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In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

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Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#201

Post by panick21_ »

cassepipe wrote: post #53
k__ wrote: post #3

Trains are pretty awesome, especially in small Europe. Flying always comes with security hassle. A train is just: get in/get out. If Europe would just spent more money on infrastructure. We have trains in Germany that can do 350km/h but I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be. Then we have the Germany Ticket. A 50€/month subscription to all regional tr…

Personally my main gripe is not so much the speed as going to higher speed is probably less efficient hence more expensive. My main gripe is the price (I am poor by european standards). For example going from Paris to Napoli only by train is currently above 300 euros whereas you can find a flight for 40 euros. I am ready to pay around 100 euros for that. Recently there was sleeper car train from Paris to Milano which…

For 300 Euros you can get Interrail and and ride around Europe all you want for 4 days in a month.

Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#202

Post by panick21_ »

enaaem wrote: post #15
eigenket wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion the main "low hanging fruit" Europe has with trains are international birders, especially if they're trying to compete with flying. Trains in Poland work great, trains in Germany work pretty well but every train I've taken between Poland and Germany has been delayed. The standard thing is that while you're in Poland they claim the delay is because of previous delays in Germany and while you're in German…

Just built a separate international network, with its own separate system and tracks. The way Japan handles complexity is through redundancy. Japan runs both really old trains, hyper modern high speed rail and everything in between. Each system runs on separate tracks, are from different companies, and are not interconnected. This can be a lesson on how to run complex systems in general.

Do you know how politically complex it is to build a single high speed rail line? In one country? Its so mind blowing complex politically, its almost unfathomable. And even then often it only results in an upgrade of an existing line, rather then a new line.

Building a whole new infrastructure from the ground up, would not only be absurdly expensive, it would also be absurdly impractical and take literally 50 years if it would ever happen.

Yes, Japan is correct that sometimes, more separation is a good thing if your network can be simpler.

But at the same time you can't just reverse that and then conclude that 'lets make everything as different as possible' and believe that's somehow going to turn into an efficient system.

We can not just simply ignore 200 years of train history and evolution each countries system has. I'm all for learning from Japan, but we also can't and shouldn't just copy Japan.

Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#203

Post by panick21_ »

awiesenhofer wrote: post #195
k__ wrote: post #3

Trains are pretty awesome, especially in small Europe. Flying always comes with security hassle. A train is just: get in/get out. If Europe would just spent more money on infrastructure. We have trains in Germany that can do 350km/h but I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be. Then we have the Germany Ticket. A 50€/month subscription to all regional tr…

So every time you say Europe you just mean Germany, right? Cause European trains are for the most part just fine, its only german trains that very famously suck. So no need to extrapolate here.

And its really ICE. German S-Bahn are freaking awesome.

Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#204

Post by panick21_ »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #104
jhoechtl wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a pattern in Germany engineering? Airport Berlin, Stuttgart 21, constantly late running trains? Is Germany over-engineered and over-regulated, what's the issue?

Trains being late is simply an overrated problem. This is not something that DB should optimize for. It would be easy to make sure every train is punctual by running one Munich-Berlin-Hamburg train a day. Trains are late because they run a demanding schedule, trying to serve every big city (this is not like France where everything is supposed to go through Paris, this is a country that unified late with many powerful…

Trains being late isn't that overrated. Its not the most important thing, but it is important. Because being late messes up the whole system. One train being late can cascade to lots of other trains being late. Causing system degridation.

There is not one single issue with the German network. Yes, the multi polarity you mentioned is one of them. But that's not the main issue, really more a feature.

One of the issues is that early on DB wanted to continue to make money with cargo, so they insisted on having cargo (and other trains) use the same lines. Rather then building new lines that nobody else uses. This choice over long term degraded to a situation where lots of high speed lines are just major upgrades of existing lines.

That leads to the network not having as much capacity as it could have had. And you have ICE trains blocking lots of the tracks for other trains, and the other way around. And even if the ICE can go, it can't go full speed because some parts aren't upgrade enough. You constantly go from a speed line, to an upgraded line, to a normal line, to a city approach.

