the starting point.
For the train journeys I take it’s pretty normal to have two or three changes, often including a trip across London. I rarely get into a situation where missing a train is a problem, because of the nature of the train timings. The last time I was delayed significantly was due to catastrophic flooding.
The fundamental difference between air travel and train travel is that missed flights have to be rescheduled. Missed train journeys, not so much. In the UK if you miss the train you had booked a seat on, you can usually still travel on another one if it's a travel period covered by your ticket (e.g. only travelling at peak with a peak ticket). You just don't get a seat guarantee.
---
An aside:
Train travel is a flow state/mindset thing. Get one train earlier than you strictly need, find something to do while you're on the train (bonus points for something you can still do while standing). And then try to remember your journey is no more important than anyone else's, maybe a lot less, and you have no more right to timeliness or expedience than anyone else... maybe a lot less. As long as your journey is progressing, things are fine.
The other week I was on a train and there was a thirty-something woman and her parents, taking up a lot of space around me and chatting incessantly and being silly, and I was just about to performatively put my headphones on (the rudest you're allowed to get when people are crossing the threshold of appropriate levels of noise) when it dawned on me that they were being silly because this thirtysomething woman was going to a hospital to find out whether her tumour had returned. And then it dawned on me from their route-planning discussion which hospital it likely was, and what that likely meant for her, and I hugged myself and read my book.
I was on a train about 15 years ago, on a local journey, that was held outside a station about three quarters of a mile from where I worked. Stuck for three hours on a cold train in winter with no working toilet.
About an hour and a half in, people were getting very angry, until a member of the rail staff walked the line back to the train, boarded, and went through the carriage explaining carefully but respectfully exactly why the train couldn't get into the station and why we couldn't all walk along the track. Once they knew why, the angry people started chatting and sharing snacks and talking to strangers like they were old friends for whom life had suddenly become too short to be angry.
This is a great point. I also find train travel the least stressful over all other means of travel.
I did like to take the train more often, but travel times are just to slow. I'd need to set aside one day to just leave the country, then maybe I can get another train somewhere in Germany and then I can get pretty much anywhere in Northern Europe in a reasonable time. It's just that train travel in Denmark absolutely suck and is fairly pointless and you almost never travel more than 80-90kph.
Billund is $45 for a week and Copenhagen is $70 for a week. That covers the three busiest Danish airports. Parking is cheap, especially compared to the time save by taking the plane.
I get its different from country to country and I guess I'm just really annoyed with the continued insisting that trains are better than planes, when there's almost no benefit to trains in my country. They are practically pointless, out matched by busses, planes and cars, unless you just happen to have a usage pattern that fit exactly with the layout and timetables.
In Denmark specifically the border policy causes some slowdown. Other than that it probably has the same issue as the Netherlands where the trains that go across the border are infrequent and don't connect to major hubs. This creates a lot of friction in the entire network which makes the entire proposition fall apart. If you have to cross more than one border you really get into some hellish territory, speaking from experience.
Airport parking in Europe is pretty expensive. It could quite possibly be more than the flights for all passengers combined. A week at Brandenburg is about €150 Euros and at Heathrow is roughly the same (and needs a shuttle bus to the terminal, or it is over £250 plus for the short stay).
That is, however, still likely cheaper than a train to the airport in the UK and substantially less likely to have a cancellation cause you to miss a flight.
If you'd have to pay for long-term parking, why not instead pay for a taxi or Uber to the train station?
Millions of train commuters in the UK optimise for just this sort of thing. Not one minute before, because the doors typically close 30s to a minute before departure, but 06:55 for sure.
I am not a commuter, but later in the day I don’t leave the house much earlier than twelve minutes before the train I want to get will leave the station, which is a third of a mile away on foot, and I will have time to get a ticket from the machine.
If it's a train that runs every half hour or so, and my ticket is flexible (which is common) I might cut that to 5 or so.
Also I might just be unlucky that it takes me >1h just to get from my apartment to the airport in Berlin, but generally trains beat airplanes for most destinations I have in Germany. For some destinations they're competitive, but rarely ever beat trains by more than a few minutes, while still being much more of a hassle. I'd rather relax in a comfortable train for 4 hours with every amenity I could wish for, going straight from city center to city center, than deal with airports for two hours just to spend an hour in a cramped airplane while still having to organize transportation between the airport and the city each leg.