How trains could replace planes in Europe

Re:How trains could replace planes in Europe by toyg on Thursday November 11, 2021 @04:14PM (#29193255)

The UK is a basket case when it comes to rail. The country that effectively invented the bloody thing, completely lost its mind in the 70s and started scrapping its extensive network. Then the Tories got in power, and at that point heavily-unionised public service like rail simply "had" to be eviscerated. Now it's an embarrassment, when compared to most European countries: expensive tickets, poor reliability, obsolete and polluting trains, continuous inability to pay for itself... I could go on.

I'm Italian, I thought "our" trains were bad, but in the UK it's much worse. Barely 40% of the network is even electrified, in 2021!

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Re:How trains could replace planes in Europe by avianlyric on Thursday November 11, 2021 @07:20PM (#29194950)

> Then the Tories got in power

What I find particularly funny about this, it that Maggie Thatcher was a strong proponent to keeping the trains in public ownership, believing that privatising them was a bridge two far, even for her. Her successor on the other hand, they weren’t so bothered.

However the recovery of passenger number after privatisation is undeniable. While the private model wasn’t great, the previous public ownership was even worse. Hopefully our second stab at public ownership goes better, this time we have very successful models like TfL to work from.

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Re:How trains could replace planes in Europe by randomswede on Monday November 15, 2021 @05:19AM (#29225763)

The way it was privatised essentially guaranteed monopolies, though. Each segment is available ona multi-year lease for one operator. There are actually some segments that have multiple operators, but that's actually the exception.

When Sweden privatised rail traffic, it still kept the track ownership in a single entity, and train operators bid for slots on the existing rail network.

This gets you into a somewhat healthy competition between operators, hopefully (longer-term) driving down the price and driving up the quality for consumers.

Comparing air and rail, a first class train ticket between Malmö and Stockholm (most direct car route seems to be 613 km) is (with the ex-monopoly train operator) 895 SEK to 1 735 SEK , and is about 4.5h city centre to city centre.

A flight seems to be between 862 SEK (RyanAir, one carry-on luggage, 168 SEK with nothing, they say) and about 300 SEK. Listed flight time is 1h 20, airport would either be MMX or CPH (the latter has really good rail from the same rail station as the train in the previous para, taking about 21 minutes, then maybe 3-10 minutes at the airport). On the Stockholm end, you have either the fast airport train (ca 15 minutes), the slower (but cheaper) commuter train (ca 40 minutes) or airport buses (probably similar price as the commuter train, about the same speed at no traffic at all).

Total travel time for "same start, same destination", train 4h 30m, airplane maybe 3-4h. I don't, genuinely, know what "class of service" the plane would be, ut short-haul you get pretty much the same seats and you may have the middle seat unoccupied for "business".

And for reference, London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley is 645 km by car, using the same route planner

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Re:How trains could replace planes in Europe by Symbiote on Thursday November 11, 2021 @05:43PM (#29194215)

Frequency of trains is generally higher in Britain.

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