Why Britain has ‘ghost trains’
bbc.com
bbc.com
Some of these routes will probably never be viable on their own, but the segments of track might be needed some day as a detour. For instance if a bridge somewhere needed to be out of service for a year or something.
For example, one of the more famous "ghost trains" (since it's in London) is the daily Paddington to West Ruislip service. Since they're both served by the underground there wouldn't be much need for a mainline train between them. If long-term work disrupted that connection they might want to temporarily run a regular service on that line though.
If you just abandoned the track, you wouldn't know its condition when you needed it. Just as important, the regulators wouldn't let you run passengers using crew that hadn't been trained on that line.
So just running an occasional train and rotating staff through it, the line and the skills are always kept sharp. Then if you suddenly need that bit of track in an emergency it's ready to go.
And since you're going to run a train anyway, you might as well sell a few tickets if people want to join you.
There's plenty of train lines in the US that are kept on the books/maintained, yet don't see any regular service. Some brush cutting, an inspection train once a year, and that's about it.
There's also plenty which are entirely abandoned and overgrown in practice, yet are still kept on the books, which means the train company retains the right of way and can resume service at any time it wants even though a train hasn't run on it in at all in 30 years and it currently looks like a forest.
Training for emergency detours makes some sense, although unless the line is long you don't really need all that many people trained to be prepared for that. You can have a few people qualified and they can just get on/off the train (riding back and forth) in the section the normal engineers aren't qualified for. And if it's once a decade or longer planned work, it's going to be cheaper to qualify the workforce right before it rather than have to keep them all up to date all the time. (I'm also sure that not all of these lines are worthwhile detours)
In the monarchy (yes, that long ago), the government believed railroads were the future of the country, and invested in them heavily (in fact half of current railroads in Brazil were built during the reign of the last emperor).
Later during the military dictatorship, the government again saw the point of railroads, and started investing in them again.
Then during our redemocratization, the federal government ended owning lots of railroad companies (example: The São Paulo railroads were given to the federal government as payment because of the São Paulo bank debts with the fedearl government), the federal government then went and shut down every single line that looked unprofitable, even ones that were unprofitable for obvious reasons (example: still under construction, thus zero revenue).
Now we need trains BADLY, but even to use old trains is impossible, for example 0.5% of the country area has 40 million people (out of 200 million in the country total), yet there is nowhere near enough trains for it, most of the transportation is by road (including all the issues of ever increasing absurd traffic, and accidents, one of the highest amounts in the world) or air (São Paulo has the dubious distinction of highest number of helicopters in the world, because road transport is so unsafe, because of accidents and crime, that people that can afford going by helicopter go by helicopter).
My parents live in Valinhos, I live near a train station in São Paulo, the train track near my home passes behind my parents home, yet I cannot do this simple trip, because not only the track is overgrown and unmaintained, but the government decided to repurpose some stations for other uses, and paved over or cemented over the tracks, the sad thing is we have the tracks there, we have the demand, and we have the trains (in storage, the military government bought lots and lots and lots of then bleeding edge electric trains), but everyone sees it as an almost impossible task to fix it.
Also comparing São Paulo subways to other countries is not even funny, São Paulo city proper has 11 million people, this is São Paulo subway+trains: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-N0nE1VbO69E/USpnqXhm5fI/AAAAAAAAAB...
note this map has some other whole cities in it (Jundiaí is a city, also is the city where the track is paved over... the Ruby track is the one that passes behind my parents house, if it was still in use).
Now london: http://www.projectmapping.co.uk/Reviews/Resources/specialrep...
Paris centre (not the whole city): http://www.urbanrail.net/eu/fr/paris/paris-centre-map.png
Tokyo: http://www.bento.com/pix/subway/tokyosubway2011.png
At least São Paulo is not bad as Salvador (4 million people, only the solid red line currently exists, the rest is planned or under construction) http://www.tribunadabahia.com.br/upload/20141104015725_mapa-...
Or Campinas (2 million people in the metro area, has several rail lines already built, stations in almost all cities of the metro area and in the biggest neighbourhoods, but has only a single train running, it is a coal train, and most people using it are tourists wanting to have a train trip, usually parents wanting to show their children how it is to travel by train).
