Living in Spain, I love trains and take them over airplane when it's an option. However, trains are often around twice as expensive as flying for may routes. I know nothing about trains, but intuitively I would expect the opposite, and I really wish it was more affordable, specially high speed rail.
This is mentioned near the end of the article but the reason those short domestic flights are so cheap in Europe is that commercial kerosene is currently tax exempt in every single EU member state. Jet fuel is cheaper per gallon in the EU than it is in the USA! (or was, before the current war)
In typically tax-happy Europe this always struck me as odd, agree it is sad when you find out an airplane ticket is cheaper than a corresponding train.
This is due to an international agreement post world war two (the 1944 Chicago Convention on Aviation) that agreed that fuel and maintenance parts necessary for _international air travel_ would be exempt from tarrifs and all taxes, barring a specific agreement between those to nations.
Domestic use is taxed, and at rather steep rates (look at the US!); however, because most flights in the EU are international, it would require both nations ok'ing a tax on flights between them. No one has gone through with this, and it's doubtful any one ever will, for a variety of reasons.
All that does is neuter domestic airline hubs and give more money to the Gulf (Emirates, Etihad, ...) or America-based airlines, which is neither good for the economy nor for the environment.
But that's exactly what hguant explains. Flights between EU countries are international flights and are therefore tax exempt under the Chicago Convention.
Okay, let's do the math. Consider a 2 hour flight, say Madrid -> Paris. A round trip is something like 140 eur. Boeing 737-800 burns something like 3000 liters of jet fuel/hour, and will typically carry something like 150 passengers. That's 40 liters per person. Jet fuel is really pricey now, something like 80 cents/liter. This means that fuel costs something like 30 eur per flight per passenger, so 60 eur in a round trip.
Now imagine we slap a tax on jet fuel similar to the one on vehicle gasoline. This would mean that the price of jet fuel would go up by 50%. The round trip ticket Madrid - Paris now costs 170 eur instead of 140 eur. Would it make Madrid - Paris train route competitive? No, not at all.
Truth is, you can make anything competitive with anything else if you put heavy enough finger on the scale, but the reason flights are much cheaper than trains, despite being faster, is not because of lack of jet fuel taxes.
According to this [1], taxes on gasoline are much higher than 40 cents/litre (50 cents in Spain, 68 cents in France).
If you buy a train ticket in advance, you definitely are in that price scale. I looked up train rides one month in advance [2] and a ride from Madrid to Spain is now 175€ to 210€, right in the range of the train ride.
But hopefully, Europe-wide CO2 taxes will start to price in externalities and remove the finger from the scale in favor of flights.
That ticket-in-advance thing is a part of the problem. For some unclear reason, some European countries let ticket prices skyrocket if you want to just go down to the train station and grab a train.
How is this a good thing?
And don't tell me it's important for planning loads: The schedules are mostly fixed anyway, and the usage doesn't fluctuate that wildly. In some countries, like the Netherlands, this is not a thing, and the national train (NS) behaves just like a city metro: You wave your pass walking on to the platform, and wave it again on the way out.
This is called market segmentation, and in competitive markets (like, say, flying or hotels) it’s a good thing: it allows the carrier to sell early tickets at very low prices, often well below the actual marginal cost of the last seat, because these losses will be made up by people who have urgent need for travel right now, and so are much less price sensitive. That’s how, for example, RyanAir is able to offer those 20 EUR cross Europe fares, which is well below even just the fuel cost, much less other costs.
I pay more than 100% in petrol taxes when I fill my car at $2.50/liter.
Also, CDG-MAD flight isn't really between Paris and Madrid but between CDG and MAD, which have some additional costs associated with transfers (assuming you are actually going beteween the city centers). So to be competitive a train ride might not need to have the flight price exactly, but can be a bot more expensive.
But a sensible policy would be that when trains are more expensive, taxes should be put on flying until they aren't (taxes directed to trains through subsidies, infrastructure investment and so on).
> Would it make Madrid - Paris train route competitive? No, not at all.
Just to provide some data points:
Madrid-Paris by train takes about 17-20 hours and costs between 261 and 350 Euros. By plane, it takes about two and a half hours and costs (in your example) around 170 Euros.
Also take into account that for many international travellers, the time saved aspect is more relevant than the money saved aspect, as lifetime is a very limited and non-regenerating resource, and planes will win pretty much always. The idea of Europeans going from Madrid to Paris by train happily is a green pipe dream outside train enthusiast circles (for our American friends: How often would you say you take Amtrak from Chicago to New York, roughly the same distance, before you get bored of it?)
Sleeper trains change the calculus a little, because you can sleep as you travel. While they're a foreign concept to many people, they are reasonably popular in Europe — not just among railfans — and in many parts of Asia are a very typical mode of transport. Going to sleep in one city centre and waking up in another is often far more convenient than the air travel alternative, especially for the many cities where there is no fast+convenient public transport to the airport.
Furthermore, to make a fair comparison you need to:
- Include all the costs of the air ticket in the price comparison, in particular transport to and from the airports. Public transport is sometimes not available, or may not be convenient (e.g. with luggage or small children), and due to the large distance to many airports taxis can be very expensive
- Include all of the time involved in the flight — depending on the cities involved, your two and half hour flight could easily be 5+ hours city-centre-to-city-centre once local transport, check-in deadline, time padding for uncertainties etc is considered.
- Compare to a rail ticket for a specific train at a specific time, which is usually cheaper. The more expensive rail tickets often give you the option of multiple trains on a given day, which is a level of flexibility no air ticket gives you.
If we want to really make it a fair comparison you should also probably compare the price to the business class flight ticket, considering that even the lowest class of train ticket gives you a comparable level of comfort to a typical intra-Europe business class airplane seat.
If you need to get there as quickly as possible, the airplane is going to win on most (but not all) routes. But for many people, having fewer steps in the journey and being able to comfortably work during the journey can actually make the longer train option more convenient.
If we want the comparison to be completely fair, you need to take into account that hardly anyone lives in a major train station (or directly adjacent to one) and wants to travel to another major train station (or directly adjacent to one). More often than not, just getting to Paris is only a leg, then you need to get to Aix-en-Belle-Fountaine (fictional place, don't look it up), some 50 km away from Paris. Once you have that realisation, the same disadvantages exists for trains that you propose to take into account for planes.
> - Compare to a rail ticket for a specific train at a specific time, which is usually cheaper. The more expensive rail tickets often give you the option of multiple trains on a given day, which is a level of flexibility no air ticket gives you.
Virtually any airline outside of the no-frills-Ryanair sector happily sells you flexible tickets (often for price).
> If we want to really make it a fair comparison you should also probably compare the price to the business class flight ticket, considering that even the lowest class of train ticket gives you a comparable level of comfort to a typical intra-Europe business class airplane seat.
You must not have had the DB ICE4 experience. I'd rather jump off an office building than to sit in one of their second-class cars ever again. They are extremely space-constrained, and now they build the window walls slightly round (and rounder so than e.g. mid-range aircraft cabins), so you sit in there with an arm folded to the inside, like Ötzi. On my ride back, I shredded the already-paid ticket and bought a new one for First Class, which was only slightly better. No European airline even comes close to that awfulness (and yes, I've had non-Business Ryanair experiences).
Planes may be more uncomfortable, but at least they don't make you sit down for half a day.
> But for many people, having fewer steps in the journey
Are you aware how often you have to switch trains if you are doing point-to-point travel? Even within Germany, I have 4 switchovers between where I live and Berlin (that is, if I am lucky). With the plane? Sit down, stand up, Berlin.
> being able to comfortably work
Unless you travel First Class AND get a seat with a table AND somehow are able to work without internet, I don't see how that argument (which comes up every once in a while) works out for you. YMMV, depending on which country you are in.
Most of your points are entirely fair, and my experience may have been unique (lived in the centre of a succession of European cities and used trains extensively throughout Europe for many years). Not every train is easy to work on, but with a minimum of planning I can usually design a long-distance journey such that the probability of being able to work during most of the trip is very high. My productivity doesn't depend on access to the Internet every minute of the day; for others the frequent loss of mobile connectivity e.g. on some routes in Germany would be a problem.
> Virtually any airline outside of the no-frills-Ryanair sector happily sells you flexible tickets (often for price).
This is not the same thing. I do not need to tell anyone that I have decided to take a later train using my open train ticket.
Yeah and the amount of space is not really anything specific to the train. You can vary the amount of space in planes, buses and cars as well, and the price will follow, just as in trains.
There is no reason why space is "cheaper" in a train really, it's only the scheduling of few trips that make more space available, if you have more trips on the tracks, similar to a road, space becomes constrained, like you see in subway trains.
And you can find round trip tickets Madrid-Paris on RyanAir for 50 eur, and for 100 eur on regular airlines. In my comment I took 140 eur as typical price of airfare. Typical cost of rail is something closer to 250 eur.
This also ignores the speed: if the prices were the other way around, with airfare twice as expensive as rail, I expect most people would still take the plane.
> Madrid-Paris on RyanAir for 50 eur, and for 100 eur on regular airlines
Airlines also typically charge for luggage, RyanAir charge extra for anything they can think of, including choosing a seat, and people booking at shorter notice subsidise those who book in advance. The cost difference for most passengers is probably smaller.
Can you? Seems that connection does not run regularly either when it comes to time (I checked Trainline and on another date there actually was a connection much like that) or for that pricepoint.
10.5 hours is still longer than 2.5 (or maybe - if you include security checkpoint time - 3.5 hours) by plane.
I think you're underestimating the travel to/from the airport. Madrid city centre to airport takes 45 minutes, you should be at the airport at least 2 hours prior to the departure, Paris airport to city centre takes another hour. Even if you're a seasoned traveller who pushes it and come to the airport just one hour prior to departure, you should still count with at least 3h overhead.
Point is: You don't often need to travel to the city center, and choosing that as fictional final destination is giving trains an unfair advantage. Often you need to somewhere NEAR Paris.
Also, and this may be related to the airports I fly out of, but I have hardly ever had planned more than an hour of time from entering an airport terminal to the gate. In TXL (sadly closed now for the much inferior BER), I averaged 25 minutes. At Stuttgart, I once managed to get there in 20. It all comes down to being prepared for security, knowing which security controls are often underused and picking up the right departure times. rel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnNyUGhXTsw
> Also, and this may be related to the airports I fly out of, but I have hardly ever had planned more than an hour of time from entering an airport terminal to the gate. In TXL (sadly closed now for the much inferior BER), I averaged 25 minutes. At Stuttgart, I once managed to get there in 20.
This is the saddest part of flying, that it really can take only 20 minutes, and instead of making it as efficient as possible, there's the opposite development, where the recommended time has gone from 1 hour to now at least two hours.
Very much depends on whether you need to check in luggage. My guess is that bag drop is closed 20 minutes prior to departure, but I might be wrong. Picking up luggage can easily add 15-30 minutes as well. Even on relatively small airports like Copenhagen, some gates are at least 10 min of brisk walking from the security, so 20 minutes is really pushing it without prior familiarity with the airport. But yes, it can be done.
Yes, but note usually around 30% of the ticket price of a european short-haul flight is already other taxes. This is compared to train tickets that include a 30%+ subsidy
The US airline industry is massively subsidized. Every country heavily subsidizes air travel.
The federal government spends $2BN/year on Amtrak and people lose their damn minds.
Meanwhile, at the FAA, nearly $12BN/year...and that doesn't account for all the local and state funds used to subsidize airports. Or Department of Transportation spending...
Airlines seem to be a bad business in the long run.
I recall a figure from MIT's microeconomics textbook (Pindyck et al.) where they showed the aggregate profits of all industry since its inception were negative.
In EU, subsidies to airlines are an indirect subsidy to the tourism industry.
Amtrack moves just shy of 17 million passengers in a year. Airlines in the US do that in 8 days. That's works out to roughly 45x as many passengers, with only what, 6x the subsidies?
American rail is apparently heavily biased towards moving freight. This may even be a good thing, but it'll throw out the numbers if you compare train to car or plane and don't include it.
I believe this is a remnant of some complications with regards to taxation in an international context, similar to duty-free shopping.
Another consideration may be the consequences of possibly diverging tax rates for kerosene: if it's much cheaper to fill up in, say, Spain, than it is in France, it might become cheaper to carry the fuel for the return leg, even if the increased weight increases fuel consumption.
I'm not saying that any of this justifies the state of affairs. But it's possible to arrive at it even with mostly good intentions.
A Boeing 737 consumes 2.28 L/100 km per seat. Fuel prices would have to go parabolic before airline tickets approached rail ticket prices (nevermind the time rail takes, even on the fastest routes)
I checked it out and the number seems about right(like up to 2x but not too much). So, to beat an airplane on fuel efficiency you need to be at least 2 persons on an extremely fuel efficient small car.
Surely, the actual costs calculations will need to include the infra and operational costs however if you check the energy consumption per passenger per distance[0], rail transport is always on the more efficient side of things.
Unless the infrastructure and operational costs of trains are higher than airplanes, I don't see how airplanes can be more competitive. Is the rail infrastructure that much expensive?
Maybe the argument can be made about convenience but on efficiency, trains look more efficient.
Trains are more efficient, but flights only do the most traveled routes generally, which is why they're usually booked out afaik. The same can't be said about trains usually, as they're also doing the outlying routes
It makes flying seem more competitive then it actually is, as trains usually aren't booked relative how much your transportation cost and instead the overall cost to also enable these almost empty routine runs
Because trains are considered an essential public service.
The people with only outlying routes nearby would be stuck without public transport, which is unacceptable. Commercial train companies only get contracts for the busy intercity routes if they also provide service on the outlying routes.
Is it? It's not that obvious to me at least. I suspect that it's more like function of distance, speed, landscape.
Airports also tend to be at the middle of nowhere, IMHO you need to incorporate the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to get somewhere from that nowhere.
Well, there are lots of other factors, but the general reasoning holds.
If you have ten airports, you have 10 * (10 + 1) / 2 = 55 airlines. If you have 10 train stations, you have only as many rail lines as you're willing to build, which means countries end up spending most of the effort and money on lines connecting major city centers.
Also, if you have an international airport, you're connected to every capital city of the world.
The logistic advantages of air travel are huge. Kerosene will need to get a lot more expensive before these advantages lose out.
Sure, there are advantages but advantages are not one sided. It's not like choosing between Netflix plans where you pay 9.99$ for 2 screen and HD streaming and you can upgrade to 14.99$ package with 4 screens and UHD streaming. It's more like choosing between Netflix and Amazon Prime. You might get fewer options to watch but you also get one day delivery and some really nice content too. Often, you end up having both.
Also, trains can switch lines, disconnect, run on the same line back to back etc.
I suspect, with some standardisation and automation, you can end up having very good point-to-point travel options by train. Even better than airlines maybe. The current inefficiencies could be due to poor management and weak integrations. Can you imagine how great could be to have Europe and Asia wide rail network where automated carriages and rail switching systems coordinate to achieve travel from any train station to any train station?
a plane also can make 4 round trips in the time the train takes to make 1, but on the other side, a train can move 500-600 people while the plane moves 160.
I bet there is a good bit of mandatory service. You cant just periodically cut off a few thousand from their job here and there just because it satisfies investors.
The usual tracks either connect big cities or they run between urban centers and less populated areas. IOW run between every seat taken and almost empty.
I'm fairly sure a mode of transportation that can carry thousands and doesn't fall out of the sky when something fails has other benefits, even if the fuel/passenger ration should be worse (which I doubt).
You're saying this like it's a bad thing, why? Why should we tax common goods and services to the point they become luxuries only some people can afford?
3.5% is a very small price for what is one of the greatest human achievements: freedom to travel anywhere, on a layman's salary. Up until the modern age, world travel was reserved for the elites. Travel means freedom, and I strongly believe our freedom should come first when talking about GHG emissions.
Let's cut out the 96.5% first, then reduce travel.
The same with cars. Automobiles amount for a small portion of total gas emissions. All in all, passenger cars+ passenger aviation is about 10% of total emissions. Yet we heard complaints about these more than anything else. And not only complaints, but policies that want to fix this problem.
Why not focus on the 90%? Industry lobbyists love this state of affairs, we auto-flagellate for 10% and nobody says a peep about the elephant in the room.
I am pretty sure land use for all those tracks, elevated rail beds, tunnels and bridges, stations is FAR higher than what the planes use.
Single plastic usage is such a red herring...every time you load up your car with gas, you put in 15 gallons, that is ~50 kilograms. A plastic straw is 0.4 grams, 125,000 plastic straws to amount to the same hydrocarbon footprint. This is a very rough math, but you get the idea. You can compensate for all your life consumption of straws and forks by not filling up once. Plates are heavier, but still marginal compared to everything else.
Another one: plastic grocery bags are 5 grams, that means one tank of gas is like 12000 grocery bags.
You could say: but at least use less single use plastic! Have you considered the alternatives? Would stainless plates weigh much more on a plane, and induce a higher CO2? Would food non-wrapped in plastic spoil more? (We throw away about 50% of all fruits and vegetables anyway).
GHG is a tough problem. Focusing on some token issues like plastic straws and plane travel for ordinary people does not solve it, it only makes it harder for people to accept it.
It might be a token problem but I think it's important to put this on the map for people to even realize it's a problem.
Also, trains (in large parts of Europe anyway) run on electricity only of which a significant chunk is from nuclear power, which doesn't emit anywhere near as much CO2 to move as many people as a plane would.
And the noise. trains are so quiet compared to planes.
The problem is that people have a limited amount of things they can care for. You bombard them with plastic straws bans, grocery bag bans, 100% gas taxes, diesel poisons, shaming flying and you amount to maybe 1% reduction in GHG.
Then when it come to bigger hitters, like industry, building insulation, agriculture etc. you will get exhausted and poorer people that just can't take it anymore. And then you end up with people thinking this is all so futile and so scared of the future that they don't want to even have kids anymore.
Around 2.4% of all global green house gas emissions, but responsible for 5% of global warming [1]. I wouldn't call it minuscule.
I think one of the reasons that aviation is so often in the spotlight in discussions about climate change is the existence of greener alternatives. Of course, those can't replace all flights, but they don't have to.
Add to that the fact that air travel has exploded in recent years before Corona, and you certainly have to ask yourself whether taking five weekend trips a year from Zurich to Hamburg really improves our standard of living so much that we should put up with the downsides of it.
Personally, of course, I also like to travel and I think flying is a great invention that brings countries and people closer. Nevertheless, you have to be a bit critical about whether every flight is really necessary.
as I remember, the discussion went that if EU implemented a tariff on on jet fuel companies would simply load their planes elsewhere, e.g. Russia/Dubai where there's abundant fuel with little to no tax
not so relevant for the shorter trips intra-EU, but still a factor
If they did do that then the EU could introduce a tariff on the fuel they import when they fly back in.
There would be rules around a fuel flight vs a legit passenger/cargo service, assuming they don't want to tax the extra fuel left in a plane at the end of a flight.
But that seem like a pretty straightforward problem to solve.
Making it even easier to implement: Commercial airline weights are carefully tracked for safety and efficiency purposes already, as are fuel levels. All the information needed to levy such a tax is already available.
It'll be more expensive to constantly fly back and forth to Dubai to load up than to simply pay the tax. Dubai is not that close to Paris. It takes about 7-8 hours. I don't know if you've been checking the news lately but Russia is out of the question for airplanes. They won't even return leased airplanes back anymore.
Switzerland and Norway at least would very likely accept such rules and implement them as well.
I'm Swiss and at least in Switzerland such a rule would automatically apply unless the population would do a referendum. And that would lead to a public vote that would almost certainty lose.
I bet this keeps a lot of national airlines afloat and they're already barely afloat, if they start taxing kerosene they'll require even more subsidies from their governments.
That wasn't really the point. He was surprised that this tax-free situation is not addressed and I just gave a (of many) reason why they might not want to change that.
I think your new point is optimistic at best. You would have to switch trains quite often and the time it takes would probably weigh heavier than the price. Especially between EU countries, within country flying is not really that big in EU.
With rail, the physical rail becomes an economic chokepoint. Who controls the rail came name his price. Now you might think that the same goes for airports, but often there are multiple viable choices. E.g. in the bay area you could use SF, Oakland or San Jose.
I think this is probably the most accurate answer in this particular thread. There's essentially unlimited capacity in airspace, and while some airports are massively oversubscribed (LHR!) most are not. You can just keep putting planes up in the air in 3 dimensions where increasing the number of trains needs laying more excessively expensive physical infrastructure in 2 dimensions
I think it is actually the other way around and also not what GP said. Trains need more scale than planes.
Example: From Amsterdam Airport to Palermo, there are 2 flights per week (Friday and Monday). That is 300 passengers per week. It is a profitable to fly planes between these two cities, but a direct rail route including maintenance of the railway system would be far to expensive. This is partly resolved by stops along the way, but definitely not completely. The busiest direct railway routes (AMS-PARIS, AMS-LONDON, PARIS LONDON) in Europe are far from full, with one train an hour.
So the problem is not insufficient capacity, but rather that the scale is to small. I see electric buses playing a big role in the future to allow for better point-to-point connections.
just 2 directions, beyond that you can (like with airlines) go bigger and more frequent. After that the proverbial landing strips become the bottle neck.
Except "who controls the rail" is often a (private or national) entity (DB Netz / SNCF réseaux) who will have to offer access to the infrastructure to pretty heavily regulated and uniform conditions.
Much like the idea of separating ISPs from the last mile infrastructure by the way.
Even with the network controlled by a "neutral" entity limited capacity means you can pretty quickly reach a situation where additional competition can't happen without actively worsening the schedules of the existing operators.
Timetabled connections are likewise impossible to set up with too much uncoordinated competition, because without making the connection times unattractively long they cannot really be set up between more than one train per relation (maybe sometimes two at a stretch).
Plus connections that aren't ridiculously padded (and therefore result in absolutely uncompetitive journey times) really only work with some sort of through-ticketing so passengers aren't left stranded if they do miss a connection after all.
Ouigo is a play by SNCF to avoid being undercut by a more aggressive low cost operator on the few profitable French lines. If you carefully look at their cost structure you will see that without the significant boost given to them
by their parent company they would probably not be profitable.
Rail infrastructure is very expensive compared to planes.
An airport is expensive, but once you've built it you're pretty much immediately connected to half the world. With a train station, you need a track to each surrounding stations, maintain them, and so on. Also, train doesn't scale down as well, it quickly becomes inefficient for the less dense routes.
People are talking about subsidies (by not taxing fuel for instance) for planes, but trains are also directly subsidised to the tune of billions each year. The rail network just costs a ton to build and maintain.
Construction of road infrastructure can be compared to construction of tracks and stations, and it's fair to say taxpayers foot the bill in full for both.
The difference is that trains operate at a loss even with high ticket prices and operational subsidies are necessary for market viability. That is not the case with car and truck usage.
At least in the US, local road networks in the suburbs and rural areas bleed money terribly, and as fuel taxes have not kept pace with inflation even the inner city streets and crowded highways can barely break even.
Local roads bleed money universally everywhere, because pretty much no place charges tolls for local road use. Gas taxes do not cover road costs, because gas taxes are not by the same entities that actually build the roads, so there is no reason to expect it to be the case. However, and fortunately, road construction and maintenance is universally a small part of municipality budgets in US, typically under 10%, and very rarely anywhere close to 20%, so there is not much reason to worry about affordability of local roads.
I felt like private cars (the ones that are not taxi/commercial) just stay in one place the majority of its lifetime.
Pre-covid, I had a 45 minute commute. The other 22.5 hours my car just stayed in one place. Engine off. Road trips unfortunately don't happen often for me.
Trains, trucks, planes, and even taxis are probably running/flying more than it's staying still.
