It's amazing. And Switzerland has an unusually strong reputation for rail but honestly my experience in places like France and even the UK has been similar. If you want to go somewhere else, you go to the nearest train station and buy a ticket to that place, and then you go to that place.
I live in NYC and it's not even close, and this is the best rail served area in the country by far. I can't get on a train anywhere in this city and get off in an airport terminal. Let's pause and think about that for a second. I live in New York Fucking City and I can't get on a train and get off at an airport. Newark is as close as it gets if you're near Penn Station, but you're still dropped off a long and tedious "Airtrain" ride away. And the PATH that runs from lower Manhattan just inexplicably stops short of that Newark Airport Airtrain, despite the fact that the same mainline track system continues right along. Same story at JFK. And Laguardia they don't even bother to pretend.
It's completely fucking dysfunctional, obviously so. The idea that U.S. rail transport, or transport in general, is even semi-remotely comparable to northern and western Europe is frankly ludicrous.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_l...
Hong Kong has a high speed rail link from the middle of the airport that gets to city centre in 30 mins flat, making two stops along the way at major mass transit junctions.
How does the 7 not go to LGA? Why doesn't the E go to JFK What stopped the PATH from extending to EWR?*
* I actually know the answer to this one and it's actually a technical constraint. The PATH system uses MTA like third rails for power. The mainline track system uses overhead lines for power. Having the PATH continue to EWR would require investment in parallel infrastructure between Newark Penn Station and EWR. Of course PATH is maintained by the Port Authority and the mainline track by NJ Transit, each of which has its own agenda and budget so it'll never happen.
Not really. I mean sure in the sense that they'd have to run the third rail as you mention, but that's not a technical constraint given how simple it is. And theoretically it's in progress.[0]
The problem here is plainly political. If the politics of building trains in this country weren't completely broken it would have been done long, long ago.
[0] http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2016/04/newark_elizabeth_l...
Oh while we're talking about dysfunctional PATH decisions based on mindless political/organizational divisions here's another one that'll make your blood boil: http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/09/the-port-authoritys-missed-c...
Why is that a technical constraint? The mainline system uses third rail from Grand Central Terminal to Pelham, where it switches to overhead line equipment, so even in a US setting it's clear that switching between power supplies on the move and dual-compatible stock is no problem.
But seriously, Swiss and German trains are well known for their punctuality and reliability. Italian and Spanish trains, not so much. (I've seen all of them first hand, and found the stereotypes pretty accurate.)
I visited this past May. Flew into Rome and immediately hoped onto the fast train to Florence. Spent a few days there, then took the fast train to Bologna, transferred to an inter-city (not as fast) down to Riccione for a few days cycling around San Marino. Then took another train from Rimini back to Rome (not high speed, but cut across the central mountains).
Anyways, it worked well. The cost was far less than flying Rome/Florence/Bologna. Might not have worked as well if we wanted to venture out of the cities, but for a typical city-based vacation, it was great.
The US doesn't have great train systems for the most part but, as you say, in the region that's most comparable to much of Western Europe, the Northeast, it really isn't all that different.
ADDED: What you tend not to have in the US is compact walkable towns and small cities once you get out of the large cities. Though I'd also say, that at least in the UK, small towns away from the main railroad lines will have bus service that's probably better than the US equivalent but it may still just be a few times a day.
That comparison is a little disingenuous, of course flying between two cities with an airport, that are not major hubs connected directly by hi-speed rail, will be faster and cheaper. Now consider how you'd get to Dusseldorf or Paris from whatever random smaller city with a train station (in western Europe basically any city with a population over ~100K). I'm not sure if there even are international airports around western Europe that arent directly accessible by train...
Besides traveling for business or pleasure, trains here are heavily used for commuter traffic as well. If you live and work close to a train station, which is quite common in the more densely populated countries, traveling by train will 100% be faster that sitting in a traffic jam every day. And in many cases your employer will even cover most or all of the cost (at least here in the Netherlands).
Obviously trains are still only point-to-point transportation, so if you need to be somewhere without a train station, or without many connections to larger hubs, you will lose time. But compared to the pitiful state of passenger rail in the US (or at least that's how I experienced it), it's pretty great here. I took the train from San Jose to SFO once: there was only one train every hour or so, which took something like 2:30 hours at a snails pace to get to San Francisco, then I had to get on the BART (which is actually pretty good), then I needed to get on the AirTrain, all just to get to the departures. By car it usually takes less than an hour... There really is no excuse for that...
That's the difference though. In the US, trains are so expensive that they're almost always more expensive than flights.
Also, comparing to NYC is disingenuous. NYC has by far the best public transport in the US. There's a very significant drop-off in quality (other major cities have poor public transport, and for smaller cities it's nonexistent).
another good thing is, you can buy in most cases tickets just days ahead, most trains have constant prices so your price isn't within 50-1000 eur boundary for same flight, same seat, depending on timing.
It just isn't the panacea that it often seems to be painted as.
In many urban areas, it is basically NYC. Which is great, and makes getting around easy. But once you get farther out, things dry up fast. And a good comparison would actually be Amtrak and the like on the East Coast of the US. Considerably cheaper (I would guess, off the top of my head, 60% of the cost for a comparable trip). But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time. And a lot of the time, those savings aren't particularly significant once you factor that in.
As someone who travels a lot for work, I didn't see a huge difference in how I approached things while working on budgets. Fly to major city nearby and then get a train/rent a car to go to a smaller town (if needed). The former was more of an option, which was nice, but the latter was a lot faster if there were a few connections. And even when there was the option to just do pure train, the amount of time versus savings wasn't worth it.
And for personal travel? Even then, a flight was a lot more logical and not a lot more expensive once I factored in vacation hours and the like to handle transit times.
In terms of cities? Yeah, we are horrible (although, the UK and Ireland is almost as crap as we are once you get out of London). In terms of general (inter)national travel? A car is a lot less required, but not to the extent that a lot of us would think.