The USS Constitution is technically still in active service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution
Also the United States Naval Academy has a sailing team, but a lot of colleges on a river or shore do. I assume they do well, as a matter of pride. http://www.usna.edu/Sailing/
Train tickets now are often more than the cost of petrol to drive across the country. So if you'd spend more on a train ticket, why not drive?
Sometimes it even cheaper to get a flight from Glasgow to London than it is to get the train.
To get a ticket, a week in advance, to go from Carlisle (where I live) to London costs roughly 120 pounds (that's 180 USD, ish).
It's crazy expensive, and the benefit really isn't there any more.
Goods wise, trains could / should have taken the same kind of approach that the shipping industry did, with containers.
If our company (live events A/V stuff, mainly) is doing an event down south, we should be able to call a train company, have them deliver a container (or pick up one that we own) at our warehouse on a flat bed truck, we load it, they take it to the train station, it get craned on, and then we minibus down there the next day and have it delivered to the location. But no, it's easier and cheaper for us to run our own bunch of trucks.
If there was a service like that, we'd use it.
Avoiding depreciation of the car or the cost of having one in the first place; lower risk of accidents; you get to use the time to work, read, or take a nap; you don't have to worry about parking. It's not all downsides.
Assuming I'd have a car already, though, I'd already have paid for the car, insurance, MOT, tax, blah blah. So for a journey I'm contemplating taking, where the choice is car vs train, the train is competing against the marginal per mile cost: roughly, fuel+repairs.
For this my car's cost has been £0.28/mile - a figure that usually turns out to be pretty close to the cost of the train. (In fact, this comparison is being unduly generous to the train, because most of my driving is short trips. For longer trips the car is more fuel efficient, making the marginal cost more like £0.20/mile.) I'm also not taking into account the cost of travel to the station.
But then again, I'm also assuming there will be free parking at your destination...
118 * £0.28 = £33.04 for the marginal cost of driving. An anytime ticket is £98.50. An off-peak ticket is £43.00.
UK train travel seems to only be cheaper if you can buy an advance ticket (restricting you to the one particular train you've bought for), or with a season ticket (where the price is regulated).
Swings and roundabouts there, though; the train doesn't give you door-to-door service.
Going from city centre to city centre on business I find trains to be much more pleasant than flying or driving - even going to London from here in Edinburgh is worth it - the trip is fairly scenic (e.g. going through Durham) and not that much longer than flying.
Mind you - I agree it's not a cheap option!
I guess it's fine if you're not paying...
If I take the train to visit my mother it's about a 3 hour trip, door to door, and costs about 50% more. But I have all that time available to work on other things that matter to me: homework, hobby projects, even pleasure reading. The net cost to me in terms of time I couldn't spend doing anything else is relatively small, and mostly consists of walking which isn't all bad since it counts toward the ol' daily 10,000.
If I drive it's only 2 hours' transit time, but in terms of actually getting stuff done with my precious time that's 2 hours of complete uselessness. From my perspective it's easily worth a measly 20 bucks to avoid that. Heck, I pay more than that just to get out of having to spend time cooking dinner more often than I care to admit.
But the occasions when the thing I'd most like to do is just sit there and passively listen to an audiobook while staring off into space are few and far between. And I don't feel that doing it while sitting in a car is a significant improvement over doing it while sitting on the sofa.
...than to get the train, booked about a month in advance. And of course, I got the best part of a whole extra day in Edinburgh with the time saved.
Crazy.
Oxford to Birmingham is about 1hr15 if everything goes to plan. Parking, going through security, boarding, etc is, generously, at least an hour. The flight is about 1hr15. It takes 30 minutes to get from the airport to the city centre (but you'll also have to navigate your way through the airport to get to the bus.
Adding that up comes to at least four hours, and could well be closer to five. So you actually saved at most two hours, and possibly as little as one. However, you probably had a pretty miserable journey (whereas on the train you could have relaxed for four hours with a good book and a nice cup of tea).