>Users of the highway passenger transportation system paid significantly greater amounts of money to the federal government than their allocated costs in 1994-2000. This was a result of the increase in the deficit reduction motor fuel tax rates between October 1993 and September 1997, and the increase in Highway Trust Fund fuel tax rates starting in October 1997.
>School and transit buses received positive net federal subsidies over the 1990-2002 period, but autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans, and intercity buses paid more than their allocated cost to the federal government.
>On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002.)
Rail can be used to make routes densify though. Air travel can never do this. The cost of rail has to be thought of in the context of an investment in a city or country (this doesn't mean 'go crazy building HSR' like some countries but then again many countries have no problems with approving road megaprojects that are terrible ideas so why not rail?). This is actually true of road infrastructure too, but there are a lot of negative externalities to roads that don't apply to rail.
But even beyond that - fuel and other power sources have been taxed well before climate change was a political issue, and jet fuel is exempt from all of that. It smacks of regulatory capture.
Sure, but so are airports and so are roads. And all forms of infrastructure are sometimes prestige projects, and all are sometimes subject to political choices that while legitimate, in retrospect turn out to have been questionable.
It's possible that despite all that rail has higher costs - but it's also quite possible that the dominating factor is the unreasonably subsidized airline fuel. The tax-exempt status is absurd, especially given other fuel and power duties - not to mention that a reasonable accounting should be taxing fuel high enough to cover the costs of the climate-change externalities, which would result in an even higher price (as it happens, due to cloud formation, air travel causes even more warming than ground based fossil fuel consumption, though I'm unaware of whether that's a significant difference).
If indeed an honest accounting were to reveal that flight is still cheaper: great! But I seriously doubt it; and in any case it's certainly time to stop subsidizing air travel like this. Let the sector succeed or fail on its own merits, not by virtue of tax shenanigans.
Trains are also noisy, at least as much as planes. As for pollution, consider how much land is taken from nature for tracks...there is almost none for airplanes, in comparison.
When you stand next to a train track yes à train is noisy. But a plane will cover literally a whole town with its noise. Very different.
I was just in Frankfurt yesterday and the noise is substantial, in the residential neighbourhood I visited it was the main source of noise during the day.
My point was that train lines are millions of miles/km and run through the center of settlements, by design. Almost everywhere in the world, unless you live in a suburb or village, you have a high chance that you will hear trains multiple times a day.
I think there are less people under flight plaths than near trains.
I guess it depends on luck how noisy they can be. I used to get woken every night at 2am by one fucker.
From what I can tell it is take offs - aircraft coming in to land, even though they are much closer, tend to be inaudible.
It might be because we are relatively high up (about 100m) and most of the distance between us and the airport is over the sea.
Edit: Just checked on a map and when most aircraft take off from Edinburgh's runway into the prevailing wind they are pointing pretty much directly away from us which might make it more noticeable.
As far as I know, airports try to setup the operations to have planes descend over cities, and climb away from them, to minimize noise. Sometimes this is not possible because of winds, so there will be a reversal.
Sometimes it's not possible to avoid climbing over cities because the city ended up engulfing the airport (e.g. Heathrow) - so they will alternate directions to give various towns a break.
Yeah the only use case where trains make sense to me, is really heavy cargo, where the lower friction of the wheels make it more efficient. That's a use case where both flying and trucks will be at a disadvantage. Transporting people in trains doesn't really make sense to me. You can fly if you need to go fast, take a bus if you have time, or drive a car if you want flexibility.
According to the Brussels Institute of Statistics and Analysis [1], in 2017, 34% of all commuters in Brussels commuted by train versus 36.2% by car. It might not make sense to you, but it does to other people.
The train itself has to be heavier than the load just to stay on the tracks. It would only make sense if you already have an established cargo route, and you can in addition also reuse a large part of that track for people transport.
> The train itself has to be heavier than the load just to stay on the tracks.
Why would that be? A typical 110 ton capacity freight train car weighs 33 tons unloaded. It has no problems staying on the tracks.
Besides both buses and planes typically weigh much more than their freight (and planes need to lift all that weight 10km vertically), so I fail to see how that is an argument against trains.
> Why would that be? A typical 110 ton capacity freight train car weighs 33 tons unloaded. It has no problems staying on the tracks.
I'm guessing at the numbers here but just to illustrate my point:
If an empty bus weights let's say 10 tonnes, and an empty train 33 tons. And the load of the passengers around 7 tonnes. So in total you'd transport 40 tonnes of train as opposed to 17 tonnes of bus.
Then obviously for that load rubber tires would be more efficient, and rail would be a bad fit.
There's a minimum load per cubic inch for trains to make sense, you have to have really dense cargo.
Like I said in another comment, subways in Paris run on rubber tires, it becomes especially inefficient with rail when there are frequent stops.
It would make so much more sense, especially in the US, to develop premium Tesla buses that could use the existing freeway infrastructure, than to expand rail.
The rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails is much, much lower than rubber tyres on an asphalt road.
From [1], the only comparable figures are the American train and the American bus. The bus is about half as efficient as the train.
There are similar figures further down the page ("German environmental costs") -- 0.25MJ/passenger-km for long distance rail, 0.85MJ/pkm for regional rail, 1.14MJ/pkm for bus service.
> The rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails is much, much lower than rubber tyres on an asphalt road.
Exactly, and you need rolling resistance for traction. The heavier the load, the lower resistance you need, and vice versa, because the weight of the load increases resistance. Which is why you don't ship hay on trains, and don't ship iron on trucks.
Where there is enough population density and 'right of way' for trains, trains almost always make sense.
Flying is better for NYC -> Colorado - LA but trains are better for NY -> DC corridor, and frankly, probably all the way down to Florida.
There is the issue of 'downtown' and 'walkable cities'. If you arrive in Baltimore near an airport, you have to rent a car. In European cities, you hop on the Subway to the Hotel, that makes a big difference as well.
But Boston->DC is ripe for train transformation.
And 'established circuits' SF->LA->Vegas should be high speed - that California can't sort that out is really sad, it's a matter of organizational/systematic incompetence.
There needs to be kind of a 'civic buy in' for it to work
> Where there is enough population density and 'right of way' for trains, trains almost always make sense.
You will come really close to that if you build a road that has the same level of right of way, and drive buses. The benefit of (expensive) bridges and tunnels are not unique for trains. Some of the subway trains in Paris run on rubber tires.
Same in the US. I would love to take the train from Seattle to SF, but, it costs so much more than a flight would, and takes a very long time compared. Sleeper cars make the price nearly double, and for such a long trip, train seats without a sleeper are somehow worse than plane seats.
I have taken many Amtrak short trips, like 1h, and 50% of the time the train leaves more than 1h late (and 100% it leaves late, some amount). So I leave my departure location after I was meant to arrive at my arrival location.
In 2005 I took a night train from Budapest to Belgrade, but not really - the ticket I paid for, the platform sign, the ticket agent, all told me that. But once on the train passing the border, the passport checker told me that the route hadn't gone to Belgrade in some time, and that I would be dumped at 2am in Novi Sad, where I was meant to buy a bus ticket. Tickets closed and Euros not accepted. Was a difficult time to resolve, but I bought overpriced Dinars from some travellers with my Euros and got a last minute ticket. Arrived in Belgrade to find 0 hotel rooms due to a football match.
I love trains. But the process needs improvement, just like airplanes. Long-distance travel without a car is honestly quite difficult in Europe and USA imo.
Planes will sell you tickets that don't exist and then pretend like a night in a hotel makes up for it. They abuse you at security. They treat you like trash and everybody deals with it.
Please make trains better, Amtrak, and EU. Please.
If I had to apply an "aggravation factor", air travel is worse. The train just doesn't seem to bug me as much. One difference is that when the train arrives I'm in the city center. When the plane arrives I'm at the airport.
When you travel by train you are treated like an adult, air travel treats you like a child and herd you around like cattle.
Getting a 100 dollar fine because you didn't click a button on a website, being commanded by uniformed people to "show your papers" over and over, standing in line waiting to stand in another line. Being forced to stand in crowded "designated areas". It's super creepy, gives me the heebie jeebies, like I'm being shipped off somewhere..
"Belgrade to find 0 hotel rooms due to a football match."
Once, I had the same problem due to a football match in Rome. In hindsight, how I got a bed for the night was hilarious but it wasn't at the time as I was dead tired (I'll spare you the details—I learned quickly that very strange things can happen in Rome).
A day or so later I was on a train from Rome to Vienna, the trouble was that by then many of those football fans were returning home so we all ended up together on the same train. To make matters worse, many of them were drunk. Suffice to say, Austrian Customs and border police were not amused, the train was delayed many hours.
See, you're not alone, we all have days like that when traveling in strange places especially so when crossing country borders.
"I love trains. But the process needs improvement, just like airplanes. Long-distance travel without a car is honestly quite difficult in Europe and USA imo."
I agree with you about the US and Eastern Europe, however you really shouldn't have any trouble in Western Europe—France, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Germany—even Italy (if you're forewarned what to expect). Of course, here I'm referring to major towns or ones that receive a reasonable number of foreign tourists. As always, small villages and places that are way off the beaten track will be difficult no matter where you are (so are one and two star hotels problematic in such places as they are much less likely to speak English).
In particular, I found such travel by train in the US much more difficult than in Western Europe. It seems to me that since WWII all the once excellent (and traditional) railway infrastructure (such as railroad-owned hotels at or near railroad stations, etc.) has either been dismantled and or sold off, so one ends up at one's destination—even in large towns or cities—without any or minimal local support. Right, all this once infrastructure has been transferred, or relocated or rebuilt around airports.
I reckon the US will have a huge job in reversing the process (or duplicating the infrastructure as it once was around rail terminals), that is if it wishes to make rail truly relevant again.
Generally, Europe is miles ahead of the US in this area of public transport infrastructure.
> even Italy (if you're forewarned what to expect).
Out of curiosity, any example of the terrible things that may happen in Italy and that travelers should be forewarned about?
Apologies for laboring the (mostly) bleeding obvious in some of these points especially item 5, but it's only because I've seen people not bother to observe them and suffer the consequences (including this once-neophyte traveler—yours truly). :-)
Note: this post is too long for a single comment, so I'll post it in parts.
I suppose the definition of 'terrible' is important here. Anyway, here's some bits of advice gained from a few incidents that I've experienced in Italy, you be the judge of whether they're terrible or not. Whilst I've singled out Italian instances here of course most of what I've to say is pretty much common knowledge and general travel advice. It's just from my experience my comments are somewhat more applicable to Italy than to other Western European countries—although it's wise to consider other notable/problematic places, Amsterdam's main train terminus for instance. Better still, always consider any major train terminus where tourists gather as potentially hostile.
First, I must say I love Italy, its people and their culture, its cities and beautiful countryside not to mention its historical heritage—the Roman Empire, et al.
Anyway, here goes:
1. Always plan your trip to an Italian city when there's no major football match taking place (that's unless you are planning to attend the match). This is especially important if the match is between an Italian team and a foreign one (Europe's obsession with football is legendary, fans are passionate about their teams and are easily excited—'tis likely some wars have started over less drama). Visiting fans can be found all over parts of the city that you're likely to want to visit, and they can get very rowdy.
2. If You have to visit an Italian city when there's a football match on then make sure that you arrange your accommodation well beforehand as you can almost guarantee that every hotel will be fully booked out and you'll have nowhere to stay (again, this is very important if the opposing team is from another country as there will be many fans from that country visiting to see the match). I've learned this from hard experience. Moreover, sleeping overnight at railway stations is not only unpleasant but it's also dangerous.
3. If perchance you do arrive by train (or any other form of transport) and have not booked accommodation in advance when there's a football match about to take place then make sure you arrive early in the day. This is an absolute must, here's why:
My first trip to Rome was done on the spur of the moment and I had no idea that any football match was about to take place let alone that it would be relevant to my visit—nor (given the circumstances of the match) did I have the vaguest notion that one must arrive early in the day to be of paramount importance (if there's any chance at all of getting accommodation then one must be early).
As it happened my time of arrival in Rome couldn't have been worse, not only did I arrive just before a key football match was scheduled to kick-off but also I arrived very late in the day, around about 21h00. After phoning many hotels (all those with outlet facilities on the station as well as others listed on signboards), it was pretty clear that there was no remaining accommodation whatsoever left in Rome—or so I thought!
After the phoning exercise, which achieving nothing of note, I was standing around on the station's concourse and perplexed as to what to do next when I began to be approached by numbers of guys all of whom were offering accommodation. As I later found out they were lone operators and they spoke just sufficient English to get across the point that they were offering me accommodation. Their demonstrable (or apparent) lack of English was such that I was unable to determine exactly what type of accommodation they were offering (suffice to say their 'limited' English was to their benefit, not mine). It's clear these opportunists were well aware of the shortage of accommodation throughout Rome during football times not to mention the arrival of unsuspecting visitors such as me and they took full advantage of the situation.
Eventually after weighing up the situation and being somewhat desperate, I selected the most seemingly respectable offer. In fact, at no time was I ever told the actual nature of the accommodation although it wasn't for the want of trying (again, the language barrier was such that it was easier to give up—and I was damn tired into the bargain, by then I believed I'd accept any any accommodation—or so I thought). It was what happened after this that made me mention my earlier caveat 'if you're forewarned what to expect'. (I can elaborate further details if you wish.)
4. If traveling by train anywhere in Europe, especially so in Italy, then avoid any train that's traveling to a football match which is likely to be carrying football fans. Moreover, it's especially important not to do so on trains that are returning home from the match as the fans are noisy, boisterous and often very drunk. As mentioned elsewhere, not long after the match was over I took an overnight train from Rome to Vienna and it was full of fans who were returning home after the match (the match was between Italian and Austrian teams). It was a horrible experience to say the least. Returning fans misbehaved so badly that Austrian Customs and border police were not amused, they delayed the train for hours not to mention that they searched every inch of the train from one end to the other with Alsatian dogs at the ready (I've experienced such searches on many other occasions but this one was the worst).
5. If you're visiting Rome or any other Italian city no doubt you'll want to visit its historical sites (as you know, they're everywhere and hard to avoid). First, here's a warning to be careful to avoid pickpockets. On multiple occasions I've had swarms of very persistent kids swarm around me on the pretext of selling some grotty postcards or such and during the process they do everything possible to distract one and it's hard to keep track of what each one is doing. They're often in groups of six or more in number (and they're very common in and around Rome's main ruins). Moreover, some kids are very young and look harmless and genteel, but don't be fooled, they're not—they're all part of a well orchestrated team and you'll be done over if you're the slightest bit gullible and or not very careful. BTW, in this regard Rome was the worst of all the Italian cites I've visited.
Never leave your wallet, your smartphone and or your passport in the back or side pockets of your pants (or side pockets of your jacket). If you are wearing jeans then place valuables deep down in your front pockets, better still put them in a money belt that's under your shirt. Also, be very careful about looking after anything else that you're carrying, a camera for instance (it's also best not to go alone as members of one's group can keep an eye on each other).
Clearly, there's little point putting one's phone in an 'inaccessible' money belt, my solution for storing it safely but still within ready reach is to store it in the front pocket one's shirt. Warning however: as everyone knows, in recent years shirt pockets have atrophied in size to now being little more than a totally useless decoration. There are nevertheless several solutions: shirts from military disposals often have suitably large pockets, trouble is they either have no button or only a single button that almost everyone never bothers to button up. In either case when you lean over everything falls out including one's smartphone—crash, there's goes another screen, and that's the last thing you need on your trip. The best solution I've arrived at is to purchase several shirts of a suitable style well before one travels. Safari, trail/outdoor or nautical-type shirts that have both decent sized top front pockets complete with easy-close zippers—which you learn to zip closed by automatic reflex every time you put your phone back in your pocket—are, in my opinion, the best option. This extra effort might seem a nuisance but I can assure you it's well worth it.
6. The horrors (perhaps terrors) of diving in Italy. You'll get quite a shock when you first drive in Italy—that's unless you come from France, Germany or other country where maniacal drivers are commonplace—even then Italy has a special place on the maniacal drivers register.
First, there are only two speeds in Italy—stop and flat out. Second, don't expect Italian drivers to obey the road rules in quite the same way that you'd expect that drivers do in anglophone countries, US, UK, Australia, etc. Yes, they actually obey road rules (sometimes) but what they'd deem as obeying the rules is very different, and it can take some experience and time to get used to the differences (eventually, you'll get the gist and be OK—that's if you're not killed first).
There are three memorable instances in my life where I actually thought I'd die before reaching my destination: the first was on the autobahn from Stuttgart to Freiberg when one of my work colleagues—a German who'd migrated but who was back in Germany with me—was driving a small car that'd often get 'airborne' whenever he'd overtake trucks and that was as often as he possibly could (nothing in front of him was too much of a challenge). As the car was small and under-powered, overtaking was slow and dangerous (yet behind the wheel he still drove like a 'Fangio Mark-II', fortunately for me, like the real Juan Fangio, he had nine lives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Manuel_Fangio). Incidentally, my colleague once used to race Minis.
The second was a local incident I'll not mention further, and the third was my first experience on the Autostrada A1—the motorway from Milan to Naples (that first time I was on my way from Milan to Rome): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostrada_A1_(Italy). The small rental car I was in could hardly make 100 mph (≈160km/h) on a gentle downhill and just about every car and trucks would pass and overtake me at such speed that the vortex they created buffeted the car with such intensity that they made steering extremely sloppy. Moreover, if one were to travel slower than about 160 km/h then one would likely be rear-ended especially so in foggy conditions (and at the time there was fog on some sections of the motorway). 'Fog—what's that, only sissies would slow down for fog?†' I'm not a timid driver, nor do I scare easily when others are driving but as a novice whose first introduction to driving Italian style was on the Autostrada A1 was certainly a memorable experience to say the least. As they say, it was like being unexpectedly dropped in at the deep end without warning.
Here's another instance of the Italian motorists' driving style (I've already mentioned this previously some while ago). I observed this incident in the residential area of Florence. Here's the scene: the River Arno flows through Florence essentially cutting it in half, busy roads with large amounts of traffic follow along the Arno's banks for most of its length through the city. Whilst over a dozen bridges interconnect these roads on either side of the River there are many roads that run perpendicular to it but which do not intersect at points where the bridges are—that is, these perpendicular roads terminate in a 'T' intersection with the roads that follow the River.
Now picture this, I've left my hotel and I'm walking along the sidewalk of one of the roads that's following the Arno's banks and I come across one of these busy 'T' intersections and its traffic lights are indicating red in the direction I'm walking. An impatient driver—impatience is a common characteristic of Italian drivers—in one of the 'stopped' vehicles intends to turn left into the intersecting right-angled street but the lights are against him (a pedestrian 'walk' sign is green on that road so he has a red left-arrow light indicating that he must stop). He hardly stops—then just before the traffic lights and intersection he immediately veers left to bypass both the roadway and the lights. That is, he turns hard left and mounts the sidewalk not that far in front of me then he disappears down the intersecting side street whilst now still traveling on its sidewalk (technically, he's avoided going through a red light and thus he's not broken that law but no doubt he's broken others). This is what I mean when I say Italian drivers (anyway, a significant number of them) interpret the road rules in ways that we'd not normally expect.
However, that's not the end of the story: the moment after he disappeared driving down the intersecting street's sidewalk I heard a large crash. Upon arriving at the intersection and looking left I saw that he'd driven straight into a huge excavation hole in the sidewalk that was part of street maintenance work. What's more amazing is that when I'd gotten a little closer I could see that he wasn't alone as there were several other cars already in the ditch. That's not the only instance where I've seen Italian drivers bypass red lights in such a manner, however on those occasions there were no ditches around to catch them.
7. (This I've also mentioned previously.) I recall that when I visited the Colosseum in Rome, which incidentally is a fabulous place to visit (I could wax lyrically about it for hours), I came across something rather unexpected, that was the large number of discarded hypodermic syringes in and around the sidewalk that surrounds this monumental edifice. It seems the building wasn't only a huge tourist attraction but also it was a shoot-up gallery for local druggies (keep in mind, I've not been there for quite some time, so things may have been cleaned up since then). The lesson is that it's probably not a good idea to travel hippy-like in bare feet around any of these attractions (on my next visit I reckon I'll wear shoes with rather substantial soles).
There's more but that'll have to do for now.
__
† Not slowing down for fog is also a trait of Austrian and German drivers but from my experience they're marginally less gung-ho about it than Italians (they're more consistent drivers at high speed). I recall once being driven by an Austrian driver from Salzburg to Vienna on the motorway in not only fog but also sleet and rain at speeds in excess of 160 km/h (≈100 mph), it was another white-knuckle experience which would rate next down the list of those already mentioned. Incidentally, the trip was during the winter. When I suggested he slow down he retorted to the effect that 'I must be joking and that he'd be rear-ended in a second if he did that'. Seems these motorists' main aim is to keep constant speed, breaking not only results in rear-enders but one would almost certainly spin out of control on the icy road surface. Such driving isn't for the fainthearted.
No it isn't. As I said Italy's a lovely place. It's just that more can go wrong there than in other Western European countries unless one's adequately forewarned.
"1) to find no place to sleep if not booked in advance the day of a major sport event"
In any city there can be problems with accommodation during any major event (sporting or otherwise) but from my experience things are more intense and or more complicated in Italy. I've been in other cities during major sporting events, Paris and Munich for example, and had no trouble getting accommodation at the last moment - but I've experienced the problem twice in Italy (albeit the conditions of each instance being somewhat different to each other).
"2) no really, do not try going in a city when there is a major football match without having booked some accomodation"
That's probably good advice anywhere. However, having lived in Europe, I've stayed in other non-Italian cities during football matches not having realized that a match was taking place until late into the event. Accommodation was easily available.
"3) if you really insist on going to a city when there is a football match arrive early"
That makes sense whether there's a match on or not. I don't know how much traveling you've done, but my experience is that it's often not possible to arrive early, same goes for being unable to book in advance (especially so if one's does a lot of city hopping, which has been my situation for work). Often things just don't go to plan for many reasons.
That said, I've never been caught out without any accommodation regardless of circumstance. Even that instance mentioned above in Rome I finally sorted out and managed to get accommodation (you'll note, I didn't say what eventually transpired (what actually did is much more likely to happen in Italy than elsewhere in Western Europe)).
The only other time I've come really close to having difficulty with last-minute accommodation was in Vienna (one time I arrived there unexpectedly several hours later than I did in Rome (around midnight) without any prebooked accommodation, that too was also solved after some effort.
"4) do not travel (in the event of a football match) by train"
Makes sense anywhere but generally Italy is somewhat less organized than say Germany is.
"5) beware of picpockets"
The only country/place where I've experienced overt trouble of this kind in Western Europe is in Italy and in Amsterdam railway terminus (no other place in the Netherlands has ever been a problem). Clearly, there are other places that I could mention where I reckon one could easily get into trouble if one wasn't careful but I never have (as always, I follow the rules I've mentioned). Even in Rome I was OK (and I was well aware of what was happening at the time they tried to scam me).
The only time I've had trouble was in Vienna (normally an extremely safe city, I know, I lived there for quite some time) and what happened was my fault (this wasn't the time when I was living there). What happened was that I arrived after traveling half way around the world and was really dead tired. I got into my hotel room, shut the door put my stuff down everywhere and had a quick rest. Trouble was I fell asleep and I'd not locked the hotel door (it didn't have a door that locked automatically).
While I was asleep someone entered my room and stole my wallet but nothing else was taken (they could have just as easily stolen my laptop and camera but they didn't). The loss was highly inconvenient as my credit cards were now gone and I'd not yet even had time to have an imprint from one registered at the front desk (as I said, Vienna is a trusting place, the comment from the desk was 'do all that stuff after you get settled'). Not having a credit card nor any cash, paying the hotel bill was then a potential problem.
