> There are really people who are willing to spend five hours, six hours, seven hours on a train
Yeah! I have no problem spending 6, 7 hours in a train if I have a comfy seat, Wifi and someplace where I can get a coffee and some food, like a dining car or a nice vending machine. A clean WC would also be a plus. There is no comfier way to travel, IMO, and you can be productive if you want to, too.
As someone who used to use the Munich - Paris TGV regularly, I'm a bit sad that they will use German ICEs, as the french trains are a bit nicer food-wise :D
Trains were bombed to pieces in Madrid in 2004[1], and since then there were multiple cases of terrorism in european trains. There were incidents galore already, so let's be optimistic that travel by train will stay free of airport-like security. :)
And in Spain you have to enter your ID card # and other personal info for the ticket, and occasional security checks, for all the long distance trains. So the difference to Germany is noticeable due to this history!
- if the purpose of traveling is the pleasure of traveling I need to travel slowly in nature, a short segment at a time, appreciating differences from a place to another;
- if the purpose is just going from A to B than the fastest option is the better.
More in general such megaprojects means very few earning big money, more concentration of humans, that ALREADY is a big issue alone and a general waste of resources that are already scarce.
Public transport is sold to be environmentally friendly, it's the opposite. Big infra are sold as progress, while since they can evolve they aren't sustainable in a rapidly changing world, for what? Well "following the money" I can say some private party profit for building and maintain such monsters, for politicians that have caged people more and more making them unable to do pretty anything on their own.
As a former big-city resident sometimes I state to some wannabe environmentalist as a matter of fact polluter: "you say you are eco-friendly because you do anything with a bike/public transport in a city. Yes, you are, needing only a hyper-polluting industry around to let you live that way, a hyper-polluted set of infra around etc. The real name it's hypocrisy like the old adage "I do not oppress others, that's the business of some stakeholder, I offload all such activities to be clean".
In the short term at least, ignoring external effects of your doing so. And you're kind of ignoring costs as well, like you wouldn't hire a space shuttle if a 3-hour train ride will do, and airplanes fly so cheaply compared to other transportation because you can avoid most of the fuel taxes (what good/bad could that tax money do, for you or for others? Do you spend the difference on non-profits?).
Anyway while this is a big discussion of itself, and includes philosophical/moral dilemmas and tax politics, just saying "go for pleasure or go fast" is definitely thinking too simplistically.
> Public transport is sold to be environmentally friendly, it's the opposite.
I'm sure you can find exceptions for some specific routes, but as a general rule that's just false. This is so backwards that I really wonder where you get your numbers or ideas from and if it might actually just be a desire to be contrarian or if you're explaining things to yourself in a way that you don't have to feel bad about e.g. a choice not to use public transport.
Honestly I see the exact opposite: the real TCO of passengers hi-speed rails is FAR above air traveling, not much in money but in environmental terms. Beside that a plane fly, so yes it need airports, but nothing on the ground so it can adapt to a changing world, rails can't.
We are abandoning nearly all mega-thing of the past, mega-ship, mega-planes, ... because they are too costly and we still build mega-cruise ships and high-speed trains ONLY to made some making big money and pleasing a flock of false-environmentally friendly modern hippies... It's absurd.
If you study logistic a bit you'll see that we all bet on water and air travel, considering all the rest nearly dead because too costly, yet most people, well convinced by some PR think the exact contrary.
> the real TCO of passengers hi-speed rails is FAR above air traveling, not much in money but in environmental terms
How? Rail is consistently ranked among the lowest CO2-per-passenger-km of any travel mode. High speed rail is all electrified, flights all put out CO2 exhaust and particulate matter into the upper atmosphere.
And now that Europe is finally, 30 years too late, starting to see the light on nuclear (as an adjunct to solar and wind) this is pretty important.
Trains are vulnerable to one hypothetical technology: self-driving electric coaches. If it ever happens, it would be some time away, and for the long distance high-speed routes, will probably never be as fast as a 350kph+ train. But I can see swarms of e-coaches dominating regional trains because they're far more flexible. I just hope they're comfortable, but I don't really think they will be, compared to trains.
Even self-driving coaches will have congestion issues. Even if there are dedicated travel lanes and all vehicles are connected, capacity will (probably) at most double (going down much further as speeds increase, since a safe braking distance is still needed).
In that mode, the new techniques that are getting developed in rail signalling (ETCS level 3 moving block) might be transferred in some way, but capacity is still very much limited.
If E-Coaches are shared, you'll have difficulties getting them to you at the point & time you want to travel (probably requiring at least ~15-30 min prior information in non-urban environments, where congestion doesn't limit adoption). They'll also have to drive in-and-out of multiple residential areas (if shared), which will increase travel time.
I think self-driving cars (personal use)[1], autonomous electric busses (with many of the limitations as current busses, but lower cost & higher comfort as well as more flexible (smaller) capacity options) and rail transit will cover most demands, with on-demand transportation covering the night hours and uncommon travel routes.
Some transit agencies are experimenting with services like ViaVan (providing most of the features of self-driving electric coaches, excluding the self-driving part) and adoption seems to be low, mostly working as a complement if no other attractive transit options exist, not as a displacement.
[1]: I fear that this will be primary form of transportation, since costs aren't going to be much higher than current cars (or perhaps even lower). The possibility of doing something other than driving will make congestion more palatable and searching for a parking spot will probably not require a human on-board. There will still be a personal space owned by someone and stuff can be (permanently) left inside the car.
Yes, if you measure JUST the travel you can state little CO₂ respect of other means (even if measuring pollution in CO₂ terms have NO scientific basis, it's done just to make pollution a market for private profit) BUT if you count the total cost:
- how much raw materials are needed, and processed, to build, and maintain, rails
- how much people per train go, because rarely they run at full capacity and when they do people is not that happy for obvious reasons
- how much raw materials, processing and energy is consumed by the side services needed
Than things completely change. Than a STOL able to land on a natural surface pollute FAR LESS compared. Keep attention when you read research how this research is done because it's easy to stretch the reality to depict a result, mathematically true, but meaningless in practice sold as meaningful and really true in the broad sense.
Surely, but they clearly states that cities pollute far more than large spread areas, i.e. "rivieras". Did you see how unfit are big rails train/stations and big infra in general in a riviera? Being spread means that any "large artery" is not much fit to serve people.
> Surely, but they clearly states that cities pollute far more than large spread areas
No, your source is highly specific in that it is looking at grid emissions from cities in Australia, which has one of the dirtiest grids in the developed world at 527 gCO2/kWh. For comparison, the US is at 379, Canada is at 124, France is at 68, and the other European countries are somewhere in the 200-350 range. The results are very sensitive to this.
The source even specifically covers some other things that make it irrelevant to extrapolate:
> With regard to energy consumption overall warm weather causes may make Australia a special case due to its climate being very different to that in northern countries. If dwellings are too close together they are more difficult to cool whereas it is easier to heat them.
The figure it uses to calculate emissions from rail transport is 105 gram per passenger-km. For Eurostar, that value is 6grams, due to higher ridership and much cleaner grid.
Plus, the lowest carbon form of transport you can use is your own two feet. Next up is a bike, followed by an ebike. All of these rely on density, and are poorly represented due to sprawling development patterns in Aus (and North America).
A railroad based on concrete sleepers would use about 265 m³ of concrete per track mile. Thus, were the North East Corridor fully 4 tracked and used concrete instead of wooden ties, it would consume about 50,000 m³ of concrete.
A single airport runway at a major airport consumes about 55,000 m³ of concrete. That's more concrete than the entire trackage of an entire major rail line.
Sure, there's a lot I'm not accounting for, but... railroad station infrastructure is far smaller than airport terminal infrastructure. And there's another dozen major airport runways worth of concrete to chew through, and I haven't even started tallying up the taxiways or terminal pads or staging areas, etc. I doubt there's enough viaducts, bridges, and tunnels along the railroad to make up all that extra concrete.
That's not the math I mean, that's the math of comparing a single railroad with some large airports hubs. Try comparing a sparse Riviera where most activities are remote or local, so at a very short range, typically with cars on 20km radius, and some other small activities are made by STOL witch do not demand much of airport, just a surface, a grass one is not the best but still work, the taxiways just a path to a space where you can park not differently than a car parking lot.
The non-local part can be served by water (when possible) or by rails from a small hub to another depending on the territory.
In such setup you still have commercial transports but people ones are FAR different than now, so the relative infra is far different. Since roads are mostly for short range activities there are no large viaduct, bridges, tunnels because there are no highways, no big cities to serve and so on. There are rail stations, harbors, sure, but FAR little than the actual large ones because there is no need to concentrate the network.
In IT terms: did you remember the evolution from mainframe to clusters? Well does clusters demand more resources than mainframes? Are them concentrated? Networks in general have a common set of properties from roads to LAN/MAN/WAN passing through biological "networks", try the math in such terms.
> More in general such megaprojects means very few earning big money, more concentration of humans, that ALREADY is a big issue alone and a general waste of resources that are already scarce.
There is no mega project, all the tracks exist already. Same for the stations and the rolling stock.
Just reading the title of the article would have given you a hint: 2023 is an awfully short deadline for any serious infrastructure project.
> you say you are eco-friendly because you do anything with a bike/public transport in a city. Yes, you are, needing only a hyper-polluting industry around to let you live that way, a hyper-polluted set of infra around
A bike is polluting? What do you use, a horse or a magic carpet?
Oh no, your bike does not pollute but the diesel truck that bring food nearby you everyday so that you are able to buy it daily does. Similarly ALL other services to enable you to live on a bike-only city range...
Do you drive all the way to the farm for your groceries? That food maybe traveled 1000 km to get to the store where you buy it. How far do you drive for you food, 50km? Thats what, 5% difference?
Lets suppose you drive all the way to the farm.
Do you think your car is more efficient at moving goods than a truck? Have you tried dividing Fuel consumption of the truck by its cargo capacity, and then doing the same math for your car?
Or is your beef with daily-ness? The store near me gets two trucks every day - would it be better if it got 4 trucks every two days? No-one is driving around half empty trucks
I generally buy from a national "federated cooperative" (Intermarché) witch despite the claim is a corporate like any others made up by a series of mostly national producers and a network of supermarket, of course foods have traveled because our actual food system is not much local-centered BUT instead of buy small batch (with packaging and so on) everyday I buy in quantity, store at home. Bread can be freeze issueless, various kind of cheese, not all unfortunately, the same, meat and various sea products equally etc. I drive 20km once a month in mean for groceries. Back in city I've driven 5km every week, notably with equal travel time due to city traffic.
