You can get a coach (bus) direct to Heathrow from almost any town in England. Getting to Waterloo [1] (London’s international) station from outside London could easily be more time consuming and tough with luggage.
But of course UK is gonna be an outlier in European train value discussions. It’s an island on the periphery with a single rail connection. The mainland capitals are more competitive.
[1] edit: now St. Pancras, which is closer to other London rail stations so likely better on balance. Thanks user sbuk.
While UK train prices are an outlier, London and the South East are very much part of the high density economic core of Europe. A box drawn around London/Paris/Amsterdam/Cologne contains roughly a quarter of the pre-Brexit EU population (and a substantially higher proportion of economic activity.)
Rail is already very competitive between these cities - it's only 2 hours on the train from London to Paris or Brussels and since the tunnel was built Eurostar has captured the vast bulk of travel between the cities it connects. The bigger challenge would seem to be making rail competitive to more dispersed cities like Berlin/Vienna/Barcelona/Madrid.
Getting to LHR from where I was, it was always quicker to get to any of the major rail stations in central London than to either LHR or LGW, but LCY was relatively good (only really works that way if you're east of the centre though).
And those are on twinned, dedicated passenger tracks where you never have to wait on a siding for a freight train to go by in the other direction, like you do with the Toronto -> Vancouver train that takes multiple days end to end.
Anyway, they keep studying HSR for the route, so much so that a prominent Canadian comedian made a joke video about it almost a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W32klYkTxCQ
But it's definitely a chicken and egg thing; it'll never gain significant market share under current conditions, but no politician can justify the money required to properly build HSR with current ridership numbers. But of course billions [1] for a new toll highway directly through protected greenbelt farmland (Hwy 413)? Ram it all through! Will it lose money and eventually be sold off to a foreign interest for pennies on the dollar similar to how Hwy 407 was twenty years ago? Probably!
[1]: Even without accounting for a likely sell-off, the gov't of Ontario has been super cagey about the planned costs of 413: https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/10/08/the-hugely-contr...
It takes 3 days to travel the 4500 km of rail from Toronto to Vancouver because the first 1500 km are through muskeg and around lakes where building straight, flat, protected 200 km/h high-speed tracks is just not an attainable option. Even if you managed 200 km/h the entire way, it's still 2 days travelling.
Planes travel about 800 km/h and can go in a relatively straight line without fear of a moose or a washout. It's 5 hours Toronto to Vancouver and 4.5 hours the other way because of tail winds.
In any case, I don't think anyone has ever seriously suggested HSR for the train out west. VIA has simply embraced that it will always be slow and impractical, and they market and price it accordingly— it's supposed to be an experience, like going on a cruise, not a practical means of getting to a destination.
In Europe passengers trains have priority over freight trains of which there are very little anyway. Freight mostly goes by road while trains are mostly used to transport passengers. It is very different from how the network is used in North America.
However, according to statistics i found, rail freight in the EU is at 17% for 2019[0], while in the US it's at 9%[1] for 2017.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://www.bts.gov/topics/freight-transportation/freight-sh...
Or the whole night with sleeper trains, which is a decent workaround for that problem.
But, while I've done it, Boston to DC doesn't really make a lot of sense unless I'm looking for an excuse to do some reading, etc. for a day.
The train is pretty much a full day. I've done it when schedule allowed but going down the day before, working on the train, and spending the night in a hotel as opposed to doing an out and back in a day doesn't work for a lot of people.
Of course, shorter segments of the Northeast Corridor work pretty well by train. I pretty much never fly Boston to NYC unless I'm under unusual constraints.
We could honestly skip these checks for no-risk travelers.
And it also assumes that you are headed downtown and not to an adjacent town.
> flying is cheaper and quicker...
In Europe, notice how it's a bunch of private businesses competing with one another vs state ran rail monopolies?
How to decide who is a "no-risk traveler" and how do you identify them?
My fastest check-in was in Phoenix. I think it took me 11 minutes from curbside drop-off to sitting in my seat at the gate, including dropping off a checked bag (Southwest Airlines). I don't think I ever stopped moving forward from the moment the machine printed my bag tag until I hit my gate. This was pre-Covid too, so the airport was somewhat busy.
I'm not aware on any European wide unified airport security structure. The closest to that would probably something EU related [0], but I couldn't find anything related to "pre check" type programs being a thing.