What happened next was that I immediately cancelled all credit cards. Two days later the desk contacted me and handed me my wallet back. When I asked how they came by it, they said that several minutes earlier another guest found it just by the entrance of the hotel's front door and handed it in. All my now-defunct cards were still there so was everything else, driver's license etc, all except the cash—that being some $60 or so USD and about the equivalent $20 USD in Austrian Schillings (it was in the days before the Euro). There's about 13 to 14 Schillings to a Euro, so luckily my loss was pretty trivial.
"7) you shouldn't go bare footed"
Surprising many do! Especially so anglophone tourists on holiday. (Same goes for dress sense, once I was in Harrods in London with a group of friends, one decided to wear his skimpy beach shorts (which he also wore everywhere else across the UK) and he was promptly chucked out of the store at very great speed (he wouldn't take our advice to the contrary and that included his Mrs who'd told him earlier that he wouldn't get past the front door looking like that).
"#1 to #5 and #7 are (IMHO) little more than common sense and apply to most if not all countries."
True, but from my expedience Italy is significantly different to other countries in Western Europe, Eastern Europe is a different matter altogether, some countries there make Italy look like a model citizen.
"<...> though it probably applies to a number of other not-perfect countries, like Austria and Germany."
You're skating on thin ice here, what gives to the idea that Austria and Germany are 'not-perfect'? No country is perfect but those two are an absolute model when compared to some others I could name (which I won't do out of deference).
Well, my ice is seemingly thicker than you think, you listed 7 purely anecdotal points of which only one can be maybe considered country specific, and you managed to state how almost the same (re: speeding too much in your opinion) happens in Austria and Germany.
Rest assured that - notwithstanding the single episode you witnessed in Florence - it is not like every day tens or hundreds of cars do evasive maneuvers to avoid red lights and/or senselessly enter construction sites in Florence (or in Italy in general).
Traveling impromptu, particularly if you do not speak functionally the local language is asking for trouble almost anywhere, and as well pickpockets are common in many large cities all over Europe (those with the largest number of tourists).
If we go by anecdata:
1) some relatives of mine have been pickpocketed BOTH in London and in Barcelona
2) I have been refused accomodation (duly booked in advance, BTW) in Munich in the Oktoberfest period (due to some sort of overbooking, or mismanagement of cancellations, not really an issue as I was traveling by car and I managed to find a hotel only a few km outside Munich)
3) in three different occasions someone managed to throw up on me (yikes!), once on a bus in Berlin, once in a train in the UK and once on a Qantas flight to Australia
4) I once eyewitnessed a car entering the highway from the wrong side in France, making a front collision with a truck that was travelling in the right sense, and another time I saw the same happening (luckily with no accidents) in Switzerland
Hence:
1) beware of pickpockets in the UK and Spain
2) double and triple check bookings in Germany
3) be prepared to find in Germany, the UK and Australia (drunk) people that will throw up on you
4) be warned that drivers in France and Switzerland often enter the highway the wrong side
The world is a dangerous place, you'd better stay at home.
Sure, my comment about Italian drivers is just my opinion, and I'm sure there are those who would disagree, especially so many Italians! :-) However, I came to my opinion not from just one visit to Italy but after having been there on multiple occasions both as a tourist and for work—and the fact that I had lived and worked 'next door' in Austria for some while.
Your comment made me think that perhaps I was overcritical so I did a quick search. Other than for some info about what tourists need to drive in Italy, this was the first hit in the list to my query: https://www.thelocal.it/20150326/why-are-italians-such-crazy.... Seems that just a few others agree with me (Italians included).
"Traveling impromptu, particularly if you do not speak functionally the local language is asking for trouble…"
In total agreement, one often experiences language difficulties especially so outside major tourist centers and larger cities. Even native speakers can get out of their depth the moment they cross their border (as I show below).
Avoiding two-star rated hotels/pensions and lower is also to be avoided (often I'd arrive at these hotels and be greeted by someone who spoke perfect English only to find that when that person finished his/her shift then there was no one else who could (I've some funny anecdotes about such encounters for another time). Any arrangements made with the English-speaker were often lost and confusion often ensued. Such confusion isn't necessarily confined to countries where one doesn't speak the local lingo, it can also occur when the natives speak English‡ by default!
Trouble is that for the average tourist Europe has too many languages for comfort (reckon percentage-wise not that many are linguists sporting six or more languages). I've some French and German, and they're very useful at times but of very little help outside Western Europe—Hungary and Serbia for instance (despite the fact that quite a few Hungarians speak German).
What's more the difficulties with language can be very localized. I recall one instance in Alsace when a group of us were in a restaurant and we tried to order meals in German only to be greeted with something gruff to the effect 'no comprehend', this was despite the fact that we had a native German speaker among us who eventually tried to help—Alsace being Alsace, we only brought him out as the big guns when all else failed, however it was to no useful effect (as we eventually ate elsewhere). Moments later when they thought we were out of listening range we could hear their conversions in German. Very strange, presumably if we'd initially tried to order in French then everything would have been OK.
Another striking instance was when I was in Menton in the south of France (Menton† is a border town between France and Italy with the Italian town Ventimiglia† immediately on the other side of the border). I was with my French aunt who normally resides in Paris and who not only spoke perfect French but who also always enunciated her words clearly. She had absolutely no problem with language when visiting the local markets in Menton, nor with conducting any another business in the town however she was totally flummoxed when in Ventimiglia's markets—essentially gestures were her only effective means of communication. Incidentally, Menton and Ventimiglia are so close to each other that one can easily walk between the two as is common practice; moreover, crossing the border which, essentially, is the only thing that separates the two towns, was so simple that to do was a non-event:
Sometimes, unexpectedly, the opposite happens. In the early days of when I was living in Vienna a Greenpeace volunteer knocked at my apartment and asked for a donation. He rattled off his request so quickly that I requested him to repeat a part of it. Without so much as even a pregnant pause he instantly switched mid sentence into English and did so with absolute fluency (how I envy people like that).
"...almost anywhere, and as well pickpockets are common in many large cities all over <...>some relatives of mine have been pickpocketed BOTH in London and in Barcelona"
I'm not disagreeing, the reason I picked out those two instances was that the pickpockets in question were so overt about their aim that even the most novice traveler couldn't mistake their intentions (they worked on the principle that it didn't matter if you knew their intentions or not as, given their numbers, they'd have no trouble getting away). As mentioned, I found other places to be OK, in fact very safe, for instance, I traveled to work every day on Vienna's crowded U-Bahn and I never gave a second's thought about being pick-pocketed (and I never was).
"I have been refused accomodation (duly booked in advance, BTW) in Munich in the Oktoberfest period (due to some sort of overbooking, or mismanagement of cancellations, not really an issue as I was traveling by car and I managed to find a hotel only a few km outside Munich)"
Stuff-ups happen, and I'm not surprised it happened during Oktoberfest (you must have masochist tendencies to have been in Munich at that time). ;-)
"...in three different occasions someone managed to throw up on me (yikes!), once on a bus in Berlin, once in a train in the UK and once on a Qantas flight to Australia."
The most polite thing I can say to that is that with incidents one and two, luck wasn't on your side. Incident three, you have only yourself to blame for traveling on that airline.
My only experience that's vaguely similar happened to me in Manhattan when I was on my way to an important meeting. Whilst waiting at a pedestrian crossing for the lights to change at the intersection of one of the avenues and a cross street (forgotten which ones) a pigeon flying overhead shat on my head and shoulders.
An inconvenient bomb out of the blue to say the least.
P.S.: I really don't like traveling much, I avoid it if I can.
___
‡ At a certain hotel in London's Russell Square that will rename nameless, I made definite arrangements the night before I was to book out to collect an important fax that I was expecting to arrive overnight (I had a very early flight to NY and time was tight). Morning duly arrived and the area around the checkout counter was beginning to fill. When it was my turn to check out I asked checkout clerk serving me (one of three on duty if I recall) for my fax which I knew had arrived as I could see that it was still on the fax machine behind the checkout counter (its printout was of the roll type and my fax was still attached to the roll).
The clerk immediately responded that "the fax operator won't be in until 10AM and I'd have to wait until then", I politely responded that the fax was already on the machine behind him and that I'd already made arrangements the previous evening to collect it first thing the morning but it was to no avail, he simply repeated the exact same mantra again. A heated argument ensued much to the amusement and chagrin of others waiting (I was holding up the checkout line) but the clerk still wouldn't budge. I then immediately jumped over the counter tore the fax off the machine and jumped back again. Clerk: "I'm calling the police", "OK, best of luck—and I'll then accuse you of stealing my goods and I'll charge the hotel for me missing my flight." Cheers and applause from the 'audience' ensued. Yeah, there are some right bastards in this world.
I find it odd that the train ticket didn't get you to your final destination. If the train doesn't travel on some part of the route, the railway company usually gets you on a bus for that part and you don't have to do anything. Just get off the train and hop in the bus.
N.B. Hungary has been an EU member since 2004, but Serbia is still not.
> The fact remains that, despite the European Union’s support for rail, the bloc’s governments continue to grant enormous subsidies to airlines — in the form of bailout packages as well as low taxes on jet fuel — although that could change soon.
By definition, low taxes are not a subsidy. It is the trains that are heavily subsidized. The main reason behind the price difference is that there is plenty of competition between airlines for a given flight, eg Paris-Berlin, but no competition for the same train connection.
No, nobody is actually paying for CO2 emission externalities. At best, you can argue that maybe someone will be paying them some day in future, but it’s a big fat maybe. Because nobody is actually paying for these externalities, we don’t have any figures of how much those externalities cost — you can come up with some estimates, but as GOSPLAN experience shows, calculating prices outside of markets is a fool’s errand. Moreover, our best estimates of these costs is rather low, especially if you do time discounting. Planes would still be cheaper than trains even if they had to pay these. Finally, since most of electricity in Europe still comes from fossil fuels, emission externalities are just as much of a problem for them as they are for trains, especially if you consider that the GHG emissions per actual passenger kilometer between trains and planes are rather similar: trains tend to be really heavy, and usually run much more empty than planes.
People are already paying for those externalities in extreme weather events caused by CO2, also from carbon taxes in other countries that wouldn't have been necessary otherwise, from people who have to buy more expensive cars and fuel, etc...
> People are already paying for those externalities in extreme weather events caused by CO2,
And others are benefitting from positive externalities of warmer weather, reducing need for heating, increases yields due to increased CO2 concentration etc. Thing is, it’s incredibly hard to put a number on net costs on climate change. The most serious recent attempt to do that had its author, William Nordhaus, a Nobel Prize in Economics. The estimated figure, by the way, is very low compared to the zeal of the activists.
Now, of course, the carbon tax proponents are not really interested in the actual costs. They either ideologically hate emissions, and their desire to institute carbon tax is vindictive in its nature, and all talk about “externalities” is for them just a distraction, or they are politicians who use carbon tax as an excuse to increase their political power and tax revenues. Nobody is motivated by actual economic efficiency, and calling them Pigouvian taxes is a distraction.
Nordhaus's work is absolutely panned as being basically literally insane by actual scientists. He based a large parts of his analysis on ideas like "well x% (something like 75%+) of GDP happens indoors so that won't be affected by any way by climate change".
Why didn't those actual scientists bring this up when he, you know, got a Nobel Prize for that? Or are you arguing here that Nobel Prize is a joke, and people who give it are total idiots?
The 'Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel' isn't really much like the actual Nobel Prizes (except maybe the Nobel Peace Prize, that one has proven to be a bit of a joke too, but at least it's a real Nobel Prize).
Where I'm at, in the North, recent weather has only increased climate control costs due to colder winters and hotter summers. I can't say for sure it's global warming at work.
William's Nordhaus models for which he has received the Nobel prize predate the millennium, and have been superceded since then by much better models. His models are highly problematic, now that we know that you cannot extrapolate the average temperature on GDP due to increased amplitude, and for many other reasons. That is why the Nobel committee awarded it not for the current relevance of the results, but for the pioneering nature of the research.
The argument that lower taxes isn't a subsidy is just stupid. It makes absolutely no meaningful difference if someone pays the same taxes as everyone else but then the government pay them some money, or if someone pays correspondingly lower taxes. In the end the recipient ends up with exactly the same amount of more money, and the government ends up with exactly the same amount of less money.
They are if other industries consuming the same product pay different tax rates. In this example, an airline purchasing 1L of kerosene pays a different rate than a train purchasing the same 1L of the same kerosene. That's the textbook definition of a subsidy.
The "Diesel tax levels" charts (p28, p81) show the UK charges the same (0.7€/L) for both road and rail use, and most EU countries charge a tax, although more than half have less tax for rail than road use.
Flying in Spain and many parts of Europe is insanely and artificially cheap. I've seen bus passes more expensive, and the bus passes were the price I expected.
The economics are quite involved, and can be easily skewed depending on what externalized costs you choose to include in your analysis.
Superficially, flying has relatively lower infrastructure costs because it only needs the two endpoints (no road, no track, no bridges, no tunnels -- all expensive items). That impacts both the initial capital cost, and the ongoing investment in maintenance.
Similarly, planes are fast: above a fairly short distance, it's much quicker to fly (by jet plane) than to travel by train or road vehicle.
But airports are difficult to access, being unwelcome in the middle of cities, and so there's a need to get to the airport as part of your journey. That part of the trip likely requires road or rail transport, and it's the most capital-intensive bits of the road/rail (ie. through urban areas).
The fuel cost of planes is also higher per passenger-distance. And beyond just simply purchasing the fuel, it's much easier (for instance) to electrify a train or car than a passenger plane. So how you account for the carbon cost will make a big difference to your result.
For the last 20 years or so, short-trip flights have been superficially cheap. The most obvious missing cost is the impact of using fossil fuel (and potentially that's even worse at high altitude), but there are other factors like the (ab)use of precarious labour, government subsidies for both fuel and facilities, noise impact, etc.
Whether it's ultimately sustainable or not all depends on what costs you choose to factor in.
I was expecting you to take a stance - either trains or planes, but your response was even better and painted a comprehensive high level picture. Thanks for taking the time. I agree with all these points, perhaps though I would challenge us about carbon-emissions with the following: If we want to progress as a civilization, is the idea to regress in and save energy expenditure in the short term; and/or in the long term become a space-exploring civilization with no limits on consumption? We kind of have an unlimited source of energy (the Sun) and if we could, we can do a lot more. Once Fusion is solved, we will have the ability to sequestrate carbon to offset everything we do on earth. I hope to see a day where talks about being miserable to save energy is completely out of the equation. Electricity and all forms of energy would be too cheap to meter for an average human.
It would be amazing to see humans build a large scale fusion reactors and Dyson spheres around the sun and never have to think about energy consumption :).
At the same time, I think we all should be disappointed in our approach towards energy production. We shouldn't have to ration it. Successful governments should be responsible for running sequestrators on tax funding.
> Once Fusion is solved, we will have the ability to sequestrate carbon to offset everything we do on earth
There are lot of IFs in your statement. Sure, it's theoretically possible to harvest so much energy that we can regard it as freely abundant without any real external costs. But this is not the case today, and probably won't be the case for hundreds of years - if ever.
* > Successful governments should be responsible for running sequestrators on tax funding. *
There's no such thing as large scale carbon sequestrations. It's unclear if this is a sensible solution to climate change in general. It makes much more sense to switch to renewables as quickly as possible and to limit emissions as much as possible. THAT's what a successful government should be responsible for, not for investing in false promises.
> It would be amazing to see humans build a large scale fusion reactors and Dyson spheres around the sun and never have to think about energy consumption :).
A Dyson sphère around the sun would make life on Earth rather miserable.
> Successful governments should be responsible for running sequestrators on tax funding.
“Sequestrators” don’t exist. There is some noise every now and then about a fancy new technology, and it gets accepted in pop science media as something that works, but we don’t really have anything practical. Besides, this would be a terrible idea, because it means we lower the cost of operations for the industry, generating profits for their private owners, whilst straining public budgets already stretched thin. This would need a radical change of how most governments operate.
Just leave a gap in the swarm for the light the earth needs (or have mirrors in the greater swarm rotate to do the same, if cheaper).
You can make hydrocarbons from c02 and water. Make digging up carbon illegal, so that only legal way to get your jet fuel is to buy it from a machine that makes it from the air (e.g. carbon-neutral fuels).
Under high temperature and pressure conditions, with expensive catalysts (I’ve had a grant to work on one of these processes a couple of years ago). It is completely uneconomical unless most government tax emissions very heavily one way or another.
Besides, this does not solve the capture bit, which is also a significant challenge, in similar ways (we have ideas about technologies, thermodynamics do not work in our favour, it would still require radical policies for it to work).
Nobody is going to wave their magic wand and make fossil fuels illegal anytime soon. It is a common techno-euphoria trap: technology is the easy bit, and we’re not there yet on that front. Policy is the struggle after that, and it is much more difficult.
One fun and counterintuitive effect: because it takes a train a lot longer to provide as many passenger-miles as an airliner, the per-passenger-mile cost as a share of the capital equipment value is much higher. Ditto the per-passenger-mile cost of crew wages.
The fact that the equipment and the crews are absolutely cheaper doesn’t help ticket prices as much as you’d think. Time is money.
RENFE (national railroad company) had no competitors until very recently, they opened the market just months ago. I am hopeful the new high speed companies (i.e Ouigo) makes the market much more competitive and lowers pricing in all tiers. Still, for same price and roughly same time, I always prefer using the train to the planes.
This is happening in France, too. I'm not too optimistic on how this will turn out.
What we've seen here is TrenItalia starting to serve one line, Paris-Lyon (and then on to Milan). The issue is that this is, by far, the most profitable train line in France.
If competitors only get in on the profitable lines and leave the others to the national company, it will probably not end well. Because it's my understanding that profitable lines used to somewhat compensate for the others, SNCF was able to provide a somewhat dense service. If this goes away, they'll either have to reduce (or even stop!) the less profitable service, or the State will have to step in with even more subsidies for those lines.
There's a lot of talk in France around "public service" and I think that things like good rail service, especially in the era of "climate emergency" is important for a State to have. Instead, we're now getting new bus routes - yay diesel!
Fucking love trains. I live in Berlin and visit Zurich often (that's where I'm from). I can just get into the train in the monrning, work, eat, drink and by the end of the workday I'm in Zurich. Extremely convenient, and not really more expensive than a flight if you book a couple of weeks in advanc, even for first class.
A plane doesn't have to build and maintain km of tracks, it just uses airport facilities (subsidised usually) and untaxed kerosene.
A high speed train can only go to a few destination, the tracks can hardly be repaid
For the plane, the start and end of the trip requires a second form of transport to get to the airport itself. So the existence of a plane does rely on some infrastructure. Some futurists are calling for aerotropolis to be built as new city models with the airport as the center of commerce, but most old world cities won’t have this.
I think the future we are looking for kind of looks like this:
You leave your house and you either jump on an electric bike or a self driving car of some kind. A 1-person 3-wheeled pod car would be very efficient if you are alone.
You get to a local mini-airport where electric helicopters transport you to the airport. Or maybe you just take the car to the local airport. Depends on where you live.
You jump into a electric plan and fly the city center you want to go to, or you land and jump in a second electric plane (this will happen less often as technology improves).
And then you do that same thing backwards to get the your destination.
Flying itself is often cheap, but the connections to & from the airport can make it less cheap. My bus to central Brussels from Charleroi cost more than the round trip flight from Copenhagen.
I suspect one reason is that with trains there's a huge amount of infrastructure to maintain - the tracks between destinations, but with planes you don't have that.
Here in Germany, for as long as I can remember, the government praises itself every year for investing as much in rail as never before. I have not noticed the service quality to change for the better over the last 15 years. The ever-rising investments seem to be only enough to keep the status quo of the crumbling infrastructure.
It's different in Poland. Here, everyone always complains about the rail and it was shit like you wouldn't believe only like 15 years ago. I've been using trains only sporadically but the improvements are absolutely immense, I couldn't believe my eyes. Not perfect of course but holy shit did it improve, especially regional rails
Of course we had to improve from much lower standards than Germany, I guess, so I have no idea if our expectations of good are the same but nevertheless
I use trains here in Poland and although there have been big improvements, a lot of them are only a facade.
Long distance PKP trains are still late everyday. The regional trains in my city tend to be over-packed, and from a technical pov they’re more like larger diesel buses than trains.
However, in response to the earlier comment and this one as well, I would have to say that investment doesn’t always mean immediate visible effects. The biggest investment to make in rail is in the infrastructure. You don’t feel as a passenger which parts of the track are old and which are new, and they are pretty expensive to build and maintain.
I also would wonder how much freight rail is in that investment, because that we don’t see or feel at all.
I can't help but feel much of this argument is relative. From my experience (I'm no longer a European resident) almost all of the European rail network that I've traveled on (and that's quite a lot) beats much of the infrastructure in Anglophone countries—and I'm referring to both track and rolling-stock).
(...Perhaps my view has been formed by the fact that I've come from a low base in Anglophone countries, so everything seems much better in Europe.)
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Edit: I must be fair, there was one European route that I traveled on that was truly substandard and that was the single-track Kaiser Franz Josephs Bahn (Emperor Franz Joseph Railway) from Vienna (Wien Nordbahnhof) to Prague via Gmünd — not the good two track route that goes via Břeclav and Brno (which I've also traveled on).
The railway track of the Kaiser Franz Josephs Bahn was in dire—most desperate—need of maintenance when I traveled on it and that was a few years before the Iron Curtain fell and Czechoslovakia was still communist.
There's no doubt that's the worst track I've ever traveled on (it's one of those experience one never forgets). The train traveled so slowly that we passengers thought we could get out and walk faster, moreover the carriages rocked wildly from side to side and we had a constant feeling that the train was going to derail at any moment (had it gone any faster then I reckon it certainly would have derailed). I have no idea whether that track is still in such poor condition today or not (at the time I was on the understanding that the track had deliberately not been maintained since the War because of Iron Curtain politics).
Nevertheless, it was by far the exception in my experience.
Sorry, Brexit is clouding my judgment. I should have said Continental Europe! ;-)
That said, to be fair I found the UK track maintenance pretty good although trains weren't as punctual as they were in most of Europe. Likewise, the carriages/comfort was somewhat primitive compared to most of what I've experienced on the Continent.
I have to say it's quite some years since I've traveled on British Rail and I understand things have improved considerably in recent years (one only has to watch Portillo speaking to camera from a UK train carriage to realize that).
My worst (and repeated) experience on UK Rail was the horrible Gatwick Express which was often notoriously late (especially the time when it broke down midway to the airport and I missed a flight to New York and lost a whole day in the process).
Perhaps my most memorable experience—it's what always first comes to mind whenever I think of rail travel in the UK—it's the horrible apology for a cheese sandwich that I was offered (and at an enormous ripoff price) on an 'overnighter' from London to Edinburgh (I've witnesses, they suffered the same fate). I can't say I've ever eaten a worse one.
Presumably, the latest food offerings have also improved somewhat since then.
My subjective view is that punctuality and comfort have improved in recent years (especially the new rolling stock on the London-Bristol and London-Cornwall and London-Edinburgh lines is excellent), but the food is as bad as ever, and the prices are getting worse. If you want food on the UK railways then buy it at a station not on the train if you can!
Right, I suppose the quality of food has always been one significant differentiator between the UK and Continental railways. As mentioned, I haven't been to the UK for some years now but over the many times that I have (I'm actually a UK citizen), I've noticed a steady improvement in the food, especially so in London. Over the years, I've noticed lunchtime and takeaway meals improve out of sight and the number restaurants serving foreign food multiply manyfold (I've found London's Indian restaurants pretty much second to none—reckon Indian must be pretty much considered an endemic food by now).
This begs the question why hasn't the food on UK rail improved. Perhaps we should send the executives responsible not to the Continent but to Japan to see how it should be done: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-train-food.