A set of individual cars is not more efficient than a single truck BUT buying in quantity, with little packaging vs buy small quantity with much more packaging change the number of trucks on the road and the numbers of waste we made, packages are not produced at the supermarket backyard they also need to travel. For instance I tend to buy wines directly from some producers (not all wine I use, but a significant slice, they are between 30 and 45 km) I generally buy in four classic barrels (glass+plastic and glass+straw / wood) bottling in my garage with the same glass bottles every years. Compared to buy single bottles I made FAR LESS traveling because if I buy in bottles they are always new ones, having traveled empty, fill, stickered, traveled again full etc. Similarly for olive oil, I tend to buy it once a year in metal barrels from a relatively near local producer (75km). In the future when I expect far more expensive gasoline prices I'll probably buy an EV recharging it from my present p.v. system, nothing really "ecological" for sure but still cut the need for distributing oils at any station, witch happen with trucks in most cases.
That's not much of a math anyway, the point is that in a distributed economy we tend to produce at a short range, like we have done in the past, surely not all is local, I can't buy local bananas here so to say, but many things can be. For instance why importing Brazilian meat when we have a national production? It's cheaper in the actual system but it should not. Sunflower oil? In a moderately recent past (~20 years) was produced nationally, then Ukrainian/Russians one became a cheaper option for sellers production have shifted. Again we do not need that shift and it was not resulting in lower prices for customers, only bigger margins from sellers. A State-made logistics for national enterprises might be the most efficient answer.
> More in general such megaprojects means very few earning big money
"Megaprojects"? The railroad infrastructure between Paris and Berlin already exists and did so for a long time, in fact googling a bit reveals that there was already a direct Paris - Berlin - Moscow connection operated since the 19th century until 1994:
So at most the existing infrastructure outside cities needs conversion to high-speed tracks (or more likely, trains will just travel at reduced speeds, which for instance is the case for most of East Germany where only few high speed sections exists - but mainly because cities are so close to each other that travelling at 300 km/h wouldn't save much time between stops).
For sure. Plus it is 2 hour flight from Paris to Berlin, factor in extra time to get to/from the airport and 2 hours to get through security and the train isn't far off. I wonder what the price difference will be.
Before Covid I regularly flew HAM - MUC (Hamburg - Munich). For me Taki g the train was not an option. For colleagues it really was. It massively depended on living location.
I am 15 minutes by car north of Hamburg airport. I regularly made the trip to my client or into our Munich office in about 4.5 hours. By train some colleagues needed 6 hours into Munich office.
Had I lived near the main Hamburg station I could have done the train trip also in 6 hours. But for the plane would habe added 30 - 45 minutes to the airport.
I still would have been faster by plane, but would not have gotten as much work done as with going by train.
In the end - for me - convenience won (and I would habe added 60 - 90 minutes to the train ride to get from where I live to the Hamburg main station) and I am glad that Covid hot and everybody learned about video meetings. This massively reduces on-site appearances.
But trains and planes can reasonably compete on mid distance connections in central Europe imho.
Will be testing using the train for the first time in years because the alternative would be driving 1600 km in 4 days and have a full day workshop within these 4 days. Being driven sounds better to me in that case. Let's wait how I feel after the upcoming week.
I spent 1h+ on CDG in November, both going out and in ( from outside of Schengen), for the whole security+ID process. It still happens, depending on the airport and load.
I took the train from Berlin to Paris in 2018. Was visiting Europe from the US with my son and we did it on a Sunday when nothing was open anyway. No problem with 7 hours on a train. Would have taken at least 5 hours to fly, getting to/from the airports, security, arriving early, etc. Cheaper and more enjoyable to take the train,
Train is 200% more enjoyable… as long as prices remain high. TGV can be as cheap as 30€ offers for Paris-Lyon in first class, or even “board without fare, annoy people, and yet, get the understanding from the controller”, and that’s where problems start: Obnoxious people on board, theft, harassment… under the lenient eye of the controllers, who still give 450€ fine to grandmas who didn’t annoy anyone.
I loved TGV and I became vegetarian for CO2 emissions, but I can’t stand this despicable show of class warfare, and I now take my car for travels up to 1000km.
Isn't this exactly why first/buisness class is made for? What is your experience with buisness class in TGV? In ICE trains, it makes a difference (i.e. more silence).
My stories were about first class. The 2 problems are that SNCF has subsidies so that single mothers with 3 babies from different fathers can use the first class; and that agressive people can use it also, without a fare, and controllers only ask for their name (they obviously say “Jean Dupondt” instead “Mouloud Al’Fahir”, and the controller still doesn’t moves much).
France thinks everyone deserves to use the first class from time to time.
This is both racist and sexist within two sentences. I've definitely seen a higher density, but not very often. For the casual reader: I have used these trains a number of times and this is definitely not the norm.
Still have airport security, that stale recycled airplane air, no dining car, and the crappy little airplane toilet. A nice train is still a better experience IMHO.
If that were true, there would be no first class, because paying 3x as much to shave at most 2% of the journey time doesn't add up.
Instead, some people who can afford it buy a nicer experience. By extension, people are also willing to add some time to a journey for a nicer experience.
Taking the train from Brussels to London is neither cheaper nor faster, but I can't even imagine choosing the plane unless I was desperately skint or it was an emergency where two hours matters (somehow).
A business class ticket from Paris to Berlin gets you the same seats as an economy class ticket, with at best the bonus of the middle seat next to you being empty. (If you fly a six abreast A-319 rather than a four abreast Embraer/Bombardier jet that is.)
You have the exact same “hurry up and wait” situation with passport checks, luggage checks, ticket checks, then a half-hour worth of seatbelt-on-no-laptop-no-toilet time at the start and end etc.
Any traveller who wants to either work or watch a movie in peace will tell you that 4-5 hours on a train are preferable to a 1 hour flight (which is also 3.5h travel time even if you have cabs and a tight timing in the priority security lane).
TGV are much worse than ICE. The TGV double-decker sucks. Tiny overhead storage. Bad leg room. Too hot in summer. And toilets are not well maintained. ICE is a much better train configuration. Although the time I used them weekly a few years back they were incredibly unreliable with huge delays.
That appears to be about 650 miles (1050km). That’s around the point where many people will still prefer to fly. However, the train will likely make a few stops, making Berlin/Paris more accessible from other cities on the route.
Where there are high-speed routes today, hopefully 300 mph maglevs will be running in 50 years.
With a Bahncard 50, one pays between 60 and 80 Euros for an ICE from Hamburg to Munich, one way. My Lufthansa flight next week is 300 Euros. There is also the Bahncard 100, which currently costs 4.144 Euros for mostly all trains and public transport for one year in all of Germany.
The European air traffic is subsidized quite often, trains not that much. Just take all that government money out from flying and put it to trains, suddenly they become much cheaper.
> That appears to be about 650 miles (1050km). That’s around the point where many people will still prefer to fly.
Not sure that is true.
When you have a high speed train, going from the centre of a city to the centre of another city... and can subtract time to get to airport, time in airport security, time to wait to board a plane, time to taxi, time to circle before landing, time to get to the city, time to safety margin most of the above... the train comes out at least comparable on time (not an order of magnitude off), cheaper, greener, and centre-to-centre.
For me... European trains are so nice in comparison to flying that unless there is a time penalty of more than double to triple the real time spent flying (which in this case does not feel true)... then the train wins.
It's also a very productive journey. I can't do meetings on a train, but 6-7 hours uninterrupted in a comfy chair with power and internet is still coding / making slides / etc.
Not everyone can work in a train because not every job is suitable for that. If all you want is to get from point A to point B and you are not paid for that, the extra time is a burden.
Another con is this scenario: you need to go from Berlin to Paris for an activity that takes 2-3 hours (ex: paperwork that requires your presence on site or a very important meeting). With a plane you fly in, do the thing and fly out same day. With the train, you spend 2 days. I had to do this a lot 20 years ago between Bucharest, Romania, and Sofia, Bulgaria; about 370km, no highway, inconvenient flight times, train took ~ 6 hours each direction etc. I was driving there and back, 4 hours door to door each direction, the gas was a lot cheaper than the hotel and sometimes traveling 2-5 people in a car. Double the distance and the plane is the attractive option vs train.
To give some more concrete numbers, I estimated the time from Google's office in Berlin (Tucholskystraße 2, 10117 Berlin, Germany) to Google's office in Paris (8 Rue de Londres, 75009 Paris, France).
Option 1 (plane + taxi) - taxi to BER (45m), check-in/security/wait (1h), BER-CDG flight 1h45m, exit (20m), taxi to the Paris office (1h) = about 5 hours.
Option 2 (plane + bus) - bus in Berlin takes 50 minutes, in Paris takes 1 hour, so about the same, but I'll add about 30 minutes because the schedules might not mesh so well = about 5.5 hours.
Option 2 (train) - taxi to Berlin Hbf (6m) or walk (25m), train to Gare de l'Est (7 hours), taxi (13m) or walk (28m) to the Paris office = about 7.5 hours.
Agreed, 5 extra hours makes a same-day visit tougher (10 hours of travel vs 15).
Plus, to start there's only one day-time direct train route, while there are more flight options.
You're much more likely to be able to do useful work on the uninterrupted 7 hour train journey, compared to all the 1-hour bits of the plane journey. There will presumably be free Wi-Fi and power sockets.
You'll be interrupted once to show your ticket, that's all.
I agree with AdrianB1 that I can think of cases where someone will want to do same-day Berlin->Paris->Berlin trip. The ~5 hour total time savings by flight vs. train (assuming a frequent enough service) might be worth being less productive while on the trip.
If I really need to be present at this "very important" 3 hour meeting in Paris then the best option might be to rent a meeting room at CDG. Then it's a 2 hour flight, 3 hour meeting, and 2 hour flight home - plus transit time in Berlin and going through security at CDG so call it another 3 hours = 10 hours total.
Nitpick, on such a long train ride, you will usually have multiple ticket checks because the crew will have a shift change inbetween. Train staff, unlike airplane staff, usually return home after every shift. After having been on the train for 3 hours or so, they will get off, have their break, then go back on the same line to their home base.
I agree there are good use cases. At the same time I notice you have an amazing saving on connections (from 1h 45 min to airport to 19 minutes, saving 1 h 22 minutes) that is not there for most people. I consider Berlin-Paris customers to be people "around Berlin area" and "towards Paris area", that would negate the connection part.
To be very transparent: I dislike commercial planes. I worked several years in a large airport and I hate the airport experience (cannot disclose any details, but it is very ineffective); I hate the seats in the plane because I am tall and leg room is inadequate. I dislike sitting uncomfortably for hours and I dislike the sound pollution. At the same time I am a sport pilot and I am flying less and less, mostly because the seat (even more uncomfortable) and noise. But I am trying to be realistic when choosing train versus plane, beyond some distance the plane is much better.
To be clear, I'm saying that for your example there are clear reasons to go by plane, starting with there are currently only going to be one or two train trips per day.
> that is not there for most people
Certainly. But you were talking about people who would fly from Berlin to Paris for an activity that takes 2-3 hours and fly back on the same day. That's not most people either. Where do they live?
