As a North American who travels in the UK multiple times per year, I really need you to elaborate. My experience has been nothing less than amazing, in comparison to the complete lack of rail options at home.
It also varies a lot in different places. Costs vary with types of tickets, who you are, and whether you have various discounts.
Local train services are very weak where I live (Cheshire) so while I can get to major cities quite easily its difficult to travel between towns in the county on trains (or buses).
1) Commute hours are brutal. Trains are packed and even a few minutes delay can feel like ages when you’re missing a meeting.
2) The cost of 5x weekly round trips is enormous. The average annual pass for someone commuting into London from outside is like £4000. That’s in a country where the average wage is around £40,000. That’s a huge amount of money to spend on public transportation. I know a car would be more but I’ve never met a single American who spends that fraction of their income on public transportation.
Still though … I’d rather have expensive and unreliable trains than no trains at all.
London is it's own bubble with "Transport for London" running all transport.
It has lots of investment, cheap busses, frequent trains and a reliable underground. It has synchronisation between different forms of transport, and timetables that make sense.
The rest of the UK, the rest of England especially, has incredibly expensive buses, might be lucky to get one train an hour in some places, and might have 3 different bus companies serving a small town, meaning you can't even travel on a day pass, as you'll find that one bus company refuses to accept your ticket because it's a different bus company. Or you find you have to wait much longer for your return journey as the "wrong" company buses turn up first.
In the north though it’s a mixed bag, frequently delayed, huge underinvestment, expensive etc.
Basically the names of geographical regions don't always make sense.
No normal person refers to Scotland as "north UK" when they could say Scotland, though.
It was once common, and in modern times it's occasionally used as a deliberate affectation.
On the other hand, Balham was the "gateway to the south" (which reached as far as the Mediterranean).
The UK definitely does not have the best public transit I've ever seen. ESPECIALLY for the price.
Quite often (maybe 1 in 6) my train to London would get cancelled. I would be able to get a refund no problem, but there is no compensation for the fact I have driven to the station and am now stuck without any travel plans.
Conversely I would have to arrive at the station early, for if I missed my train I would forfeit that half of the ticket and would have to pay again to travel on the later train. As such my journey would actually also include an extra 15 minutes of slack time in case the car didn't start and I needed to wake the wife for a lift, for example. It would also be quite stressful on the way home, where a meeting might overrun, putting my chances of getting my booked train at risk.
A year or two ago they opened a new "parkway" railway station (basically park-and-ride) and now the earliest train no longer stops at my local station. It would take me 30 minutes to drive to the parkway station, plus cost me £6 a day parking there, so my only option now is the later train which arrives in London at 8:30, if it is on time, making it impossible for me to start work before 9am.
The trains are supposed to have eight carriages, of which one is first class. On the outward journey I could often get a seat but the return journey would be standing only for the first hour. Quite often the train would arrive with only five carriages meaning it would be absolutely rammed the whole way. This leaves you very exhausted and sweaty for the start of the work day. And forget first class: it is twice the price of standard class.
So I've given up with the long distance train and now drive down to a commuter town near London and get the train just the final bit. I can also get into London much earlier and I don't have to pre-book specific trains. It's actually cheaper too, with the fuel and train tickets coming in at about £65, though obviously there's car depreciation, tyres, &c. on top.
So between £75-£130 for a prebooked ticket on an inflexible, specifically timed, intercity train, with a total journey time of about 3:00, or £65 for a drive down in my own car whatever times I want with a total journey time of about 3:30.
They're so punctual that delays issue a certificate for employees to present to employers*
* Source: random article
China is pretty good, but the only place I've ever seen proper turn-up-and-go HSR is Japan. Tap your card or phone (NFC-F, because credit card contactless is too slow for Japan), walk on. If you missed the train you were aiming for there'll be another one 7.5 or at most 15 minutes later, so no big.
China has more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined.
1. https://www.railway-technology.com/features/the-10-fastest-h...
And tickets, specially in Spain, are very cheap.
But maybe we were just lucky.
But the train near my house still runs.
Train travel has doubled since the privatisation.
The main problem is we don't know how to build out infrastructure in a cost effective manner (see HS2 and the electrification of the Great Western Main Line). This isn't surprising as we do it in a stop/start manner rather than a continual process.
The biggest problems recently (for me) have been strikes and inadequate services. The rot really goes back to pre-privatisation (it was not great in the 1990s) and arguably started with the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, based on the decision not to subsidise rail in the face of increasing road use.