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More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

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Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#201

Post by tluyben2 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #136
tluyben2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what distances you are travelling I suppose; the prices for longer travel are, imho, very high and sure it is comfy but compared to a plane? Planes are cheaper and much faster. At the same price I think many would still take the plane. If trains were vastly cheaper, then maybe it would change a lot. But only inside the Netherlands, I only know a few commuters in my circles who go by train; the rest drive a…

> sure it is comfy but compared to a plane A large part of the comfort factor is that a direct train takes me from city center to city center, while a "direct" flight requires me to first get to the airport, then navigate the airport, then get from the destination airport to the city. That not only easily adds at least 2 hours to the trip (30 min x 2 spent getting to/from the airport, 30 minutes to get through the ai…

I travel enough to not be confused when booking :) And sure for 3-4 hrs I would (and do) take the train, but when the hours go up (over 5 hr say), trains are not so good. When you are a frequent business traveler, you pack differently as well; no luggage surcharge, no waiting in line (priority because of points), free food/drink in lounges. For frequent larger distance travel, trains are a very poor alternative at the moment. Still, I would take them (usually, if not in a hurry which is usually not the case) if they were much cheaper (they are almost always more expensive at 5+ hr distance on the routes I frequent), but that's also not the case...

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#202

Post by Camas »

radicalbyte wrote: post #196
Camas wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does HS2 have to do with private rail?

Trains are privatized in the UK. Maybe this project is being built with public money but it will eventually be privatized.

Trains are privatised, not the tracks.

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#203

Post by thu2111 »

eesmith wrote: post #200
thu2111 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, "pretty journal" was just a bad autocorrect I didn't spot. It was meant to say "pretty normal". The problem with rail is the capacity issues affect the entire line. If one station has busy platforms and the rest are all quiet, you can't put additional trains on that line (unless it's a terminal station and there's a turning circle before that station and you are willing to run trains that don't go there). Also…

Ahh. I was thinking that "journal" was either some new slang or a region term that I hadn't heard of. Thanks for the clarification. Regarding "kills capacity", aren't passing loops meant to help that exact scenario? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_loop has many details. At the very least, it's not as dire as you describe. I know little about the UK rail system -- or any country's rail system, for that matter. I…

There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult. The railways are surrounded on all sides, almost everywhere, by urban development. Homes and businesses have to be relocated, earthworks have to be done, and it all has to be broken into tiny pieces done in 4-5 hour spans in the middle of the night or over Christmas, because the railway is live and too economically important to shut down for long periods of time. Doing any kind of upgrades at all on a live line is horrifingly expensive and slow. That's why HS2 is a completely new railway. The UK has reached the limit of adding capacity to the West Coast Main Line; further upgrades are possible in theory but can't solve the fundamental issue of the same rails being shared by fast and slow trains.

As for Beeching, it's not quite that simple. The roughly 25-35% of the country that's pretty left wing hate the Beeching cuts for the same reasons they hate all government cuts.

Despite my negative view on trains above, I'm actually a train enthusiast. I love taking the train. I love reading about how they work. There was a story on HN some days ago where a rail engineer talked in detail about how the high-speed rail record was set, I absolutely loved reading about it. My girlfriend had to tear me away from the screen. And I've often wondered about how to really scale up the railways in a big way.

In a way, railways are kind of the ultimate nerd dream. An ideal railway is a huge, smoothly operating and very safe high performance machine, entirely coordinated by engineers and planners. I think perhaps that's why it's such a political hot-button issue: a nationalised railway represents a very tangible instance of massive state planning and control. Decentralising it is difficult for various logistical and technical reasons, not only the politics of it.

Despite that the Beeching cuts have never been rolled back, even under the 3 terms of Labour government. Many of those lines made no sense, especially in the context of continually declining ridership and the ever rising traffic on the roads. It'd have been a very irrational government that continued ploughing money into rail instead of building motorways given the expressed preferences of the population at the time.

For unknown reasons that are still debated today (but which align perfectly with privatisation), the decades-long decline in train usage reversed and so now new lines are needed again. But they're different routes to the ones closed by Beeching. Those were mostly small rural lines.

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#204

Post by speedplane »

thu2111 wrote: post #203
eesmith wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh. I was thinking that "journal" was either some new slang or a region term that I hadn't heard of. Thanks for the clarification. Regarding "kills capacity", aren't passing loops meant to help that exact scenario? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_loop has many details. At the very least, it's not as dire as you describe. I know little about the UK rail system -- or any country's rail system, for that matter. I…

There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult. The railways are surrounded on all sides, almost everywhere, by urban development. Homes and businesses have to be relocated, earthworks have to be done, and it all has to be broken into tiny pieces done in 4-5 hour spans in the middle of the night or over Christmas, bec…

> There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult.