BER is in the southern part of the city, which means that for at least half the population it's easier to get to Berlin Hbf than the airport.
From Spandau, 18 minutes to the Hbf, plus the walking time to the station. By car, "typically 30-45 minutes" to BER. (This is for leaving home around 5.30am, expecting to get to Paris in mid-morning.) From Pottsdam and Hoppegarten, the times to Hbf is about 37 min. and "typically 35-50 min" by car to BER. That supports my assumption that over 1/2 the population finds it easier to get to the train station than the airport.
Google Maps says the expected mass transit time from Gare d'Est to Vincennes is about 25 minutes, while the driving time from CDG to Vincennes is "typically 45 min to 1 hr 15 min."
As a further complication, you earlier wrote "and you are not paid for that". I assumed someone was willing to pay for the taxis, for a quicker trip, and accepting as a given they weren't paying for your time, though I think that's odd.
I prefer to fly, even if it takes slightly longer. Trains in EU are usually more expensive. Central railway stations are occupied by criminals and homeless. I would not dare to use toilets there.
I take it you either haven't been to many central railway stations, or were pickpocketed on one of your first times through and now feel (understandably) unsafe there? Also not sure what you mean about the toilets, you think they're lying in wait there or do you mean 'dare' from a hygiene standpoint?
I totally get OP's comment. Cleanliness and safety of the station is usually proportional to its city's GDP. IE main central station in Vienna is fine. The one in Dresden not so much.
This is very different when it comes to airports as even small tier 2 airports are somehow clean and safe due to tightened security of them being airports and not train stations.
That airports are more secure is not hard to believe, as they're not actually in cities so criminals would have to plan ahead and travel there to start whatever undefined criminal activity we're talking about. I doubt it's the security theater that does it, as they are just for getting onto planes (I haven't seen security people outside of that security area).
It's not like I've never seen a homeless person in a city center (which includes train stations, though usually they're not inside) but I'm not sure that crime rates are actually that high. With cameras all over the place, it sounds like it would be a hard place to operate at more than a handful of times until they know what you look like, but IANAC.
I live in Dresden. Could you elaborate on what you find unclean or unsafe about Dresden Hbf? I travel from there quite often, and don't recall any experiences that would make me feel unsafe or uncomfortable like you seem to allude to. If anything, the one thing I notice is that there is the high density of police patrols, since the border police for trains going to Czechia and Poland operate out of Dresden Hbf.
Depends on the route - I've never not had reliable phone service and internet on the TGV or Thalys networks ( i used to work on the Paris - Amsterdam train occasionally and it was completely usable).
It’s also often more flexible. I’m right now sitting in a major European city Centre eating lunch because I was running a bit late to take my train and it was less stressful to just take the next one 90 minutes later. To some extent you can do that with flights in major cities, but you’d have to have the correct (not cheapest) ticket and make the decision a few hours in advance. In Japan it’s even nicer, as the next train is probably in 15 minutes.
I once saw a presentation on marseille frankfurt TGV. there are few ppl doing the trip end to end, it becomes economical due to all the other trips (n stops means n² possible trips).
You can also just hop on, without any planning, in Germany anyway, and the price will only be expensive, not outrageous.
An ICE is no different than a bus in this regard. A flight is a totally different story, probably planned weeks in advance and stress starts on the morning the day of.
> That’s around the point where many people will still prefer to fly.
The thing with economy, as always, is the price of an alternative. If these cost the same, it's one thing. Usually though, trains are more expensive. And for a good reason — maintaining the tracks costs a lot of money, while maintaining the air is free.
Maintaining the air is only free until we properly price externalities. Would add an extra ~€45 for the carbon emissions, making trains pretty cost competitive.
This. Most people don't realise that the biggest reason flying is so cheap, is it's subsidised by the state in every contry in accordance to rules of international aviation, whereas train companies must pay taxes on any fuel they use.
>Also, planes (and rockets) are _kind of_ simple when compared with trains or cars.
In which context? I very much doubt that maintanence costs are similar or even cheaper for planes - for one, the plane maintanence has to be more thorough.
Also, I would say that electric engines for trains are relatively simple compared to jet engines.
Even cost supports this thesis: Poland bought 400-seat Pendolino for 400 millions for 20 trains.
Comparable 777 costs 400 million... for one plane. 737s start from 100 million.
A 777 can take you from Warsaw to New York, which no train can do in any time.
For a cost of 737, you can have five trains. But a 737 can make a 1000 km flight, be back, make another 1000 km flight, and be back — in the time it takes a train to make one-way 1000 km ride.
Your points are valid, but it takes more 400-seat trains to provide for a good intercity connection where one plane can do it.
Additionally, in the time the plane flights from point A to point B, the air has lots of space to accommodate other planes. But trains need to share the limited tracks resource — e.g. one one-way tracks, you can't have two trains going in opposite directions, or they will crash into each other.
We have a one-way regional rail line that has double tracks only on the stations, so that's where the trains can pass one another. A failure of any train to be there on time wrecks the whole day schedule.
> In 2011-2015 the Warsaw-Gdańsk-Gdynia route underwent a major upgrading costing $3 billion, partly funded by the European Investment Bank, including track replacement, realignment of curves and relocation of sections of track to allow speeds up to 200 km/h (124 mph), and modernization of stations.
> Maintanence of planes is way more expensive than trains, and maintanence of airports is way more expensive than train stations.
Which is the reason that the bigger the distance, the cheaper flying is compared to trains. Constant costs are the same, but per-kilometer costs add up, and not in trains' favor.
> Also, the biggest reason is tax free plane fuel.
I guess the solution of making planes as expensive as trains are won't be very popular.
Track maintenance is expensive because you need to buy tracks, signalling systems, and railroad switches, and pay the people to install, check, and maintain them. Air is already there and requires no maintenance.
A lot of that sounds like the initial investment you need to put it, I was more wondering about the maintenance part.
I assume most of the equipment is supposed to last decades, and maintenance itself can be automated to a degree (use the trains themselves to run track diagnostics for example).
I have a programmer friend who has a train pass and actually likes to take trains just to work. I also absolutely love reading for a few hours in trains, and at some point adjusted my lifestyle to switch town every 1-2 weeks.
The one time I programmed on a train (central pennsylvania to new york city) was better than the times I've programmed on aircraft. Not sure if it was seat size, the consistency of altitude, smoothness, etc. But I'd love to do more work trips on a train.
Don't forget the constant very loud plane engine noise, and the number of people in line of sight to distract you (a train is more elongated so you're further away from most other passengers). And as you already mentioned, a major factor for me would be the space to actually use a 15" laptop conveniently.
Programming on a train means 30 minutes of crunch time and tangible progress for me; on a plane I can't imagine it being nice though I never tried it (for me flying is a wonderful experience, probably because I almost never do it and I love the perspective you have out the window and I monitor my phone's sensors like pressure and gps and everything, enjoying the special experience).
Oh darn I see that an edit I did made it confusing and I didn't re-read it anymore (edited again for clarity just now). I meant that planes are very loud whereas trains usually just whizz away.
There are indeed some old trains that were very loud, I remember the NL Mat'64 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Mat_%2764) where my phone (uncalibrated, so it'll have been wrong but I don't know by how much) said the employees had to be offered hearing protection and my subjective experience would say the same. For the 8 minutes that I spent in those local trains, it was perfectly fine and also hearing-safe afaik (don't try to drown it out with music as I did, though :/). Since the retirement of this model a few years ago, all trains I've been on in NL/DE are much quieter.
Some friends and I do this in Japan, too (pre covid). Before leaving the US, I also tried to kick off a more structured version of this https://amhacks.com They were very “on board” with the idea, but internal inefficiencies slowed planning down to a snails pace.
My friend, actually, not me. I'm the one reading :)
The difference in resources for moving a traincar vs a traincar with me in it is... I think it might be measurable, with some effort. Definitely not relevant to anything.
Yes but the difference than build, maintain and move a traincar + all the rest needed by it to function vs not building, maintain nor move such trains is very measurable.
Just as a simple home-made curious math: did you ever try to compute how much resources are needed to build cement, iron to made CA, iron for rails, metals for electrical infra dedicated to trains and rolling stock etc vs how much resources to build small personal VTOL/STOL to serve people in a vast riviera?
Just consider that factories to build VTOL/STOL use very little steel, far less then rails, they use much aluminum a bit of copper and others minerals that pollute far less to be prepared and recycled and far less energy, such factories can be nearby mines/metallurgic industries/districts since they can fly directly their product, no heavy logistic required. No special infra, just a bit of flat natural soil. Sure, they demand energy, and they are LESS easy to power with renewables, but just compute how much less resource they demand initially and how flexible they are. Consider that they can last 50+ years with regular entertainment AS TRAINS but not as rails who demand much more work to be kept in good working conditions. Consider their recyclability.
Just see https://i.redd.it/3gpp18t6d6291.png where red area and green area represent the same population, at two different mean density, than consider an hypothetical society, a far less dense one, where we still have some dense area/hub/district for specific purpose (campus, factories etc) that for some reasons can't be distributed efficiently BUT THE REST is distributed. How much daily commuting we need? All eligible jobs WFH are done FH, most jobs are in a short range/locals. No complex metro/tall buildings and the hyper-big resources they needs. Anything can change since there is physical space to made changes etc. Is really utopia? I bet not. Actually seeing the actual real world the SOLE areas that have had a constant mean quality of life, good enough economy where rivieras. Sometimes cities have done better, economically only, but then they fall. Rarely very low density areas have done better. Rivieras have kept they status in almost all situations including wars and catastrophes. They do not demand cities to exists, while cities demand both rural and rivieras to exists since they consume foods, goods but they almost produce nothing behind the tertiary sector. Rural areas need industry. Rivieras normally have (some) industries embodied, residential and work areas mixed, they might be not totally self-sufficient but they are the least dependent on anything else. So, why keep concentrating in cities just to flee when something happen like with covid discovering that being in nature is better for those who can or like in China where cities was the richest and prized areas and now cities have unemployment far bigger than rural areas and much more foods provisioning issues? It's just habit? Just "we always do like that so we continue"? Something else I miss?
The connection Saarbrücken -> Paris (around 500 km) only takes 1:45h. Currently the problem is getting to Saarbrücken from Berlin, which takes up to 7 hours depending on the connection. So yeah, lots of room for improvement, mostly on the German side though. A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons, which of course makes them slow. In France, on the other hand, you have trains going from Paris to Marseille without a single stop in between, and in just 3:04h (for a whooping 780 km).
>A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons, which of course makes them slow.
This is absolutely insane to hear. Feels like the whole "German efficiency" trope is mostly a meme or it doesn't apply to government/national services and is in line with all the other negative things I heard about the infamous archaic German bureocracy in general.
I know even Ukrainian refugees were shocked at how archaic German paper based bureocracy was compared to their home country which moved to digital, as they expected Europe's richest country to have much more efficient bureocracy than Europe's poorest country. Boy were they in for a surprise.
