I am from Italy that geographically is not very easy to connect to the rest of Europe because of the Alps.
Still, below a thousand kms train beats flight 100% of the time!
I travel a lot throughput Europe to meet my special other who travels a lot due to her job.
I used to fly to meet her but , pandemic aside, I discovered that traveling by train was a much better option, mainly because you're on the ground and everything works almost like you're not moving at all.
internet connection is hit and miss of course, but compared to the very tight seats on a plane with no internet at all, it seems like a moving office.
Truth is I rarely work on a train, I mainly read, but having the option and the opportunity to book a solitary seat it's such a luxury that I gladly pay the extra money.
Other benefits include: no baggage limit, no early show up routine for no reason, no security or "show your face" checks, no packed up load-in load-out lines, being able to walk away if you need to (a phone call, for example) or because you simply need to stretch a little bit, but my favourite one is night trains where you book a bunk bed, sleep and wake up at the destination. A friend of mine calls it teleportation, you are not traveling between two places, you are waking up in a new place, far from the starting point, without even noticing it.
Trains are a great way to move, especially now that they are so fast.
They aren't cheap in general, that's true, but it's worth it, especially if you compare train fares with low cost offers that are undoubtedly cheaper, but don't even include a real baggage or the option to chose your seat for free (had to pay 6 euros for a seat just two days ago flying from Barcelona)
You were the local shopping stimulus all along.
(It's a song called United Breaks Guitars that you may remember from over a decade ago).
Even when you do have to pay in the US it is typically very generous. Larger size and weight allowance, and you won’t get dinged for being even a few kilos over. And the bottom tier of frequent flyer programs (which is usually trivial to get and keep) waives all these fees anyway. I can’t remember the last time I paid for luggage allowance outside of a trip to or through Europe.
I can't remember the last airliner that I was on that didn't have WiFi. Is WiFi uncommon in Europe?
However this is coming soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Aviation_Network
It's pretty rare, and when they do have it it is incredibly expensive, limited or both. On trains they basically always have it and it's free.
(with the caveat that it's been 2+ years since I was on a plane so I don't know how things have changed)
That depend on the quality of the rail and train. I have had nice experience in Germany, but here in Sweden it is the opposite. The side-to-side movement triggers motion sickness that is only compare to really rough ocean trips, and while the noise is lower than on a plane it is also less regular and higher pitch so it can be quite hard to ignore.
The problems stems from rails and trains here being 30-50 years old and long history of poor maintenance. To make matters worse, almost no lines has redundant tracks so if there is a problem (which there often is because to the issue of maintenance), the train get replace with busses. Night trains in particular tend to have a rather terrible experience with trains that are by now around 50-70 years old. Because of the motion sickness, the handful times I tried it has resulted in me basically being sick for a full day afterward. This doesn't occur if I take a plane or drive.
I don't know if they still do that but it is certainly something that could be instituted if governments wanted it.
2004 Madrid Train Bombings:
Not to disregard your example but from my perspective it is not representative to most of travelers in the Europe.
While taking train for me was more comfortable, most of the times it is not feasible and definitely a lot longer than taking an airplane.
Especially if you live in smaller city where you don't have a major train station couple bus stations away.
Let's take, for instance, my hometown in Asturias, Spain. There's technically a train sttation... which will get someone to Madrid in about 8 hours. If someone wanted to go to Barcelona, the fastest route is still via Madrid! Going to Bilbao via the northern corridor by train is a whole 10 hours: The route is prohibitively expensive to tunnel for high speeds.
However, let's look at plane options. There's a single runway airport about an hour away with direct connections to Madrid, Barcelona, Las Palmas, Malaga, Valencia and Tenerife. Pre covid, it also had direct flights to Paris and London. The typical planes that land there aren't private jets, but just the typical narrow bodies that do short routes everywhere in the world: A319 or so.
So yes, there absolutely are plenty of cities in Europe where the train doesn't even begin to be competitive, in either price nor travel time.
Well, and that's about it. I don't care for Paris that much, there are about thousand other places I prefer visiting. Its not that exotic to Europeans compared to Americans, and Paris' painful and obvious drawbacks (its a mega tourist trap, rampant crime, french are often rude if you don't speak perfect parisian french etc.) remove a lot of its allure.
Currently we travel to nearby islands with small kids (balearic, canarias, sardinia, corsica, greek ones etc.). We travel home which is 1500km away (1:30 flight to +-nearby airport, or 15h+ multi-train galore), we travel exotic (0 options for trains).
Heck, being Swiss, we use practically 0 Swiss trains. They are super expensive even for us since we don't commute by them to work every day, and Geneva being border town literally at the edge of confederation surrounded by France has little use of rails for us. France has pretty bad rail situation in comparison - our usual way to Chamonix takes 45mins by car, and 2+h by train. Family of 4 with 2 tiny kids? Never, ever, with all necessary luggage, even for free.
You can't have cheap good reliable railway network even in dense Europe, unless its heavily subsidized. Its a pipe dream, nice one but unless they tax flights into oblivion they will remain as easier and cheaper option for most. Options will be different for rural living and different family settings obviously.
