Why are cross-country train tickets in EU still so complex?

I have to ask why it’s a loophole. OP consumed just as much train with long stops as someone that travelled directly.

It’s odd, in aviation, you’ll pay less with longer layovers and more for direct, even though direct is the least miles in the air.

I get it that suppliers like to charge more for more convenience but really, the cost of provision is the same (or less!).

Hindsight /km payment for international travel would not readily take your mind off of distances beyond the travel time; you'd never know how much to pay. Every international card has recognition issues in some countries/places, or limited ticket stations serve special deals. Countries probably vary in their use of smartcard gates etc further complicating such deals.

I was wondering about train pricing and train pricing ideals. There's a large factor of involvement of the cost of finance, as they're expensive projects. The market-technical pricepoint relates to alternative modes of travel, but the nature of mobility does not. This relates to hyperloop etc.

It would be neat to have fast-train New York - London/Paris/Amsterdam - (... more stops, have skip-trains ...) Bejing - Seoul/Busan - Tokyo, maybe Australia would even pay to have one next to a brand new city in the northeast of the country.. But the scale implies enough industry to have issues being expressed in regular currencies - and it should have fargoing implications to live so proximate; in one of the world-cities.

But how many people would you expect to make the journey? And whatfor? Is the economy of it the leading choice, or is prestige a factor? What is the balance of advantages at different price-points, or at different expectations of traffic volume. It might be added value for tickets to be ~20 euro's (cheaper even per hour than 'typical' train fair, probably impossible without large volume and subsidy), instead of the 'serious hassle' Another question could be, why are countries ran 'retroactively' nowadays? I'd rather the news stated there was debates about future trains, proactive regulation of automation and small electric vehicles, something to tie science like a horse for improvement, rather than to consider (promoting) improvements indirectly; through a market.

You could book one nighttrain ticket from Stockholm to Paris straight and that had been possible since 1930 until ~1970!

Now when the Swedish governement tries to revive the service they say they encounter resistance from the Germans who apparently don't want to let traffic just cross their territory for some reason? Political blame game?

"In this case, one of the objections has been that the final destination of the traffic is not German. There are similar challenges with other countries. But if we are to have train traffic in the EU, we must accept and let traffic through, says Minister of Infrastructure Tomas Eneroth"

https://www.dn.se/sverige/tyskland-stoppade-svensk-nattag-ti...

Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnie_Internationale_des_W...

Back when we were still allowed to travel i spend a fair bit of time traveling between non-airport cities which meant that an 8-10 hour cross border train ride was often the only alternative to even more time spend waiting at airports, which still required muiti-hour train journeys to the final destination, and i really did enjoy that mode of transport, but it does take some mental adjustments as delays are pretty common on the railways so if you have a "must meet" every connection as scheduled schedule where you cannot just jump on the next train out things will get messy.