And let's not talk about Germany's infamously abysmal infrastructure and service coverage for fiber and mobile internet that's well behind Eastern Europe.
It's not insane at all. Every additional stop takes about 20 minutes - but there are a lot of people who actually use the stations between, say, Berlin and Cologne.
Germany is much less centralised than France. 20% of the population is in Paris. Only 2% of Germans live in Berlin. It would be insanity to mindlessly copy the French model when the circumstances are so different.
You can play with combinatorics where there are ten trains per day, of which 2 are direct with no stops, 2 only stop in Cologne, remaining 6 stop in Cologne and some other destination as well.
(Edit: this comment was based on apparently incorrect information from GP that there is some rule that high-speed trains need to stop in any state they cross. A counter-example is given below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31548720)
> there are a lot of people who actually use the stations between, say, Berlin and Cologne
Sure, and a stop in the middle would make sense on that length of route, or alternating at which intermediate place(s) it stops. But with a stupid rule like having to stop in whatever state you pass means that you have to build rails around to avoid hitting a corner where nobody lives anyway because you'd have to stop for absolutely no reason.
Let the trains make stops and rails be laid based on, like you say, demand. Not on arbitrary border lines.
Might have been worth mentioning in your existing reply above to the person who said that. I'm kind of wondering who to believe now: one the one hand there's the silliness of the rule that makes me inclined to think you must be right; on the other hand there is my experience living in germany and their love for rules and bureaucracy (whoever spawned the phrase 'german efficiency' must have been sarcastic).
Edit: ah I see you added an example. That settles it then, thanks!
I should have made that clear: there is no such formal rule, although there are quibbles like that where regional politicians demand additional stops.
That's the system working as intended, though. People like to laugh about small cities like Montabaur or Limburg getting ICE access but it turned out that the regions benefitted a lot from that access and after two slow years the demand for high speed train access in the region exploded.
There is no such fixed rule. Many high-speed trains Hamburg-Berlin-Leipzig don't stop in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen-Anhalt, or Brandenburg through which almost all of the route is going through. As far as I am aware there isn't even a single service on that route stopping in Brandenburg at all.
This was a reasonable reading of the sentence, let me indulge into a digression about German grammar.
> A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons
English is more topic-loaded: We might say "for political reasons, every high speed train in Germany..." and so on. In fact if it made any sense for the reason trains cross states to be a political one, the "for political reasons" clause would attach to "cross", not "have", where I believe this is unambiguous in German.
"for political reasons" could have been regulation, also. It happens that it isn't. For that matter "need to" carries more of a sense of obligation than I feel is truly warranted.
That all said, it's valid English and I read it to mean as the author intended.
Germany is mostly a State-less country, their infra suffer from that: Germans rails and roads tend to be far worst than some poor eastern neighbors, still many rails on diesel, roads in obscene conditions etc except few main arteries.
French side having a certain State-planning infra are much, much more spread and in shape.
Too much federalization hurts. The country as a whole ends un bogged down by political squabbles of the different regions who want it "their way".
This isn't an issues specific to Germany though but many EU countries have the same issues.
The end result is too much talking politics and too little improvement, which only benefits the bureocrats cashing their paychecks either way, and hurts the taxpayers who need the services now.
>Germans rails and roads tend to be far worst than some poor eastern neighbors
Example? I know Poland is doing something, but still is far from speed of ICEs. The country is a bit smaller though, and largest destination - Warsaw - is relatively in the centre so it helps.
Germany still have many non-electrified rails, sometimes even cross-borders ones. Polemics about dangerous bridges and roads etc are regular and so on.
Broadband coverage is in a similar sorry state respect of similarly big countries in EU, and it's very expensive, electricity is probably the most expensive in the EU etc
Long-story short: Germany lack of a state-wide infrastructure development, being too concentrate in private profit of some big industries, that's works well for such industries but not work at all for the country at a whole.
I do not know how old is this issue, I do not know if was planted on purpose after WWII to lock their development capability, it might be: I know for Italy was done, with the complicity of vast local corruption "allied" have managed to break up the too quickly too powerful industrial complex born after WWII in most sectors successfully stop many nascent champions. But anyway that's what I've seen in Germany and the little I read about, perhaps someone else here know more and can contribute :-)
Yeah, but stability is important. Take the recent federal elections. Germany moved without any pain from a CDU/CSU/SPD to a three party government (SPD/Greens/FDP). No complaints about the election system, besides a too large Bundestag. Compare that to the US elections Biden/Trump: massive problems with the voting system: real and made up.
The Germans voted on paper. -> There was an undisputed result.
> For example, the Poles are much better at building apartments and transport infrastructure fast than anyone else on your list, including Germany.
Is it that they are 'much better' or the economy is in different stages? The housing market in Germany is much more expensive. It's much cheaper to build in Poland.
Germany already has a larger transport infrastructure. Example: Autobahn 13000 km in Germany vs. roughly 2000km in Poland.
Czech and Polish economies are fairly comparable, but Czech ability to build anything is in tatters. We are a NIMBY paradise, every modest block of flats takes a decade to approve. Our northern neighbours aren't, they build fast.
Poland was a post-Communist rust bucket a short time ago. It's easier to grow and leapfrog when you're starting low. Britain, France and Germany have a lot of inertia.
Its also not true. Local politians are pushing hard to get high speed rail stops, and there is political horse trading going on when building lines to get more local stops, but it doesn't necessarily translate into "one stop in each state" rule.
The problem with hsr is geographical (non centralized coubtry means u need a big network), bureaucratic (it takes decades to build big infra projects), pilticical (germany underinvests in hsr, conservatives want cars, many local greens despise big infra that destroys local meadows), inertia (germans lack vision and follow through, they mostly fiddle and optimize).
Berlin to Hamburg (~1:50) is a nice route. There's almost nothing in terms of population between these two cities.
However, every 2 hours there is a train that stops at Wittenberge (population 8k) and Ludwiglust (population 12k). I assume this is one of those mandated/political routes, rather than economic routes.
It adds an extra 20-30min to the trip, which isn't so bad. But whenever I've taken this route, maybe 2-5 people get on or off.
Would it be better served by more normal IC (200kph) or RE (160kph) train rather than an ICE? I don't know.
That train on the Hamburg Berlin line doing extra stops is an IC, which is a loco hauled 200 km/h train, compared to all other trains which are high speed rail sets running 230km/h. The slower trains aren’t publicly organised, they are for-profit services operated by the German railways inc. like virtually all other IC and ICE services. The German railways are owned by the federal government, meaning there is political influence into the system, but it’s pretty indirect for local politicians.
One thing to consider is that these services may be historic as well. Removing them will burn a lot of good will, which may be expensive in the long run for an operator that is dependent on ongoing public support - even if day-to-day decisions are made independently with economic interests in mind. Compare he marginal cost of providing those stops. Also consider that while Hamburg-Berlin may have a lot of competition from other modes, the small towns may not. Also, most ppl in those small cities will be close to the rail station. Add to that that ppl from surrounding regions will use the stops to get … basically anywhere by train, and you have a bunch of factors that my result in higher ridership than u would expect just by looking at the population of the cities themselves.
> every 2 hours there is a train that stops at Wittenberge (population 8k) and Ludwiglust (population 12k)
That's a Milchmädchenrechnung if I've ever seen one. When a long-distance train coming from Berlin stops in Ludwigslust, there is nearly always a guaranteed connection to a local train continuing towards Schwerin and Wismar (combined population 137k). I'm regularly using this route to visit my parents in Mecklenburg, and it's never just me who's changing trains in Ludwigslust. There's always at least two dozen people. On the weekends, sometimes a lot more.
In a similar vein, Wittenberge may not have all that much people living directly there, but it is an important train hub for northern Sachsen-Anhalt and Brandenburg with several RE lines all meeting there.
> I know even Ukrainian refugees were shocked at how archaic German paper based bureocracy was compared to their home country which moved to digital, as they expected Europe's richest country to have much more efficient bureocracy than Europe's poorest country
Ukraine isn't the poorest European country, Moldova is. (Well without counting the war, and i don't think we can accurately estimate it's economic damage).
As for the bureaucracy, it's actually quite easy to understand once you think about it. It's the same reason why Estonia was a frontrunner in eGovernement and eIDs - when regime change happens ( communism is replaced by a democracy-ish), lots of existing things (laws, institutions) are "tainted" with the aura of the old bad regime. So there's lots of impetus, desire and excuse to change all sorts of things. On the other hand, in a country Germany, even with the absorption of East Germany, things have worked, there's momentum, so there's not that much desire to just change everything.
Germans can be efficient when they need to. It's just governments generally aren't so efficient. But they still get shit done.
I'd say it's actually much worse in the US in terms of the government's ability to get anything done related to infrastructure. Bad roads, rolling blackouts are a regular thing, etc. And of course there is the complete lack of any form of high speed rail connections anywhere in the US. Apparently it's impossible to get anything done on that front for decades now.
To some extent this simply reflects the real differences in population distribution between Germany and France.
The urban agglomeration of Paris houses roughly one sixth (!) of the total population of France, and is roughly 6½ times as big as the next biggest agglomeration (Lyon).
The biggest agglomeration area in Germany in Germany (the Ruhr area, which in turn is itself somewhat spread out and rather polycentric even on the local level) on the other hand only accounts for slightly more than 1/15th of Germany's population, and going further down the list you won't find any such large size discrepancies as between Paris and the rest of France. (In France, Paris is the only agglomeration area with more than 2,000,000 inhabitants, whereas Germany has seven agglomeration areas of that size category, all spread out throughout the country.)
So in France it totally makes sense to just build a series of radial high speed lines all linking Paris with the provincial agglomerations, and even where one line might serve several cities along the way (like how going to Marseille you also pass through/next to Lyon), traffic to/from Paris will dominate, so you'll still get lots of non-stop Paris ↔ Province trains and only comparatively few trains making intermediate stops.
Germany on the other hand doesn't have such a dominant traffic generator and the existing agglomerations are dotted all around the country, so traffic is more spread out and it's more difficult to capture/speed up an appreciable fraction of that with just a few lines.
The rail network that the Prussians built in the second half of the nineteenth century was probably the most significant factor in their smashing victory against France in 1870.
So if the incentive is military (and sadly the Ukrainian Russian war is a reminder that war can happen even not too far away from Germany) Germany has proved its worth in making a dense railway network, possibly more costly than the French one, but very effective once built.
> A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons, which of course makes them slow.
That's not generally true. For example, the ICE train from Hamburg to Berlin goes through 3 other states (Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg) without stops.
There may be local politicians in some states making such demands ("If you want to build your tracks through _my_ state, ..."), but I would assume they are trying to make an impression in an election campaign or something.
In this particular case, it works because there are other long-distance services on the same line that do the extra stops. The EuroCity towards Prague stops in Büchen, Ludwigslust and Wittenberge, which (funnily enough) maps precisely onto the three states that the train passes through.
