Railways--and public transit generally--is optimized for people who speak the native language and use the system regularly and more or less ignore the jet-lagged person just off a flight who doesn't speak the language. In general, a lot of systems do a bad to terrible job of accommodating people who are unfamiliar with them.

It also doesn't help when so many countries (and even cities) have totally different systems for paying, etc. Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others. And, no, having to scour guidebooks (of possibly outdated info), for all the right incantations for a given locale isn't really satisfactory.