The saddest part of this statement is that the European rail system is MASSIVELY subsidized even at the price points that the person you responded to described as "paying out the nose", which of course is a somewhat subjective position for a European to say, because their already lower salaries are massively taxed and to pay for the subsidized rail systems the gleeful Americans can gush about being so cheap when they return to the USA and demand socialism.
I'll take Austin's local light rail train as an example to illustrate what I mean. I once looked into the finances and financing sources to get the system stood up, and I worked out that it would be around a $30-$35 trip from one end in the middle of the city to the outskirts of Austin's Leander township if the actual cost of the system were paid for by the rider.
It is immensely deceptive and rather dumb that these realities are simply ignored, especially by seemingly otherwise rather intelligent people that congregate here.
At the very least, there should not only be the direct cost per ticket if it were not heavily subsidized by taxes of Europeans, which non-Europeans should have to pay, and the price that is subsidized that Europeans pay. It is really rather immensely immoral to ride on the train at a cost that is heavily subsidized by wildly immoral tax levels (e.g., 100% on gasoline, 20% on sales of goods, ~35% of income that is also 70% of what it is in places like the USA).