Germany is more densely populated (232 people / km², 357000km²)and not centralized, compared to France (106 people / km², 547000km²).
The ICE trains connect larger cities & regions, not just the big ones. There are ICE Sprinter trains with fewer stops, though. The ICE trains often don't have their own tracks, which is what makes them slow.
Think of German train infrastructure as a mesh, compared to a more star like system in France with Paris (14 Million people for the metropolitan area) as its center. Berlin is not the center of Germany and has only around 6 Million people in its metropolitan area.
Sounds like sprinter is the fastest class of train in Germany. (Fun?) side fact: As a neighbor (Dutchman), sprinter is a euphemism for the slowest class of trains here. They rebranded it from "stoptrein" (a train that stops at every station it comes through) to "sprinter" for marketing reasons. (The new generation doesn't know better and started using the word; for me I think it'll always remain a euphemism -- in NL specifically of course.)
It is for marketing reasons but it's not a euphemism. IIRC the reasoning is that the newer (Sprinter-class) trains can accelerate much faster than intercity trains; as it were, they're 'sprinting' from station to station (instead of taking their time like the older stoppers).
> as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state
This is not correct. The Frankfurt-Berlin Sprinter, for example, is nonstop.
It takes about 3h 50-55min. Connections with 6 to 8 additional stops take not much long, though: around 15 to 20 min. more. Less than 3 min. more per stop.
The biggest problem with trains is Germany, in my opinion, is not speed, but the unreliability of the connections.
Yeah there are exception, but in general it's very difficult to get a train pass through a federal state without stopping, at least if a new track is needed. The high-speed connection from Berlin to Munich needed to go through the "Thüringer Wald" due to political intervention, which added tremendous cost and delay to the whole project.
You are right that that some train stops only exist for very peculiar reasons, such as Montabaur on the Cologne-Franfurt line.
However, regarding the high-speed connection Munich-Berlin, the question was not so much whether to got through the Thüringer Wald (via Efurt), as the alternative would have meant to cross the Thüringer Schiefergebierge to the east (via Leipzig–Probstzella–Hochstadt-Marktzeuln), but whether building the line is worth the high costs at all.
There are quite a lot of "Inter City" railway stations in Germany.[1] This reflects the situation that Germany has not many large cities (only four have more than 1 mil. inhabitants), but a lot of medium sized ones (80 of over 100,000 inhabitants). Sometimes there are "Inter City" stops at small towns with important companies, such as Walldorf, where SAP is located. So the focus is not on connecting distant cities, but on train rides in the 50 to 150 km range. (Long distance commuting averages around 100 km.)
If time and cost are factored versus a low-cost flight, there is very little economic sense for this option. If you take in consideration the shit-show that is airport experience, then short trips by train become interesting, but only up to 3-4 hours. 7 hours for 1000km does not sound like high speed, 4 hours would be fine.
Lots of economic sense in being able travel while you work or sleep, and also lots ethical and economic sense in not bringing on the worse scenarios of global warming by unnecessary use of fossil fuels.
Japan's night trains are, sadly, almost gone, but that's because the bullet train network now covers all the major islands. There are quite a few luxury tourist sleepers though if you're willing to fork out $1000/night or so.
Making a major resurgence in the last few years though. We took a direct Amsterdam-to-Innsbruck sleeper train earlier this year and there are several companies operating sleeper trains to other parts as well. Somewhere next month the Brussels-Amsterdam-Prague line will start and several more are in planning.
The biggest downside of sleeper trains IMO is that they are only really suitable for certain distances. It's not very nice to arrive somewhere at 02:00, so you really need a destination that is at least 8-10 hours away from your origin.
I had newly found and was exploring this concept of European night trains only last week so don't have concrete experience with planning this yet, but I did see notes in some places that you can disembark until 7am even if the train arrived at 5:something am already. If it drives only from 23:00--02:00 then I'd imagine you're out of luck indeed, but they do accommodate this problem in some cases.
I took the Paris-Munich sleeper a while ago, and also the London-Glasgow one. Both were great.
So much better than trekking out to the airport and dealing with the security and general hassle of planes. Plus you arrive at the destination at the right time. On a plane, you either arrive to late to do much except trek to the hotel, or you have to get up at 4am to get your plane (and still arrive around lunchtime).
However, it's generally between 2 and 5 times more expensive then a flight, so it doesn't always work out. You can do a coach too, but that is pretty uncomfortable.
There totally are night trains, I just never knew of them. Only heard this talk on HN that they are a thing of the past in Europe, and I never looked further than that. Turns out there are night trains all over Europe, from the mediterranean sea to the arctic circle!
Taking a train through Russia is also a thing I've been thinking of doing, but then there's this wannabe-warlord situation messing up a lot of lives right now :/
Looks like Berlin-Paris (or rather, Frankfurt-Paris) is really a missing link here (pun not intended). Good to see ÖBB pick up the slack when DB won't. When the NightJet line opens next year, that sounds like a good opportunity to visit France once again.
I took a sleeper train several times in my life, but my experience was mostly bad. The compartment shakes too much, I was waken up by bright floodlights outside and long, loud loudspeaker messages like "Train Foo goes to Bar, composition of wagons is XYZ, regular departure at 3:00 am, current delay is 20 minutes, we apologize for the delay which was caused by C." in two languages at every stop in between.
These might be a Czech and Slovak specialty, though. Maybe western wagons do not shake as much, western curtains do really block the sharp industrial light and western stations do not pronounce such long messages at every opportunity. IDK.
Other big amount of resources wasted to speed up concentration... I suggest a classic comparison: http://carfree.fr/img/2015/06/sncf.jpg between the past where rails was about connecting peoples vs the current present where rails are about connecting hubs.
Oh, yep, hubs used just to push people in modern open-sky prisons totally dependent on available services since in such hubs all eat, as normal, all have normal humans needs but nearly anything to satisfy them have to come from outside.
Try really to imaging such concentrated world in a projected future and imaging how obscene and vulnerable it is.
the same reasons we have these days for COMMERCIAL rails, witch are meaningful for certain applications (one including run only when we have surplus from renewables, for non-perishable/non-urgent goods) instead of people fast trains who demand very leveled rails, much entertainment to a point that France TGV slow down year on year to reduce hyper-big maintenance costs...
I flew from Ireland to France recently and then caught two trains to my ultimate destination about 100 km from the airport.
The train fares worked out at double the cost of the flight despite being one fifteenth the distance.
Doesn't that strike you as silly given the externalities (like CO2) being way higher for the plane ride than for the train ride?
I still can't get my head around the fact that we as a society allow air travel to dump that much environmental costs on all of us. If flying had to internalize the cost for externalities into the pricing your plane ticket would have probably cost way more than the price of the train ride.
Aviation fuel is taxed lightly but still train fares in france seem to be very expensive, the train in Ireland is far cheaper (even though most things in Ireland are more expensive).
bahn.de now, Paris to Berlin eight hours one change TGV then ICE around 120 euros. They used to do £50 tickets from London to Germany that were actually quite competitive time and price rise to flying. And of course there is always the night bus from Berlin to London....
But there are already train routes with >6 hours in Germany. I sometimes take the train from Berlin to Basel (CH) from just a few stops away from Berlin and when there are no problems that's a 6 hour trip. With the car that would be >7 hours.
I plan to visit Paris and Berlin and was considering taking the train between both. It would be an over night which would save me one hotel night. I'm excited for this.
182 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadYeah! I have no problem spending 6, 7 hours in a train if I have a comfy seat, Wifi and someplace where I can get a coffee and some food, like a dining car or a nice vending machine. A clean WC would also be a plus. There is no comfier way to travel, IMO, and you can be productive if you want to, too.
As someone who used to use the Munich - Paris TGV regularly, I'm a bit sad that they will use German ICEs, as the french trains are a bit nicer food-wise :D
When it comes to railway terrorism, there are more effective infrastructure threats than some guy boarding a passenger train with an explosive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings
- if the purpose of traveling is the pleasure of traveling I need to travel slowly in nature, a short segment at a time, appreciating differences from a place to another;
- if the purpose is just going from A to B than the fastest option is the better.
More in general such megaprojects means very few earning big money, more concentration of humans, that ALREADY is a big issue alone and a general waste of resources that are already scarce.
Public transport is sold to be environmentally friendly, it's the opposite. Big infra are sold as progress, while since they can evolve they aren't sustainable in a rapidly changing world, for what? Well "following the money" I can say some private party profit for building and maintain such monsters, for politicians that have caged people more and more making them unable to do pretty anything on their own.
As a former big-city resident sometimes I state to some wannabe environmentalist as a matter of fact polluter: "you say you are eco-friendly because you do anything with a bike/public transport in a city. Yes, you are, needing only a hyper-polluting industry around to let you live that way, a hyper-polluted set of infra around etc. The real name it's hypocrisy like the old adage "I do not oppress others, that's the business of some stakeholder, I offload all such activities to be clean".
In the short term at least, ignoring external effects of your doing so. And you're kind of ignoring costs as well, like you wouldn't hire a space shuttle if a 3-hour train ride will do, and airplanes fly so cheaply compared to other transportation because you can avoid most of the fuel taxes (what good/bad could that tax money do, for you or for others? Do you spend the difference on non-profits?).
Anyway while this is a big discussion of itself, and includes philosophical/moral dilemmas and tax politics, just saying "go for pleasure or go fast" is definitely thinking too simplistically.
> Public transport is sold to be environmentally friendly, it's the opposite.
I'm sure you can find exceptions for some specific routes, but as a general rule that's just false. This is so backwards that I really wonder where you get your numbers or ideas from and if it might actually just be a desire to be contrarian or if you're explaining things to yourself in a way that you don't have to feel bad about e.g. a choice not to use public transport.
We are abandoning nearly all mega-thing of the past, mega-ship, mega-planes, ... because they are too costly and we still build mega-cruise ships and high-speed trains ONLY to made some making big money and pleasing a flock of false-environmentally friendly modern hippies... It's absurd.
If you study logistic a bit you'll see that we all bet on water and air travel, considering all the rest nearly dead because too costly, yet most people, well convinced by some PR think the exact contrary.
I repeat
> > This is so backwards that I really wonder where you get your numbers
Care to share?
How? Rail is consistently ranked among the lowest CO2-per-passenger-km of any travel mode. High speed rail is all electrified, flights all put out CO2 exhaust and particulate matter into the upper atmosphere.
And now that Europe is finally, 30 years too late, starting to see the light on nuclear (as an adjunct to solar and wind) this is pretty important.
Trains are vulnerable to one hypothetical technology: self-driving electric coaches. If it ever happens, it would be some time away, and for the long distance high-speed routes, will probably never be as fast as a 350kph+ train. But I can see swarms of e-coaches dominating regional trains because they're far more flexible. I just hope they're comfortable, but I don't really think they will be, compared to trains.
