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The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

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161–170 of 215 posts

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#161
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the costs of a car are fixed once you own it. Wear and tears per mile is actually small. Insurance is the same for a car driven 7000 miles a year as one driven 30,000. there is a small discount for less than 7000 miles/year, but it is still fixed. Likewise the car payment doesn't change at all. The IRS has to come up with a fair number that translates all those fixed costs into per/mile. It is a good financia…

Not really. Buying new tires are a thing. Even if you buy cheap tires and get good life out of them (and that combo is...rare, you get what you pay for), that's, say, $400 ever 40,000 miles, that's a cent a mile right there..and tires are usually more expensive than that and don't last that long. The most obvious cost of wear and tear though is that eventually the car needs to be replaced. More miles = sooner replace…

Any modern car that is well maintained will last far longer than you will own it. People give up on their cars because their self image needs an excuse to get a new one. A lot of the maintenance cost is time based as well: UV and ozone are destroying rubber parts even while the car is sitting.

It depends on the car, but typically you are looking at $.20/mile for fuel, and $.05 for all other maintenance (including tires).

The average new car payment is something like $550/month. The average used car is somewhat less of course. Most people are making payments. Insurance is $500/year if you have a perfect driving record, many people pay more. These costs have nothing to do with how far you drive.

A few years ago I calculated my actual per/mile cost for my car, it was $.15/month, even though I bought it new (I track every fill up, though at 46mpg my fuel costs are less than average). The car had 200,000 miles on it to spread all the fixed costs across, and had been paid off for a few years.

The point is the marginal cost to drive a car you already own is low.

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#162
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the costs of a car are fixed once you own it. Wear and tears per mile is actually small. Insurance is the same for a car driven 7000 miles a year as one driven 30,000. there is a small discount for less than 7000 miles/year, but it is still fixed. Likewise the car payment doesn't change at all. The IRS has to come up with a fair number that translates all those fixed costs into per/mile. It is a good financia…

It's only worthless to this discussion if you hold the basic assumption that everyone should own a car.

I agree once someone doesn't own the car the numbers change. However if you already have a car the additional marginal cost to drive it on a trip is very low.

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU should force a carbon tax on plane fuel for intra-EU flights and subsidize rail with the money.

> The EU should force a carbon tax on plane fuel for intra-EU flights and subsidize rail with the money. You are aware that most of Europe produces electricity by burning fossil fuel right? So by all logic we should apply a strict carbon tax on rail as well.

I don’t think it’s an issue given how little CO2 is emitted by trains per passenger/km, and hopefully the electricity used already has CO2 taxes on it. Plane fuel doesn’t.

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#164
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU should force a carbon tax on plane fuel for intra-EU flights and subsidize rail with the money.

Or just add the same taxes to airplane fuel as is done for fuel used for ground transportation.

That would be the most obvious level to set the tax at, yes.

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love that route. Also, on a train the ride is so much smoother - no starts or stop or dealing with traffic. The pricing is nuts, though. A one way train ticket for that route is $36. The same trip via car takes about the same amount of time and $20 in gas. The train is a nice luxury for one person, but for the whole family it becomes very expensive. Passenger rail in the US is absurd.

Unfortunately, compared to Finland at least, that pricing seems pretty normal, maybe even on the cheap side. (It's apparently a roughly 5.5 h drive?) Long-distance rail travel seems to be fairly expensive. Is that kind of trip cheaper somewhere comparable?

The thing in the US is that almost everyone already owns a car (so that’s considered sunk cost) and the cost of fuel is heavily subsidized.

So that’s the comparison I guess. It’s not fair, but it’s also sort of reasonable, given car ownership here.

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Air travel is massively subsidized too (airport construction, airline and manufacturer bailouts); as is highway travel (automaker bailouts, free trade supply chain, environmental externalities, health costs associated with driving and sprawl, plus gas taxes which cover only a small proportion of actual construction and maintenance costs). It's difficult to do a true apples to apples comparison, especially when highwa…

>free trade supply chain

free trade is hardly a subsidy.

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#167
post #31
post #2

Sleeper trains make so much sense for travel over land. They are often competitively priced with air travel, they pollute a lot less and the time saved can be huge when you consider that you spend time travelling when you would otherwise be asleep (although this is sometimes true for air travel, many/most people find it difficult to get quality sleep in economy class). The London - Edinburgh sleeper train (Caledonian…

Problem is they really don't quite make as much sense for city pairings that don't fall into the narrow window of roughly one night of travel time. This severely limits the amount of mainstream awareness sleeper trains can reach, so people who don't routinely travel such a route won't have them on their radar when they do.

Well, pairings that fall below the window of 6 to 9 hours are short enough you don't need a sleeper train: sitting in a train for 3 to 5 hours is not that bad. Pairings that are above the window are turned into a 6 to 9 hour sleeper train ride plus a regular 3 to 5 hour ride that's not that bad.

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#168
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that trains with a locomotive up front are quite rare these days (although most common in the US - Amtrak Acela notwithstanding). Most of the rest of the world has gone down the "multiple unit" route, where there are smaller motors in each car, under your feet, and there are no dedicated locomotives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_unit

For long distances and even regional trains there still exist plenty of locomotives. And BTW, even many high speed trains, including tgv duplex and the acela u nention are effectively locomotive hauled trains.

The UK sleeper trains were refurbished recently. They go out of London up to Scotland and down to the South West of England.

They are not multiple units or likely to be if they were refurbished tomorrow. The reason being that the stock is not in 24/7 use. It does the one long night journey then gets parked all day.

The train out of London gets split to serve different bits of Scotland, so you do get some shunting around going on when they do things to the train.

It doesn't go that quickly as a train because there is no need. Being in Euston at 5 a.m. is no fun, might as well be there at 6 a.m. with some sleep had.

So the loco that pulls the train can be any old freight thing. Although now it is likely to be a Class 73 diesel electric that can use electrified track as well as diesel. Note that there i no electric track all the way out to Scotland.

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#169
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, I've taken the London to Edinburgh on LNER and Virgin East Coast multiple times and it runs about £40 each way. And my 30 mile train into Manhattan is $14 $36 one way for a 5 hour train seems pretty cheap.

The problem is that the train has to compete with 3 hours by car... And then the ability to actually use a car at your destination. The transit systems in either Seattle, or Portland, are nowhere near as good as they are in New York.

[deleted]

Re: The New Austrian Railways' Intercity and Nightjet Sleeper Train Interior Design

#170
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are often competitively priced with air travel, Not in the US! I would love to travel by train whenever time permitted, but it is prohibitively expensive to travel by sleeper car.

I traveled from NY to LA via train with one planned stop-over. We had coach seats which were a little less expensive than air travel, so it's not really worth doing unless you're in it for the experience of it. It was an enjoyable experience tough, and we'd probably do it again on another route. While it would have been nicer to have a sleeper, the coach seats were pretty comfortable.

As someone who's done lots of long-haul (Texas–Chicago and Texas–Maryland) rides, one (or a few) long-distance coach trip is perfectly doable, and even enjoyable if you like train rides; but I feel that it gets unbearable pretty quickly as a regular occurrence. Also a big factor: travelling with an intimate (someone you can literally lean on) makes sleeping much easier, even in coach.
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