431–440 of 468 posts
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Trains can also be pretty quaint in Europe today now that low cost airlines like Easyjet and Ryanair offer cheap flights to most major cities. I live in Berlin and even domestic trains are far more expensive than domestic flights to medium and large cities.
Ignorant American question. Why is this the case? What are the costs that railroads are having to pay that makes them more expensive?
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I just looked it up. A sleeper for one is ~1'800$. About 300 more if you're two. That's about half of a yearly train pass for Switzerland (2nd class). The pass allowes you to travel in virtually any mode of transportation without restrictions. Except for taxis, some boats and some mountain railways. So yeah, that's pretty steep.
In fairness, the continental United States are over 195 times the size of Switzerland.
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Denver to Chicago would be perfect for high speed rail. An express high speed train could beat air travel door to door.
No it wouldn't. The ridership cliff for HSR is around the 3-4 hour mark, or about 500-600 miles--Denver-Chicago is 1,000 miles, well outside that range. What would work quite well, though, would be something like the Auto Train: you can get an overnight ride that ferries your car and you don't have to drive the thoroughly boring drive of the Great Plains.
My (now) wife and I took the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago about 10 years ago. We purchased a private cabin. We were 8 hours late leaving Seattle and couldn't get into our cabin until we got to Spokane because of some sort of merge of trains coming from Portland and Seattle. Got to Spokane, got our cabin, another 6 hour delay. By the time we reached the upper Midwest, they were rationing food, literally cutt…
For those that don't know, the Empire Builder from Seattle stops in Spokane to hook up with a train that is coming from Portland. The combined train then goes all the way to Chicago. If either are delayed it can result in waiting for the other and long delays are apparently the norm and not the exception. My wife and her grandfather took the train from Portland to Minnesota in the fall of last year. There were a numb…
This mentality weirds me out. As in: Why are we explicitly valuing the time of companies over the time of actual people? Companies can probably adjust to getting their shit 8 or 12 or 24 hours late (or, if they can't, they can charter a plane). It's a lot harder to deal with for people who need to be somewhere.
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I once saw a large party of school children going on a trip on the Caltrain. Turned out they weren't going anywhere... it was just going on the train that was the activity. A commuter train running alongside a highway through urban sprawl. They were whooping when it pulled into the station.
>large party of school children going on a trip on the Caltrain. Haha when I took Caltrain daily to mountain view this was my nightmare. Bluetooth headphones and a white noise app were a requirement. Those field trip days, and the rides home on baseball game days... I do not miss that commute.
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Yay government-run train service.
You know, I have a suspicion that the reason the US has poor government services compared to other countries is in large part because too manypeople in the US believe government services are poor. If the wrong people get in charge (and very likely if the ideology is widespread) they make little effort to improve things other than to cut costs. Competition usually improves things, it's true, but natural monopolies are…
Of course, the people proposing/pushing for the idea and the people implementing the idea did not share a lot of membership, so the implementers put a person deeply opposed to the project in charge. Of course, no projects of use got approved, most of the projects that did get approved were obviously pointless and tedious, and they were constantly thousands of jobs short or what was needed to employ everyone who wanted work anyway.
So yeah, that's why we have the "digging and filling holes" analogy for useless make-work. Ideas are fine and all, but it doesn't matter for shit if you have an antagonist implementing them.
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I once saw a large party of school children going on a trip on the Caltrain. Turned out they weren't going anywhere... it was just going on the train that was the activity. A commuter train running alongside a highway through urban sprawl. They were whooping when it pulled into the station.
I've taken the train in Minneapolis from the mall to downtown several times, purely for the novelty of it. We have a lot of freight trains in Iowa. Passenger, not so much.
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That's a wild generalization, based on a lack of experience or knowledge. A number of passenger railroads in the United States also have quiet cars. Metra comes to mind, but I know I've seen others. For americans its something quaint and wild whereas for europeans its just a basic form of transportation You're either repeating outdated cliches from the internet, or you must not live in a large metropolitan area with…
In America, "large metropolitan area with passenger train service" is the exception, not the norm.
"Yeah, we have passenger train service"
"good passenger train service?"
"Hey, lets not get ahead of ourselves"
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Are they? Düsseldorf-Munich for 26,70€ including reserving a seat. Kiel-Düsseldorf 29,90€. To get back, 26,90€. Kiel-Munich and back for 53,80€. Not even Ryanair is that cheap, especially when you consider that with trains you don’t have to go through security, have none of the check-in times and other bullshit, and can take luggage without paying a 60€ surcharge.
None of those are to or from Berlin. Munich might have cheaper rail options than Berlin, especially since Munich is a more traditional hub of industry. Flights Berlin to Köln are definitely cheaper than trains. Generally in my experience flights in Europe are less expensive than trains YMMV.
You just have to check sites like https://bahn.guru/ to find the cheapest connections.