In that mode, the new techniques that are getting developed in rail signalling (ETCS level 3 moving block) might be transferred in some way, but capacity is still very much limited.
If E-Coaches are shared, you'll have difficulties getting them to you at the point & time you want to travel (probably requiring at least ~15-30 min prior information in non-urban environments, where congestion doesn't limit adoption). They'll also have to drive in-and-out of multiple residential areas (if shared), which will increase travel time.
I think self-driving cars (personal use)[1], autonomous electric busses (with many of the limitations as current busses, but lower cost & higher comfort as well as more flexible (smaller) capacity options) and rail transit will cover most demands, with on-demand transportation covering the night hours and uncommon travel routes.
Some transit agencies are experimenting with services like ViaVan (providing most of the features of self-driving electric coaches, excluding the self-driving part) and adoption seems to be low, mostly working as a complement if no other attractive transit options exist, not as a displacement.
[1]: I fear that this will be primary form of transportation, since costs aren't going to be much higher than current cars (or perhaps even lower). The possibility of doing something other than driving will make congestion more palatable and searching for a parking spot will probably not require a human on-board. There will still be a personal space owned by someone and stuff can be (permanently) left inside the car.
- how much raw materials are needed, and processed, to build, and maintain, rails
- how much people per train go, because rarely they run at full capacity and when they do people is not that happy for obvious reasons
- how much raw materials, processing and energy is consumed by the side services needed
Than things completely change. Than a STOL able to land on a natural surface pollute FAR LESS compared. Keep attention when you read research how this research is done because it's easy to stretch the reality to depict a result, mathematically true, but meaningless in practice sold as meaningful and really true in the broad sense.
Start with a classic http://www.newgeography.com/content/006840-high-density-and-... than you can dig in the LITTLE we have on that topic, since some dislike certain research.
No, your source is highly specific in that it is looking at grid emissions from cities in Australia, which has one of the dirtiest grids in the developed world at 527 gCO2/kWh. For comparison, the US is at 379, Canada is at 124, France is at 68, and the other European countries are somewhere in the 200-350 range. The results are very sensitive to this.
The source even specifically covers some other things that make it irrelevant to extrapolate:
> With regard to energy consumption overall warm weather causes may make Australia a special case due to its climate being very different to that in northern countries. If dwellings are too close together they are more difficult to cool whereas it is easier to heat them.
The figure it uses to calculate emissions from rail transport is 105 gram per passenger-km. For Eurostar, that value is 6grams, due to higher ridership and much cleaner grid.
Plus, the lowest carbon form of transport you can use is your own two feet. Next up is a bike, followed by an ebike. All of these rely on density, and are poorly represented due to sprawling development patterns in Aus (and North America).
A railroad based on concrete sleepers would use about 265 m³ of concrete per track mile. Thus, were the North East Corridor fully 4 tracked and used concrete instead of wooden ties, it would consume about 50,000 m³ of concrete.
A single airport runway at a major airport consumes about 55,000 m³ of concrete. That's more concrete than the entire trackage of an entire major rail line.
Sure, there's a lot I'm not accounting for, but... railroad station infrastructure is far smaller than airport terminal infrastructure. And there's another dozen major airport runways worth of concrete to chew through, and I haven't even started tallying up the taxiways or terminal pads or staging areas, etc. I doubt there's enough viaducts, bridges, and tunnels along the railroad to make up all that extra concrete.
The non-local part can be served by water (when possible) or by rails from a small hub to another depending on the territory.
In such setup you still have commercial transports but people ones are FAR different than now, so the relative infra is far different. Since roads are mostly for short range activities there are no large viaduct, bridges, tunnels because there are no highways, no big cities to serve and so on. There are rail stations, harbors, sure, but FAR little than the actual large ones because there is no need to concentrate the network.
In IT terms: did you remember the evolution from mainframe to clusters? Well does clusters demand more resources than mainframes? Are them concentrated? Networks in general have a common set of properties from roads to LAN/MAN/WAN passing through biological "networks", try the math in such terms.
There is no mega project, all the tracks exist already. Same for the stations and the rolling stock.
Just reading the title of the article would have given you a hint: 2023 is an awfully short deadline for any serious infrastructure project.
A bike is polluting? What do you use, a horse or a magic carpet?
Lets suppose you drive all the way to the farm.
Do you think your car is more efficient at moving goods than a truck? Have you tried dividing Fuel consumption of the truck by its cargo capacity, and then doing the same math for your car?
Or is your beef with daily-ness? The store near me gets two trucks every day - would it be better if it got 4 trucks every two days? No-one is driving around half empty trucks
A set of individual cars is not more efficient than a single truck BUT buying in quantity, with little packaging vs buy small quantity with much more packaging change the number of trucks on the road and the numbers of waste we made, packages are not produced at the supermarket backyard they also need to travel. For instance I tend to buy wines directly from some producers (not all wine I use, but a significant slice, they are between 30 and 45 km) I generally buy in four classic barrels (glass+plastic and glass+straw / wood) bottling in my garage with the same glass bottles every years. Compared to buy single bottles I made FAR LESS traveling because if I buy in bottles they are always new ones, having traveled empty, fill, stickered, traveled again full etc. Similarly for olive oil, I tend to buy it once a year in metal barrels from a relatively near local producer (75km). In the future when I expect far more expensive gasoline prices I'll probably buy an EV recharging it from my present p.v. system, nothing really "ecological" for sure but still cut the need for distributing oils at any station, witch happen with trucks in most cases.
That's not much of a math anyway, the point is that in a distributed economy we tend to produce at a short range, like we have done in the past, surely not all is local, I can't buy local bananas here so to say, but many things can be. For instance why importing Brazilian meat when we have a national production? It's cheaper in the actual system but it should not. Sunflower oil? In a moderately recent past (~20 years) was produced nationally, then Ukrainian/Russians one became a cheaper option for sellers production have shifted. Again we do not need that shift and it was not resulting in lower prices for customers, only bigger margins from sellers. A State-made logistics for national enterprises might be the most efficient answer.
"Megaprojects"? The railroad infrastructure between Paris and Berlin already exists and did so for a long time, in fact googling a bit reveals that there was already a direct Paris - Berlin - Moscow connection operated since the 19th century until 1994:
https://uic.org/com/enews/nr/412/article/moscow-berlin-paris...
So at most the existing infrastructure outside cities needs conversion to high-speed tracks (or more likely, trains will just travel at reduced speeds, which for instance is the case for most of East Germany where only few high speed sections exists - but mainly because cities are so close to each other that travelling at 300 km/h wouldn't save much time between stops).
I am 15 minutes by car north of Hamburg airport. I regularly made the trip to my client or into our Munich office in about 4.5 hours. By train some colleagues needed 6 hours into Munich office.
Had I lived near the main Hamburg station I could have done the train trip also in 6 hours. But for the plane would habe added 30 - 45 minutes to the airport.
I still would have been faster by plane, but would not have gotten as much work done as with going by train.
In the end - for me - convenience won (and I would habe added 60 - 90 minutes to the train ride to get from where I live to the Hamburg main station) and I am glad that Covid hot and everybody learned about video meetings. This massively reduces on-site appearances.
But trains and planes can reasonably compete on mid distance connections in central Europe imho.
Will be testing using the train for the first time in years because the alternative would be driving 1600 km in 4 days and have a full day workshop within these 4 days. Being driven sounds better to me in that case. Let's wait how I feel after the upcoming week.
I loved TGV and I became vegetarian for CO2 emissions, but I can’t stand this despicable show of class warfare, and I now take my car for travels up to 1000km.
France thinks everyone deserves to use the first class from time to time.
If you pretend to fight racism (most people only pretend), please fight this.
I take my laptop some snacks and just enjoy the time.
Have you not been on business class flight?
Instead, some people who can afford it buy a nicer experience. By extension, people are also willing to add some time to a journey for a nicer experience.
Taking the train from Brussels to London is neither cheaper nor faster, but I can't even imagine choosing the plane unless I was desperately skint or it was an emergency where two hours matters (somehow).
Also you have no turbulences in a train, also no safety announcements :D
Airplanes definitely have a smell to them, but not because the air is "stale". Apparently the air is changed quite often
>Most aircraft cabin air is [...] completely changed 20 to 30 times per hour
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/how-clean-and-safe-is-a-pla...
You have the exact same “hurry up and wait” situation with passport checks, luggage checks, ticket checks, then a half-hour worth of seatbelt-on-no-laptop-no-toilet time at the start and end etc.
Any traveller who wants to either work or watch a movie in peace will tell you that 4-5 hours on a train are preferable to a 1 hour flight (which is also 3.5h travel time even if you have cabs and a tight timing in the priority security lane).
Where there are high-speed routes today, hopefully 300 mph maglevs will be running in 50 years.
Unfortunately ICE is very expensive to date
Not sure that is true.
When you have a high speed train, going from the centre of a city to the centre of another city... and can subtract time to get to airport, time in airport security, time to wait to board a plane, time to taxi, time to circle before landing, time to get to the city, time to safety margin most of the above... the train comes out at least comparable on time (not an order of magnitude off), cheaper, greener, and centre-to-centre.
For me... European trains are so nice in comparison to flying that unless there is a time penalty of more than double to triple the real time spent flying (which in this case does not feel true)... then the train wins.
It's also a very productive journey. I can't do meetings on a train, but 6-7 hours uninterrupted in a comfy chair with power and internet is still coding / making slides / etc.
Another con is this scenario: you need to go from Berlin to Paris for an activity that takes 2-3 hours (ex: paperwork that requires your presence on site or a very important meeting). With a plane you fly in, do the thing and fly out same day. With the train, you spend 2 days. I had to do this a lot 20 years ago between Bucharest, Romania, and Sofia, Bulgaria; about 370km, no highway, inconvenient flight times, train took ~ 6 hours each direction etc. I was driving there and back, 4 hours door to door each direction, the gas was a lot cheaper than the hotel and sometimes traveling 2-5 people in a car. Double the distance and the plane is the attractive option vs train.
Option 1 (plane + taxi) - taxi to BER (45m), check-in/security/wait (1h), BER-CDG flight 1h45m, exit (20m), taxi to the Paris office (1h) = about 5 hours.
Option 2 (plane + bus) - bus in Berlin takes 50 minutes, in Paris takes 1 hour, so about the same, but I'll add about 30 minutes because the schedules might not mesh so well = about 5.5 hours.
Option 2 (train) - taxi to Berlin Hbf (6m) or walk (25m), train to Gare de l'Est (7 hours), taxi (13m) or walk (28m) to the Paris office = about 7.5 hours.
Agreed, 5 extra hours makes a same-day visit tougher (10 hours of travel vs 15).
Plus, to start there's only one day-time direct train route, while there are more flight options.
You'll be interrupted once to show your ticket, that's all.
