The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
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Re: The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
#2i would say from now on links to cnn should be automatically lite-ified. they have a plain-text version of all their articles. link to that instead.
every once in a while i read something or hear a narration and i cant help but suspect that GTP had some part in writing it. this article gives me very strong GTP vibes. i remember in 2018 i realized that i would never again be able to assume that an online account, post, comment, article was written by a human. and here we are. think about the author of this article. he would almost be forced to use GTP because it makes the writing and composition so much better. so much smoother. i dont think this is a good situation we are wading into…
Re: The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
#3Hailed by who?
We should not accept news that use weasel words so blatantly.
Re: The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
#4In Europe these night trains are useless IMO.
Air travel within Europe is cheap and easy, night trains are far more expensive, slow and run unreliable schedules sometimes, and they often don’t even take you to places you want to go.
In America though, night trains would be awesome, since air travel is expensive, hellish, and the country is built in a way that the destinations most people will want to go to are already laid out in an efficient layout due to the car focused culture.
Re: The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
#5>At least that’s the theory – and why the new wave of night trains are being touted as one way to replace short or even medium-haul flights across Europe and the US.
I am sure in the US it is and will always be talk. Train service in the US is terrible compared to what is in the EU. It will never happen.
Maybe this will work in Boston where the subways run a 3 MPH (~5kph) due to ignored repairs over the past 30/40 years.
Re: The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
#6It's not. It's expensive, noisy, takes a long time (6h door to door) and is uncomfortable as fuck.
I recently had to go to Edinburgh. It was £235 standard class to get a train that takes several hours. Or £80 to get a plane that takes 2h door to door (1h in the air).
If I want to go anywhere in Europe it's quicker, easier and almost always cheaper to fly. Even on a bad Lufthansa flight where everything goes wrong :)
Edit: just checked I can go from my LHR to BER on Monday and back same day for £127. I can't get to the English Channel and across it at any time for twice that.
Re: The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
#7[Autonomous] Night cars are much more likely to be an alternative to airplanes in the next 10 years.
Re: The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
#8In Europe these night trains are useless IMO. Air travel within Europe is cheap and easy, night trains are far more expensive, slow and run unreliable schedules sometimes, and they often don’t even take you to places you want to go. In America though, night trains would be awesome, since air travel is expensive, hellish, and the country is built in a way that the destinations most people will want to go to are alread…
> since air travel is expensive, hellish, and the country is built in a way that the destinations most people will want to go to are already laid out in an efficient layout due to the car focused culture.
What? Air travel may be hellish, but it's super-cheap domestically compared to driving or trains. Both air and train share the issue of needing to rent a car or pay to be ferried about at $destination.
Re: The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
#9>At least that’s the theory – and why the new wave of night trains are being touted as one way to replace short or even medium-haul flights across Europe and the US. I am sure in the US it is and will always be talk. Train service in the US is terrible compared to what is in the EU. It will never happen. Maybe this will work in Boston where the subways run a 3 MPH (~5kph) due to ignored repairs over the past 30/40 ye…
> Train service in the US is terrible compared to what is in the EU.
And train service in the EU is terrible compared to Japan.
If EU/US trains ran like Japanese Shinkanzen then there would be exactly zero need for night trains.
You would board a clean train, that departed on-time, and whisked you along the countryside, reaching your destination hundreds of miles/kilometers away in 3–4 hours.
Before the pedants arrive, yes I am aware there are some night trains in Japan, but they constitute 0.0000001% of Japanese train services, and are mostly a fun-tourism thing.
Re: The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes
#10It's not. It's expensive, noisy, takes a long time (6h door to door) and is uncomfortable as fuck. I recently had to go to Edinburgh. It was £235 standard class to get a train that takes several hours. Or £80 to get a plane that takes 2h door to door (1h in the air). If I want to go anywhere in Europe it's quicker, easier and almost always cheaper to fly. Even on a bad Lufthansa flight where everything goes wrong :)…
Yeah I'm all for fighting climate change but air travel should be excepted until there's battery-powered options available. We can't go back to the dark ages of travel. And especially internationally in Europe the rail network is shit and has way too little capacity. There's almost no good international high speed rail. It's only in countries that invested in it locally like Germany, France and Spain.