(I can attest firsthand at the accuracy of that article, the food on Japanese trains is truly excellent. There's only one drawback: if you're going to some obscure destination that you've not been to previously then don't let the food (or anything else) distract you. Whilst stations in big urban centres often have station names in both Japanese and Roman scripts outlying ones often don't. You either remember the hiragana or kanji scrips accurately for the station names or you count the number of stations accurately from where you embarked—or you do both. Luckily, I've never missed a stop but I've had a few narrow escapes.)
My take: It depends on the line / company. But generally I think the UK is sub standard and extremely expensive compared to continental Europe (expensive, even compared to Switzerland).
Good experience: Virgin first class from London to Manchester. That said, it would have been prohibitively expensive if we hadn't booked the tickets well in advance. Pre-booked and restricted to a specific train they were around 50 quid each. If we would have bought the tickets before boarding the train they weould have been well over 200£ each.
Bad experience: The company that makes my blood boil even thinking about them is Northern. Whenever I have to use them I seriously consider travelling by couch. They are just such an appalling experience and a real sorry excuse for a train company.
Overall I don't think privatization of the railways were a good idea. Not when specific lines are dished out to specific companies and don't allow competition on them.
Even a diesel bus on rails is much more efficient than a diesel bus on roads. It's also much easier to electrify than a fleet of buses, an much more ecological when you do (because no significant battery). Thus, anything on rails is a win.
Agreed - especially in the context of how unbelievably clumsy the US is at doing trains.
Here in western Poland however it was a bit easier - lots of tracks remained since 19th century. And with these diesel buses popping up, an opportunity presented itself to go relatively low investment and lots of political bang. Those trains are usually way too packed in my personal experience.
Similarly, Pendolino high speed rail was developed and implemented to huge fanfare. Only the tickets ended up being so expensive that basically only the upper-upper-middle class wants to take them. Why take the high-speed train at double the price to get you there twice as fast, when all you need is to get there?
Indeed it was what confused me. I'm Sweden our vocabulary is:
Train,
Commuter train,
Subway,
Tram
Then again, our fastest train does 200 kph, so we only have "old shitcans". I reckon this is because we're 12% the population of Germany on 126% the area. It's not worth the investment with high speed rail.
Then again these numbers are a bit exaggerated, you could essentially cut Sweden in into 2 pieces just above Stockholm and you'd end up with one relatively densely populated area and something that would more or less resemble Alaska in population.
What's great about the north is it is our own little Alaska in the sense that we have a metric shitload of iron ore so pure you can put it straight to the furnace, keeps us southerners afloat for sure.
Poland made a huge step back when it comes to trains after 1990 - there is a good book by Karol Trammer "Ostre cięcie" about disastrous cuts.
On the other hand - Pendolino is a real step forward, and at least Cracow is trying to improve general quality and invest in intra-city trains, which maybe not the fastest, but still much better than buses or trams.
I highly disagree on Pendolino and I am quite angry about it. It has been around for what, >5 years now? I have still yet to take it because it is so expensive. It’s basically the Concorde of Polish trains - it cost a fortune to build and only rich people take it because it speeds up travel time by ~30%. Meanwhile, standard speed trains, which are still capable of covering the same distances in reasonable time, are late, are underinvested and are overcrowded. What we would need is an affordable high volume train network, not trains that cost the same as planes and look cool.
That’s my rant on that subject. On the other hand I do think the one great thing we got out of the previous system is a well developed train network. Even with all of it’s faults and issues, trains remain a great way to get around Poland. And that is something to be grateful for. I’ll check out that book, thanks!
Yeah, around that time I was still in college and used trains a lot. I remember we had a running joke about everything inside the trains we traveled in had some sort of sticky, yucky film. When you grabbed something and then let go you could kind of feel the train clinging to you. The heating in the winter was always either broken or turned to 11. My friend once, by accident, melted a big chunk of his shoe on the radiator under his seat.
I've recently traveled by that same line. The train has changed a bit, the film seems to be gone but the ~100km trip takes 5 minutes longer than it used to, averaging <50km/h... So still ways to go.
> My friend once, by accident, melted a big chunk of his shoe on the radiator under his seat.
This happened to me while on a train to Warsaw 20 years ago, as a high-school student. Ironically I travelled to the Parliament where Buzek, the at-the-time PM, came back from Athens having signed the EU Treaty of Accession to give an impromptu press release. Crazy how much progres we had seen since, and how many set backs.
Yeah. On the flip side I've traveled to Warsaw some time ago on the Pendolino (?) train. I splurged on a first class ticket (~$35) and it was real nice. No "film", separate seats, great service, clean, real fast. Of course, the bubble burst when we approached Warsaw - the train slowed to a crawl just as we were entering the city and I was late like an hour :P Baby steps I guess ;)
The fleet is in much better shape(especially refurbished, compartmentless carriages - these are great at limiting antisocial behaviour), but the infrastructure is disappearing in favour of car traffic.
Some cities, like Łomża, lost access to rail entirely (although IIRC it's going to be restored after an over six year hiatus).
I still drive between Wrocław and Warsaw, even though I would rather travel by train, but there's no dedicated track between these cities, so it has to take a long detour, ultimately making the trip take 6h vs 4h point-to-point by train and car respectively.
That seems wrong. New high speed lines are being built and have recently opened (e.g. Berlin-Munich, soon Stuttgart-Ulm). The number of passengers using high speed trains (ICEs) is steadily increasing: from 75 million trips in 2009 to 99 million trips in 2019. To increase the number of trips like that, lots of investment in rolling stock / signalling / lines is needed. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/162877/
The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita it's moved from ~0.91 trips per person per year to ~1.19 trips per person per year. Not to say there is no progress, but rather that the number of trips is low to begin with. If you contrast the money spent with the end result of roughly one trip per person per year, things are not that rosy.
> The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita...
Which is still an absolute number. Just in another context.
It's a relative improvement of 32% which is approximately 3% per year. Not ground breaking, but a nice steady improvement.
ICE usage is also much higher (~6x ) than in-country plane usage to give another point of context. [1](percentage of domestic flights) [2](total air passengers)
I think trips per capita is misleading as a high percentage of the population isn't doing much in-country long distance travel to begin with.
32% is a remarkably large change in a demographic behavior. Of course the majority make no trips, and a relative few take it frequently.
More meaningful numbers would be how many use it 5 times or more in a year, and how many miles they traveled. Anybody who doesn't use the train at all doesn't really count, unless there was a likelihood of enticing them aboard.
The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita it's moved from ~0.91 trips per person per year to ~1.19 trips per person per year.
I mean, if the goal is to make the smallest number, why stop at "per person per year"? If you instead reflected the number as "per person per second" then you would see that the improvement is barely measurable.
But that seems like a reasonably understandable number? For all that everyone talks about how amazing trains are in other countries, I'm a little surprised to learn that I take Amtrak more in the US than the average German citizen takes DB, which is generally a much better system.
That said, that seems like a pretty good improvement, percentage-wise, but a lot of folks talk about trains in Europe as if it's so amazing that everyone is taking it all the time. I'd be curious of that number relative to the number of flights taken per year per capita.
Sure, but then the better US comparison includes things like the Chicago/NYC/Boston/DC/Atlanta train systems, which I'd imagine a decent number of folks in those cities take more than 31 times a year. Heck, I think I've taken more than 31 MTA rides per year and I don't even live in NYC.
City train systems are not offered by Deutsche Bahn AG, but by local city carriers, so they are not part of that statistic. E.g. Munich is mostly run by MVG and had 596 million passengers in 2018 [1], which aren't included in the numbers above. DB only runs the S-Bahn in Munich.
But yes, the 2600m DB passengers probably mixes long distance and short distance service to some degree.
> I'm a little surprised to learn that I take Amtrak more in the US than the average German citizen takes DB
Amtrak had 31.3 million passengers in 2016 [1]. That's 0.095 passengers per capita. And that's on all Amtrak trains, while the German number is just for the ICE high-speed trains. Amtrak's high-speed Acela trains only had 3.5 million passengers in 2019 or 0.01 per capita. [2]
Per capita is just not a useful number for this discussion.
Sure, but Amtrak is a weird comparison since its "real" service area isn't anywhere close to the full population of the US. There's plenty of whole states that don't have an Amtrak station in them. Most EU countries have a much lower median distance to a train station than the US does.
I'm not expecting to have them be similar numbers. My original point was purely anecdotal - I usually take 1-3 Amtrak rides a year and I don't even live in a part of the country that has good Amtrak service. It's odd to me that folks in a country with much better service use it less than I feel like I would use Amtrak if I could.
My point wasn't to dismiss your anecdotal evidence, but just to highlight that the number per capita can be easily misleading. Yes Amtrak doesn't serve a lot of the US and IIRC has effectively only a single high-speed line. But the average German citizen is using high-speed railway 100 times more often than the average US citizen (for the obvious reasons we both mentioned). You're just not the average citizen.
I'm pretty sure many Germans don't use the ICE at all. While service is a lot better, the way to and from the high-speed train station often makes it inefficient, especially because the German autobahn is also world-class and doesn't suffer from a "last miles" problem.
You probably just travel more than most people. Also, America is much bigger than any given European country and that leads to greater travel distances.
America is much bigger, but there’s also something to be said about size and perceptions.
As a general example, the Midwest is roughly the same size and population as France, so if we made the investment we could reasonably have a regional high speed network centered on Chicago. We’ll never have coast to coast high speed rail, but having a few regional networks is certainly doable.
Looks like in 2019 there were 200-250 million airplane trips starting or ending in Germany. So maybe the surprise is how little average people travel rather than how little they rail.
Yea, that doesn't seem like that useful of a number, since Frankfurt is a fairly major layover airport for international travel.
I guess the more specific question would be how many Germans fly to elsewhere in Germany or Central Europe vs. taking a train. I generally have to either do a long car trip or a flight to get around in the US outside of some specific corridors. Presumably most of Europe has the option to take the train instead, but are they?
And yet layover flights are decreasing since the 2 engine restriction was "lifted". A 787 can fly non stop for as long as would be comfortable for someone to be on a plane.
But there’s still a connection/hub-and-spoke system. You could fill a 787 with enough fuel to fly from Columbus, OH to Venice, but you couldn’t fill it with enough people to make it make sense.
And airlines usually charge more for direct flights (price discrimination), so for leasure long-haul travel it's fairly common for Europeans to have a flight with stopover, even if there's a direct connection available.
Give or take. There's plenty of trains between countries in Europe that would also be within driving distance.
In my mind, the optimal realistic situation is to have rail for longer distances (1-8 hours), but not trans-oceanic obviously, and then either ICE or local light rail for smaller trips
The relevant point is that there are no (or very few) international ICE trains. Cross-border are usually slower Euro-city trains that shouldn't be included in the ICE statistics.
Per capita is a standard way to contextualize things in statistics and since the original measure is per year, per capita per year. The point is not to "make the smallest number". 99 million trips per year alone doesn't tell us anything. If it was made by 1 million people, the scale is big, if it was made by 100 million people, not so much. That's why contextualizing per capita is important.
Well it could be per capita in decade for a ten-fold increase, but given that a human career lasts around 4 such periods, this metric would not be too useful.
> Here in Germany, for as long as I can remember, the government praises itself every year for investing as much in rail as never before.
Unfortunately, that's not true (the investment part). In preparation for the IPO (that never happened because of the crash) Deutsche Bahn was heavily tuned for profit since the mid 90s which led to a massive decrease in investment. As rail infrastructure has a rather long service life, a lot of those cost-cutting measures have only beginning to be felt rather recently. Now not only do the investments that have not been made have to be made up for, but the funding gap has caused the infrastructure to decay even further.
Also, a lot of money has been spent on vanity projects like Stuttgart 21, instead of much-needed extension of freight lines like the one in the upper Rhine valley.
Also, construction prices have gone up a lot. Rail investment depends heavily on steel and concrete, both have skyrocketed over past years. And as you said, undoing a decade or more of underinvestment is extremely costly and leads to more delays in the short term.
At least they're speaking into a culture that wants to hear about investment in rail, regardless of whether the work being done feels like it's yielding tangible improvements or not.
Here in Canada, it sometimes feels like they're almost ashamed of what little they're spending and even try to hide it away, or spread the big capital expenses over multiple years to make it look like even less.
I have had only trouble traveling by train in Germany. It happened so many times that I believe it becomes statistically significant. In comparison, I can't remember the last time a train trip in France was anything but smooth.
A few examples, all of which have in common that we arrived 3 to 9 hours late to our destination:
- The train leaves earlier than planned (!), but they tell you by email at 7:00 in the morning for a train leaving at 9.
- The AC on the train is not running perfectly. They offload everyone at a random train station, and you spend four hours sitting on the stairs of an overcrowded commuter train with kids and luggage, instead of one hour on a mildly hot train.
- Stoerung auf der Strecke: twice (!) the train stopped for hours in the middle of the tracks. Once the train had stopped in the middle of a bend, and we spent hours tilted to the side. The other time we missed a flight even though we were on the regular shuttle from city center to the airport.
And in addition to that they also removed a lot of rail lines, especially goods traffic. It would've been a boon to have fewer trucks on the motorway and probably better for the environment.
European trains don't really do that much freight though. They tend to be optimized to carry people. America is actually way ahead of Europe in terms of rail freight, something like 10x depending on the measurement.
Having commuted with both american and german rail systems before, my educated guess it's likely due to who owns the rails. American rail freight companies have far more control over prioritization than european freight companies.
DB Netz owns the vast majority of german rail and therefore prioritizes what makes them the most money. Historically that's been carrying people due to all the government and company subsidies they get for supporting commuters and students. During COVID times the rail freight increased dramatically because the personen trains were offline. I suspect that will have generated some inertia towards freight, but it will take years to see and only if the right folks at DB crunch the right numbers.
On the american side, I've sat for 20 or 30 minutes regularly (up to an hour on the worst days) while our commuter train had to wait for the rail owner's freight train to roll through. And that's a regularly scheduled commuter!!
But why couldn't DB Netz do both people and freight, if both are profitable (after subsidies for passenger traffic)? i.e. why does it have to be a choice?
Because things which are designed to be good at one thing will not be as good at other things. There's only so much rail network and given a conflict either freight is a priority or passengers are. You can't have two number 1 priorities.
I'm pretty impressed with India opening dedicated freight corridors. It's double-track that is optimized for longer, heavier freight trains. It seems obvious that the different operational patterns of freight and passenger rail means they each should have their own tracks. The only thing they did "wrong" IMO was to have level crossings where cars & trucks can get hit by the trains.
They could but german rail is already ridiculously crowded when factoring in all the safety regulations. Automation on the speed control already lets them pack the lines pretty tightly, which may be one reason why they've removed so much rail already.
Germans, in my experience, tend to be pretty rational folks. As much as the public likes to ream the decision makers for poor choices while armed with the perfect clarity of hindsight, my guess is they've gotten to this point because all the other choices seemed worse at the time they considered them.
On high speed lines, you often can only run either one of those. Not only that freight trains are slower, but they often aren't allowed to use tunnels at the same time as high speed passengers trains. So on some of the most direct and modern tracks, freight can only be run at night.
Typically everyone does both freight and passengers, but it'll be better at one or the other. Passengers want fast trains with few delays that get close to population centers. Freight doesn't care about speed as much but cares about the overall throughput and wants to end up in distribution centers.
Anyway, about "distribution centers" - just have an optional turn when approaching some town, choosing between the central train station and the "distribution center" location. That in itself does not sound like much of an issue.
However, other comments suggest that freight needs _slow_ speed and must avoid tunnels. Maybe that's the reason?
I think they do. The Dutch railway definitely does. But a lot of freight is actually transported over rivers, which is very efficient. Though also still by trucks, sadly, which is not.
Russia is ahead of the US, even in absolute tonne-km terms. And I don't know about other EU countries, but we (Czech Republic) seem to be transporting almost exactly as many tonnes per capita per year as the US, despite the fact that we have mixed rail traffic. The US just wins on tonne-km since it's larger, so the average distances are larger as well. But purely the volume of freight seems to be about the same, despite heavy passenger traffic.
Back in 1996 Switzerland and Germany signed a non-binding agreement (Vertrag von Lugano) to increase the capacity for freight trains. Now in 2022 the Swiss part [0] with two 34km and 57km long tunnels through the Alps is basically finished meanwhile the German part is expected to be completed in 2042 [1]
In the Australian case, that percentage is heavily skewed by bulk freight of coal, iron ore, wheat, etc. That's often using dedicated tracks, direct from mines to ports, and not connected to the general freight network.
The mix of road and rail for more general freight has been heavily in favour of road for a long time, and only getting worse as Internet shopping, etc, increases the role of last-mile home delivery.
I went to germany a cuple of years ago, and my experience was delightful, here in chile in the years of the coup, the rail system was almost completely dismantled in favor of trucks and buses, I dream the day I could travel in train to the north of the country in a moderate modern train :)
That is a massive change.
Subjectively, how a train trip feels on that route went from "quite exhausting in the end" to "oh I just opened my laptop, couldn't even finish what I had started".
Note that it's still four hours compared to one for a flight - and flights are still cheaper. Even if we assume two hours for arrival, boarding and an hour for local transportation in Berlin, flight would still win on price.
(I just checked for "Munich to Berlin next monday": 120€ cheapest for trains unless I want to sleep in them, 105€ for a flight, with more choice of time.)
Realistically, it takes an extra hour door to door for the train, and around 3 hours for the plane. In my experience you do save a bit of time with the plane for Berlin-Munich.
> Even if we assume two hours for arrival, boarding and an hour for local transportation in Berlin, flight would still win on price.
It is 50€ if you look for the Monday in 2 weeks. For quite a bit of my travel, I am booking 2-3 months in advance, and it is usually around ~30-40€, first class, for a 600km trip. (This site is quite helpful: https://bahn.guru/) Some other things to consider: Trains (ICE) are substantially more comfortable and "freer"; you can walk around, don't have to pretend to listen to a safety choreography, keep your data on the whole time etc.
Trains also don't restrict the amount of luggage you can take with you. In fact when my grandma died, I transported a ~2x4m persian rug by ICE, and while I got some comments on it, and switching trains was a pain, it was a very cheap option for a poor student with a big rug.
On another note, there will be a 9€ Ticket for summer in Germany that allows you to use all non-high speed trains within Germany, which will be a really interesting experiment.
Agree with all of that. Though with flights, you can also optimize a lot if you have enough lead time: I recommend https://skyscanner.com/
Trains are nice if you need to transport anything of volume, especially bikes, if you stay longer than a day or two so you can amortize the travel time, if you have lots of run-up time, and probably cheaper if you travel a lot. They're definitely competitive, it's just not a slamdunk, and planes do straight win sometimes depending on requirements.
Aside from skipping the added bureaucracy of airports, the major advantage of trains is that you usually arrive in the centre of the city while air travel usually takes you to the outskirts.
All the Germans I've met like to complain about the quality of Deutsche Bahn. But it is important to keep in mind that from the perspective of an American, Deutsche Bahn is a miracle.
Absolutely loved taking the train in Italy, fast, convenient, cheap, good amenities. Of course the country very much lends itself for rail (more or less an elongated territory that can run a very fast high-capacity north/south backbone, with slower but more ubiquitous horizontal offshoot rail to the various smaller cities and villages), but it was still very well done. Especially considering how much tunnelling was required.
My big concern is that we're not really moving towards a single european market nor a single european train infrastructure system. I'm not sure if it can thrive as a patchwork of different ticketing systems and different rail systems. Without it it can't compete for international travel. And without it it's hard to get the right economies of scale.
In my experience, at least neighboring countries tend to be pretty good at selling you international tickets, and most people aren't interested in 17 hours journeys that could be replaced by a 2 hour flight.
bahn.de will sell me (through an international website to which they redirect) a ticket from Frankfurt to London via Paris, an 8h40m trip costing 182 EUR one way for a date ~2 weeks out.
The real issue is that I'm very unlikely to choose this option, no matter how convenient the booking, when I can get a round trip plane ticket for the same date for 156 EUR including luggage that will take 4-5 hours (including transit to/from the airport, security, boarding, waiting etc.) and gets advertised as 1h45m, 133 EUR.
Some yes, others not so much.
E.g. regarding France, using its regular online services DB will only sell tickets on the through trains from Germany, but nothing involving a connection in France, whereas conversely SNCF won't sell online tickets to stations in Germany not served by the direct trains from France.
> bahn.de will sell me (through an international website to which they redirect)
The problem with international-bahn.de is that what it sells aren't real through tickets, so if you miss a connection, you're depending on the goodwill of the operators involved to let you continue your journey without having to buy a (potentially very expensive) new ticket, or pay you a taxi respectively hotel accommodation if you've missed the final train of the day.
The only way to get proper through tickets involving connections both on the French and the German side (e.g. I luckily live near the Paris – Strasbourg – Stuttgart service, but technically I still need a connecting regional train for a few stations) is by buying them from a ticket office, but then again due to some obscure technical issues this hasn't been possible since the end of February.
> The real issue is that I'm very unlikely to choose this option, no matter how convenient the booking
It's broader than just convenient booking, it's also integrated servicing, scheduling and infrastructure. With integrated scheduling you can get better connecting trains.
> > bahn.de will sell me (through an international website to which they redirect) a ticket from Frankfurt to London via Paris, an 8h40m trip costing 182 EUR one way for a date ~2 weeks out.
Frankfurt to Brussels is 3 hours, Brussels to London is 2 hours. It could be a 5 hour trip if the trains connected, very competitive to the 4-5 hours you mentioned. (And with existing technology the durations could be cut down by 30%). But if there's no connecting trains between the German-Belgian track, and the Belgian-UK track, then it will indeed take 8-9 hours.
I'd definitely rather sit on a train. Relative to airplanes you typically get:
- quiet
- cheap/available wifi
- spacious (leg room, work space)
- large windows
- easy access to your luggage (for work, food and recreation)
- boarding experience that's less frustrating
- boarding in a city centre as opposed to a peripheral airport
Price remains an issue, but it's also an issue of scale and value proposition. The Italian trains I've been on were simply vastly superior experiences to whatever flight I ever took and quite cost-competitive. Take Bologna to Napels, it's a 600km route that is 3h 20m by train for just 38 euros, central station to central station. Flights certainly don't win out here. By comparison, Frankfurt to London is 640km as the bird flies. It seems once things start crossing borders and you get into disconnected international tracks, scheduling, ticketing, infrastructure, prices and connections start to suck. But that's in part a solvable issue that can be largely mitigated. If Italy can do a 600km track for 30 euros in 3.3 hours, that should be a attainable across Europe with the proper strategy and investments within 20 years.
There's also the point of pricing in externalities for air flight, not doing so makes them unduly competitive. That's unlikely to last. Some countries are adding 10-20 euros to flight prices this year alone as a start, making 1-2 hour flights less interesting vs trains. Although I've read reports both ways (how flights are undertaxed, as well as how trains are already very subsidised) so I'm not sure on this point.
As tourists, we got a Eurail pass, and international travel was as seamless as you could expect (at the time, the Italian trains were slow, the French trains stank, and the British ticketing offices were full of useless queues. The German trains were a little nerve wracking because the conductors were in a blind panic because the train was 30 seconds late).
Anyway, some computer figured out the transfers for us, and the itineraries were fine.
The only real problem was that we had to book weeks ahead. They physically mailed the tickets the US. I can't imagine it works like that now.
Either way, it's proof the patchwork of national operators can work well together.
Just solving urban transport with train would be a huge thing here in Croatia. Rails are so shit that if you need to commute it's faster to travel through peak rush hour with a car than ride a train. It's depressing really because good rails would really connect less developed places near the capital and offload the pressure on city.
I live in Italy and can attest that the high-speed rail running along the backbone of the Italian peninsula is really nice: it's clean, faster than a regional flight (no need for security, etc.), quiet, and it's fun to watch the hills roll by out the window.
