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I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

metro.co.uk

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Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#151

Post by badcppdev »

ciconia wrote: post #133

> Uch. TRAINS. They’re a necessary evil in many of our lives. Horrible big tin cans full of smelly people that never turn up on time and make you late for everything. The less time spent on them the better. At least for most of us in the UK, anyway. Not my first though when I think of trains, but I'm not in the UK.

It's the British way to hate on things that are quite useful parts of their society. Trains, highways, airports, health system, garbage collection, emergency services, etc all work remarkably well and people just choose to look at the negative aspects and tell negative anecdotes. It does feel like it's counterproductive on a society level.

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#152

Post by shinryuu »

01acheru wrote: post #7

All fine and good, I hope he likes it but €10k is a lot of money to live more or less like a beggar. With €10k/y you can afford a house+food+bills in most of Europe and in many places it is way cheaper than that. So... yeah, I find it incredibly stupid.

10k euro / year will give a small apartment in a large city in Germany if that.

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#154

Post by Moldoteck »

SuperNinKenDo wrote: post #20
01acheru wrote: post #7

All fine and good, I hope he likes it but €10k is a lot of money to live more or less like a beggar. With €10k/y you can afford a house+food+bills in most of Europe and in many places it is way cheaper than that. So... yeah, I find it incredibly stupid.

10k covers all that in "most of Europe"? I'm more than a little skeptical of that claim without some expansion, and also a little curious if what you're saying is true.

imo it depends. It is possible to live with this money in most eastern&southern europe. In western/north it's harder, idk about prices but I suppose in smaller cities/bigger villages where demand is lower it should be doable too

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#155

Post by carlmr »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #121
JonChesterfield wrote: post #84

Sounds alright really. Less dystopian than living in Google's car park. Doesn't work with dog or family and I'm not sure about being stuck near train stations at destinations, folding bicycle would improve things. Not remotely surprised that he's a programmer. This is essentially living subsidised by the train company who didn't expect someone to take an unlimited train ticket quite that literally. One guy doing this…

He's not the only one though. I read about a guy that spends his whole days in trains, driving the whole day through Germany. They accounted for that, I'm sure. It just these people are in, what, the 0.000001% or something? He's subsidized by the state and other passengers, not the company.

>It just these people are in, what, the 0.000001% or something?

Exactly. It's not comfortable, it's not safe and cozy, it's not that cheap that homeless people would buy the BahnCard 100 that you couldn't find some form of cohabitation for a similar price.

And then there's the constant strikes as of now, so you might go days without shelter or need to pay for hotels which adds up quickly.

I'd say this is a rounding error

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#156

Post by BSDobelix »

627467 wrote: post #112

There are so many possible perspectives for such story but in this day and age the focus is on how much this cost. So let's talk about cost: I don't know how often he sleeps in this way[0] but clearly at £8500/year no one is discussing the externalized cost of taking up (arguably empty) seats he didn't pay for and setting the stage for future "nomads" to do the same and turning first class night trains into a substan…

>seats he didn't pay for and setting the stage for future

That`s why he's under the seats, but let's talk about AirBNB-Ghosttown's ;)

And i think it's a absolute nice adventure for a 17 y/o. Talk with lot's of different peoples, see lot's of places....genius i love it!

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#157

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

secretsatan wrote: post #136
pera wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why trains are so expensive in England: when I lived in Bristol I liked to spend time in Bath, it's just a ~10 minutes ride but it costed 10 pounds each way if I remember correctly... but at least you could bring your bike for free :p

I'm so disappointed every time I go back there, and the bloody tickets now, ffs, it shouldn't be like air travel, the whole thing was setup by someone who's never used public transport.

The whole thing was set up by people who don't like public transport. They don't like public anything. They don't want the peasants to have nice things, because only extra-special wealthy people should have nice things.

The rail network was cut right back in the 60s by the then transport minister, who happened to have a large share in the corporation building out the motorway network.

And so on.

Completely dysfunctional politics. Utterly unsuited to the 21st century.

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#159

Post by williamdclt »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #77
pera wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why trains are so expensive in England: when I lived in Bristol I liked to spend time in Bath, it's just a ~10 minutes ride but it costed 10 pounds each way if I remember correctly... but at least you could bring your bike for free :p

Simple, they're run by European train operators to subsidise their national networks.

> to subsidise their national networks

Do you have a source? That's an extraordinary claim, the sort of thing I'd expect to find in Nigel Farage's bag of lies

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#160

Post by ithkuil »

627467 wrote: post #112

There are so many possible perspectives for such story but in this day and age the focus is on how much this cost. So let's talk about cost: I don't know how often he sleeps in this way[0] but clearly at £8500/year no one is discussing the externalized cost of taking up (arguably empty) seats he didn't pay for and setting the stage for future "nomads" to do the same and turning first class night trains into a substan…

> he didn't pay for

hey, he paid for it! They gave him an unlimited ticket in exchange for euros.

You're free to say that the train company shouldn't have created an unlimited ticket but it's unfair to paint a person who uses what he legally bought as a thief.

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