There are many other practical factors about my specific journey your comparison doesn't include, such as the fact that I don't actually live in Oxford, so I need to get the bus to Oxford station (in which time I can get 90% of the way to Birmingham Airport by car), the times of day I was travelling, connection times, and travel time at the other end of the train journey. (And if you factored in Oxford's marvelous road works, that's probably another 4 hours saved right there ;-)
As for a miserable journey... last time I went to Edinburgh by train it was so overcrowded they simply cancelled all the seat reservations altogether, because people couldn't get to their seats. So I stood/squatted/sat on luggage in a crowded hot train for hours. Not fun at all. I knew would be busy. That's why I bought a "reservation"!
The plane journey was a doddle by comparison.
Demand-based ticket prices accurately reflect the availability of seats. The cheapest advance fares from Carlisle to London are £24 each way; the most expensive open single is £239. It doesn't make sense for rail operators to offer cheap fares on trains that will be filled at a higher price.
In the US, containers are transferred from ships directly to trains. A train may have hundreds of cars, each single, double, or triple stacked with standard shipping containers.
A curious case of technological leapfrogging (in a sense; I rather prefer the electrified network even at the cost of no double stacked freight trains).
I don't know why parent is talking about triple stacking containers. That's completely infeasible; the tallest common loading gauge in America (AAR Plate H, or 6.3 m) doesn't even come close to fitting 7.8 m = 3 × 2.6 m (about the height of a container).
[1] http://www.csx.com/share/wwwcsx_mura/assets/File/Customers/S...
But if you want to get something shipped rail is cheap and reliable (if not particularly fast).
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/12/rail-privati...
Great research by the author there. Private operators have a market share of 25% urban/regional transport in Germany, ie. those railway routes that are co-financed by the public. The biggest private operators are French and British. As long as I don't have to buy a special ticket when I ride their trains -- and I do ride them all the time --, it's all the same to me.
The point is, if you want to take the train, either book ahead (and maybe get a BahnCard 25), or get one of the other two. I used to do a mere 2h journey a bunch of times a year (as returns), and the BahnCard 50 easily paid for itself in just 2 or 3 trips, while also offering fantastic flexibility, since it's always 50% off the regular price, which is static.
That's how people afford trains. Also, with the BahnCards, you usually get a free ticket for central public transport zones at your destination, for example for Zone A in Berlin.
Just for your example, a single from Munich->Berlin costs 65€ with a BahnCard 50, i.e. 130€ return, booked right now. The booked ticket lets you ride at any time within the next two days, so you are also not tied to a specific train and it's no big deal if you arrive later at the station etc. (which is not the case for special offers, which tie you to a specific train). 130€ return from München Hbf to Berlin Hbf is really not that bad.
But perhaps the BBC doesn't want to cover that story for some reason.
‘By Parliamentary, this morning. I came forty mile by Parliamentary this morning, and I’m going back the same forty mile this afternoon. I walked nine mile to the station this morning, and if I find nobody on the road to give me a lift, I shall walk the nine mile back to-night. That’s pretty well, sir, at my age!’ said the chatty old woman, her eye brightening with exultation.
Dickens - Hard Times
The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window panes,
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
In Parliamentary trains.
Looks like the same situation with British trains.
I also recall back in the 70s when the DOE regulated which gas stations got how much gas to sell. The result was a patchwork of gluts and shortages across the US. That ended immediately when Reagan abolished those regulations.
While this may be good for the airline, it's not necessarily good for the people that are now forced to drive multiple hours to the nearest airport.
I would think that something similar would happen if the trains were deregulated.
I don't have figures handy, but airline fares (adjusting for inflation) are much, much lower today than when the government set routes, schedules and fares.
The hub and spoke system common today evolved out of the deregulation. Smaller airports are served by small "commuter airlines" today, not big empty jets.
“It has to be one of the maddest places we have both been to,” he says. “No words can describe how isolated this place was.” The closest road was three miles away; the only nearby structures were a shuttered pub and an old windmill.
In the American West, Canada, Russia, and myriad places throughout the world, it's not hard to get three miles away from a road.
Wild places are good for the soul.
Average Distance to the Nearest Road in the Conterminous United States
Surprised to actually find something while checking your claim!
(Still, thanks for providing the link.)
It depends on where you are. In a lot of places west of the Mississippi, there are still pretty regular grids, spaced less than three miles apart, of roads. Without them, access for agriculture and ranching would be difficult/impossible.