I went from Rome to somewhere like Florence by train. Fast, easy, reasonably priced, and it was a short walk from my seat to a café car where a team of sharply uniformed gentlemen made me an excellent espresso!
first, Germany has had a high level of sefvice quality with trains for the last 15 years, compared to much of the world, there's little to improve
and second, DB had become a HUGE holding company of many kinds of business endeavours and rail service is not in the states hand anymore, while the company "optimizes" for profit which makes travel aside of high traffic routes become worse and worse and coverage deteriorates.
Well, if my single unit of university economics taught me anything, its that you have produced the most efficient possible rail system and Germans are getting exactly what they want. Congratulations!
Thanks for your perspective from someone close to the situation there. I believe many Americans have a picture of a perfect system in Europe, but the truth is likely different. Can you elaborate on the negative aspects of the train system, as you see it?
I’m an American who recently took a train in Europe from Paris to Brussels.
Some brief thoughts:
- It was so fast! Under 90 minutes for a journey which would have taken a few hours by car. Clearly much faster than a plane on this particular route, due to extra waiting and security in airports.
- It was also a very comfortable mode. If you’re traveling with friends, it’d be very easy to socialize around a table. Quieter than a car or plane as well.
- Love being able to hop on/hop off without a huge ordeal or waiting in a long line.
- Too expensive for the route. I would have to book much further in advance to think it was worth it. I think maybe 6x the cost of driving, if I compared to a similar route in the US.
- Obviously this is a high speed route. That doesn’t exist between all cities.
- Looking at other tickets, connecting between two routes can be tricky. For example, if I wanted to go from Amsterdam to London, I’d might transfer to a different train in Paris. That adds a huge amount of time.
I mean, compared to the US, it’s a delight! For a similar city-to-city distance (Portland to Seattle), I’d love a 90min transit mode, especially if it was relatively cheap.
Obviously there are still some route and cost drawbacks, but there just isn’t much comparable in the US. It’s a much better system, obviously, even if it’s not perfect. At least they have high speed rail!
Eurostar runs direct trains from London to Rotterdam & Amsterdam, 3.5 and 4 hours respectively.
You can't really compare to a similar route in the US because there are hardly any and hardly anybody uses them. The train routes in EU are busy and frequently full, just like planes. Obviously booking ahead is cheaper, how else could you do it?
Top tip, plan a head and read up a little bit on seat61:
Overnight trains is one of the best ways to see Europe as a backpacker on the cheap. The routes are often scenic and the cost is frequently cheaper than anything else since you don't have to pay for accommodations.
Buses are a thing too. And they are not greyhound bad, but definitely not as good as trains.
We have the same buses as you these days. Megabus exists to connect many larger metropolitan areas. More or less the same vehicles as you'd find for similar services in Europe. Sadly, none of the "sleeper bus" variety that have existed (from time to time) in Europe.
I took a Megabus from Houston to Austin one time, it was honestly the worst bus journey I have ever taken in my life. A man sat down next to me, talking to himself, rocking back and forth holding a screw driver. There were a lot of other "interesting" characters on the bus as well.
When I arrived in Austin and told the story, my colleagues told me that the different cities would buy bus tickets for homeless people to move them from city to city. I don't know if that was the case here or not, but my guess would be that at least a large portion of the passengers had mental health issues.
At the time, I was concerned with my personal safety, but afterwards I was wondering if there was something I could have done to help :(.
Eurostar runs a direct route, with passport control in Amsterdam. But looking at any link from Europe to London that isn’t directly served by Eurostar (i.e. any city except Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels) is going to suck.
Depends what you optimize for. I used to travel from Germany to London and had to change in Brussels. Yes you have to wait a bit, but not like at an airport. The walking distances and wait times are very small and the trains connect timewise so it is fairly stress free.
If you want to play it super save, you can stop for a good meal in Brussels as you are taking a break in the middle of a city, rather than hanging around in an airport.
I've taken Eurostar from London and changed in Paris for Grenoble and Brussels for Amsterdam (before the direct train.) It was completely fine. No different from any other train journey with a change.
I think it may have taken a while to get from Brussels to Amsterdam because that line hadn't yet been upgraded at the time but the journey time wasn't far off what it would have been getting to and flying from Heathrow/Gatwick/Stansted.
That's the one that surprised me the most. I shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose, given that even Amtrak is quite expensive compared to air travel, but I was a little shocked at just how expensive trains in Europe can be. Especially the good ones.
If you are a german resident, and you make two or more long distance rail trips a year, then you a buy a bahncard 25 or bahncard 50 which give you (respectively) 25% or 50% ticket discounts.
> I mean, compared to the US, it’s a delight! For a similar city-to-city distance (Portland to Seattle), I’d love a 90min transit mode, especially if it was relatively cheap.
Fully agree. Years ago, I took Amtrak from Minnesota to Seattle, and it was 36 hours. I enjoyed most everything about it except that it took. So. Long. I rarely drive down to Portland, but if we had a ~1.5hr train, I'd probably do it several times a year. Same for Seattle to BC.
I may have a rose-colored perspective of Europe's rail, but I also really enjoy Paris <-> Caen or <-> Versailles. My kids loved the night train from Paris to Venice, too. And having just flown from the Midwest to Seattle with a layover, I would GLADLY trade that ~11 hour travel day (from arrival at the airport to getting picked up at SeaTac) for an ~18 hour cross-country TGV. It'll never happen, but I can dream.
Minneapolis to Seattle is around the same distance as Madrid to Warsaw. And for that trip you’d need ~4 transfer and it would take ~30 hours in total. So it doesn’t seem that much better.
The capital of the EU to the capital of France in an adjacent country is pretty much the definition of good train travel in Europe. Also anything TGV in France. As sibling noted, Eurostar from London is also great. Various other routes are pretty good.
Prices are pretty high by and large especially if you haven't booked well in advance.
As someone else mentioned, very fragmented in Europe generally. I actually try to take trains in Europe but not always a great option especially when traversing multiple countries.
Europe doesn't have a rail system, it has dozens of systems; and they're not all compatible - which given this all originated in pre-EU times, is hardly surprising.
And that also means that it can take quite a long time to travel by rail, despite high-speed rail. If you need to cross rail-system borders - some of which are even intra-national like in France, you may need to change trains and/or take illogical routes. If, however, you're lucky and your route is on the happy path - then it can be quite competitive with short-haul flights both in hassle (if not quite speed) and cost.
Then there's the fact that operators are fragmented too, so booking a ticket or finding the optimal route can be surprisingly tricky once you need to cross several borders. I'm not sure this is worse than navigating airline booking systems, mind you, but it sure isn't efficient either.
The thing is, you used to be able to buy a ticket from, say, Lisbon to Copenhagen, from any ticket booth, and just take any reasonable train on the (multi-day) route. But nowadays many national railway companies use yield management, so that original price is now the full price which is a lot higher, and actually you simply can't buy such tickets anymore, you must use booking systems that just cannot book all trains. In some countries such as France and Spain reservations are now obligatory for long-distance trains.
At some international ticket booths you can still book complicated trips, but if you try to book them yourself over the internet, you will have to cut up the trip into separate parts which are treated as separate trips for the travel guarantee, so if you miss a connection due to a delay beyond your control you don't have the right to take the next train if it's not part of the same trip.
Learned about iberian gauge while taking a train in Portugal last month. The tracks were further apart than any that I have ever seen. Rail is much more complicated than people might think
A short answer for Germany would be: the system is operating at its absolute limits. The results are employee burnout and bad reliability.
An example: a few years ago, they introduced a new way to reduce delays caused by trains arriving so late at their destination that they cannot make their scheduled return trip. This is the so-called "Pofalla-Turn", named after the manager who supported it: if a train has a delay of over 30 minutes, the train will often just stop at some station and the passengers are told "the train ends here". They then have to figure out their journey using alternative trains.
Just imagine this happening on a flight. I often witness completely helpless tourists lost at my local rail station who don't speak the language and cannot understand why the train they have an expensive ticket and reservation for just stopped, drove back, and left them stranded here.
If you are meeting/visiting someone in a city more than 200 km away, and if you tell them that you plan to take the train, the usual response is: "Oh, good luck".
Amtrak does that sometimes (the train and/or crew die on the rails) but then they produce a bus from somewhere and get you to your destination.
At least in the US, once a company has accepted you on your journey they have to eventually get you to your destination, or get you to agree to give up. One time the train even stopped and told people trying to make a connection to get out; they'd called taxis to meet the other train.
I don't live in Germany, but I'm pretty sure they'll be another train available. Probably in about 30 minutes (or less if the train is so late that the next train has caught up with it). The inconvenience is having to get off of one train and onto another.
> the train will often just stop at some station and the passengers are told "the train ends here". They then have to figure out their journey using alternative trains.
In the Czech Republic, what would happen in that case would be that the railway company would shuttle the passengers to their destination using buses. This doesn't happen in Germany?
The typical scenario is that passengers can just take another train. Depending on the ticket, the railway is responsible for refunding cost for alternative transportation (EU law), but there can be frustrating edge cases where people are left stranded, because there is no alternative, but a lot of bureaucracy. The railway may be responsible for refunding accommodation then, but I think this would not necessarily be the case for monthly tickets, student tickets and so on, when there is no explicit booking for a canceled train like with a regular ticket.
My most memorable train experience in Germany was when Deutsche Bahn left me in Munich in the middle of the night. I had a connection there but my first train was ~10 minutes late, and my second train had already left. So I spent the whole night at the train station until ~5am when I could catch another train in the direction I needed. I've taken many train trips in the Czech Republic, and that has never happened.
The ticket you bought has a ToS attached to it, but basically it boils down to that DB is only required to get you from A to B, but you're not entitled to any specific mode of transportation other than "preferably by rail". While the train may have ended surprisingly, since other trains are still running, DB's opinion is that you can figure out the rest.
> if a train has a delay of over 30 minutes, the train will often just stop at some station
I've seen that happen in London, sadly, although it's less of a problem given the general frequency and other alternatives (bus, etc.) Also the "if the train is going to be delayed enough to cause payouts, just take it out of service before the deadline" trick.
In London it's often done to try to stop the "no bus for an hour then 3 come along at once" phenomena and even out the service. Personally I think it's a big improvement over the alternative.
Nothing is perfect, but also remember that people always find things to complain about, particularly if they don't have personal experience of less well functioning systems.
They're not saying there's no reason to complain. They're pointing out a very valid phenomena. For those of us on the total outside, it helps us temper bad feedback. Otherwise, you can end up with a situation like the following:
Person A from place without infrastructure X: wow, life with infrastructure X sure would be better. I wonder if we should invest in X?
Person B from place with infrastructure X: There's lots of problems and it annoys me daily.
Note that in this situation, the wrong conclusion is to say "well, then maybe infrastructure X is a bad idea". We want to avoid that line of thinking (since it's not an appropriate conclusion given the statements), so it's worth pointing out many tempering factors, such as those mentioned by the parent comment.
Parent: people often complain because it’s the worst they’ve ever had, take it with a pinch of salt.
You: well you can’t complain about anything then can you!?
——
You can complain, but it’s good to have an understanding of what you’re complaining about, the parent is right. We are quick to complain about imperfection when a lot of what we have is truly quite good.
Sometimes it’s legitimate criticism, sometimes it’s being spoiled.
Any criticism that is not specific can (and probably should) be dismissed outright. Complaints and criticism should always be specific.
That’s not what I meant. Only that the fact that people complain about X in both A and B does not tell much about the relative quality of X in A compared to B because the expectations and standards may be very different.
It's been separated into many subsidiaries in preparation for a privatisation. It never happened and while subsidiaries like Schenker work quite well and drive profits, others like those responsible for network or train maintenance create only costs and have been neglected. This results in delays in your daily experience with DB. DB's "punctuality" or the lack of it is actually a running gag here in Germany.
It was quite similar in France. It was a step before privatisation, true, but the final step would have been the re-nationalisation of the infrastructure and maintenance branch, in a usual “privatise the profits and socialise the losses” that the European Commission seems to so love. Because efficiencies, or something.
my short answer would be: bad at punctuality. Frequent delays bigger than 10min.
France for example is better at punctuality IMO. But granted: smaller population density, therefore less stops needed in rural areas. And lower population density made it also a lot easier to build many complete own tracks for fast trains (TGV). Also more centralized way of thinking, so if you are around Paris: good, if you live far away of big cities, not so lucky.
> smaller population density, therefore less stops needed in rural areas.
I see this argument regularly, but I do not find it very convincing. There are places in the US about the same size as France with much lower population densities as well. France is about the same size as Texas. Surely there are Texas-sized bits of land with similar densities as France in the US.
> Also more centralized way of thinking, so if you are around Paris: good, if you live far away of big cities, not so lucky.
The network is still very centralised, but it is much better than it used to be. Thanks to the Paris south and east bypasses, as well as progress on the high speed line in the south made things like Lyon-Lille, Lyon-Toulouse, Strasbourg-Nantes, or Marseille-Bordeaux quite nice. Lyon-Bordeaux is still a pain in the backside because of the mountains in the middle.
I haven't taken European trains, but Amtrak in the US is often atrociously late. They pay to rent tracks from freight companies and have to cede right-of-way to not block them.
It's hard to say. Trains have been chronically underfunded in the US for so long that I don't think the US even knows what decent train infrastructure is like. Amtrak hasn't had a guaranteed budget until the recent infrastructure bill passed and was originally designed to just be a publicly-funded holding company to sell off its rolling stock and lines.
We don't really want the trains (because of the way the US developed its cities). Let me give an example. In order to add a few more daily routes from Chicago to Milwaukee on Amtrak, a freight train would have to hold on a holding line for several hours in residential areas to let the Amtrak through. The increase in ridership, not just riders shifting their schedules, would have been at most a few hundred.
So in order to get a few hundred cars off the road, Amtrak would have to build a holding track (carbon cost), add more rolling stock to the route, burn more diesel, and a residential neighborhood full of children would have had diesel trains idling for hours a day.
The total economic and environmental value of the program was negative by most measures.
This seems poorly argued to me. You're making a number of assumptions here which I don't see why they would hold:
1. Amtrak ridership will barely grow, at most by a few hundred riders per day. If you're this bearish on trains then naturally you'll think nobody wants to take the train and you don't think Amtrak should build more trains. You're coming into this assuming that nobody wants to ride the train.
2. Building dedicated track between Chicago and Milwaukee would be cost prohibitive for Amtrak or otherwise infeasible. The majority of the cost for building track comes from acquiring ROW (so purchasing the land), grade separations, and utility relocations needed for laying the track. Chicago to Milwaukee in particular is one of the cases where these costs are probably _lowest_ as much of the ROW is cheap to acquire (outside of the direct Chicagoland area), the land is fairly flat so grade separations are rarely needed and utility relocations are cheap to build.
3. The opportunity cost in carbon for added vehicles on the road would somehow be less than the opportunity cost for rolling stock to idle. Even if freight rail continues to refuse to electrify in perpetuity, the added carbon from private vehicle emissions will quickly dwarf extra carbon emissions from idling freight cars.
I think you're coming at this from a "trains are stupid, here's why" perspective rather than an unbiased cost and carbon perspective. These arguments change in areas where ROW acquisition is expensive or grade separations and utility relocations are difficult, but Chicago to Milwaukee has very few of these problems. In particular the problem in this part of the US is that while rail works to move from city-to-city, most Midwestern cities (other than Chicago) have no actual transit to speak of. Once the Amtrak drops you into Milwaukee, if there's nowhere to go via train, then you're stuck, in which case you may as well drive the whole way. That goes back to the fact that rail/transit in the US has been historically and systematically underfunded, particularly so in the Midwest where Detroit had a lot of negotiation (read: money) leverage in the golden years for American auto companies.
This to me just argues for separate lines for passenger vs freight trains.
Especially if we are talking about installing high speed lines anyways, doesn't make sense to turn a freight line into a high speed line and then share it (other than the fact that you wouldn't need to eminent domain as much).
Trains kill lots of people and the noise is excruciating. They also impede other traffic when at grade, and require massively expensive carbon guzzling infrastructure when not at grade. The stations are often designed or located more optimally for getting freight to and from, rather than people.
> require massively expensive carbon guzzling infrastructure when not at grade
If you think that building rail viaducts and rail grade separations are carbon expensive, wait till you learn about the carbon used for roadway viaducts and roadway grade separations.
You can argue that rails usually run on much more consistent of a grade than roadways but that's only to decrease the amount of acceleration that's required by train cars and to increase top speeds. Freight rail is a special case because freight companies try to avoid as much wear-and-tear on their train cars as feasible within their delivery windows, unlike passenger rail which necessarily cares more about speed and less about wear-and-tear.
Yeah, this seems like a weird argument against trains. Every mode of transport will kill some people. Trains just happen to be one of the safest there is. Heck, if you think about heart attacks, walking likely kills more people than trains do.
> Here in Germany, for as long as I can remember, the government praises itself every year for investing as much in rail as never before. I have not noticed the service quality to change for the better over the last 15 years. The ever-rising investments seem to be only enough to keep the status quo of the crumbling infrastructure.
And the ticket price inflation is twice as high as regular CPI.
I live in Berlin, but I am not from Germany, nor from Europe. I never understand the complains on the quality of trains (or the public transport in general) in Berlin at least. And I am from Buenos Aires, where we have great transport system (subway, buses, trains). Still, Berlins is much better.
"The ever-rising investments seem to be only enough to keep the status quo of the crumbling infrastructure."
It's quite a while since I've traveled by Deutsche Bahn but I found it very efficient and on time when I did. What do you reckon is the reason for the crumbling infrastructure? There was huge reinvestment after the war to renew war-damaged infrastructure and rail infrastructure usually has a very long life (many rail bridges and viaducts built in the mid 1800s are still in service today).
Was that war reconstruction rushed/not well implemented or what?
Deutsche Bahn is a disaster. Extreme delays up to 2 hours more often then not. Rude staff. Forcing moms with kids out of the train by police. Travelled for 3 summers through germany, now just take the plane.
At least your trains run on time, or at all. I guess your criticism is based on the level of service you have become accustomed to in your country, which is incredibly good by world standards.
Trains are incredibly expensive to maintain. The US still relies a lot on manual operations when running trains. I wonder if they will ever be able to fully automate their travel.
Rail infrastructure can be expensive (especially when done as inefficiently as in the US) but the actual economics of running trains are fantastic. They're the second-most efficient way of transporting goods and people - after marine shipping.
A freight train can move 1 ton of cargo 480 miles using a single gallon of diesel. [1]
Even city rail, Bart trains in SF average 249 miles per gallon equivalent.
Not to mention you only need what - one or two people - manning a train carrying the average equivalent of 700 truckloads. Once you commit to putting it up, it's super cheap and efficient, which is why we do it.
Not so. The whole point of trains is that expenses are largely one-off. Building the infrastructure is expensive. Recurring costs are much lower than other modes of land transport, ceteris paribus.
This. Rail lines don’t need much maintenance once installed. Compared to a hwy which starts to fall apart immediately. Trains are a relatively simple and robust transportation method. I wonder what the insurance costs look like between the different methods of transportation
Is it though? Or is it the fact that airlines are able to externalize their environmental costs, and are generally both under-taxed and subsidized.
[edit] I'm not saying that rail isn't subsidized - it usually is, and often heavily, to be clear. It's the environmental impact that's the thrust of my claim.
It's that + Every step of the aviation industry is subsidized by state actors. oil companies are also incentivised to support as airlines are a massive consumer of karosene that would otherwise be a cheap byproduct of oil refining
High speed rail is much more expensive to maintain than ordinary rail. Motorways are also more expensive to maintain than normal roads, but I think the railway has more capacity than both.
The comparison for a freight railway vs. an equivalent road is obvious: private companies who need the entire capacity, like mines, build railways.
(I will leave it to someone else to find figures for high speed rail vs. an equivalent motorway.)
Do you have a source? I'd expect rail to be more expensive from a capital expenditure perspective (laying rail, ties, buying cars, etc) but much cheaper to operate (coefficient of friction is lower between train wheels and rails than with rubber tires and roads, optimal speeding and slowing causing less wear on tracks, less downtime as rail repairs are much simpler than road repairs, etc)
In the UK, Network Rail spends about £150k per track kilometer per year on maintenance and renewal. Track needs constant maintenance through ballast redistribution and compaction to maintain track geometry; the rail itself needs to be ground regularly to maintain its shape; points systems need to be maintained, as well as signaling systems, earthworks and embankments, even vegetation.
Maintenance costs for major roads in the UK (trunk motorways and A roads) is something about half that.
All Network Rail railways: £4479M / 20,000 miles of track = £140000/km
Strategic Road Network: £700M / 4,436 miles = £98000/km
Not included: cost of pollution, injuries and deaths on the roads.
Not considered: potential and actual capacity of the roads vs the railways, potential for historic underinvestment meaning higher current costs, whether these statistics mean a single track/road lane or all the tracks/lanes, usage costs for passengers and freight.
A breakdown of the railways costs would be useful for a better comparison, i.e. major lines only.
You need to divide maintenance by the actual usage of the infrastructure. Railway can handle much larger usage of the infrastructure per km than a motorway can. You may need 4 motorway lanes to support the usage of a single train track in order to handle the same capacity. Per capita, rail costs tend to be a lot lower as rail can handle much more than 2x motorway throughput.
I really don't, if my point is to rebut the statement "the whole point of trains is that expenses are largely one-off."
I love trains. I used them all the time when I lived in the U.K. and in Japan. I've ridden Amtrak from New York to San Francisco, and the Orient Express. They are, however, very much not a one-and-done investment as is being suggested elsewhere in this thread.
People are largely familiar with road maintenance, but most of them have no idea at all about maintenance of the railway.
As an American who doesn't drive, the experience of trains in the EU compared to the US is just delightful. Yes, there are super cheap flights and I used them often for longer haul trips but the trains were always amazing- I've done trips including Mariupol to Lviv, Budapest to Berlin, and Berlin to Munich and always had a great experience. The Romania-Chisinau line is quite old but part of its charm. I see a lot of people talking about the expense compared to the cheap flights- those are solid and I've used them a lot but after you factor in the waiting time at airports, the unexpected fees in case your bag is a kilo too heavy, the uber to and from a far away airport, etc. it's really not that much of a difference. There is no comparison to trains in the U.S. (e.g. I took one for 3 days from DC to LA; while I enjoyed it, it was a slough with no real food facilities for the passengers not in sleeper cars, old chairs, etc.). I hope there will be more investment, especially in the Baltics.
Sadly, anyone noticeably younger than me missed the chance to ride the Hellas Express (Dortmund to Athens). 3 days, 2 nights. Rode it twice. Then Yugoslavia came apart, war broke out, and the Hellas Express was no more.
That would have been incredible. I had actually started one journey in Athens and did the usual beach thing on an island before flying to Hungary to begin a train trip up to Germany (where I was starting a new job some days later). I would certainly have taken a train if I could. I had a chance to spend a few days in Albania and Serbia just before the pandemic and was very pleasantly surprised as to the countries. I don't know why but Albania I had a picture in my head as a very Soviet brutal country stuck in the mid 1900's but I think I saw far more prosperity in Tirana than say in Skopje.
> The Romania-Chisinau line is quite old but part of its charm.
As a tourist when you have all the time in the world, I would agree it's part of the charm. When the development of your economy depends on such a neglected and terrible line, it's an unbelievable nightmare for people living in either country (Personal anecdotes support this).
I remember going to Crimea one summer some 20 years ago, it took almost 40 hours but boy it was something I'll never forget! Especially the babushkas with local produce, pelmeni and so on at every stop so you could buy them (so cheaply) just grabbing them from their hands through the window. Delicious food, great views and an excellent company.
On the other side of the equations are superfast trains like the TGV, this one is expensive but in my humble opinion it is faster than plane on routes like Paris-Lyon and I'll take train over plane on any day at distances shorter than 500-700km.
