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Europe is investing heavily in trains

nytimes.com

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Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#541

Post by ant6n »

BurningFrog wrote: post #206
Leherenn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rail infrastructure is very expensive compared to planes. An airport is expensive, but once you've built it you're pretty much immediately connected to half the world. With a train station, you need a track to each surrounding stations, maintain them, and so on. Also, train doesn't scale down as well, it quickly becomes inefficient for the less dense routes. People are talking about subsidies (by not taxing fuel for…

Yeah, rail infrastructure costs O(distance) while plane infrastructure costs O(trips).

Rail infrastructure forms networks.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#542

Post by atoav »

ant6n wrote: post #539
meerita wrote: post #534

Trains are great for no more than 600km range trips. I live in Spain, and it's great to get into the train without doing all the procedures you do with a plane. I arrive to the station 10 mins before departure and I never had troubles. With airplanes I need to be there 1 hour before. Then you spend another 30 mins getting into the plane, following the instructions for just only 1h trip. The same trip Barcelona -> Mad…

Im French rail planning, rail is considered competitive with air travel up to 3h. In German planning, up to 4h. With 250km/h average, that would allow up to 1000km. Plus, one could try to revive night trains. Arriving at 9am in the morning in some far away city, we’ll rested, would be useful both for vacations and business trips. And could easily allow distances of 1500km even without having high speed rail lines eve…

> With 250km/h average, that would allow up to 1000km.

Sadly going through the alps at that speed is not that simple. But I'd love to have interconnected cities.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#543

Post by meerita »

ant6n wrote: post #539
meerita wrote: post #534

Trains are great for no more than 600km range trips. I live in Spain, and it's great to get into the train without doing all the procedures you do with a plane. I arrive to the station 10 mins before departure and I never had troubles. With airplanes I need to be there 1 hour before. Then you spend another 30 mins getting into the plane, following the instructions for just only 1h trip. The same trip Barcelona -> Mad…

Im French rail planning, rail is considered competitive with air travel up to 3h. In German planning, up to 4h. With 250km/h average, that would allow up to 1000km. Plus, one could try to revive night trains. Arriving at 9am in the morning in some far away city, we’ll rested, would be useful both for vacations and business trips. And could easily allow distances of 1500km even without having high speed rail lines eve…

I'm up for investing in faster trains, like Magrevs or even faster japanese who can reach +600km/h, that would be a game changer, you can transport four times more efficiently.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#544

Post by baud147258 »

jsinai wrote: post #88
Barrin92 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bus networks are a pretty decent solution as well. Rail is very expensive and there's not that many regions where you can operate it economically. In particular with electrical busses becoming better you can shift a lot of traffic away from personal vehicles on existing infrastructure.

fyi GP’s post is sarcasm. In UK “rail replacement bus” means the train route is cancelled and there’s a replacement bus instead. Bus networks can work over small high density areas. Johannesburg has been building a bus network with exclusive lanes for years, but it’s designed to work in conjunction with its part complete metro. Cambridge, UK, has limited “busways” which connect the local villages. However, over large…

> However, over large distances, I fail to see how buses can be more efficient.

I'd say it can work if there's no existing railway and/or there's not a lot of people traveling this way. Or maybe for short duration, like one or two months a year

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#545

Post by locallost »

dgellow wrote: post #517
locallost wrote: post #426

After reading some of the comments on the price of train tickets, and while it's true trains are on paper more expensive, there are some things to consider: * prices and conditions vary between countries. For example, in Germany your children can travel for free until 14, but apparently this is not universal and it can be a big difference for families * in a lot of countries you can pay for discount cards and get 25/…

I’m quite familiar with both Germany and Switzerland trains, an interesting difference is that in Switzerland the default is a flexible ticket, you buy it for the day and can use it an any time, and using any train you want that goes in the correct direction. And since a few years SBB/CFF let’s you get a reduction if you get instead a non-flexible tickets (so with a strict time and train, called “dégriffé” in French)…

There is no default, until recently it always showed both the reduced and full price, but you always had to manually select what you want on the 2nd screen.