While its great that in Germany the ICE goes to the main station, unlike in France where Paris doesn't even have a real main station. It also leads to ICE trains having to use an excessive amount of the old city network. And there are always issues there. Just last week our train was lolligaging around the approaches to Hamburg.

There is also just a general maintenance issue, personal and so on.

That all said, having traveled threw Germany a lot with the train just in the last couple months, overall, I think its amazing. But could be so much better still.

Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#205

Post by panick21_ »

muspimerol wrote: post #77
ericmay wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's misleading. The America is big argument fails to hold water once you actually take a look at a map. Take Columbus for example where we're within just a couple hours by train (could be less if we had any sort of seriousness about our country) away from: Chicago Detroit Cleveland Cincinnati Indianapolis Pittsburgh and maybe just a few hours away from other cities like Toronto, Buffalo, Louisville, and more.

It's only misleading if you disregard the rest of my comment :-) You have identified a part of the USA with a decent density of cities - nice! That is exactly what I think. There are pockets where rail makes sense, and should be built up. But even this area is not nearly as dense as Germany, England, Belgium, Italy, etc, so I fail to see why it makes sense to compare this to the EU.

There are lots of pockets in Europe that aren't that dense, they still have good public transport, as least compared to the US.

It always really funny when American point at some place, and say 'look how not dense' and then there is like a city of 200+ people there. Sure maybe not close to other cities. But any city that size should have its own S-Bahn system at least.

Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#206

Post by awiesenhofer »

panick21_ wrote: post #203
awiesenhofer wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So every time you say Europe you just mean Germany, right? Cause European trains are for the most part just fine, its only german trains that very famously suck. So no need to extrapolate here.

And its really ICE. German S-Bahn are freaking awesome.

Agreed!

Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#207

Post by Wytwwww »

muspimerol wrote: post #133
Wytwwww wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I added up the population of all those cities: 6.13 million. Well just Boston (where it would presumably start) is over 4 million (and whole Massachusetts is almost as dense as Belgium). Minneapolis is another ~3 million. Chicago is over 8 million. I didn't even look up the other cities... yeah it's lower but really not as much as you're implying.

Oh if we're talking about metro area population, then the EU route is also significantly higher (for example, Paris goes from 2 million to 13 million). I was just looking at city limits in both cases. Honestly I agree with your sentiment. We should connect all these urban areas with passenger rail. But I don't think that this is the first step. Most American cities have atrocious public transit, which needs to be fix…

> Oh if we're talking about metro area population

I was just looking at the urban area. The official population of many cities in the US is almost entirely meaningless in this context.

Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#208

Post by bluGill »

To every American posting that NY Times piece about high speed rail in Europe - I can sort of forgive you, as Europe’s trains are better than America’s

To every European posting the piece - it’s superficial PR guff from the rail industry, semi formed into an article. You can do better!

https://gruene.social/@jon/111714851047117612 follow his account for why trains in europe need help

Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#209

Post by Wytwwww »

muspimerol wrote: post #138
sophacles wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit misleading to claim: "The dense parts of Europe have 500k+ cities basically overlapping.", while pretending that Chicago doesn't have 6M+ additional people in its immediate suburbs who would also be able to use this hypothetical train. The US and EU structure administrative units a bit differently, so using the Urban or Metro populations for both is a better metric for population served. I agree that Europ…

Sure, all mega cities have even larger metro areas. I'm not pretending Chicago doesn't have a huge metro area. But my point stands: the European route has much higher catchment than your proposed USA route, even if you include metro areas. Population density is not the only argument, although I think it's pretty clear why the US and EU are not comparable: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#4/38.51/-51.06 Most of t…

> all mega cities have even larger metro areas

But that not the point. Many of these borders are arbitrary e.g. it's like saying that Paris has a lower population Berlin even though such a claim would make no sense at all.

Re: In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

#210

Post by illiac786 »

k__ wrote: post #3

Trains are pretty awesome, especially in small Europe. Flying always comes with security hassle. A train is just: get in/get out. If Europe would just spent more money on infrastructure. We have trains in Germany that can do 350km/h but I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be. Then we have the Germany Ticket. A 50€/month subscription to all regional tr…

> We have trains in Germany that can do 350km/h but I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be.

no, they never built high speed rails in germany simply. a decision that baffles me. whereas france has been at it for 30 years for example.

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