Ah that sounds amazing! On the trains in Ukraine they did still have the babushkas hawking produce and fish at the stops and I have had some lovely conversations on these trains but I would have loved to go to Crimea. A Siberian railway trip is still on the bucket list but I will wait until things are less contentious and so I'm not putting dollars into the hands of the Putin regime.
> I hope there will be more investment, especially in the Baltics.
There is an ongoing development, Rail Baltica, European gauge, being built to join Helsinki through the Baltic states, to Poland, which will link up with Germany. The end date has slipped (it was supposed to be in 2024, now it's pushed to 2026) but construction is already ongoing, and it looks quite promising.
Yes, I was thinking specifically about this. I was working for the Estonian gov a while back and thought it would be great for this to be pushed forward; unfortunately the mistiming probably would have killed that new mall that was built around one of the stations if covid didn't. But maybe they'll get that and the tunnel to Helsinki done at the same time :)
trains are weird because most European countries they are sorta nice but carry some kind of sizeable cruft. be if general disrepair or weird privatization incentives
Trains are great for no more than 600km range trips. I live in Spain, and it's great to get into the train without doing all the procedures you do with a plane. I arrive to the station 10 mins before departure and I never had troubles. With airplanes I need to be there 1 hour before. Then you spend another 30 mins getting into the plane, following the instructions for just only 1h trip. The same trip Barcelona -> Madrid can be done without all the hasle and even faster than in airplanes, in addition, you arrive in the center of the city, much better connected than the airport, where you spend another half an hour to reach the city center.
In my experience, airplanes are worth once you talk about trips over 800km. Trips that you cannot do in less than 2 hours of train.
I used to do Cologne-Munich _all_the_effing_time (~600km, door-to-door 6-7h, depending on connection). You can save about 1h by taking a flight, but then you'll never have a solid chunk of at least one 1h to do anything within.
And that's given the current shitty track system. The only bit of genuine high-sped rail on that connection is Frankfurt-Cologne, maybe a quarter of the trip. Top speed is around 300 km/h on that bit; otherwise around 200, sometimes less. One point of comparison: The fully modernized Berlin-Munich track is about the same length; some trains take less than 4 h and that's with stops along the way.
This is a trip that I'm very familiar with, but it's very typical [0]. Note that some countries have chosen different tradeoffs - e.g., France and Spain with their ultra-fast point-to-point connections, eschewing a more dense high-speed net.
The point of all this being: Trains already work great, and can still get quite a bit better with investment - certainly quite some ways above 600 km trips.
I wouldn't look at trip time alone, but uninterrupted time during which you can do work. On most brief flights there barely is any. By contrast, for a business traveler, a long high-speed rail trip can simply be the first part of the day.
I completely agree, except I think trains have a much higher competitive range, possibly up to 1,000 km .
With a plane 1,000 km trip including all things you mention like arriving at the airport in advance, boarding, finding your way back to the city center, etc. would come easily to 4-5 hours when you calculate it door-to-door. This could be comparable to a train at 200-250 km/h.
Also, trains tend to be more punctual and less prone to delays compared to planes. And arriving in the city center as opposed to 40-50 kms out is a big advantage indeed.
I agree here, some lines and trains in Europe go up to 300 kmh (last one I've tried was actually in Spain, on par with French TGV).
Plus airports have this pesky habit of losing all your luggage, even on fairly trivial flights. Recently my journey was Geneva -> Barcelona -> Seville, and they lost my big luggage with complete paraglider (4000+ euro) and other stuff (cca 1000 euro). For a week, they couldn't even locate it, had to buy tons of stuff and rent basic paraglider from school and I started saying goodbye to all equipment. No real compensation for anything. Then it just showed up in place I told them to deliver to, not even apology (vueling airlines, but I blame airports for this more than airline).
That's just one sample out of quite a few on how to ruin your dream vacation by flying.
I did 1000km in airplane (also i was private pilot) and it's a 1h trip. Barcelona -> Santiago is max 1h. I can spend another hour getting into the airport, the total trip will not go more than 3 hours, but in Train it will take me 8hs.
I think it's really difficult to average 200-250 km/h over 1,000 km with a train. I would guess the trains that average that speed would be much shorter trips.
Various Shinkansen lines average that much or higher for long stretches. To be fair, there isn't a 1000km line in Japan, but ~500km at those speeds should indicate that it's possible. Sanyo runs at near maximum operating speed (300km/h) for most of its >500km run.
We don't have such train lines that do that much kms. We have fast lines, like max 600km. Longer lines have trains who are +180max. And each trip is like 7-8 hours.
Im French rail planning, rail is considered competitive with air travel up to 3h. In German planning, up to 4h. With 250km/h average, that would allow up to 1000km.
Plus, one could try to revive night trains. Arriving at 9am in the morning in some far away city, we’ll rested, would be useful both for vacations and business trips. And could easily allow distances of 1500km even without having high speed rail lines everywhere, or somewhat longer distances with.
Taking the night train is a common way to travel within Finland. By train, it takes around 10 hours and 1000-1100km north to Lapland (taking Helsinki-Levi as example). It's possible to take a local flight at vastly higher prices and no room for the equipment people tend to take along for such trips, such as skis and hiking gear.
In central Europe, commuting by train is also pretty common. You might get packed pretty tightly at the most busy commuting times, but you avoid the huge traffic jams in and out of major cities which can waste hours of your day.
>New sleeper train connections are cropping up across Europe. The Austrian operator ÖBB Nightjet has overnight services to cities like Rome, Milan, Brussels and Amsterdam, and recently initiated a Vienna-Paris overnight link.
There are several connections through the alps being built right now. Gotthard base tunnel through Switzerland, Brenner Base Tunnel through Austria/Italy, and a connection Italy/France. Not all connections through Europe go through the Alps, and u can get a decent average speed even if occasionally dropping below the maximum speed for some rough areas.
I am from the alps, so I am quite aware of this. Still, I can go from Berlin to Munich in the same time it takes me to get through half of Austria as of now. The Brenne Base Tunnel is a needed thing (my grandparents live in the area where traffic is currently going through) but by my judgment it will be too little, too late.
I'm up for investing in faster trains, like Magrevs or even faster japanese who can reach +600km/h, that would be a game changer, you can transport four times more efficiently.
The problem at least in parts of Europe is that trains are not always competitive in terms of pricing, especially when it comes to fast connections. Airplane tickets are sometimes just stupidly cheap.
Also, in Germany trains are very often late or have other issues.
Nevertheless, I agree that it's more relaxed to go by train most of the time (unless it's super crowded) and I'll sometimes pay extra for that comfort.
Yeah, small delays are happening constantly, bigger delays very often, you will always see a few ICEs running 120+ min late. Many malfunctions and building sites. Some tickets are horribly expensive or straight up overpriced and then knowing the arcane system behind pricing is required to pick the right ticket for the right price.
It's also a dense network with lots of passengers and I do manage to get around so there's that? But you were probably thinking of Switzerland, not Germany :o)
Germany tried to privatise rail transport but kind-of half-assed it, so now you have a system which is basically the worst of both worlds: Not customer-centric at all, but at the same time investing more money in high-prestige projects (sometimes at the other end of the world) than in fixing the problems with badly maintained infrastructure at home.
> it's great to get into the train without doing all the procedures you do with a plane.
Well, if they just let go of the security theater and phobias, we could theoretically have a situation where you just board with no procedures, like on a train: Ride a local train/metro/bus up to the larger train station, flash your card or pass or what-not, maybe flash your passport, put your suitcase on the baggage cart or beltway going up to the cargo hold, and get on the plane. No queues, no checks and no nothing - basically like a train.
I realize it's not that trivial to switch to that way of thinking of air travel, but again - not impossible.
Barcelona-Madrid vía the "Puente Aéreo" (air bridge, freely translated) is the closest I have seen. There are departures every half hour, you buy one ticket and can take any of them. Boarding is also very fast.
Have you been in a "Mediterranean corridor" train? It can take 6-4h to get from Valencia to Barcelona. Maybe the AVE is an outlier. And it isn't available everywhere exactly. Curious that the 2nd and 3rd biggest cities are so badly connected. The fuel it took driving alone in a car was cheaper (2018) than those trains also.
I was in Spain recently and while the trains were as pleasant/convenient as I expected, I was definitely surprised by how expensive it was. Even more so, given how (relatively) cheap the rest of the trip was.
After reading some of the comments on the price of train tickets, and while it's true trains are on paper more expensive, there are some things to consider:
* prices and conditions vary between countries. For example, in Germany your children can travel for free until 14, but apparently this is not universal and it can be a big difference for families
* in a lot of countries you can pay for discount cards and get 25/50 percent off. Even in places like Switzerland where the prices are notoriously high, the discount card is comparatively cheap and to my understanding it's valid on pretty much all public transportation (e.g. city trams). If you travel even slightly frequently, it pays for itself quickly.
* similar to planes, trains in some countries offer discounted prices if you book in advance, and for a specific train. E.g. on my last trip to Switzerland, the price was around 160, but I paid 40 for one leg (even first class!) and going back it was 120 because I had the 25% off card. The card itself cost around 60 so it basically was worth it for one trip. When I was a student 10 years ago, I would travel to e.g. Budapest on a German train with their "Europe Special" ticket for 40 (30 with 25% off). You had to book in advance, but this is true for planes as well if you want something really cheap.
* others have commented on this, but there are a ton of external costs for planes and cars. Usually a taxi to the airport, or parking or whatnot. Trains in comparison put you mostly in the city centre and quite often bundle a city ticket so you can hop on a bus, tram or subway to your final destination.
* planes in Europe don't (always?) pay VAT on international travel. that is quite a big difference in the total price
* trains even if not always punctual often come with a guarantee, meaning you can get money back for a delay. In Germany it's 25% if you are more than an hour late, and 50% for two hours. My family spent over two hours a couple days ago sitting on a cramped plane because they could not take off from Berlin, the only thing they can do about it is cry.
There are things that are quite infuriating about trains and train companies, but IMHO their prices are not all that unreasonable. The comfort and speed for short and intermediate trips also has its price im general.
I love the experience of travelling in Europe by train, but it certainly is cumbersome and expensive.
I took a car train from Hamburg to Vienna last year. Drive the car into the train, and get a sleeping coach for the 14 hour journey - as comfortable a journey I could ask for. Except it cost about €1000 if I remember correctly for my family. I still preferred it because it negated the need to rent a car in Austria, and also saved in baggage costs on a flight. However, if trains could be scaled up, the costs would come down and become competitive even for people who aren’t needing those perks like baggage and car transport.
The train (and tracks) are not as compatible across Europe as I thought. You can travel from Denmark to Austria by train, but be ready to change from Danish train to German, to Austrian train because of different track or signaling systems. Now, the anxiety is on the passenger to not miss a connection at each of those countries (sometimes at the middle of the night).
If EU regulated the train system as a continent, and brought in a whole “European rail system” and not just a ticketing system that works with individual country systems, that would be the beginning of rail as a great transport option. I still have hopes that it’d happen. I just wish it will happen sooner and in my life time.
> The train (and tracks) are not as compatible across Europe as I thought.
Th gauge is the same in many countries, but signalling and power is not. Some train engines are ok with it, others are not, train cars are usually fine. They change engines on multi-country trips, but this only takes a few minutes and can be safely ignored. It's still the same train.
I'm not arguing that it's cheap, just that it's not that expensive compared to other means of transportation. If it's more expensive at all.
But I will argue to death that it's not cumbersome :-). I guess it depends on the country, but the only cumbersome thing are the many different options and fares where it's usually difficult to figure out what the cheapest one is. Changing trains... don't know, it's rare for me to use only one train, and I've never had issues with it other than the train being late and missing a connection. Otherwise it's easy and I even like it, since it feels faster. My record is 7 trains :-).
I’m quite familiar with both Germany and Switzerland trains, an interesting difference is that in Switzerland the default is a flexible ticket, you buy it for the day and can use it an any time, and using any train you want that goes in the correct direction. And since a few years SBB/CFF let’s you get a reduction if you get instead a non-flexible tickets (so with a strict time and train, called “dégriffé” in French).
In Germany the default is a non-flexible ticket, and you can pay for a more expensive flexible one.
As a result the default train experience in Switzerland feels more expensive but with a way to get a discount, while Germany is the opposite. And people in Germany plan their train trips waaaaaay earlier in advance to be sure they have the cheapest prices (the earlier you book the cheaper it is) and flexible tickets are mostly used for business trips.
There is no default, until recently it always showed both the reduced and full price, but you always had to manually select what you want on the 2nd screen.
Anyway, I'm neither German nor Swiss, but I think there are certain prejudices about both countries. Germans might look to save money, but realistically everybody needs to plan their trip somewhat in advance, unless it's a short weekend trip. I made the mistake recently of not booking my train from Switzerland in advance because I didn't know when I exactly need to go and figured what the hell, I'll just buy it when I figure it out. Big mistake, almost everything was booked out, and I barely made it home.
Also, SBB likes to complain about DB, and there might be truth to some criticism, but realistically the two companies don't solve the same problems, in terms of passenger count, distances traveled and overall complexity.
At least in Switzerland the discounted system for fixed-trips is relatively recent (admittedly I left the country a while ago so we may be talking about a different time frame).
I didn't mean to say one way or the other is bad (your use of "prejudices" has a negative connotation, which isn't what I wanted to highlight). I'm Swiss, lived there for ~25 years, and now live in Germany since a good amount of time. And it was funny to observe this difference in expectations and behaviours between the two countries.
I've never seen SBB/CFF complain about Deutsche Bahn so I'm not sure what you mean here. I personally like both groups, their services are really good IMHO.
> Germans might look to save money, but realistically everybody needs to plan their trip somewhat in advance, unless it's a short weekend trip
I mean, I can generally agree here, but the German approach to saving money is waaaay more extreme than what I've experiences living in other countries! People book their trips like 6 months in advance to have some reductions, and will use every single way to save a few cents!
(Note that I'm from the French speaking side of Switzerland, which is culturally quite different from the German speaking side)
One other thing that is easily forgotten, trains are much safer and feel safer.
In road traffic there are maybe 50 deaths per year per million people (wild guess, but not that far off). With trains in Europe, it's not even 1 per year per million. I don't have to think about all the "almost-accidents" that are part of road traffic. This does come with a price, but buying a newer and safer car also comes with a price.
I disagree, a car with 4 passengers is going to have far more deaths per billion miles than a car with 1 passenger, but the risks per passenger is about the same.
That’s why people use deaths per passenger mile to compare things.
...That's what I have said? The only thing that could be unclear about my comment is that I have meant distance traveled per passenger, not per vehicle.
Unfortunately, there’s no compensation for this flight.
Also I think from experience of other people it's generally a hassle to the point that most people outsource it to some kind of a company for a fee. On (german) trains you ask for a form, fill it out and get the money back, hassle free.
It seems likely that hydrogen will replace diesel in trains. Companies like Alstom[1], PESA[2] and Talgo[3] are developing hydrogen trains. Germany has already started deploying them on a small scale[4], while Poland is planning to[5].
Bad idea in mi opinion, this is a solved problem, overhead wires, the amount of energy lost between the converting water into hydrogen and then back into water to get electricity can be as high as 70%, it's just a bad idea when you can use that energy directly using wire to get the same job done
Overhead wires would involve a significant infrastructure investment. Not too much of an issue with more densely populated areas like Europe - and countries like France and Japan already do use overhead wires - but it is not cost competitive in sparse locations like much of North America.
It's true that it's contingent on a carbon-free source of hydrogen. But if something like thermochemical hydrogen production through nuclear [1] or solar takes off, hydrogen fuel represents an energy-dense fuel that could be used in lieu of fossil fuels in many applications.
> Overhead wires would involve a significant infrastructure investment.
Yeah building dozens of large scale hydrogen plants, trenching and welding pipelines, building massive excess of necessary renewable energy, figuring distribution networks, deciding storage & container standards, house retrofits etc to run our society will be much easier than ...(checks notes)... Hanging wires
A hydrogen economy is likely going to be developed anyway, to decarbonize air transport and maritime shipping. Piggy backing on top of this maybe be cheaper than the ~$700 billion (probably closer to a trillion if we include Canadian rail) required to electrify North American rail transport.
Most rail stations are wired for water and electricity already, and small scale hydrogen crackers are already being deployed commercially in the US.
That addresses all your concerns, except maybe that people will want to produce hydrogen at home from their own solar arrays. That's expensive, but arguably unnecessary, since the hydrogen would mostly just be used to power cars.
> "Countries like France and Japan already do use overhead wires"
Don't most countries already use these? World wide, a third of all rails is electrified in some way, and for long-distance rail, that's bound to be overhead.
Most European rail is electrified. So hydrogen or any other diesel replacement is only relevant for very rural, very sparsely used lines.
Even in Japan, about 30% of rail (by distance) is not electrified. It’s more than 40% in France. Generally these are lower usage, so electrification isn’t justified. Hydrogen might be a good option in cases where the route is too long for batteries.
If a third of all rail is electrified then two thirds are not. Most of North America's railways are not electrified. Be cautious when looking at statistics on electrification: many results specifically only show electrification of passenger railways.
Yeah, the statistics on that are very interesting. Many European countries, but also countries like India, have 70+% of their rail network electrified Even Russia has 51% electrified, but in the US it's only 0.92%, Canada 0.20%, and Mexico 0.12%. No idea why North America is so adverse to electrification.
In total less than 2,000 miles of track are electrified out of 140,000 miles of track [1]. Boston to DC is electrified only on a specific passenger rail line (along with one route to Philadelphia). The only other electric rail lines are short coal-haulers moving coal from mines to coal power plants.
Europe's lines are economical to electrify because of greater density. Electrifying a rail line costs the same regardless of how many trains use it, so it breaks even in dense and frequently traveled routes but not on sparse lines. Guess which is more common in a less densely populated continent like North America?
You have to put up wires and a bunch of posts. Googling around, cost estimates are $4.8 million per track-mile [1]. At 140,000 track miles in the US that's $672 billion to electrify the railway network.
Especially if hydrogen becomes very cheap through something like generation through waste-heat from nuclear power plants, hydrogen propulsion may make more sense.
Interesting. That one diesel HST wasn't very successful. It's been taken out of service again and the line is now operated by a slower train again. This seems to suggest that electric trains are more suitable for high-speed lines, although it's not clear why exactly this diesel train didn't perform the way it should.
It was a 'tilting' train(leaning into the curve). Some part of that mechanism was constructed in wrong ways (too thin), which led to partial cracks, which led to partial derailing, trailing sparks. Which led to investigations of all of them, showing more cracks in development. So they have been "grounded" for a while, conventional trains taking over. Then it was deemed safe to operate them in non-tilting, conventional modes, which led to delays. So Deutsche Bahn wanted their money back, and got it. But no tilting diesel-trains.
I am German. Most of us hate cables that aren't underground (hence the bad internet connectivity, because it's expensive to upgrade the network underground). Based on that I extrapolated. I presumed the same to be the case for these overhead cables, as I don't usually see them where I live.
I'm surprised I must say. I have never ever heard of anyone talking about 'Oberleitungen' being something that we should get rid of. It wouldn't have come to my mind to question them, so that's why I was so baffled (and maybe a bit harsh in my expression).
I think the vast majority of trains will go electric. This is already a mainstream technology (unlike electric cars). Overhead wires or 3rd rails in most places, with batteries where that's not possible or economic. Perhaps hydrogen will have it's niche though (perhaps on low-use railways?).
Hydrogen fuel cells and batteries are roughly comparable technologies.
The main difference is that you can use the power grid to "charge" the fuel cell while it's in motion. You simply generate hydrogen at its destination, then rapidly pump the hydrogen into tanks when it stops.
So, the higher the duty cycle of the vehicle, the more sense hydrogen makes. Also, hydrogen has higher energy density (volume and weight per unit energy are both lower).
For those two reasons, I'd guess long haul, heavy use lines would be the first use case for hydrogen, and that batteries won't ever be particularly competitive for those use cases.
Hydrogen also requires quite a bit of infrastructure that hasn't been built out, whereas railways generally have an electrical supply already. I suspect that will make batteries a lot more competitive in the short term. Hydrogen could make sense if it can overcome those hurdles. But with improvements in battery technology (solid state lithium batteries seem to be coming soon) I wonder if it will ever be better enough to gain adoption.
I'm not against using Hydrogen but the problem is always what are they producing Hydrogen with and how is it more efficient energetically and emission wise?
> what are they producing Hydrogen with and how is it more efficient energetically and emission wise?
Even if it is just Blue hydrogen being burnt here, the splitter plants can have some carbon capture in it which would be impossible to install on a moving train (beats diesel and also direct LNG burning).
That said, with trains there's no real argument against electrification. The wheels have been electrically driven for a few decades now. It's not like they need to come up with motors or work out batteries.
Hydrogen can be produced electrically from water. A positively stupendous amount of electrolysis equipment will need to be built out, but there will be demand for as much as can be produced. Burning hydrogen produces mainly water. Burned in an engine, it also produces nitrous oxides, so probably some ammonia would be dissolved in to scavenge that.
Liquid hydrogen takes up a lot more room than kerosene. The insulated liquid-hydrogen tank is quite a lot bigger than the kerosene tank -- maybe it is a whole other car -- but so what? Room on a train is cheap. What matters is weight. The tank is light, and the weight of LH2 needed to go the same distance is much less. The difference is weight that doesn't itself need to be transported.
Furthermore, the LH2 can be produced and banked on-site at the railyard, and during peak-production hours, so cheaply.
So, a win all around. Not as big a win as LH2-powered aircraft, but better, and much easier to retrofit.
> Hydrogen can be produced electrically from water.
Which adds three energy transformation steps (Electricity for H2O to H2 + compression, H2 + 02 to water and heat, water and heat to mechanical movement) as opposed to electricity to motor.
Solar panels on the train car roofs would utterly fail to propel the train, even at noon. So, the energy has to be concentrated somehow. Batteries are heavy, and also involve a pair of chemical transformations. Hydrogen is the single most energy-dense (per unit mass) medium.
But hydrogen is not best compressed, but liquified. There might be some value in compressing it on the way to liquifaction. Liquifying hydrogen consumes some energy too.
A tanker that holds 80,000 pounds of kerosine will hold about 8000 pounds of LH2 in the same dimensionality. 0.07 = density of LH2, Density of water 1.0, kerosine 0.7 +/- varies with grade. So it take 10 times the cubeage plus Dewar grade insulation. At a permeant depot they will have a super refrigerator to condense boil off into LH2. They are trying to get a viable clathrate hydrate to hold a higher density form of bound but not reacted Hydrogen
The measure of fuel you need to carry is not weight, but energy content. It takes a much smaller weight of LH2 to match the energy content of diesel. So, correspondingly less than 10x volume. It is this better "gravimetric energy density" that makes LH2 an attractive fuel in many cases. You end up needing only about 2-3x tankage space, including the insulation.
Better gravimetric energy density doesn't make so much difference for a train, so its other advantages -- production on-site, zero emissions, carbon-neutral -- are more important.
At the trainyard, the LH2 would be banked in an underground tank where insulation is easy. It is not necessary to refrigerate it after it is liquified. It will gradually boil off, so you just make more anytime the level goes down, whether from boil-off or pumping out to a locomotive tank.
There is truth in that energy density. but it is still cheaper energetically to chill boil off to liquid back to the tank that to make new hot hydrogen you then chill to liquid back to the tank. The end game of clathrate storage will solve many of these problems.
True, keeping the LH2 below its boiling point is, energetically, strictly cheaper than producing as much new hydrogen as would have boiled off, and then chilling that... But, it incurs the added complexity cost of building refrigeration plumbing into the tank, and maintaining that. That could mean the tank has to be above ground, for easy access (which might be needed anyway).