While trains are touted as very efficient modes of transportation, and generally beloved by nerds, I'm skeptical, largely because train tracks are so under-utilized.

Train tracks take up as much space as many multi-lane highways. On highways, dozens of cars go by every minute. But a train car only passes through at best a few times an hour. I suspect that if you took one mile of train track and one mile of a highway with the same overall footprint, far more people/goods will move through the highway-mile every hour than the train-mile.

Don't have data to back this up, just a hunch. But if it's true, then even though trains are far more energy efficient than cars, they're likely far less real-estate efficient.

(Also, I do suspect that this is not always true. A heavily trafficked tunnel in/out of Manhattan's Penn Station is probably more efficient real-estate wise than an equivalent tunnel. But that's a very extreme case with super high densities).

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#205

Post by tluyben2 »

brnt wrote: post #133
tluyben2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what distances you are travelling I suppose; the prices for longer travel are, imho, very high and sure it is comfy but compared to a plane? Planes are cheaper and much faster. At the same price I think many would still take the plane. If trains were vastly cheaper, then maybe it would change a lot. But only inside the Netherlands, I only know a few commuters in my circles who go by train; the rest drive a…

The Netherlands had the highest ticket price in the EU. When I lived in France I'd take a TGV on a regular basis but in NL train are not fast, don't go far (connections abroad are bad except to or through Brussels) and very expensive. Dutch rail infra was designed as a commuter network, and it shows.

So we are doing anecdotals or is that real data? UK as worst example I have seen but with many countries in Asia having by the second average times, NL is, for such an organised tiny shithole (I am dutch, born and raised and dutch genes going back to at least 1560 if that makes a difference) it is quite horrible really; you would expect much better for such bit mouths. I take and took the utrecht amsterdam train daily and it is delayed or cancelled a lot. I would expect 99.9999999999999999999 uptime for a country the size as my shoe. And it ain’t.

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#206

Post by eesmith »

thu2111 wrote: post #203
eesmith wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh. I was thinking that "journal" was either some new slang or a region term that I hadn't heard of. Thanks for the clarification. Regarding "kills capacity", aren't passing loops meant to help that exact scenario? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_loop has many details. At the very least, it's not as dire as you describe. I know little about the UK rail system -- or any country's rail system, for that matter. I…

There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult. The railways are surrounded on all sides, almost everywhere, by urban development. Homes and businesses have to be relocated, earthworks have to be done, and it all has to be broken into tiny pieces done in 4-5 hour spans in the middle of the night or over Christmas, bec…

> especially in the context of continually declining ridership and the ever rising traffic on the roads

One point of "unease" (to quote the Wikipedia entry) is that Marples was pro-road; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#cite_note-50

> A more critical interpretation is that after Macmillan named Marples as Minister of Transport, Britain’s transport policy swerved to the right, and became motivated by the kind of conflict of interest that Thompson notes can be loosely regarded as a form of corruption (9). Actually, in this case it may well have been a rather tight form of corruption. At the time that he was named minister, Marples owned 64,000 of the 80,000 shares of Marples Ridgeway, a civil engineering firm that specialised in building roads"

I as an ill-informed outsider cannot disambiguate how much of the shift to roads was from "expressed preferences" and how much was from "a form of corruption".

You wrote "nationalised railway represents a very tangible instance of massive state planning and control".

But .. so is a national road system. Your country spends billions on roads, which is pretty massive.

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#207

Post by eesmith »

eesmith wrote: post #206
thu2111 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult. The railways are surrounded on all sides, almost everywhere, by urban development. Homes and businesses have to be relocated, earthworks have to be done, and it all has to be broken into tiny pieces done in 4-5 hour spans in the middle of the night or over Christmas, bec…

> especially in the context of continually declining ridership and the ever rising traffic on the roads One point of "unease" (to quote the Wikipedia entry) is that Marples was pro-road; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#cite_note-50 > A more critical interpretation is that after Macmillan named Marples as Minister of Transport, Britain’s transport policy swerved to the right, and became motivated by the ki…

To add, I recall that the Netherlands also followed the post-war system of adding more highways/promoting cars, so I know it's not simply a corruption issue.

In the 1970s, protests against the increasing number of children deaths caused by cars resulted in the more pro-cycling infrastructure they have now, rather than prioritizing cars first, second, and third like they did in my country (the US) and, I believe, the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic... for background.

I can't help but also note that post-war UK manufactured cars, while the Netherlands did not.

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