You can commute Segovia - Madrid Chamartin on a high speed train (95 km, 27 min, 200 euro per month). Reliability and price are top notch.
A comparable commute is Cambridge - London (60 mi, 65 min, 500-600 pound per month depending on some details).
I have used both, and there is no contest, sadly.
Youve also missed over the fact that the Cambridge train is more like 45 minutes than 60.
This goes both ways. When I search for Madrid to Segovia routes, I get trains that vary from 30m to 2 hours.
For example Peterborough which is quite some miles north of Cambridge runs trains to London in 51 mins.
What about Milton Keynes > London in 34 mins, Reading > London in 30 mins and so on.
Why is this?
I know the story about the University insisting that the station be far from the center of town to make it inconvenient for students, and that Peterborough is on the ECML, but I don't see good reasons for Cambridge being hard to get to. There are direct express trains! It's not the North where everyone's trundling around in Pacers.
I think the reasons are mix of the two above you mention. No ecml which for what can only be described as a decent economic hub is a missed opportunity. Train station a bit of a pain to get to which extends real life journey times, although they are clearly trying to improve that and Cambridge North isn't bad.
it's also 46 minutes[1], which is essentially the same as the peterborough expresses[2]
[1] https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:W78063/2022-0...
[2] https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:L77638/2022-0...
Says who?
Do you feel it's not?
But since 2020, short distance commute via train has had an upgrade with new 8 carriage trains along the Fen Line, making situations where you don't have a seat less likely.
edit: grammar
1. For railway travel, you need to top up a minimum balance of 20 € (okay, technically 16 €, because with an anonymous card you're allowed 4 € of credit), which is already a bit on the high side if you're only need to go a few stations by train and are only travelling occasionally.
2. Changing trains has become a bit more complicated, because if the change of trains also coincides with a change of the train operator you now always have to check out and back in again (and the check out/in procedure also potentially makes things more expensive than a true through ticket).
3. Certain offers (including e.g. reduced fares for children!) are only available with a personal chipkaart – for a long time those were impossible to obtain without a Dutch address of residence and/or bank account. These days they're also sold to residents of Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany, but you still have to order them in advance, and everybody else is still left out (e.g. somebody from Lille is actually closer to the Dutch border than somebody living in Munich, but only the latter is allowed to buy a personal chipkaart).
I'm not saying it's a good system - it's a very bad one, having it split between so many companies is a mistake. But the London metro is not a good analogy since it is all one company.
The Dutch railway system is more like a giant metro/light rail. Trains between the major cities have a high frequency of every 10 minutes.
The issue’s it’s a bit too transparent: and after a while you realise that your suica is emptying unexpectedly fast, because you’re paying (and resetting your trip counter) every time you pass a gate, and that you probably shouldn’t blindly follow western trip system because you want to limit network switches, at which point you run into the issue that the resources for that are mostly in Japanese.
Then it depends how much the overhead is and how much you care.
It only works on JR lines, so in Tokyo you still need to buy tickets for all the private train lines and metro lines (city run and private run). Try getting around Tokyo on the daily using only JR lines; it won't be too much fun for you.
JR pass is only really useful for long-haul, intercity type journeys, primarily by shinkansen
Person above was talking about the JR Pass, which as you know is pretty useless for general "getting around Tokyo" purposes
You can even get a ticket to Ryde, Isle of Wight and get the Ferry ticket included too.
I'm fairly sure you can buy this from any station in Britain, at least if it has a ticket office or machines.
Mostly true, but not universally so - try Denton -> Manchester Piccadilly ;)
</pedantry>
Although going outside Northern Trains' area does indeed seem to prevent fares being calculated: http://traintimes.org.uk/denton/deal/08:45/2022-10-22
(Denton is mildly famous amongst British rail enthusiasts as it has a 'parliamentary'[1] service of one train a week each way. Useless for actual travel, but (partly because of an unusually pleasant station buffet with good beer at Stalybridge) the regular site of meetups for rail geeks).
They're about to. National train operators were mandated to find a solution to homogenize booking but it's getting nowhere.
(For a while in the early 2000s the best way to buy UK train tickets was through the Deutsche Bahn website; exogenous ticketing is weird, but presumably they've already done the API work to simplify it for you)
I've given it a go, but on my phone TheTrainLine is returning "unavailable" on literally any journey for some reason (my radical ad-and-tracker blocking?).
I was trying to search for tickets from Cervera—served by regional trains from Barcelona and Lleida—to Torrijos—served by regional trains from Madrid. If TheTrainLine works for you maybe you can try Cervera-Torrijos.
Best case, I'm guessing it might be able to suggest a reasonable combination (regional to Lleida -> high speed to Madrid -> regional to Torrijos) but I'd be very surprised if it can directly sell you any ticket except the Lleida-Madrid one, let alone the whole route as a single ticket.
EDIT: I finally got TheTrainLine working, and it suggested me an odd bus journey from Cervera rather than the train. So, I decided to check, and in fact TheTrainLine is fully unaware of commuter and regional services around Barcelona or Madrid, and erroneously states "No tickets available" even when searching for routes which I take often. This is almost as bad as Renfe's own website, but at least TheTrainLine includes (some) 3rd party bus services.
In Spain, by contrast, you simply cannot get a train ticket for the long distance network if you're at a commuter station, nor can you get a ticket to cover a route between two arbitrary stations if the route would combine long- and short-distance trains. You need to buy long distance and regional tickets separately, and cannot buy tickets for commuter services from outside the specific region. And they are all run by the same state-owned operator Renfe!
Meanwhile, in the UK, you can go to Stalybridge on the outskirts of Manchester and ask the ticket office for a return ticket from Edinburgh Haymarket to Bury St Edmunds and they won't bat an eyelid even though it covers God knows how many potential operators.
Note this is not in any way an example of the UK system being superior due to privatisation. The reason it works this well is because it already worked like that under British Rail.