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Europe is investing heavily in trains

nytimes.com

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Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#571

Post by [deleted] »

jseban wrote: post #503
pg314 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The train itself has to be heavier than the load just to stay on the tracks. Why would that be? A typical 110 ton capacity freight train car weighs 33 tons unloaded. It has no problems staying on the tracks. Besides both buses and planes typically weigh much more than their freight (and planes need to lift all that weight 10km vertically), so I fail to see how that is an argument against trains.

> Why would that be? A typical 110 ton capacity freight train car weighs 33 tons unloaded. It has no problems staying on the tracks. I'm guessing at the numbers here but just to illustrate my point: If an empty bus weights let's say 10 tonnes, and an empty train 33 tons. And the load of the passengers around 7 tonnes. So in total you'd transport 40 tonnes of train as opposed to 17 tonnes of bus. Then obviously for th…

[deleted]

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#572

Post by imtringued »

xyzzyz wrote: post #340
jhgb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By definition, low taxes are not a subsidy. The conspicuous lack of Pigouvian taxes on a fossil fuel for just one industry is definitely a subsidy. Someone else is paying for the externalities.

No, nobody is actually paying for CO2 emission externalities. At best, you can argue that maybe someone will be paying them some day in future, but it’s a big fat maybe. Because nobody is actually paying for these externalities, we don’t have any figures of how much those externalities cost — you can come up with some estimates, but as GOSPLAN experience shows, calculating prices outside of markets is a fool’s errand…

That's a long winded way of saying the future doesn't matter to you.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#573

Post by wvh »

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…

Taking the night train is a common way to travel within Finland. By train, it takes around 10 hours and 1000-1100km north to Lapland (taking Helsinki-Levi as example). It's possible to take a local flight at vastly higher prices and no room for the equipment people tend to take along for such trips, such as skis and hiking gear.

In central Europe, commuting by train is also pretty common. You might get packed pretty tightly at the most busy commuting times, but you avoid the huge traffic jams in and out of major cities which can waste hours of your day.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#574

Post by jseban »

DocTomoe wrote: post #569
jhugo wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sleeper trains change the calculus a little, because you can sleep as you travel. While they're a foreign concept to many people, they are reasonably popular in Europe — not just among railfans — and in many parts of Asia are a very typical mode of transport. Going to sleep in one city centre and waking up in another is often far more convenient than the air travel alternative, especially for the many cities where th…

If we want the comparison to be completely fair, you need to take into account that hardly anyone lives in a major train station (or directly adjacent to one) and wants to travel to another major train station (or directly adjacent to one). More often than not, just getting to Paris is only a leg, then you need to get to Aix-en-Belle-Fountaine (fictional place, don't look it up), some 50 km away from Paris. Once you…

> They are extremely space-constrained

Yeah and the amount of space is not really anything specific to the train. You can vary the amount of space in planes, buses and cars as well, and the price will follow, just as in trains.

There is no reason why space is "cheaper" in a train really, it's only the scheduling of few trips that make more space available, if you have more trips on the tracks, similar to a road, space becomes constrained, like you see in subway trains.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#575

Post by jseban »

tici_88 wrote: post #555
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…

I completely agree, except I think trains have a much higher competitive range, possibly up to 1,000 km . With a plane 1,000 km trip including all things you mention like arriving at the airport in advance, boarding, finding your way back to the city center, etc. would come easily to 4-5 hours when you calculate it door-to-door. This could be comparable to a train at 200-250 km/h. Also, trains tend to be more punctua…

I think it's really difficult to average 200-250 km/h over 1,000 km with a train. I would guess the trains that average that speed would be much shorter trips.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#576

Post by pinche_gazpacho »

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…

Have you been in a "Mediterranean corridor" train? It can take 6-4h to get from Valencia to Barcelona. Maybe the AVE is an outlier. And it isn't available everywhere exactly. Curious that the 2nd and 3rd biggest cities are so badly connected. The fuel it took driving alone in a car was cheaper (2018) than those trains also.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#577

Post by svara »

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…

I used to do Cologne-Munich _all_the_effing_time (~600km, door-to-door 6-7h, depending on connection). You can save about 1h by taking a flight, but then you'll never have a solid chunk of at least one 1h to do anything within.

And that's given the current shitty track system. The only bit of genuine high-sped rail on that connection is Frankfurt-Cologne, maybe a quarter of the trip. Top speed is around 300 km/h on that bit; otherwise around 200, sometimes less. One point of comparison: The fully modernized Berlin-Munich track is about the same length; some trains take less than 4 h and that's with stops along the way.

This is a trip that I'm very familiar with, but it's very typical [0]. Note that some countries have chosen different tradeoffs - e.g., France and Spain with their ultra-fast point-to-point connections, eschewing a more dense high-speed net.

The point of all this being: Trains already work great, and can still get quite a bit better with investment - certainly quite some ways above 600 km trips.

I wouldn't look at trip time alone, but uninterrupted time during which you can do work. On most brief flights there barely is any. By contrast, for a business traveler, a long high-speed rail trip can simply be the first part of the day.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/High_Spe...

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#578

Post by pg314 »

jseban wrote: post #565
Symbiote wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails is much, much lower than rubber tyres on an asphalt road. From [1], the only comparable figures are the American train and the American bus. The bus is about half as efficient as the train. There are similar figures further down the page ("German environmental costs") -- 0.25MJ/passenger-km for long distance rail, 0.85MJ/pkm for regional rail, 1.14MJ/pkm for bus s…

> The rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails is much, much lower than rubber tyres on an asphalt road. Exactly, and you need rolling resistance for traction. The heavier the load, the lower resistance you need, and vice versa, because the weight of the load increases resistance. Which is why you don't ship hay on trains, and don't ship iron on trucks.

> Exactly, and you need rolling resistance for traction.

No, you don’t. Look at e.g. gears: almost no friction, perfect traction.

> Which is why you don't ship hay on trains

No. You don’t ship it on trains because that is uneconomic. You keep your cattle close to your hay producing fields, where they can also graze.

Also, by your reasoning, an empty train would not be able to move?

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#579

Post by LtdJorge »

saiya-jin wrote: post #566
tici_88 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree, except I think trains have a much higher competitive range, possibly up to 1,000 km . With a plane 1,000 km trip including all things you mention like arriving at the airport in advance, boarding, finding your way back to the city center, etc. would come easily to 4-5 hours when you calculate it door-to-door. This could be comparable to a train at 200-250 km/h. Also, trains tend to be more punctua…

I agree here, some lines and trains in Europe go up to 300 kmh (last one I've tried was actually in Spain, on par with French TGV). Plus airports have this pesky habit of losing all your luggage, even on fairly trivial flights. Recently my journey was Geneva -> Barcelona -> Seville, and they lost my big luggage with complete paraglider (4000+ euro) and other stuff (cca 1000 euro). For a week, they couldn't even locat…

They can go even faster, but it's not as efficient.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#580

Post by clownpenis_fart »

meerita wrote: post #543
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…

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.

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