My personal international airtravel experience, living in Germany, has been rather limited in the last decade; I flew on vacation to Turkey for a few weeks. There was pretty much zero security theater.
The biggest time waste was the slowness of everything, waiting in lines for luggage, pass/ID clearance, traversing the long distances across the different airport wings, really long time window for boarding.
Apparently the same airport also offers an "evening before pre-check in", but the website for that seems to have become another pandemic victim. It seems to be the biggest thing that skips is luggage check in and formalities/getting boarding pass, by allowing passengers to do that the evening before.
[0] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/security-and-em...
We should stop subsidizing fossil fuels, and start taxing them by how much they pollute.
You probably hit over night travel. If you leave early enough the time goes down to ~9 hours.
> You tie up the machine and staff for 7X longer,
You also cover over a dozen stops in one trip instead of two.
> and need safely maintained local infrastructure every meter of the journey.
The German rail infrastructure is so outdated that it probably is at least partly responsible for the last big train crash (no automatic lockout).
The last big airplane crashes on the other hand were caused by much needed efficiency upgrades that forced Boeing into using engines that were way too large for the half a century old frame they needed to remain compatible with on paper.
If DB updates infrastructure, that's on their budget (and while 100% publicly held and lots of politicians involved, it's nominally private). If it breaks down so much that it needs to be repeated, that's coming from federal funds. We have some perverse incentives in infrastructure maintenance.
You have exactly 1 destination with a plane flight, right ? A to B. But with a train you have A + all stops along the way + B so if done correctly you could potentially serve a lot more passengers with a single trip than you can with a flight. It could be that monetarily doesn't work out still, but it could be because of an inefficient market.
And you should also think in terms outside of just transportation. I imagine plane flights have a centralization effect on where people choose to live while trains allow them to be more spread out.
The train is several times cheaper than a plane, seats 10x more people and some of machines used in UK were built in the 70's. How many airplanes keep flying that long?
Infrastructure? Hs2 is the first track of rail in UK in over a century! Most track is 200 years old, so it has paid for itself a hundred times over.
The UK does have plenty of track: 20,000 miles worth, along with 6,000 level crossings, 30,000 bridges and viaducts, 2,500 stations...
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.
Network Rail spends billions of GBP every year maintaining the railways.
Many.
> Most track is 200 years old
And have been relaid about 30-40 times since then.
About the only thing that dates to 19th century are the rights-of-way.
No, it's zero. Commercial airlines last about 30 years, they have metal fatigue from pressurisation cycles.
"And have been relaid about 30-40 times since then."
Are those expenses comparable to earthworks and contraction involved in laying down new line?
Look, I just opened up flightradar24 and clicked a random plane. That was G-DHKC, a 757-256, first flight 1989. 33 years.
And that's just a random pick. There are many airframes from mid-late 1970s still flying commercial.
> Are those expenses comparable to earthworks and contraction involved in laying down new line?
What do you mean by that?
Your random choice also did hit an interesting quirk in aviation that cargo airlines tend to use old aircraft that are no longer fit for passenger operations.
There are several reasons for this, but cargo ops are able to use their aircraft in ways that maximise their life [1]. Passenger airlines try and maximise the time each aircraft is airborne (i.e. earning revenue) whereas cargo operators often schedule differently. This sometimes allows for operation of aircraft that have very few pressurisation cycles left in their lifespan.
The specific aircraft you found was retired from passenger ops in 2016 (after being in storage since 2015) from Icelandair when DHL purchased it [2]. This is when the airframe was 16 years old. It was converted to a freighter variant at this time - the 757-256.
You can look at fleet ages to get an impression for the age of aircraft, and generally passenger airlines (especially in developed countries) are using newer planes and cargo airlines have a much older fleet. You might have noticed this when you see old fashioned designs like tri-jets, or four engined jets like the 747 only in cargo livery at airports.
[0] https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/boeing-757-200-g-dhkc...
And agents onboard do absolutely nothing upon them. Last time after my complaint for noise, he asked them if they had a fare, they said no, and the controller didn’t even give them a fine (on a 2hrs Paris-Lyon).
I’m over with train and I’ll ride my diesel as long as they mix us with them.
You tie up the machine and staff for 7X longer, and need safely maintained local infrastructure every meter of the journey. It's tough to make that cheaper.
And then the service is less valuable since it's so damn long. I love train rides, but 14 hours costs a whole day, and 2h costs an early-rise morning.