My expectation was that native electrical energy will be cheap enough that wasting some is better than complicating your system. Each tradeoff will be an engineering analysis. In this case it will all depend on how good your insulation is, which is of course better in an underground tank. Many old conventions will be overturned as the marginal cost of electrical power at peak times gets cheaper.
Yes, flow batteries, gravity batteries and high water storage will all make their presence felt. Those ~~20-50 tonne bricks they haul and drop would be costly, but I expect them to make them as strong walled brick shapes, with a lower cost fill - be wise to add salt to limit freezing in cold weather.
Observations from a frequent train traveller in Germany and Japan:
- Train Travel works when the frequency of trains is so high that you do not need to think about "a" connection, but instead just choose the "next" connection.
- Any significant number of delayed trains are a problem when one has important appointments. Morning meetings require an overnight trip, even if an early morning connection would usually work.
- European Train companies produce shitty trains (compare to Japan), lead amongst them Siemens for Deutsche Bahn. Train restaurants are broken too often. A/C breaks down in summer. Alstom TGVs are an exception - if they are pre-Siemens-merger attempt period.
- Electrification of lines is just not happening anymore in Germany. It's politically more sexy to do something with Hydrogen. Very odd.
- Deutsche Bahn is the largest user of Round-Up (Glyphosat) in Germany. Still - vegetation along the tracks causes frequent delays (burning brush, fallen trees), because maintenance crews have been cut.
- By trying to remodel stations cheaply for commerce, most stations in Germany have become unpleasant to navigate. Signage is particularly bad (compared to Japan).
- The mood in the train system has become very aggressive. Drinking groups who ransack compartments, passengers who get angry because of delays and start shouting, conductors who react unprofessionally - it's all just about to blow up.
> Electrification of lines is just not happening anymore in Germany. It's politically more sexy to do something with Hydrogen. Very odd.
"Odd" is a fine euphemism to describe Germany's energy strategy.
> By trying to remodel stations cheaply for commerce, most stations in Germany have become unpleasant to navigate. Signage is particularly bad (compared to Japan)
Yes... Parisian train stations are also becoming gigantic shopping malls that happen to have train tracks in their premises... an infuriating experience.
Every train station and every airport is a geographical monopoly. There needs to be government regulation that prevents them from forcing people through a huge shopping mall maze.
In Japan, make huge shopping mall near (or into) station is a big part to make train company profitable. Banning them could be bad to make public transport profitable.
My experience has been it's not a maze, though, they just build some commerce at ground level and a lot more on upper levels. The experience of getting to your train isn't very compromised.
I once spent more than 40 minutes in a Parisian train station trying to find a platform; had to ask for help multiple times, all the signs pointed to a general direction across a hall.
A couple weeks later I was in the London underground, felt like I could not get lost there if I tried.
>- By trying to remodel stations cheaply for commerce, most stations in Germany have become unpleasant to navigate. Signage is particularly bad (compared to Japan).
That's interesting. What are the worst examples of this? I had found some Japanese stations rather labyrinthine too, especially Tokyo ones with multiple public/private systems and above/underground malls cobbled together like Shinjuku, so I'm surprised that the European experience is worse.
It's a little unfair to compare to Shinjuku, which is the busiest station in the world. Sure, some of the big Tokyo stations can be mazes, but the signage is always very clear. No German stations are really dealing with comparable density either.
Frequent problems and breakage. Just last week one train couldn’t continue because of a stuck door. Another had no food because the water wasn’t running in the galley.
Also they are not accessible. Strollers are inconvenient to bring - wheelchairs are a nightmare.
I used to travel frequently between Vienna and Paris (to visit relatives in Paris) and I quickly stopped flying between the two cities when I discovered the city-to-city train then called the 'Mozart' (it ceased service in 2007): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_(train).
I found that whilst the duration of the flying time was considerably shorter than the train trip the overall flying time was still quite long given all the rigmarole at the airports and getting to and from them.
I found that traveling this intercity circuit on the Mozart much more enjoyable and relaxing than flying even though the trip took typically between 13 and 14 hours (Wiki says 13h10), the food was quite excellent (for a train) and the trips were in the daytime so there was much scenery to look at. When not doing that I could occupy myself with written/paperwork work or read a book and not be interrupted. What was really excellent about the Mozart was that it was not only an intercity train but also it took me directly to the very heart of both cities—there was no need to travel to the outskirts of the cities to their airports (I've always found traveling to and from airports a nuisance and pain so I've always considered train travel a great advantage over flying (except when flying exceptionally long distances, intercontinental, etc.).
I've not done that circuit for quite some years now and I'm sorry to see the Mozart service terminated. After reading the article I did a check on its replacement service and it seems that now a section of the trip is by TGV and that there are now two changes between the cities. Despite the introduction of the TGV, the travel time between Paris and Vienna is 13h15 — which is all of 5 minutes longer than the nominal time taken by the Mozart. Shame really.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but believe that Europe's investment in passenger train transport will pay off handsomely. When I was doing a lot of traveling around Europe by train I found most of the services quite excellent—much more so than in Anglophone countries—and I reckon that the main reason for this is that culturally the Europeans seem to be much more at home with and adapted to train travel. As such, it's very unlikely that that investment in trains will be wasted.
You can also do this journey by Nightjet now, takes a bit longer (14 hours) but you can sleep through most of the time. There are also a few options for single change journeys (eg via Zürich) but they might not be the fastest.
Thanks for that info, I've already looked up the timetable and current fares and the prices are more reasonable than I thought they'd be. From a somewhat vague memory of Mozart's fares, I reckon these current prices are even cheaper than they were back then (which seems strange—perhaps my memory is wrong). Or it may be that SNCF uses a different more competitive pricing structure than did the former. It's also possible that I've screwed up the conversion from Austrian shillings to Euros (I'll give it some more thought).
Moreover, I thought the couchette prices to be very competitive to what I've experience in the past. (Again, my memory may not be correct but I base that comparison on my recollection on what I thought I paid for my last couchette which was from Paris to Bordeaux.)
Also, the option to go via Zürich is certainly most welcome, one of which I'd gladly take advantage.
This all reminds me that I must return to Vienna again soon (I lived there long enough to consider it my second home). :(
> Last year, SNCF relaunched overnight services between Paris and Nice, with tickets starting as low as 19 euros, about $21, for a midweek low-season ticket. That compares with 31 euros, not including baggage fees or the cost of airport transfers, for a short flight on EasyJet
These prices are inconceivable in the US, where competition in air travel has essentially been eliminated.
Air travel is expensive. Airframe maintenance is expensive and labor intensive. Pilots are highly skilled professionals and need to be paid as such. Jet fuel is expensive. Handling baggage is a logistical challenge. Due to the nature of aircraft, they have low limits on passenger capacity. The government subsidizes air travel into rural areas through the Essential Air Services with about 1/6th the budget it puts into Amtrak. The US government frequently "bails out" airline companies and spends more money than they do on the yearly budget of Amtrak. This ignores the bevvy of subsidizes city governments offer airports to stay in business.
Like most forms of infrastructure, American traveling preferences are driven mostly by a mixture of emotion and lobbying. Air travel doesn't make much economic sense and hasn't for years.
Asia often doesn't have any infrastructure in place of air travel. The US and Europe have large roadways and rail networks for transportation which means airfare is more expensive in relation. Much of Asia has no road or rail network in place that can support the capacity that air travel offers and many governments in Asia cannot fund a road or rail project of sufficient magnitude to offer a compelling alternative. In Europe jet fuel is mostly untaxed and distances in Europe are shorter so less fuel is spent moving passengers from city-to-city.
EasyJet from Dublin to Milan is so cheap, as are international flights like KL to Taiwan These are distances that aren’t feasible to drive even if they were on the same landmass.
And as you say europe also has a dense road network. The fuel tax is interesting, definitely, but in my US/EU comparison price delta is often a factor of five or more.
Flights between KL and Taiwan are cheaper because labor and maintenance is cheap thanks to the much lower wages in KL and Taiwan compared to Europe and the US (so everything from maintenance to refueling is cheaper).
As far as taxes are concerned, it would be interesting to do a cost breakdown of fuel to see how much of the delta comes from taxes.
The overall industry has been profitable since 2010, peaked at 15% average in 2015. 2020 was a slaughter for obvious reasons.
You have a weird definition of "barely profitable" given the average corporate profit margin in the US is 9% and your claim "others are near 0% most years" is an outright fabrication.
Yes, I was wrong about near 0% for the past decade, although a few of the airlines were near zero for many of the years. But given the volatility, it still does not seem like a big profit margin. Seems like the consolidation was necessary to make them viable businesses. In my lifetime (I am mid 30s), you would have had a really bad time owning a piece of the airline business.
This price isn't representative. To give you an idea, Lyon - Lille tomorrow is between $90 and $130 for a second class ticket. It's a three hours trip. For more context, the median salary in France is about $2000 after tax [1].
Lyon - Lille flight on the other hand for tomorrow is 147 euros (cheap price compared to other days it seems). The flight takes a little bit over an hour, getting to Lyon airport from the city takes about an hour as well (18.20€ with public transport, 50+ with taxi/ride hailing). On the landing end transport to city is luckily cheaper and faster, 45 minutes with public transport, 15 mins and ~20€ with a taxi.
The 31 euro air travel “price” doesn’t include a fuel surcharge, airport fees, baggage fees, then a nice fat 20% VAT tax on top, etc, all of which can often exceed the “price” itself. Maybe you should start an airline and report back.
If air travel in the US was such a profitable biz as you say, airlines wouldn’t be constantly on the brink of insolvency.
As someone who just rode in a sleeper car for the second time. I like amtrak when I can do this. It's completely unreasonable for a round trip, but I did Chicago->Seattle and Chicago to Boston (Where I"m currently here.. and will be flying back tomorrow).
It's a mostly great experience... all due to the scenery you're watching, not so much everything else.
What worries me if it becomes more privatized: You'll see the experience drop a lot more, features you need for long distance trips (big seat+power outlet) removed. You'll get a lot more stressed employees who will create conflicts etc.
What I would like to see:
- More prioritization on autonomous cars
- More frequent routes
- Infrastructure improvements for faster service (We could and should have a hub/spoke model for ICE like passenger rail)
- Support with integration into the communities they connect into. (Build the town around it) Create a standard that local rental car companies are working with the passengers arriving and leaving.
- General equipment refreshes (A lot of it is maintenance by schedule rather than reactory.. a lot of the experience is pretty dirty) Also there is an attitude with the coach passengers that the train is a trashcan because it's already pretty dirty. Being in coach is freaking brutal if you have to be on it more than 9 hours or overnight.
Btw Their employees are a lot more helpful about being functionally helpful when something goes wrong. Airline employees just escalate and pull the "screw you, you won't get help" when something goes wrong in person. (Yea I'm looking at you IAH gate agent that just left the desk right before boarding.. the captain was playing secretary). No the empire builder doesn't have WIFI.. but how will dinner work.. they're more than helpful at explaining it, etc.
Part of the reason that Amtrak is expensive is that it's so slow. For a flight from Chicago to Seattle you only need to pay pilots/flight attendants/etc for around 5 hours of work, whereas for Amtrak it's 46 hours or more.
You can get a California zephyer ticket from Chicago->Seattle for 160 in coach one way. That's a really good deal for 2k+ miles, generous baggage allowance, etc (if you can tolerate that).
Sleepers can go 1k+ for the 2.5d. In the winter (what I did) was 600$. I'm also not paying for the efficency. I'm paying for the experience of the hotel, meals, convenence of travel, and the ability to watch out the window.
Train prices go up a lot (a factor of 2 or more) when it’s close to the time of the train, since the price is based on how full the train is currently booked. You might get cheaper train trips by booking further out.
Buses will still beat the cost, but they’re slower and less comfortable.
I've never seen this personally (living in DC area since 2014). At best, flights were on par and you still had to transport from airport to destination vs being likely in the city center (as noted elsewhere in this thread already) and deal with all the other airport time. Bus is definitely cheaper today though with highly variable experience along the way.
If you consider the time-money spent in security checkpoints and riding taxis it’s a wash. Amtrak is able to charge more because it’s a better experience than a flight! But only on the NY-DC route.
Buses on the northeast corridor will certainly be cheaper. Trains (especially Acela) are competing with flying given the huge amount of business travel.
> given that it's so heavily subsidized by the government
It's not. Until the recent infrastructure bill, Amtrak didn't even have a dedicated yearly budget. Every year they would beg Congress for some money, get some amount less than that, then prioritize what they could given the funding. Moreover roads in the US never pay for themselves, they're just written off as an "economic driver" rather than expected to pay for themselves. Very few roads in the US are toll roads and much of the US is vehemently against toll roads. Fundamentally, public infrastructure is public infrastructure. The public pays for public infrastructure. If we expect Amtrak to be able to fund some non-trivial percentage of its infrastructure costs then we're placing an expectation on Amtrak that the US road and highway system does not have.
Amtrak hasn't built much new rail. Amtrak maintains its rail and rolling stock and buys new rolling stock. Most of Amtrak's rail routes were originally made by the private rail companies that owned American rail during the Industrial era. Even the lines leased by freight rail was originally made by private rail companies. These companies were going bankrupt and the US government created Amtrak as a holding company to deal with selling off or winding down existing rail assets.
Well, it's not really. It makes money on the Northeast Corridor and loses it on (most of)the rest of the country. A profitable Amtrak would basically service Boston to DC.
It starts at 9:30 and arrives at 8:30. So if you're in a sleeper, you're pretty much ready to get to bed when it starts. There's plenty to do on the train if you carry electronics, books, etc.
It is there but I wish there was a more comprehensive network of high speed rail in Europe.
Going from Amsterdam to Spain the plane seems to win on price and travel time.
One thing that isn’t infrastructure but could easily be improved is buying international train tickets. So often I see that one needs to call or you can only book one month ahead.
Note that if you travel from The Netherlands to Spain you might be traversing 6 different railway electrification systems that vary in critical stuff like voltages (and by more than a factor 10!) and possibly Hz, and some are AC and some are DC (not kidding). Also there will be at least 2 incompatible track gauges involved. And I bet other stuff like communications and routing systems are incompatible and safety critical too.
As a result, such a trip would take a long time, even if high-speed rail is a possibility for part of the trip; it's not possible for a simple train to go even most of the way; you'll need to change trains multiple times not just due to logistical issues, but simply to be on a train that can even use the rail you need to traverse.
If we can't fix that (and that's a really hard and expensive problem), we're never going to get a fast connection from the netherlands to spain.
And I'm sure you can find even worse scenarios (say, tack on denmark and germany to that route for 2 more technologically incompatible systems!). Baltic states still use a soviet-derived system, and much of eastern Europe a yet different one.
There's no gauge change. Spain high-speed tracks already use the international one (older tracks still use Iberian gauge). There are already high-speed trains that go to France without stopping at the border.
Right, but that's only if you stick to hi-speed rail. Which isn't a reasonable limitation if you want to travel to Spain more broadly (or, for that matter, from the Netherlands more broadly!)
The point isn't only that there aren't perfectly reasonable routes - there are, and that's great! It's that the overall network is pretty fragmented, and that that does cause issues. If you live in Amsterdam and want to travel to Paris - you're in luck. If you live in Murcia and want to travel to Groningen, you're out of luck. And if you live in the countryside... well, don't even bother.
Yep; I'm sure all these issues are solvable, and not just that - there are obviously workarounds in place even today (after all, you can make such trips). But the need to work around such incompatibilities (whether technically by using more complex trains, or logistically by altering your routes) has downsides. Those downsides make trains less competitive overall compared to other means of transport.
When people ask how planes can be competitive with trains, part of that is surely due to aviation's... interesting... tax situation; but part of it is due to real technical shortcomings in the European rail network.
> Note that if you travel from The Netherlands to Spain you might be traversing 6 different railway electrification systems that vary in critical stuff like voltages (and by more than a factor 10!) and possibly Hz, and some are AC and some are DC (not kidding). Also there will be at least 2 incompatible track gauges involved. And I bet other stuff like communications and routing systems are incompatible and safety critical too.
none of this is nearly as problematic as you seem to think it is. modern powertrains traverse various electrification schemes without difficulty. signaling systems are trending towards ETCS, trains that traverse incompatible signaling systems (eg the eurostar) simply carry a set of onboard signaling equipment for each standard. gauge changes are the most challenging technical limitation in your list, but are a solved problem. spanish talgo's regularly change gauges at speed [1]
> modern powertrains traverse various electrification schemes without difficulty.
Indeed, however the majority of currently existing stock is only fitted for operation in at most one or two countries
> signaling systems are trending towards ETCS
"trending towards" is doing a lot of work here, ETCS rollout has been stalling for ages. New train sets are still being delivered today that do not really support it. Most countries have somewhat understandably not been in a hurry to make the huge investments required to replace their current, working systems with ETCS.
> trains that traverse incompatible signaling systems (eg the eurostar) simply carry a set of onboard signaling equipment for each standard.
Yes, which is extremely expensive and also requires full re-certification for every country, which means that in practice most trains are only certified for one or two countries at most.
None of these would be unsolvable with some more willpower of course, but they are still absolutely an issue today.
Exactly - the issue isn't that any of this is unsolvable; these problems are solved, even today. The issue is that those solutions aren't free, and that they do impose limitations on the quality of service.
I believe you could get from the Netherlands to Spain in just two trips: Amsterdam > Paris in Thalys, and Paris > Madrid in AVE (seasonal) or > Barcelona in TGV (neither involve track gauge change). You could do that in the span of a day and still have spare time, depending on how well the schedules match.
Of course technical hurdles can be worked around - the issue is that those workaround often have limitations and consequences. Trains won't be as interchangeable as they might be. Not all trains and all routes will be chosen because they're ideal from the perspective of traveler's logistics, but to stick to technically more feasible routes. There's going to be cost involved in making trains support multiple systems. Electrical systems can convert between voltages, but doing so efficiently, cheaply and robustly isn't that easy, and they'll take space and weight in the train too.
All those factors reduce the overall efficiency of the network, and they help explain why it's so slow and costly to travel large distances by train - much more so than you'd naively expect given modern train speeds.
For instance, I just tried looking for a connection between Groningen,NL and Murcia, ES. The train connection takes 29-30 hours. Adding busses into the mix reduces that time to 23-24 hours. Avoiding high-speed rail entirely and using a car would take ~21h - despite the trains going much, much faster for long stretches of the trip. By contrast, if you take long trips within e.g. France or Germany countries, it's pretty common for the train to be the fastest option.
The interconnections just aren't great, and I bet part of that poor connectivity is due to the fragmentation in the standards involved.
When you assert that these hurdles aren't impossible to take you're of course correct - but that doesn't mean the hurdles are irrelevant either.
Flying from Stockholm to Copenhagen (or even Malmö or Gothenburg) is often a better alternative to trains. Thankfully there's now an express train to Gothenburg, but that's about it.
I agree that ticketing is terrible. But note that you can take the train from Amsterdam to Barcelona or even Madrid or Sevilla using essentially only high-speed lines (the only segments that aren't high-speed are Amsterdam to Lille and Avignon to Perpignan). So at least on those routes, one can't really complain about the comprehensiveness of European HSR. Amsterdam to Barcelona can be done in 12h17 with two changes, giving an average speed of 100km/h (measuring straight-line distance!).
I wish this was true. European leaders have been speaking a great deal about how much they are going to invest into trains and how they are the future of green transport, but then in reality they are unwilling to do the things that are needed to improve trains or even actively sabotage them. (see e.g. https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2021/derailed-europe-ra...)
Austria is pretty much the only country in the EU that is actually making genuine strides in this area.
One thing that's cool about intercity train travel is that, while high speed rail is an ~=obvious economic miracle, trains can be slow and still be commercially competitive.
I would much rather take an overnight sleeper train than either an early morning flight or a night flight with hotel room. The sleeper train will arrive right to the city center and save a lot of hassle and I always sleep like a rock on sleeper trains.
My impression is that Europeans are 'waking up' to this fundamental difference in value proposition vs aeroplanes and overnight trains are becoming more popular.
I think there’s a good value proposition for high speed rail when it comes to business travel, which is usually same day. But for non business travel, overnight does seem good. However, there is simply not a culture of overnight train in the US. In India, it is really common and many routes can be quite delightful.
Also, train companies were (and RENFE still is) neglecting night trains because their marketing department and direction were more interested in snazzy high-speed trains, so they didn't upgrade old train stock and stopped night services that were still filled to the brim with passengers.
I wonder if there's a master list of "things China and the EU are doing but the USA isn't". Would be interesting, and if you had the data you could do it for things EU isn't doing or China isn't doing.
I'm always surprised by how parochial political debates are "X wouldn't work" when everyone else around the world thinks X is vital.
My dream is a high-speed train from Vancouver to Kelowna and Calgary, with an optional leg to Edmonton. Like a Rocky Mountain Express. I believe this would be a massive driver of economic growth for the West Coast of Canada.
What hurts my soul is that Canada has the wealth to afford it, the engineering chops to build it but we lack the political will. Even more I feel we lack the belief and the vision.
Here in the UK the train to London is five hours and £75. The coach is £15 and eight hours. Four people in a car perhaps £10 a head. Trains are nicer but there is something annoyingly mysterious about the ecomomcs of it all.
You are severely underestimating the cost of the car ride. Fuel is not the only cost, but even this feels low. Five hours by train has to be at least 500km which will be depending on the car on average I guess 35 liters of gas, which at today's prices is more like 60 pounds.
But a car costs a couple pounds every day for registration, insurance, regular maintenance, new parts (tires etc). If you go to London and spend 10 days there, this is easily 50-100 pounds even if it's just parked and doing nothing. Now also add possible parking costs and emergency costs for maintenance if the car breaks down -- a friend of mine went with his car to the seaside with kids a couple years ago, and the car broke down midway. It cost him 2.5k for his local shop to pick it up and repair. The shop on the spot even gave him a 4k quote.
And of course you have the upfront investment for the actual car which is a few thousand for a used car or at least 15 thousand for a new car these days.
Yes I absolutely over simplified to make a quick point. But most people already either have the car with its costs and breakdown coverage or they don't. For what its worth I have made the 250 mile journey in a car on about 25 litres of petrol which is about £40 these days I think. Though sure you could alter a thousand factors to change the results.
Accepting or not that you pay for these costs anyway, they exist. And the more you use your car the sooner you will need to replace it. And certain other costs exist for trains also, not just the price of electricity. A more realistic comparison would be car rental vs train since in both cases you pay for temporary use.
It’s a question of economy of scale. The amount of road vehicle that has been built over the last 150 years vastly supersedes the amount of train over an even longer period. More train, means better train. Hopefully advances in computer aided design will allow some narrowing of that gap.
EDIT: There is also an inherent feature in trains that greatly reduces the rate of progress. With toad vehicles there is very good decoupling between the track and the vehicle, from a design pov. With trains the chassis design is more coupled to the track design. And since you can’t really upgrade track easily, on both train and road, there are more constraints in new train design.
Bus networks are a pretty decent solution as well. Rail is very expensive and there's not that many regions where you can operate it economically. In particular with electrical busses becoming better you can shift a lot of traffic away from personal vehicles on existing infrastructure.
fyi GP’s post is sarcasm. In UK “rail replacement bus” means the train route is cancelled and there’s a replacement bus instead.
Bus networks can work over small high density areas. Johannesburg has been building a bus network with exclusive lanes for years, but it’s designed to work in conjunction with its part complete metro. Cambridge, UK, has limited “busways” which connect the local villages. However, over large distances, I fail to see how buses can be more efficient. A single train can move hundreds of people over hundreds of kilometres, at much higher speeds than a bus, and with very little pollution.
> However, over large distances, I fail to see how buses can be more efficient.