Plus, even a lot of state and national parks have access roads running through them. You have to go out to places that have no agricultural, industrial or tourism value whatsoever in order to get that far from a road.
Then I thought I'd better look it up.
The comment in the article was about Berney Arms[1]. Looking on the map, it looks like the station is indeed unserved by roads. However, the nearest road does appear to be 500 metres away (much closer than three miles). The pub and windmill are on that road, rather than at the roadless station.
The next junction along that road is about 2km away (still not 3 miles), and the nearest meaningful junction (i.e. that gives you a choice of destination) 3.5km (still not 3 miles).
The nearest junction with an A road is about 3 miles away, following the road. It is also the closest you can get with Google Streetview[2]
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Berney+Arms,+Great+Yarmo...
[2]https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.621769,1.651184,3a,75y,187...
Deleted comment
A47 appears to be less than a mile away according to Google Maps scale bar. Walking to Great Yarmouth is listed as .1 mile (I don't know how though since I don't see any bridges across the water).
In addition, that's a stop along the train line to Great Yarmouth which isn't exactly nowhere. So, are they running a train only to Berney Arms? I doubt it terminates there. Now, it could be that passenger service is sparse because it follows the geographic feature (the river) rather than cutting through like the roads.
Finally, a lot of this stuff stems from the massive cuts that the railways took in the 1960's. That area used to have a lot more rail lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Yarmouth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe
The same reasoning applies to road freight, pipelines, and probably fresh fruit and cut flowers too.
I had a flight like that in the late 90's to Minneapolis. The flight crew wouldn't let the few of us sit in the 1st class section. :(
Some of the Technology is there already, for example to reduce the huge traffic on the European roads: http://www.cargobeamer.eu/Technology-849174.html
Should be no problem, to have automatic coupling/decoupling of parts of the train, separating at major hubs going to different destinations. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=671327...
Also, Trains are run by electricity which can be created through nuclear energy (Thorium reactors in the future etc.). I see a point in the future, where we DON'T have the resources to build such an infrastructure anymore: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/
And yes, I know, the Nazis thought up similar things: http://jalopnik.com/5819038/hitlers-giga-railway-from-paris-... http://www.breitspurbahn.de/3000.html
If you want more detail:
http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2011/04/24/security-breach-lon...
The train infrastructure has fallen badly since Soviet times and it will be another 20 years until Rail Baltica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica will be completed(that is politics and economics willing).
In 1930s you could take a train from Riga to Berlin in 14 hours(I have the original poster), from what I understand the only way you can make the same route is by going Riga-Moscow-Berlin which is not very convenient or making taking a lot of local trains http://www.seat61.com/Latvia.htm#Moving on
A flight from Denver to San Francisco is $150-200 roundtrip and takes about 2 hours. A train from Denver to Emeryville (the train doesn't even go into the city) takes about 33 hours and costs $220 and hemorrhages money so badly that each passenger is a loss of $150+ even with that price.
You could dump 100 billion into it, making it true HSR and not having any intermediate stops, and it still won't be time competitive, and obviously won't be cost competitive. The distances are too large.
I support the HSR corridors, and more commuter services in the urban/semi-urban areas. But with the long distances and zero population density of most of the American West, the cross-country routes often make little sense beyond basically being a long scenic railway.
As someone who rides the train I can tell you that you are very, very wrong.
In the winter lots of people ride it to Reno.
Families ride it from Winnemucca, NV to Green River, UT. Kids ride it (by themselves) between Reno and Winnemucca.
Lots of families ride it that can't afford the airfare for all of them. Or they have too much luggage, or they live in rural areas that are hours away from the nearest major airport.
Unlike an airplane that is point to point - the train connects people in the in-between places to other in-between places.
Between SFO and Chicago, Amtrak sells each seat in the zepher about 3-4x.
I know that the train will be crowded between bay area and reno ( filled with people that don't exist apparently ). It will empty out at Reno. Gradually refill across nevada, utah and western colorado. Empty out again in Denver. And then refill to chicago.
And yes I have met people who are taking the train all the way.
Traveling by train is way more than just getting there.
And that airfare from SFO-DEN - that is fantasy - esp around christmas.
And as far as the whole "does not pay" / "subsidies" - that is a nonsense argument because no one applies that standard to the interstate highway system or to airports.