I’m an American who recently took a train in Europe from Paris to Brussels.

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!

Eurostar runs direct trains from London to Rotterdam & Amsterdam, 3.5 and 4 hours respectively.

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.

We have the same buses as you these days. Megabus exists to connect many larger metropolitan areas. More or less the same vehicles as you'd find for similar services in Europe. Sadly, none of the "sleeper bus" variety that have existed (from time to time) in Europe.

I took a Megabus from Houston to Austin one time, it was honestly the worst bus journey I have ever taken in my life. A man sat down next to me, talking to himself, rocking back and forth holding a screw driver. There were a lot of other "interesting" characters on the bus as well.

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 :(.

Long distance trains in the US are frequently full, they just don’t run as often. And the US does the same thing where it’s cheaper in advance.

On this specific example

> 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.

Depends what you optimize for. I used to travel from Germany to London and had to change in Brussels. Yes you have to wait a bit, but not like at an airport. The walking distances and wait times are very small and the trains connect timewise so it is fairly stress free.

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've taken Eurostar from London and changed in Paris for Grenoble and Brussels for Amsterdam (before the direct train.) It was completely fine. No different from any other train journey with a change.

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.

> Too expensive for the route

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.

If you are a german resident, and you make two or more long distance rail trips a year, then you a buy a bahncard 25 or bahncard 50 which give you (respectively) 25% or 50% ticket discounts.

> 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.

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.

Minneapolis to Seattle is around the same distance as Madrid to Warsaw. And for that trip you’d need ~4 transfer and it would take ~30 hours in total. So it doesn’t seem that much better.

> 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.

You also have to persuade everyone else to vote for it

Yes! It's been done, many, many times.

The capital of the EU to the capital of France in an adjacent country is pretty much the definition of good train travel in Europe. Also anything TGV in France. As sibling noted, Eurostar from London is also great. Various other routes are pretty good.

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.

One bit that might surprise people is how fragmented it was (probably still is?). I'll see if I can find more sources, but e.g. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.67... illustrates some of the issues. Gauges vary. Voltages vary. Safety systems vary. Edit: here's a nice diagram from (of course) wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_system...

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.

The thing is, you used to be able to buy a ticket from, say, Lisbon to Copenhagen, from any ticket booth, and just take any reasonable train on the (multi-day) route. But nowadays many national railway companies use yield management, so that original price is now the full price which is a lot higher, and actually you simply can't buy such tickets anymore, you must use booking systems that just cannot book all trains. In some countries such as France and Spain reservations are now obligatory for long-distance trains.

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.

Learned about iberian gauge while taking a train in Portugal last month. The tracks were further apart than any that I have ever seen. Rail is much more complicated than people might think

A short answer for Germany would be: the system is operating at its absolute limits. The results are employee burnout and bad reliability.

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".

Amtrak does that sometimes (the train and/or crew die on the rails) but then they produce a bus from somewhere and get you to your destination.

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.

I don't live in Germany, but I'm pretty sure they'll be another train available. Probably in about 30 minutes (or less if the train is so late that the next train has caught up with it). The inconvenience is having to get off of one train and onto another.

The crew dies on the rails!?

> 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.

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?

The typical scenario is that passengers can just take another train. Depending on the ticket, the railway is responsible for refunding cost for alternative transportation (EU law), but there can be frustrating edge cases where people are left stranded, because there is no alternative, but a lot of bureaucracy. The railway may be responsible for refunding accommodation then, but I think this would not necessarily be the case for monthly tickets, student tickets and so on, when there is no explicit booking for a canceled train like with a regular ticket.

My most memorable train experience in Germany was when Deutsche Bahn left me in Munich in the middle of the night. I had a connection there but my first train was ~10 minutes late, and my second train had already left. So I spent the whole night at the train station until ~5am when I could catch another train in the direction I needed. I've taken many train trips in the Czech Republic, and that has never happened.

I never take the last possible connection of a day, because of this risk.

DB will pay a Taxi or Hotel in such cases. Just had them pay my Taxi home last week.

What I meant was that the buses are provided if there's no other option, like another train.

In some cases, but not always. Probably depends on multiple factors.

The ticket you bought has a ToS attached to it, but basically it boils down to that DB is only required to get you from A to B, but you're not entitled to any specific mode of transportation other than "preferably by rail". While the train may have ended surprisingly, since other trains are still running, DB's opinion is that you can figure out the rest.

> if a train has a delay of over 30 minutes, the train will often just stop at some station

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.

In London it's often done to try to stop the "no bus for an hour then 3 come along at once" phenomena and even out the service. Personally I think it's a big improvement over the alternative.

Nothing is perfect, but also remember that people always find things to complain about, particularly if they don't have personal experience of less well functioning systems.

By that logic, no one should complain about anything, because we don't live in literal hell. But that is of course preposterous.

They're not saying there's no reason to complain. They're pointing out a very valid phenomena. For those of us on the total outside, it helps us temper bad feedback. Otherwise, you can end up with a situation like the following:

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.

Parent: people often complain because it’s the worst they’ve ever had, take it with a pinch of salt.

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 good to complain and improve things but having moved to the US I now miss even British trains!

That’s not what I meant. Only that the fact that people complain about X in both A and B does not tell much about the relative quality of X in A compared to B because the expectations and standards may be very different.

Deutsche Bahn is a weird construct.

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.

It was quite similar in France. It was a step before privatisation, true, but the final step would have been the re-nationalisation of the infrastructure and maintenance branch, in a usual “privatise the profits and socialise the losses” that the European Commission seems to so love. Because efficiencies, or something.

my short answer would be: bad at punctuality. Frequent delays bigger than 10min.

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.

> smaller population density, therefore less stops needed in rural areas.

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.

> Frequent delays bigger than 10min

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.

I haven't taken European trains, but Amtrak in the US is often atrociously late. They pay to rent tracks from freight companies and have to cede right-of-way to not block them.