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
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.
(...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.)
___
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
Amusingly enough, most of this is something we got from the systems before that, or simply other countries :-) Just look at this map: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_kolejowy_w_Polsce#/m...
See how the rail network is much denser in the western regions? Now compare it to this map: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziemie_Rzeczypospolitej_pod_za...
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.
edit: spelling
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.
edit: Damn spelling again
I do believe that trains are really good in compare to what we had like decade or so ago
Quiet, looking modern, clean, reasonable seats and their "placement" strategy
For comparison: monthly ticket price is like 10% of minimal wage (or 50% of that for students) for distance around 100km/day
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.
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.
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/06...
[2] https://knoema-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/knoema.com/atlas/G...
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.
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.
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.
Its more than ICE trains not more than the whole of DB. Its 100m ICE trips per year but 2600m DB trips per year in 2019 (c. 31 per capita per year)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/936254/deutsche-bahn-pas...
But yes, the 2600m DB passengers probably mixes long distance and short distance service to some degree.
https://dewiki.de/Lexikon/M%C3%BCnchner_Verkehrsgesellschaft
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.
[1] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155658/acela-high-speed...
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.
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.
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.
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?
According to Wendover Productions.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
However, other comments suggest that freight needs _slow_ speed and must avoid tunnels. Maybe that's the reason?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe%E2%80%93Basel_high-s...
[·] https://goo.gl/maps/gnrqGEdz3H7vz8V99
Context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrsprojekt_Deutsche_Einhe...
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".
(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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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:
https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/london-to-amsterdam...
Top tip 2:
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.
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 :(.
> Amsterdam to London
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.
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 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.
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.
Sorry, but people give up too easily. This isn't a fusion power plant. We only have to vote for it.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
tl;nr: mismanagement.
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.
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.
Im an European having spent few years in US and also used to complain about this, until I learnt what delays mean in domestic US flights.
Not unusual to be few hours and already spent a couple of nights at the airport.
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.
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.
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).
The bathrooms are less claustrophobic though.
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.
Vastly fewer, per passenger mile, then passenger cars, comparable to busses, less than scheduled airline flights.
And the ticket price inflation is twice as high as regular CPI.
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?
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.
[1] https://www.aar.org/article/freight-rail-moving-miles-ahead-...
[2] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/GreenSheet.pdf
[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
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.)
Maintenance costs for major roads in the UK (trunk motorways and A roads) is something about half that.
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.
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Ann...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
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.