Europe is investing heavily in trains

Re:Europe is investing heavily in trains by dgellow on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @05:21AM (#31000345)

I’m quite familiar with both Germany and Switzerland trains, an interesting difference is that in Switzerland the default is a flexible ticket, you buy it for the day and can use it an any time, and using any train you want that goes in the correct direction. And since a few years SBB/CFF let’s you get a reduction if you get instead a non-flexible tickets (so with a strict time and train, called “dégriffé” in French).

In Germany the default is a non-flexible ticket, and you can pay for a more expensive flexible one.

As a result the default train experience in Switzerland feels more expensive but with a way to get a discount, while Germany is the opposite. And people in Germany plan their train trips waaaaaay earlier in advance to be sure they have the cheapest prices (the earlier you book the cheaper it is) and flexible tickets are mostly used for business trips.

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Re:Europe is investing heavily in trains by locallost on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @06:40AM (#31000825)

There is no default, until recently it always showed both the reduced and full price, but you always had to manually select what you want on the 2nd screen.

Anyway, I'm neither German nor Swiss, but I think there are certain prejudices about both countries. Germans might look to save money, but realistically everybody needs to plan their trip somewhat in advance, unless it's a short weekend trip. I made the mistake recently of not booking my train from Switzerland in advance because I didn't know when I exactly need to go and figured what the hell, I'll just buy it when I figure it out. Big mistake, almost everything was booked out, and I barely made it home.

Also, SBB likes to complain about DB, and there might be truth to some criticism, but realistically the two companies don't solve the same problems, in terms of passenger count, distances traveled and overall complexity.

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Re:Europe is investing heavily in trains by dgellow on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @08:15AM (#31013727)

At least in Switzerland the discounted system for fixed-trips is relatively recent (admittedly I left the country a while ago so we may be talking about a different time frame).

I didn't mean to say one way or the other is bad (your use of "prejudices" has a negative connotation, which isn't what I wanted to highlight). I'm Swiss, lived there for ~25 years, and now live in Germany since a good amount of time. And it was funny to observe this difference in expectations and behaviours between the two countries.

I've never seen SBB/CFF complain about Deutsche Bahn so I'm not sure what you mean here. I personally like both groups, their services are really good IMHO.

> Germans might look to save money, but realistically everybody needs to plan their trip somewhat in advance, unless it's a short weekend trip

I mean, I can generally agree here, but the German approach to saving money is waaaay more extreme than what I've experiences living in other countries! People book their trips like 6 months in advance to have some reductions, and will use every single way to save a few cents!

(Note that I'm from the French speaking side of Switzerland, which is culturally quite different from the German speaking side)

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