Anyway, I'm neither German nor Swiss, but I think there are certain prejudices about both countries. Germans might look to save money, but realistically everybody needs to plan their trip somewhat in advance, unless it's a short weekend trip. I made the mistake recently of not booking my train from Switzerland in advance because I didn't know when I exactly need to go and figured what the hell, I'll just buy it when I figure it out. Big mistake, almost everything was booked out, and I barely made it home.

Also, SBB likes to complain about DB, and there might be truth to some criticism, but realistically the two companies don't solve the same problems, in terms of passenger count, distances traveled and overall complexity.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#546

Post by fsflover »

atoav wrote: post #542
ant6n wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im French rail planning, rail is considered competitive with air travel up to 3h. In German planning, up to 4h. With 250km/h average, that would allow up to 1000km. Plus, one could try to revive night trains. Arriving at 9am in the morning in some far away city, we’ll rested, would be useful both for vacations and business trips. And could easily allow distances of 1500km even without having high speed rail lines eve…

> With 250km/h average, that would allow up to 1000km. Sadly going through the alps at that speed is not that simple. But I'd love to have interconnected cities.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31000124

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#547

Post by avgcorrection »

avianlyric wrote: post #62
fredoliveira wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is a European country. Not in the EU anymore, but you folks didn't move continents ;-)

Culturally we generally consider Europe to mean continental Europe i.e. Europe without the islands. Thus the U.K. being an island nation isn’t part of Europe. But the definition of Europe will change depending on who you’re talking to and what your talking about.

Culturally we Icelanders consider Europe to mean continental Europe i.e. Europe minus the volcanic islands.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#548

Post by avgcorrection »

nicoburns wrote: post #319
avianlyric wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Culturally we generally consider Europe to mean continental Europe i.e. Europe without the islands. Thus the U.K. being an island nation isn’t part of Europe. But the definition of Europe will change depending on who you’re talking to and what your talking about.

In my experience, the UK is culturally very similar to the rest of Europe (much more similar then we are to the US, although there is some influence there). This fact is just obscured by the language barrier.

What language barrier? English is a Germanic language with a lot of French vocabulary. Close to Dutch. It isn’t like Basque or Hungarian.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#549

Post by Aachen »

SergeAx wrote: post #430
Aachen wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm reading too much into your comment, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like an "as opposed to the sprawling USA". Just did some doodling in OsmAnd, connecting a few cities big enough that I've heard the name (at least I'm presuming that's why I know their name). https://snipboard.io/0aunhF.jpg You can do Sacramento–San Francisco–San Jose–Los Angeles–Las Vegas–Salty Lake City–Reno–Sacramento (round trip)…

I didn't write my comment with "as opposed" sentiment in mind, but can't help to wonder what is the typical distance between US capitals. So, wow, thanks for that piece of data! I also think there's a hen and egg problem. To build a rail road you need to buy the land strip between two stations, and in today's US you can't just do it because someone knowing about your venture and how you cannot succeed without having…

That's a good point I hadn't even considered, both about the railroad venture problem and hyperloop depictions already working around that.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#550

Post by namelessone »

ant6n wrote: post #539
meerita wrote: post #534

Trains are great for no more than 600km range trips. I live in Spain, and it's great to get into the train without doing all the procedures you do with a plane. I arrive to the station 10 mins before departure and I never had troubles. With airplanes I need to be there 1 hour before. Then you spend another 30 mins getting into the plane, following the instructions for just only 1h trip. The same trip Barcelona -> Mad…

Im French rail planning, rail is considered competitive with air travel up to 3h. In German planning, up to 4h. With 250km/h average, that would allow up to 1000km. Plus, one could try to revive night trains. Arriving at 9am in the morning in some far away city, we’ll rested, would be useful both for vacations and business trips. And could easily allow distances of 1500km even without having high speed rail lines eve…

> Plus, one could try to revive night trains.

The linked article talks about this:

>New sleeper train connections are cropping up across Europe. The Austrian operator ÖBB Nightjet has overnight services to cities like Rome, Milan, Brussels and Amsterdam, and recently initiated a Vienna-Paris overnight link.

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