I guess you know that, but if you live in Switzerland you're supposed to have the discount card ("demi-tarif") which makes the train way more affordable. It's still not cheap, especially if you compare with a car trip not taking the price of the car and maintenance into account (which is reasonable if you need the car for other reasons anyway). But in my case at least, without kids, it's really worth being able to use my time to do something productive rather than driving.
Also curious about the Chamonix example: I've never lived in Geneva, but aren't there a ton of other options in Switzerland that are way more connected than the French side? Why choose this example over Swiss resorts?
Besides there are pretty places much closer in France. France is also much cheaper, food better. Not that many reasons to chose otherwise for short weekend trips.
Car is unfortunately a must for family of us, any alternative is world of pain and limitation, even ignoring the prices of trains (just like any other family we know). You need so much equipment for whole family and small kids especially, that using trains means we wouldn't be traveling at all. People we know that don't own the car rent it out every weekend they need and waste tons of time and energy on chasing lower prices. Even with demi-tarif/halb-tax (which makes you waste 200 CHF/USD per head per year for no services), the prices of Swiss trains are properly bad. It still is marginally cheaper to take one's own car even if driving alone, and often much faster.
Frequent experience from times before when I was using Swiss trains for commute/traveling around - you end up standing for quite long amount of time during normal times, many people travel everywhere. Not nice if you are ie tired after long hike/skitour. With small kids, just a horrible experience.
All this ignoring current covid crisis and the fact that in trains here you are stuck in long narrow tube with 100 other people, few coughing, few sneezing, few not wearing masks on nose, or at all because they hold that can of beer for 2 hours to have an excuse, kids not wearing anything at all etc.
Of course if you work in Geneva that's a different matter. There aren't any trains in Geneva as it just isn't big enough, but unireso's tram network is widely used.
This is particularly timely because right now there's a hole in the line between Lausanne and Geneva. Consequently you can't currently take a train either way and have to use a replacement bus. The autoroute is seeing stupid levels of traffic right now as a result as all the people who usually take the train get in cars instead.
Chamonix is almost certainly slower by train unless there are traffic issues. This is also likely true of the Swiss resorts too because personal motorised transport avoids the inconveniences of waiting and changing that trains inevitably have. But the article is about eliminating short haul flights in Europe, not this.
By contrast, that's roughly the same price as an annual ticket between central London and a town about 30 miles away.
If you want to go with train from east Germany to Amsterdam you still have to go to Berlin. It still takes ~6.5hr of train ride from Berlin to Amsterdam. Where flight is ~1.5hr - of course getting through security and all it is at least 2.5hr and then depending on which side of Berlin you live transfer from your place to the airport. Which I would say does not matter because for train you still have to get to Berlin HbF. You might have direct connection to Berlin HbF but as well some people might have direct connection by bus or train to the airport.
Most trains/ICEs will stop at 2-3 stations in Berlin. Usually they stop at least at Spandau and Hauptbahnhof, and sometimes Gesundbrunnen as well. You should be able to reach one of these stations in at most thirty minutes regardless of where you start.
All of these stations are major transport hubs and thus easy to reach.
Airports not so much: It takes me more than 90 minutes to reach BER[1], meaning I should probably depart from home at least 180 minutes before takeoff if I want to catch my plane most of the time. Note that it is usually recommended to arrive at the airport two hours prior to takeoff (or even three hours for international flights).
Following all the best practices and accounting for delays in public transport would mean I'd have to depart almost four hours prior to takeoff for a domestic flight.
To catch an ICE I usually depart from home about 40 minutes before it leaves Gesundbrunnen, which gives me enough time to grab some sandwiches at a bakery and a coffee that doesn't suck (DB is clearly taking their inspiration from airline food).
Of course, one guy was prepared and literally _ran_ to the FEX. We walked and then waited 30 mins for the next one to arrive. :)
So these small cities don't have train stations, yet they have airports?
To get from Poland to Germany or from Netherlands to UK you have to go to major city. Some towns have luck being on the way of such train and you could benefit from it but it is rather exception than rule.
Which in the end makes it basically the same as getting to the airport for most of the people.
I remember my wife (who I'd just met back then) being somewhat surprised when I told her there were no train stops nearby.
I had two airports within an hour drive though, so we managed.
well personal experience is not always representative - but anyway isn't one of the ways how trains could replace planes by increasing number of connections and speeding them up so that it does become feasible?
I've never seen any situation even remotely insecure in the years I have been taking the train regularly, either in Europe or in Asia.
Unless you conflate 'urban' train (like subways) with long distance train ? But in this case it seems like an unfair comparison : I cannot take the plane to go to work.
I do wonder how the railways justify that even people who are paying first class tickets (which are really expensive) only have, at most, a single attendent for possibly 50 passengers. First class on the airplane and you might have a ratio of 1 to 10.
In Germany, they always seem to have at least two Ticket Collectors so the chance of not having your ticket checked is very low. On many services in the UK, you could get away without a ticket travelling later in the evening when many ticket barriers are left open.