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Europe is investing heavily in trains

nytimes.com

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Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#611

Post by cyphar »

jseban wrote: post #575
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 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.

Various Shinkansen lines average that much or higher for long stretches. To be fair, there isn't a 1000km line in Japan, but ~500km at those speeds should indicate that it's possible. Sanyo runs at near maximum operating speed (300km/h) for most of its >500km run.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#612

Post by thomasahle »

cinntaile wrote: post #307
thomasahle wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point was that if train was cheaper than flying OP would fly less. Of course that means we'd have fewer airlines.

That wasn't really the point. He was surprised that this tax-free situation is not addressed and I just gave a (of many) reason why they might not want to change that. I think your new point is optimistic at best. You would have to switch trains quite often and the time it takes would probably weigh heavier than the price. Especially between EU countries, within country flying is not really that big in EU.

I meant this

> I love trains and take them over airplane when it's an option. However, trains are often around twice as expensive as flying for may routes.

But I agree that switching trains is also an issue.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#613

Post by kergonath »

inkblotuniverse wrote: post #527
kergonath wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be amazing to see humans build a large scale fusion reactors and Dyson spheres around the sun and never have to think about energy consumption :). A Dyson sphère around the sun would make life on Earth rather miserable. > Successful governments should be responsible for running sequestrators on tax funding. “Sequestrators” don’t exist. There is some noise every now and then about a fancy new technology, an…

Just leave a gap in the swarm for the light the earth needs (or have mirrors in the greater swarm rotate to do the same, if cheaper). You can make hydrocarbons from c02 and water. Make digging up carbon illegal, so that only legal way to get your jet fuel is to buy it from a machine that makes it from the air (e.g. carbon-neutral fuels).

> You can make hydrocarbons from c02 and water.

Under high temperature and pressure conditions, with expensive catalysts (I’ve had a grant to work on one of these processes a couple of years ago). It is completely uneconomical unless most government tax emissions very heavily one way or another.

Besides, this does not solve the capture bit, which is also a significant challenge, in similar ways (we have ideas about technologies, thermodynamics do not work in our favour, it would still require radical policies for it to work).

Nobody is going to wave their magic wand and make fossil fuels illegal anytime soon. It is a common techno-euphoria trap: technology is the easy bit, and we’re not there yet on that front. Policy is the struggle after that, and it is much more difficult.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#614

Post by Karrot_Kream »

thebean11 wrote: post #583
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given that it's so heavily subsidized by the government It's not. Until the recent infrastructure bill, Amtrak didn't even have a dedicated yearly budget. Every year they would beg Congress for some money, get some amount less than that, then prioritize what they could given the funding. Moreover roads in the US never pay for themselves, they're just written off as an "economic driver" rather than expected to pay f…

Doesn't the government build and maintain the rails?

Amtrak hasn't built much new rail. Amtrak maintains its rail and rolling stock and buys new rolling stock. Most of Amtrak's rail routes were originally made by the private rail companies that owned American rail during the Industrial era. Even the lines leased by freight rail was originally made by private rail companies. These companies were going bankrupt and the US government created Amtrak as a holding company to deal with selling off or winding down existing rail assets.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#615

Post by gandalfian »

locallost wrote: post #487
gandalfian wrote: post #221

Here in the UK the train to London is five hours and £75. The coach is £15 and eight hours. Four people in a car perhaps £10 a head. Trains are nicer but there is something annoyingly mysterious about the ecomomcs of it all.

You are severely underestimating the cost of the car ride. Fuel is not the only cost, but even this feels low. Five hours by train has to be at least 500km which will be depending on the car on average I guess 35 liters of gas, which at today's prices is more like 60 pounds. But a car costs a couple pounds every day for registration, insurance, regular maintenance, new parts (tires etc). If you go to London and spend…

Yes I absolutely over simplified to make a quick point. But most people already either have the car with its costs and breakdown coverage or they don't. For what its worth I have made the 250 mile journey in a car on about 25 litres of petrol which is about £40 these days I think. Though sure you could alter a thousand factors to change the results.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#616

Post by meerita »

svara wrote: post #577
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 t…

Yes, I have bias due in Spain you can use AVE and other lines who are +250km/h average and a 600km trip is like max 2hs.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#617

Post by meerita »

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 did 1000km in airplane (also i was private pilot) and it's a 1h trip. Barcelona -> Santiago is max 1h. I can spend another hour getting into the airport, the total trip will not go more than 3 hours, but in Train it will take me 8hs.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#618

Post by lotsofpulp »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #352
lotsofpulp wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet US airlines (United/American/Delta/Southwest/Alaska/JetBlue) are barely profitable, if not losing money many years. The most hated airline, Spirit, has the most consistent profit margin 10%+, but all the others are near 0% most years.

The overall industry has been profitable since 2010, peaked at 15% average in 2015. 2020 was a slaughter for obvious reasons. You have a weird definition of "barely profitable" given the average corporate profit margin in the US is 9% and your claim "others are near 0% most years" is an outright fabrication.

Yes, I was wrong about near 0% for the past decade, although a few of the airlines were near zero for many of the years. But given the volatility, it still does not seem like a big profit margin. Seems like the consolidation was necessary to make them viable businesses. In my lifetime (I am mid 30s), you would have had a really bad time owning a piece of the airline business.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UAL/united-airline...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAL/american-airli...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JBLU/jetblue-airwa...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ALK/alaska-air/pro...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LUV/southwest-airl...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DAL/delta-air-line...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SAVE/spirit-airlin...

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#619

Post by meerita »

jseban wrote: post #575
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 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.

We don't have such train lines that do that much kms. We have fast lines, like max 600km. Longer lines have trains who are +180max. And each trip is like 7-8 hours.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#620

Post by aurizon »

ncmncm wrote: post #603
aurizon wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is truth in that energy density. but it is still cheaper energetically to chill boil off to liquid back to the tank that to make new hot hydrogen you then chill to liquid back to the tank. The end game of clathrate storage will solve many of these problems.

True, keeping the LH2 below its boiling point is, energetically , strictly cheaper than producing as much new hydrogen as would have boiled off, and then chilling that... But, it incurs the added complexity cost of building refrigeration plumbing into the tank, and maintaining that. That could mean the tank has to be above ground, for easy access (which might be needed anyway). My expectation was that native electric…

Yes, flow batteries, gravity batteries and high water storage will all make their presence felt. Those ~~20-50 tonne bricks they haul and drop would be costly, but I expect them to make them as strong walled brick shapes, with a lower cost fill - be wise to add salt to limit freezing in cold weather.
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