If I really need to be present at this "very important" 3 hour meeting in Paris then the best option might be to rent a meeting room at CDG. Then it's a 2 hour flight, 3 hour meeting, and 2 hour flight home - plus transit time in Berlin and going through security at CDG so call it another 3 hours = 10 hours total.
While it's a minimum of 17 hours by train.
To be very transparent: I dislike commercial planes. I worked several years in a large airport and I hate the airport experience (cannot disclose any details, but it is very ineffective); I hate the seats in the plane because I am tall and leg room is inadequate. I dislike sitting uncomfortably for hours and I dislike the sound pollution. At the same time I am a sport pilot and I am flying less and less, mostly because the seat (even more uncomfortable) and noise. But I am trying to be realistic when choosing train versus plane, beyond some distance the plane is much better.
To be clear, I'm saying that for your example there are clear reasons to go by plane, starting with there are currently only going to be one or two train trips per day.
> that is not there for most people
Certainly. But you were talking about people who would fly from Berlin to Paris for an activity that takes 2-3 hours and fly back on the same day. That's not most people either. Where do they live?
BER is in the southern part of the city, which means that for at least half the population it's easier to get to Berlin Hbf than the airport.
From Spandau, 18 minutes to the Hbf, plus the walking time to the station. By car, "typically 30-45 minutes" to BER. (This is for leaving home around 5.30am, expecting to get to Paris in mid-morning.) From Pottsdam and Hoppegarten, the times to Hbf is about 37 min. and "typically 35-50 min" by car to BER. That supports my assumption that over 1/2 the population finds it easier to get to the train station than the airport.
Google Maps says the expected mass transit time from Gare d'Est to Vincennes is about 25 minutes, while the driving time from CDG to Vincennes is "typically 45 min to 1 hr 15 min."
As a further complication, you earlier wrote "and you are not paid for that". I assumed someone was willing to pay for the taxis, for a quicker trip, and accepting as a given they weren't paying for your time, though I think that's odd.
This is very different when it comes to airports as even small tier 2 airports are somehow clean and safe due to tightened security of them being airports and not train stations.
It's not like I've never seen a homeless person in a city center (which includes train stations, though usually they're not inside) but I'm not sure that crime rates are actually that high. With cameras all over the place, it sounds like it would be a hard place to operate at more than a handful of times until they know what you look like, but IANAC.
I live in Dresden. Could you elaborate on what you find unclean or unsafe about Dresden Hbf? I travel from there quite often, and don't recall any experiences that would make me feel unsafe or uncomfortable like you seem to allude to. If anything, the one thing I notice is that there is the high density of police patrols, since the border police for trains going to Czechia and Poland operate out of Dresden Hbf.
Airports are much better! No squatters, beggars or drug dealers!
Trains need to provide consistent connectivity and then they can be mobile offices. Maybe add some rentable phone booths, too.
An ICE is no different than a bus in this regard. A flight is a totally different story, probably planned weeks in advance and stress starts on the morning the day of.
The thing with economy, as always, is the price of an alternative. If these cost the same, it's one thing. Usually though, trains are more expensive. And for a good reason — maintaining the tracks costs a lot of money, while maintaining the air is free.
Maintanence of planes is way more expensive than trains, and maintanence of airports is way more expensive than train stations.
Also, the biggest reason is tax free plane fuel.
This. Most people don't realise that the biggest reason flying is so cheap, is it's subsidised by the state in every contry in accordance to rules of international aviation, whereas train companies must pay taxes on any fuel they use.
Kinda doubt if you count per passenger mile. Also, planes (and rockets) are _kind of_ simple when compared with trains or cars.
Not even the largest A380 are comparable to ICE4 which are presumably going to be used on this route.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v15f0ux8dk07ap7/ICE4.pdf?dl=0
>Also, planes (and rockets) are _kind of_ simple when compared with trains or cars.
In which context? I very much doubt that maintanence costs are similar or even cheaper for planes - for one, the plane maintanence has to be more thorough.
Also, I would say that electric engines for trains are relatively simple compared to jet engines.
Even cost supports this thesis: Poland bought 400-seat Pendolino for 400 millions for 20 trains.
Comparable 777 costs 400 million... for one plane. 737s start from 100 million.
What's expensive is infrastructure.
For a cost of 737, you can have five trains. But a 737 can make a 1000 km flight, be back, make another 1000 km flight, and be back — in the time it takes a train to make one-way 1000 km ride.
Your points are valid, but it takes more 400-seat trains to provide for a good intercity connection where one plane can do it.
Additionally, in the time the plane flights from point A to point B, the air has lots of space to accommodate other planes. But trains need to share the limited tracks resource — e.g. one one-way tracks, you can't have two trains going in opposite directions, or they will crash into each other.
We have a one-way regional rail line that has double tracks only on the stations, so that's where the trains can pass one another. A failure of any train to be there on time wrecks the whole day schedule.
Seems to be the case:
> In 2011-2015 the Warsaw-Gdańsk-Gdynia route underwent a major upgrading costing $3 billion, partly funded by the European Investment Bank, including track replacement, realignment of curves and relocation of sections of track to allow speeds up to 200 km/h (124 mph), and modernization of stations.
Note it was an "upgrading" of existing tracks.
Which is the reason that the bigger the distance, the cheaper flying is compared to trains. Constant costs are the same, but per-kilometer costs add up, and not in trains' favor.
> Also, the biggest reason is tax free plane fuel.
I guess the solution of making planes as expensive as trains are won't be very popular.
Or, at the very least, not tax electricity used by trains?
Also, I think you overestimate the importance of plane ticket prices on people's voting patterns.
I assume most of the equipment is supposed to last decades, and maintenance itself can be automated to a degree (use the trains themselves to run track diagnostics for example).
Programming on a train means 30 minutes of crunch time and tangible progress for me; on a plane I can't imagine it being nice though I never tried it (for me flying is a wonderful experience, probably because I almost never do it and I love the perspective you have out the window and I monitor my phone's sensors like pressure and gps and everything, enjoying the special experience).
There are indeed some old trains that were very loud, I remember the NL Mat'64 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Mat_%2764) where my phone (uncalibrated, so it'll have been wrong but I don't know by how much) said the employees had to be offered hearing protection and my subjective experience would say the same. For the 8 minutes that I spent in those local trains, it was perfectly fine and also hearing-safe afaik (don't try to drown it out with music as I did, though :/). Since the retirement of this model a few years ago, all trains I've been on in NL/DE are much quieter.
The difference in resources for moving a traincar vs a traincar with me in it is... I think it might be measurable, with some effort. Definitely not relevant to anything.
Just as a simple home-made curious math: did you ever try to compute how much resources are needed to build cement, iron to made CA, iron for rails, metals for electrical infra dedicated to trains and rolling stock etc vs how much resources to build small personal VTOL/STOL to serve people in a vast riviera?
Just consider that factories to build VTOL/STOL use very little steel, far less then rails, they use much aluminum a bit of copper and others minerals that pollute far less to be prepared and recycled and far less energy, such factories can be nearby mines/metallurgic industries/districts since they can fly directly their product, no heavy logistic required. No special infra, just a bit of flat natural soil. Sure, they demand energy, and they are LESS easy to power with renewables, but just compute how much less resource they demand initially and how flexible they are. Consider that they can last 50+ years with regular entertainment AS TRAINS but not as rails who demand much more work to be kept in good working conditions. Consider their recyclability.
Just see https://i.redd.it/3gpp18t6d6291.png where red area and green area represent the same population, at two different mean density, than consider an hypothetical society, a far less dense one, where we still have some dense area/hub/district for specific purpose (campus, factories etc) that for some reasons can't be distributed efficiently BUT THE REST is distributed. How much daily commuting we need? All eligible jobs WFH are done FH, most jobs are in a short range/locals. No complex metro/tall buildings and the hyper-big resources they needs. Anything can change since there is physical space to made changes etc. Is really utopia? I bet not. Actually seeing the actual real world the SOLE areas that have had a constant mean quality of life, good enough economy where rivieras. Sometimes cities have done better, economically only, but then they fall. Rarely very low density areas have done better. Rivieras have kept they status in almost all situations including wars and catastrophes. They do not demand cities to exists, while cities demand both rural and rivieras to exists since they consume foods, goods but they almost produce nothing behind the tertiary sector. Rural areas need industry. Rivieras normally have (some) industries embodied, residential and work areas mixed, they might be not totally self-sufficient but they are the least dependent on anything else. So, why keep concentrating in cities just to flee when something happen like with covid discovering that being in nature is better for those who can or like in China where cities was the richest and prized areas and now cities have unemployment far bigger than rural areas and much more foods provisioning issues? It's just habit? Just "we always do like that so we continue"? Something else I miss?
This is absolutely insane to hear. Feels like the whole "German efficiency" trope is mostly a meme or it doesn't apply to government/national services and is in line with all the other negative things I heard about the infamous archaic German bureocracy in general.
I know even Ukrainian refugees were shocked at how archaic German paper based bureocracy was compared to their home country which moved to digital, as they expected Europe's richest country to have much more efficient bureocracy than Europe's poorest country. Boy were they in for a surprise.
And let's not talk about Germany's infamously abysmal infrastructure and service coverage for fiber and mobile internet that's well behind Eastern Europe.
Germany is much less centralised than France. 20% of the population is in Paris. Only 2% of Germans live in Berlin. It would be insanity to mindlessly copy the French model when the circumstances are so different.
Over 6 million people live in Berlin metro, in an 80 million country this is closer to 8%.
> there are a lot of people who actually use the stations between, say, Berlin and Cologne
Sure, and a stop in the middle would make sense on that length of route, or alternating at which intermediate place(s) it stops. But with a stupid rule like having to stop in whatever state you pass means that you have to build rails around to avoid hitting a corner where nobody lives anyway because you'd have to stop for absolutely no reason.
Let the trains make stops and rails be laid based on, like you say, demand. Not on arbitrary border lines.
There is no such rule in Germany.
> high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross
For example the ICE from Hamburg to Berlin tomorrow at 14:35 goes directly, not stopping in Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Brandenburg.
Edit: ah I see you added an example. That settles it then, thanks!
That's the system working as intended, though. People like to laugh about small cities like Montabaur or Limburg getting ICE access but it turned out that the regions benefitted a lot from that access and after two slow years the demand for high speed train access in the region exploded.
> A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons
English is more topic-loaded: We might say "for political reasons, every high speed train in Germany..." and so on. In fact if it made any sense for the reason trains cross states to be a political one, the "for political reasons" clause would attach to "cross", not "have", where I believe this is unambiguous in German.
"for political reasons" could have been regulation, also. It happens that it isn't. For that matter "need to" carries more of a sense of obligation than I feel is truly warranted.
That all said, it's valid English and I read it to mean as the author intended.
French side having a certain State-planning infra are much, much more spread and in shape.
This isn't an issues specific to Germany though but many EU countries have the same issues.