I'd say it can work if there's no existing railway and/or there's not a lot of people traveling this way. Or maybe for short duration, like one or two months a year
Rail replacement buses are what the rail companies lay on when they can't run their trains because of some failure. It isn't an investment in the way you interpreted it.
Culturally we generally consider Europe to mean continental Europe i.e. Europe without the islands. Thus the U.K. being an island nation isn’t part of Europe.
But the definition of Europe will change depending on who you’re talking to and what your talking about.
In my experience, the UK is culturally very similar to the rest of Europe (much more similar then we are to the US, although there is some influence there). This fact is just obscured by the language barrier.
Mostly British people's poor education in languages. It's not that other European languages would be hard for us to learn, it's that most people in the UK de facto don't learn another language to a useful level (presumably because English is so widely spoken that we can get away without doing so). Which makes it very difficult for most of us to engage with European culture, media, etc even though it's often quite similar to our own and I suspect would otherwise interest us.
Ha yes well... "the continent" refers to the European land mass. C.f. "continental breakfast". But the UK is part of the European continent in the continental shelf sense. The word "continent" is not really well defined. Here's a nice video about it:
In the UK, 'Europe' in this kind of context has almost always meant 'the continental mainland'. That's not a Brexit thing - that's the terminology for as long as I've been alive.
A lot of the rail replacement currently is due to staff sickness ...
Covid has hit a lot of things very badly.
Positively, the government has heavily supported rail through the pandemic.
(estimated 22 billion pounds in 2020-21, up from 11 billion in 2019-20) (1)
Mostly to make up for loss of passenger ticket income.
Investment in High Speed 2 is also continuing despite the current situation, which I'm relatively hopeful about.
On the other hand the government has demanded cutbacks on operations to possibly 80% or less of pre-covid, and there seems to be a lot of overcrowding in some areas where the demand has rebounded faster. There is also a fairly widespread withdrawal of much of the onboard catering :-(
I love night trains. Europe has the right size to make them work well, i.e. i can get on a train in the evening in the middle of Germany and wake up at the Mediterranean coast of Croatia. Trains starting in the late evening in the north or south of Germany could arrive at the other end (a distance of 900km) the next morning.
You produce less CO2, stay one night less in the hotel at your destination, everything is less stressful and you arrive well-rested.
Unfortunately, Germany got rid of all of their night trains in 2016 so we have to rely on other countries' trains. I'm not aware of any plans to get night trains back. I hope this will change!
Without national night trains, flights within Germany will remain attractive.
I feel that when the total cost of rail is taken into account, there are only a few very high density areas or high traffic routes where they make sense. I was recently reading about how large stretches of China's bullet train system cost tens of billions of dollars, and ongoing expenditure of billions more, and have hardly enough traffic to justify their maintenance, let alone their construction costs. There are some routes that are well utilized, but it seems that when you empower the government to make such infrastructure, there is massive malinvestment ... and its hard to know what the alternative could have been without such centralized planning.
You can’t just look at the income from fare and use that to justify the construction cost. The train may have brought development and investment into the area that wouldn’t have happened otherwise earning tax for the government in other ways. Highways/interstates in the US would have been an infinite percentage of loss with your original assumption since they don’t produce anything directly.
Agree. Trains make perfect sense in metro areas like London, Berlin, Paris, Frankfurt, etc. Everywhere else, they are a complete waste of money, are difficult to run on a regular schedule, service only narrow corridors, are inconvenient to get to/from for daily commutes and increase total commute time 2+ times. To increase use of public transport, we need to increase convenience, not reduce cost.
Train's bonus over driving a car is that I have no chance to kill/break anyone/anything. IMO people should think driving a car is a special operation that have high risk in daily basis.
People want to use trains and we want people to use trains -- which means whatever is left over is an irrelevant detail. We should subsidize it more and invest more.
I lived in the south of France for a while and it always struck me that instead of one huge, heavy engine pulling ten cars, arriving once an hour, along that stretch (from Cannes to Menton), it would be better served to have light, individual cars that ran every five minutes. (More like a large tram.)
We can do so much better. And it will happen the minute we get the greed of the oil/auto/airline industries from getting in our way.
Rail travel here in Sweden is unfortunately not reliable at all. In february only 75% of long distance and 90% of short distance trips were on time. Many departures were canceled due to a myriad of problems ranging from technical issues with the tracks caused by poor maintenance, to staffing problems caused by staff being off sick or failures of the new staff planning system to allocate staff. The problems aren’t uniform, some parts of the country are worse affected.
The train is fantastic when it runs but it takes a heavy toll on quality of life for thousands of commuters when they unexpectedly have to spend several hours a day every week waiting for trains that don’t work. Today my partner spent 3 hours on what should be a 70 minute commute.
Instead of spending much more on maintenance (which has been underfunded and mismanaged for years) to increase reliability the government is spending billions to build a new fancy high speed line between Stockholm and Gothenburg. I guess maintenance and reliability aren’t sexy enough for political campaigning.
Typical distance between European capitals is ~500km. It is less than an hour net time by plane, but adding travel from city center to the airport, check in, security check, waiting time, waiting for luggage, travel from destination airport to city center - all those are compounding into 4-5 hours door to door depending on road traffic. High speed train is about the same or even better, and you have internet connection on board all the time.
You can do Sacramento–San Francisco–San Jose–Los Angeles–Las Vegas–Salty Lake City–Reno–Sacramento (round trip) in 2500km as the crow flies, with as longest stretch 700km (SLS–Reno) and an average of 300km (of course you can then branch off and make lower-speed connections to towns in between). Checking inhabitants on Wikipedia for a few real quick, it seems they're bigger in my imagination (or in movies perhaps) than in reality, e.g. Reno is only like 200k inhabitants, but at least to/from, say, Los Angeles, which is a small country in itself from my Beneluxian perspective, there has to be travel demand. Or between SF and SJ, they're so close and there's other stops you can make in between. Hard to retrofit into a city if there's no existing train or metro that can at least pave the way to the edge of town, but otherwise it's hard to imagine it wouldn't earn itself back in a handful of years if it doesn't exist yet.
Across a continent east-to-west is obviously less practical, same with any other continent, but it looks to me like connecting big cities that are similarly nearby as European big cities isn't the problem. It's probably more about everyone needing a car anyway, extremely low fuel prices, public transport is deemed for peasants, no good walking/cycling/bus options to/from stations, that sort of issues (it's a thing here as well, a rich German has a lot of trouble getting into a bus when they can drive something fancy instead—of course I'm generalizing and this doesn't apply to every German with money).
I didn't write my comment with "as opposed" sentiment in mind, but can't help to wonder what is the typical distance between US capitals. So, wow, thanks for that piece of data!
I also think there's a hen and egg problem. To build a rail road you need to buy the land strip between two stations, and in today's US you can't just do it because someone knowing about your venture and how you cannot succeed without having all the land - will just ask any enormous price knowing you won't have a choice. I think the whole idea of hyperloop was born on that restriction - because buying places for support pillars and making the whole system more or less silent making it at least viable.
In EU railroads are there for 100+ years, all the land under them is belong to government or railroad companies.
That’s going to be tough: the bit about competing with low cost flights. We flew Ryan air to Italy for 50 bucks a person each way. By train would have been much more expensive and taken a ton longer.
But let’s see how they build this out. I do love living in a Berlin. The public transit system is amazing. It’s not perfect. But it’s reliable enough that I do not miss my car.
Certainly not in the UK, our ticket prices keep going up massively and the service is getting worse and worse, putting on smaller and smaller trains and more delays and cancellations than ever, with most train stations badly run down.
It's a complete joke. The trains are far worse and largely more expensive than they were ten years ago.
In the past eight months, I have gotten a same day return journey on average once a month and I have experienced:
Twice - Stranded missing my last train home due to delayed connecting trains. One of which I was advised to go to a different station and speak to them there to arrange a taxi, got there station was unmanned and ended up having to sort via customer service on twitter at 11pm.
Had a train that I couldn't move on, standing in the isle, when i had reserved seats that i couldn't even get too due to the amount of people on it, later stops they couldn't even let anymore people on it. This was a train they decided to cut the size by more than half without warning therefore I am not even sure if my reserved seats existed!
2x train home that I wanted cancelled, lucky I had checked the app due to constant issues so I Could change plans and get an earlier train home.
Had a train terminate several stops early and thrown off the train without explanation.
3x had delays (not the ones mentioned on others) of over 15 minutes.
Most recently, left at the station late at night for over an hour as train was delayed, with constantly changing information on screens including saying the train was coming in the next 5 minutes for around half an hour and then various different platform changes only for it to turn up at the original platform, unstaffed station, no staff to help and many annoyed/confused people. I was desperate for the toilet, but due to it being later they were all locked, leaving for an uncomfortable and uncertain wait.
In France, the train is just so much more convenient, provided one of your stops is Paris.
Take Paris-Lyon for example
- by train :
1. depart from Paris Gare de Lyon (inside the city), arrive at Lyon perrache (inside the city). 10€ to 30€ (ouigo), ~3h.
2. recommended arrival time : 30min early
- by plane:
1. go from Paris to ORY (~40min, ~10€ in orlyval/orlybus or RER)
2. recommended arrival time : 2h early
3. 1h of flight, cheapest 50€, most prices are around 100€
4. Get from Lyon airport to the city whith rhonexpress, 15€, 30min
Result : even though the flight time is a bit shorter, the plane trip is actually way longer and way more expensive
The only time when plane is more convenient than train is when you want to travel between two cities that are not linked by rail, and the correspondance in Paris is too much of a detour, such as bordeaux-nice
Mildly unrelated to the article at hand, but I wish Amtrak had better quality (faster and more consistent) wifi onboard for NE regional and other non-Acela trains. I think even the Acela doesn't have high speed wifi.
If I could work during a 6+ hour journey it would really change the equation on traveling for me. The desks that are available on these trains is a huge change from the tiny lapdesks on flights. The thing people miss about trains, I think, is that you can have these comforts. You can have a cafe car with real coffee and snacks. Multiple outlets, etc. I don't really mind the journey taking a bit longer or being more expensive if it's not dead time and I can work.
Starlink could solve this reasonably cheaply. You basically need a few Starlink antennas per train and then a decent wifi hotspot in each car. Then and then when the train is in range of mobile connection you can use both.
I can hop in a train at Zürich main station in Switzerland and be in Paris in 4 hours or I can get in another one and be in Milan in 3 and half hours. On my trip I can use the internet, go to the restaurant or relax in the quiet carriage. No turbolance, no weather delays and the ride is very quiet.
How much work can you really get done going via airplane? How much time do you waste going through security and how well can you work crammed into a tiny seat?
Sometimes taking it a bit slower is also good for your health.
Yup. Door to door from south east England to the French Alps is nigh on identical if you take a plane and all then ceremony around that, or just jump on the Eurostar and travel mostly at 140mph or so.
It _really_ depends on the distances and sizes of the cities you're going to. Paris-London train is about 3 hours, which is likely less than you'll spend on getting to+from an airport. Paris-Berlin on the other hand is miserable, unless you love trains.
Or unless you take a night train. Get in in the evening, sleep most of the way and wake up at your destination. That can actually save you time compared to a flight, or be a lot more comfortable than, e.g., getting up at 4 AM to take a flight to a meeting in the morning somewhere.
I was speaking more generally, sorry; there is currently no daily Paris-Berlin night train (and I guess the weekly Russian train is suspended). The most reasonable connection seems to be: Paris 19.04 (ICE 9557) 22.17 Mannheim 23.47 (Nightjet 470) 07.38 Berlin, with some time to drink a nightcap in Mannheim, but I can see how that won't work for everyone. You can also leave Paris at 17.55 and change more comfortably in Karlsruhe with maybe a late dinner. In the reverse direction you'll have an unpleasant change in the early morning though.
In daytime, there are a few options with only one change, but you'll sit in a train for 8 hours or so, which may not be your thing.
This is exactly my point, trains can't compete with point-to-point travel at 500mph. So injecting a bunch of padding on either side of flights is the best way of making train travel more appealing.
Those points are usually fairly far outside of their respective cities though, to be fair. Planes are always going to be preferable for long journeys, London-Istanbul is a trip only big train fans would plan to take by rail. But I can take some really nice direct train journeys where I am - Budapest, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Belgrade and more. And since I end up in the city centre it's usually a quick tram or subway to where I'm staying, or hopping another train onwards to a smaller town. And travelling on the train with friends and a beer is really pleasant :-)
Taking a train from Hamburg to, say, Malaga, would be pretty uncomfortable. The distance is too big and you would have to switch trains several times, with a risk of one train running late and missing the next connection.
But for distances up to 4-5 hours by train, especially if the connection is direct, it is better to take the train. While the flight time may be much shorter, the need to get to/from the airport (which tend to be far away from the city itself, if only because of noise issues) and to be at the airport 2 hours before departure will consume a lot of time.
Train stations, OTOH, are usually located fairly close to the city center, if not squarely in it, for historical reasons (most important railway links were built prior to 1870, when the cities were much smaller than today).
Trains could easily beat air travel if they could skip the ridiculous security theater. Having to get to the airport 2 hours early is a whole lot of slack to let trains catch up.
I view any mass transport as a security risk for me so I welcome airport "security theater". there is downside, but imo airports screen better than trains for bad actors
I don't think anyone is expecting people to start taking a train from London to Istanbul, unless they are doing it for the trip in itself. The sweet spot for trains is travel > 100 miles and < 500 miles, so say Paris-Nice like is highlighted in the article.
In around the 150-800 km span, high speed rail reigns supreme over all other modes of transport. Above that, airplanes start making more sense, but for any trips in that span HSR should really be the default.
high speed night trains can compete at longer distances but capital costs become problematic. they would be more cost competitive if rail received the same amount of subsidy that air does
> Booking in advance, just as you would for a flight, can also save travelers a lot of money, Mr. Smith said, adding that he advises people to reserve their long-distance train travel one to three months ahead to avoid last-minute price hikes.
This is stupid. It's wasteful to fly an empty plain, but it should be cheaper to run an empty chain than mess with the schedule.
There's no economic reason to shake down unplanned travel like this.
I'd like to see trains and planes integrated to a greater extent. Many of the "hub to spoke" connections could be replaced by trains, that could actually arrive quicker than a plane. And trains are less affected by weather.
They could even check you into your flight while you're on the train.
I've traveled a lot by train in France, but one issue when comparing with travel by car is that, when traveling with three or more people, it'd be cheaper to take the car (and then you even avoid all the hassle of going to and from the station)
Russian military is dependent upon rail and struggling with truck logistics.
Just wanted to point out that Western European rail investments are dual use. Large scale military operations require massive logistics and rail is a big part of that.
Batteries are still too heavy and take too long to recharge for most commercial travel by plane. If we had better batteries, planes would become electric.
Hydrogen has an infrastructure problem. Planes aren't designed for holding hydrogen and they would need to be redesigned entirely to accommodate for using it as a fuel. Hydrogen is hard to store and transfer as it tends to embrittle a wide variety of metals. There are also no hydrogen refueling stations near airports, you would have to build all of that infrastructure as well. You might be able to generate hydrogen on demand via a chemical reaction with something like NaOH and Silicon or Aluminum, but I haven't run the numbers to see if that would be technically possible, economically feasible, or safe for passenger travel. Theoretically you could use hydrogen, but it would cost trillions of dollars to get everything up and running without some sort of breakthrough.
For the distances need to be viable in a lot of regions we are pretty close.
Current companies are targeting something like 400km. And that is with pretty conservative design choices along every dimension.
With some real investment that would allow companies to embrace more ambitious designs we could do much more then that.
Batteries can be a structural part of the plane. You can use the airflow to cool them potentially. There are lots of opportunity to do much, much better.
I think the connection between most major capital is around 500km. So an 20-30 seat plane that can go 600+ km is really not that far away as people think.
And this is with batteries that are not really optimized for flight. You can push the charge speed up considerably if you are willing to have less cycles. And it very well might be worth to do that. Even so your total investment in electricity and batteries combined is still gone beat fossil fuel by a wide margin.
If we are talking about investing billion into something, it should be electric planes!
However, it's moving to electric, with the first electric locomotive undergoing testing now, and the first electric fleet arriving this spring, with fully electric service expected to begin in two years.
It's 2022 today and they estimate to complete the project in 2024. Italy had electrified lines in the 1930s, for comparison. There is really no excuse however you look at it. I guess better later than never.
Depends on the country. Most of the UK away from London and apart from a handful of main lines is diesel. Elsewhere in Europe, most rural lines still are. It's likely many of these will switch to either hydrogen or battery trains, the latter possibly with shorter stretches of overhead wire to recharge.
A more interesting table would be the percent of electrified vs not passenger service miles delivered. The rail networks has a lot of quiet or disused track.
When doing these calculations, we really need to think strongly about electric airplanes.
By the time any major high speed rails are built, electric planes will exist.
Given electric planes can be fueled with green energy in many European countries there is not really an environment argument anymore. Well one could argue that its less efficient and that true but the difference is certainty much closer.
Electric planes will also make air-travel much cheaper, because the operational cost will be far, far lower just as with electric cars and the 'fuel' will be cheaper as well. The fuel is consider a major part of the cost right now and has the potential to be much lower.
Electric planes also require little buildup of infrastructure. In fact, electric planes will allow us to fly many more routes to smaller airports that are often not utilized much right now.
If we can get the absurd security restrictions removed and make air-travel within continents more like trains we can eliminate much of the wasted time as well.
Because electric planes have the potential to be much more quite while on the ground and on landing, airports can be build closer to population centers. And there are additional innovations that could make propellers in general more quite as well.
Planes allow for point to point transport rather then following a line of stations. Or rather you still might use stations but on much less granular scale.
From where I live I can reach a local airport in something like 10min with the bus. If I could fly from there to places like Paris, Milan or Berlin it would be quite amazing. Even if those flights only happen once 1 week or so. Or you just connect to some larger airport and get on a second plane there.
I feel like really major investment in high speed rail is misplaced. I much rather see more investment in local rail. And if you need to hope from city to city jumping into an electric plane would be better.
Now the technology is not fully there yet, specially in battery cells (and how to package them into plane). No proposed electric plane can fly Zürich->Berlin. But I think major investment in that sector would yield amazing results. The current electric plane companies are minimally innovative because they want to just get electric plane of the ground (and they are right to do so).
However once you really think threw all the implications of electric planes you could do so much more. Its like first generation EV were just traditional cars with batteries in them. When now in Tesla and BYD produce cars where the actual battery cells are a vital part of the cars structure.
With battery electric supersonic overland flights are a real possibility because you would fly high enough that air density and distance would make the sonic boom much less of a problem. We could rethink vertical launch as well.
In general a change in paradigm will force revising on many of the most basic assumptions of how traditional combustion planes look.
I would not be surprised if we fly around with electric vertical starting, supersonic flying wing airplanes in 30 years.
There are more than just ICE and IC trains in Germany. These other trains are not powered by green energy. So yes it seems reasonable that there are some coal power plants that are providing power for trains.
The economics of trains are wrong and only make sense when fuel is expensive and fuel savings are worth investing in. That's a broken assumption long term.
Why is this important? Rail operates on the basis of an extremely high investment (rail) offset by the notion that you earn that back over decades / centuries via fuel savings. But rails has a high up front investment cost (many tons of steel, land disputes, decade+ of planning and construction), high maintenance cost (upkeep & maintenance). So, the fuel savings are really important.
With the mass deployment of electrical vehicles (cars, buses, trucks, ships, and soon small airplanes) that stops being feasible. Electricity is cheap and dropping in price and generally trending towards dirty cheap in roughly the time it will take to build a meaningful amount of new rail. Also, a lot of these vehicles will eventually become autonomous which knocks out a secondary source of cost: the driver.
That creates a formidable competitor to rail that can utilize roads, water ways, air ways, etc. and uses energy that is harvested at more or less constant cost from wind, geo thermal, solar, or nuclear.
That knocks the whole premise away under mass transit solutions that amortize the extreme cost of fuel (and drivers) by just moving a lot of stuff with one enormous vehicle (an airbus 380, a train carrying many tonnes of cargo or thousands of passengers, huge ships, etc.). These huge vehicles are only economical when the fuel savings matter. They won't.
What if you could route individual containers via light, self driving, battery electrical vehicles? Production cost of about 100-200K$ each, probably cheaper if you mass produce them. Good for a million mile+ operational life time. Can go anywhere you want it to go. Does about 1-2 miles per KWH at a cost of less than 0.005$/kwh depending on weight/size. The numbers are far better with people carriers because we are talking lighter, cheaper, and more efficient vehicles.
That's our future. Rail does not make sense in that future. If you have a train that transports 100 containers, we're talking 5$/kwh worth of electricity every mile or so. Electrical trains would have similar or a bit better fuel cost of course but be very expensive to build and operate due to the need for rails and heavy duty machinery on the rails. But it would be meaningless because electricity is so cheap. The vehicle purchase cost of hundreds of electrical trucks would be negligible compared to that and maintaining and constructing roads is also a lot cheaper. The fuel cost difference would no longer justify spending many billions on both infrastructure, vehicles, and maintenance for rails. No chance in hell to earn any of that back with fuel savings when the price of that drops through the floor.
Current prices for the most competitive solar bids are hovering around 0.012$/kwh. They are not going to stay there. 0.005 is only a very modest improvement. Long term we might be looking at 0.001 or even less. That's only 1 order of magnitude of improvement. It's the conservative scenario. Manufacturing cost is basically a function of how cheap it is to manufacture and install panels, storage, cables, etc. Ironically, a big factor in that cost are energy and labor. So, having cheaper ways to generate energy will make making cheap energy cheaper. Add robots to the mix and you drop the labor cost as well. Moving stuff around is going to be very cheap.
It doesn't make sense to emphasize passenger travel over goods transport for rail. Rail's strength is efficient transport of heavy loads at slow speeds.
People are light and often want to go at high speeds.
Europe should reorient its rail network for rail transport, and passengers can travel by bus or plane.
But - Europe's rail network is completely reliant on subsidies, and its easier to get them when you're transporting politicians instead of lumber, steel, milk.
According to a relative who has spent a lifetime being a transport nerd, rail is actually more suited to people transport and roads to goods.
The reason is surprisingly obvious in hindsight. You bring 1000 people into a city centre train station and then they deliver themselves to their final destination. But goods either have to be sent to single purpose custom built lines and depots (eg power stations) or else transferred to road and taken onwards in a multitude of vehicles.
I am personally very good at delivering myself autonomously on foot for several miles, and I will even transfer myself to another train in minutes without external equipment. Coal is generally less cooperative.
Worse, if you decide to keep people in cars, you have to build parking spaces absolutely everywhere they might possibly want to go, whereas most goods just need to be dropped off.
No, just no. You obviously don't have experience with European infrastructure. Rush hour traffic on any German Autobahn will quickly tell you that adding more busses and cars is the worst idea here.
European roads are also impossible to build and maintain without subsidies but somehow nobody or at least very few people talk about that.
A general problem with all these debates is that rail and road have for so long been deeply interlinked with states strategy and subsidies that any real cost comparison is almost impossible.
We are using tunnels all over Switzerland that are built many decades ago. How to you take stuff like that into account?
Sure we could just say 'lets wipe all infrastructure of Europe and start fresh, what the most efficient combination of things?' but that is a pointless exercise.
People very lives have been shaped around existing infrastructure as well.
Everything is interlinked to a crazy degree that makes finding and comparing solution challenging.
The not so long ago completed Alp transit Gotthard Basistunnel was primarily dug for cargo, yes passengers also go through it but the idea is for fast, clean cargo transit all the way from Amsterdam to Italy through the Swiss alps.
Not sure about other countries, but Germany's long distance trains are run for-profit. Only commuter trains are subsidized. Tracks are paid for by taxes - but so are streets.
In most European countries, even if the financing is organized differently than in Germany, the long-distance trains bring in the most money and would be profitable if run entirely commercially.