The end result is too much talking politics and too little improvement, which only benefits the bureocrats cashing their paychecks either way, and hurts the taxpayers who need the services now.
Example? I know Poland is doing something, but still is far from speed of ICEs. The country is a bit smaller though, and largest destination - Warsaw - is relatively in the centre so it helps.
For instance https://elib.dlr.de/121661/1/Railways%202018_E3.01_Pagenkopf... page 3 you have a map of rails with the fraction electrified or https://www.tellerreport.com/business/2021-07-21-infrastruct... and https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/low-german-infr...
Broadband coverage is in a similar sorry state respect of similarly big countries in EU, and it's very expensive, electricity is probably the most expensive in the EU etc
Long-story short: Germany lack of a state-wide infrastructure development, being too concentrate in private profit of some big industries, that's works well for such industries but not work at all for the country at a whole.
I do not know how old is this issue, I do not know if was planted on purpose after WWII to lock their development capability, it might be: I know for Italy was done, with the complicity of vast local corruption "allied" have managed to break up the too quickly too powerful industrial complex born after WWII in most sectors successfully stop many nascent champions. But anyway that's what I've seen in Germany and the little I read about, perhaps someone else here know more and can contribute :-)
Yeah it's really false, Germany is painfully bureaucratic, ceremonial and slow and dysfunctional, compared to other leading western nations.
German engineering, and german manufacturing, are really what deserves to have good reputation.
The Germans voted on paper. -> There was an undisputed result.
For example, the Poles are much better at building apartments and transport infrastructure fast than anyone else on your list, including Germany.
Is it that they are 'much better' or the economy is in different stages? The housing market in Germany is much more expensive. It's much cheaper to build in Poland.
Germany already has a larger transport infrastructure. Example: Autobahn 13000 km in Germany vs. roughly 2000km in Poland.
Czech and Polish economies are fairly comparable, but Czech ability to build anything is in tatters. We are a NIMBY paradise, every modest block of flats takes a decade to approve. Our northern neighbours aren't, they build fast.
Its also not true. Local politians are pushing hard to get high speed rail stops, and there is political horse trading going on when building lines to get more local stops, but it doesn't necessarily translate into "one stop in each state" rule.
The problem with hsr is geographical (non centralized coubtry means u need a big network), bureaucratic (it takes decades to build big infra projects), pilticical (germany underinvests in hsr, conservatives want cars, many local greens despise big infra that destroys local meadows), inertia (germans lack vision and follow through, they mostly fiddle and optimize).
However, every 2 hours there is a train that stops at Wittenberge (population 8k) and Ludwiglust (population 12k). I assume this is one of those mandated/political routes, rather than economic routes.
It adds an extra 20-30min to the trip, which isn't so bad. But whenever I've taken this route, maybe 2-5 people get on or off.
Would it be better served by more normal IC (200kph) or RE (160kph) train rather than an ICE? I don't know.
One thing to consider is that these services may be historic as well. Removing them will burn a lot of good will, which may be expensive in the long run for an operator that is dependent on ongoing public support - even if day-to-day decisions are made independently with economic interests in mind. Compare he marginal cost of providing those stops. Also consider that while Hamburg-Berlin may have a lot of competition from other modes, the small towns may not. Also, most ppl in those small cities will be close to the rail station. Add to that that ppl from surrounding regions will use the stops to get … basically anywhere by train, and you have a bunch of factors that my result in higher ridership than u would expect just by looking at the population of the cities themselves.
That's a Milchmädchenrechnung if I've ever seen one. When a long-distance train coming from Berlin stops in Ludwigslust, there is nearly always a guaranteed connection to a local train continuing towards Schwerin and Wismar (combined population 137k). I'm regularly using this route to visit my parents in Mecklenburg, and it's never just me who's changing trains in Ludwigslust. There's always at least two dozen people. On the weekends, sometimes a lot more.
In a similar vein, Wittenberge may not have all that much people living directly there, but it is an important train hub for northern Sachsen-Anhalt and Brandenburg with several RE lines all meeting there.
Ukraine isn't the poorest European country, Moldova is. (Well without counting the war, and i don't think we can accurately estimate it's economic damage).
As for the bureaucracy, it's actually quite easy to understand once you think about it. It's the same reason why Estonia was a frontrunner in eGovernement and eIDs - when regime change happens ( communism is replaced by a democracy-ish), lots of existing things (laws, institutions) are "tainted" with the aura of the old bad regime. So there's lots of impetus, desire and excuse to change all sorts of things. On the other hand, in a country Germany, even with the absorption of East Germany, things have worked, there's momentum, so there's not that much desire to just change everything.
I'd say it's actually much worse in the US in terms of the government's ability to get anything done related to infrastructure. Bad roads, rolling blackouts are a regular thing, etc. And of course there is the complete lack of any form of high speed rail connections anywhere in the US. Apparently it's impossible to get anything done on that front for decades now.
The article mentions the Berlin - Paris will only stop in Frankfurt.
The urban agglomeration of Paris houses roughly one sixth (!) of the total population of France, and is roughly 6½ times as big as the next biggest agglomeration (Lyon).
The biggest agglomeration area in Germany in Germany (the Ruhr area, which in turn is itself somewhat spread out and rather polycentric even on the local level) on the other hand only accounts for slightly more than 1/15th of Germany's population, and going further down the list you won't find any such large size discrepancies as between Paris and the rest of France. (In France, Paris is the only agglomeration area with more than 2,000,000 inhabitants, whereas Germany has seven agglomeration areas of that size category, all spread out throughout the country.)
So in France it totally makes sense to just build a series of radial high speed lines all linking Paris with the provincial agglomerations, and even where one line might serve several cities along the way (like how going to Marseille you also pass through/next to Lyon), traffic to/from Paris will dominate, so you'll still get lots of non-stop Paris ↔ Province trains and only comparatively few trains making intermediate stops.
Germany on the other hand doesn't have such a dominant traffic generator and the existing agglomerations are dotted all around the country, so traffic is more spread out and it's more difficult to capture/speed up an appreciable fraction of that with just a few lines.
So if the incentive is military (and sadly the Ukrainian Russian war is a reminder that war can happen even not too far away from Germany) Germany has proved its worth in making a dense railway network, possibly more costly than the French one, but very effective once built.
That's not generally true. For example, the ICE train from Hamburg to Berlin goes through 3 other states (Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg) without stops.
There may be local politicians in some states making such demands ("If you want to build your tracks through _my_ state, ..."), but I would assume they are trying to make an impression in an election campaign or something.
Edit: It turns out this EuroCity (line 27) is the only long-distance line that stops between Hamburg and Berlin. Lines 18, 28 and 29 go non-stop, as per https://assets.static-bahn.de/dam/jcr:b4fca34a-4b95-4d82-98d...
The ICE trains connect larger cities & regions, not just the big ones. There are ICE Sprinter trains with fewer stops, though. The ICE trains often don't have their own tracks, which is what makes them slow.
Think of German train infrastructure as a mesh, compared to a more star like system in France with Paris (14 Million people for the metropolitan area) as its center. Berlin is not the center of Germany and has only around 6 Million people in its metropolitan area.
(Also, Fyra? That's a hell of a throwback :P)
I thought Tijdreiziger would appreciate that!
This is not correct. The Frankfurt-Berlin Sprinter, for example, is nonstop.
It takes about 3h 50-55min. Connections with 6 to 8 additional stops take not much long, though: around 15 to 20 min. more. Less than 3 min. more per stop.
The biggest problem with trains is Germany, in my opinion, is not speed, but the unreliability of the connections.
However, regarding the high-speed connection Munich-Berlin, the question was not so much whether to got through the Thüringer Wald (via Efurt), as the alternative would have meant to cross the Thüringer Schiefergebierge to the east (via Leipzig–Probstzella–Hochstadt-Marktzeuln), but whether building the line is worth the high costs at all.
There are quite a lot of "Inter City" railway stations in Germany.[1] This reflects the situation that Germany has not many large cities (only four have more than 1 mil. inhabitants), but a lot of medium sized ones (80 of over 100,000 inhabitants). Sometimes there are "Inter City" stops at small towns with important companies, such as Walldorf, where SAP is located. So the focus is not on connecting distant cities, but on train rides in the 50 to 150 km range. (Long distance commuting averages around 100 km.)
[1] The German Wikipedia has a list: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Bahnh%C3%B6fe_mit_Ha...
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/europe-is-undergoing-a-slee...
Japan's night trains are, sadly, almost gone, but that's because the bullet train network now covers all the major islands. There are quite a few luxury tourist sleepers though if you're willing to fork out $1000/night or so.
The biggest downside of sleeper trains IMO is that they are only really suitable for certain distances. It's not very nice to arrive somewhere at 02:00, so you really need a destination that is at least 8-10 hours away from your origin.
So much better than trekking out to the airport and dealing with the security and general hassle of planes. Plus you arrive at the destination at the right time. On a plane, you either arrive to late to do much except trek to the hotel, or you have to get up at 4am to get your plane (and still arrive around lunchtime).
However, it's generally between 2 and 5 times more expensive then a flight, so it doesn't always work out. You can do a coach too, but that is pretty uncomfortable.
There totally are night trains, I just never knew of them. Only heard this talk on HN that they are a thing of the past in Europe, and I never looked further than that. Turns out there are night trains all over Europe, from the mediterranean sea to the arctic circle!
Taking a train through Russia is also a thing I've been thinking of doing, but then there's this wannabe-warlord situation messing up a lot of lives right now :/
Depending on when you looked, there may not have been meaningful night train options.
These might be a Czech and Slovak specialty, though. Maybe western wagons do not shake as much, western curtains do really block the sharp industrial light and western stations do not pronounce such long messages at every opportunity. IDK.
Oh, yep, hubs used just to push people in modern open-sky prisons totally dependent on available services since in such hubs all eat, as normal, all have normal humans needs but nearly anything to satisfy them have to come from outside.
Try really to imaging such concentrated world in a projected future and imaging how obscene and vulnerable it is.
- little entertainment
- high load capacity
the same reasons we have these days for COMMERCIAL rails, witch are meaningful for certain applications (one including run only when we have surplus from renewables, for non-perishable/non-urgent goods) instead of people fast trains who demand very leveled rails, much entertainment to a point that France TGV slow down year on year to reduce hyper-big maintenance costs...
I still can't get my head around the fact that we as a society allow air travel to dump that much environmental costs on all of us. If flying had to internalize the cost for externalities into the pricing your plane ticket would have probably cost way more than the price of the train ride.
630 miles between Portland and Sanfrancisco
500 miles between San Diego and San Francisco
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_California_High-Spe...
Too much Douche-Baggery in that project, take a look at the california money grab they joke of american high speed rail has over the decades...
But there are already train routes with >6 hours in Germany. I sometimes take the train from Berlin to Basel (CH) from just a few stops away from Berlin and when there are no problems that's a 6 hour trip. With the car that would be >7 hours.