251–260 of 526 posts
By the way, student dormitory cost around ~200-300 euros per month. And semester fee costs 300 euros per semester (6months). In total, it makes 3900 euros. So, the train is not the most cost efficient solution, if you are young.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Read the comment again - he pays for one seat, he sleeps across 3 or 4.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, because of the awful way the privatisation is managed. Not that I think it should be privatised anyway, but really had to be it is hard to imagine it being setup in a way that benefits the passengers less. The killer is that there are still significant subsidies involved, so we pay through the nose for bad service due to the way privatisation is arranged and also pay extra through indirect taxation too. In fact,…
The subsidies go mostly to the infrastructure and currently that number is high because it includes the cost of the shambolic HS2. Indeed, Network Rail is still a state-owned company. But the majority of the expenses (trains, staff, etc) are borne by the operators and paid for by the fares. I agree that the way privatisation has worked is poor, though.
The public purse should not be raided more after privatisation than before, surely?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are not paying for the seat, but for the journey. Go ahead and try to get a refund when you don't have a seat on a crowded train.
While that is true (if you don't have a seat reservation) you are prohibited from occupying more than one seat per DB ToS. "Each passenger is only allowed to occupy one seat [...] Passengers who behave contrary to the above regulations, ignore the instructions of employees or otherwise pose a threat to safety and order can be excluded from transport or further transport without entitlement to reimbursement of the far…
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…
Unlikely, the FAQ on the ordering page explicitly states that the Bahncard 100 can be used for "any number of trips": https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/bahncard100-1-klasse.
Also, 7714 Euros is expensive (it's more than I pay for a year's rent in a small appartment in Berlin for instance).
I guess he's eating the additional cost for a 1st class Bahncard 100 because the 1st class usually isn't as extremely overcrowded as the 2nd class.
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This kid is 17. What a chad! As long as he doesn't let less interesting people beat the creative spirit out of him, he's going to go places in life. I mean he's already doing so, about 800 miles worth of places per day
Or he just dwells on this one thing for the rest of his life like many others did before him...
Not all environments are conducive to musterable control but when it lines up stuff can happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's not safe and cozy What's unsafe about it?
He sleeps in public train coaches (sometimes under the seats, if you look at his blog). This means he spends at least 6 hours a day unconscious - and vulnerable - in a public place that anyone can enter. Arguably less safe than sleeping at home behind a locked door.
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…
Some of the older posts ( https://leben-im-zug.de/howto-nachtreise-im-ice/ ) explain that when he was travelling second class, he was able to sleep on a luggage rack most of the time. That practice actually appears to consume a negative number of seats! This is clearly also something you can only do when you're seventeen. I think if I tried to sleep on a luggage rack then (a) I would wake up in a claustrophobic panic…
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…
> Drawing attention to himself like this may mark the end of this experience. Unlikely, the FAQ on the ordering page explicitly states that the Bahncard 100 can be used for "any number of trips": https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/bahncard100-1-klasse . Also, 7714 Euros is expensive (it's more than I pay for a year's rent in a small appartment in Berlin for instance). I guess he's eating the additional cost for a 1…
€600/month In Dublin would get you a 1m2 closet and shit bucket
Compared to the UK where a standard-class rail season ticket for me to get to London (including underground), at £8,272 p/y.. but for that, I also have the luxury of either standing in an overcrowded carriage, or if I am super lucky I get to sit in a seat that smells of urine.
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
For instance, Southern Railway is owned by Govia Thameslink Railway, which is part of Govia which also operates Gatwick Express, Great Northern and Thameslink services.
However, Govia is a partnership between the Go-Ahead Group and Keolis.
Keolis is a French transportation company owned by SNCF, the French national railway, and CDPQ (a crown company of Canada).
Go-Ahead is owned by Globalvia, a Spanish multinational transport infrastructure company, and Kinetic Group (formerly known as AATS Group) which is an Australian-based multinational bus company.
Globalvia are owned by OPTrust, one of Canada's largest pension funds; PFZW, the second-largest pension fund in the Netherlands; and USS, a large UK Pension scheme.
Kinetic Group are also owned by OPTrust, but also by Foresight Group Holdings plc a British private equity and venture capital business, supposedly focused on clean energy generation and associated infrastructure (*cough* Go-Ahead spends £100 million a year on Diesel *cough*).
Now, try to imagine how many small subsidiaries those companies have where transfer-pricing can occur and how many layers of profit are being extracted.
France's SNCF trains are run by SNCF (owned by the French Government) who also do all the track and maintenance.
Germany's Deutsche Bahn (owned by the German Government) runs Germany's trains.
Deutsche Bahn also own Arriva and were nearly banned by the UK government for how badly they ran the trains in the north of England (spoiler: they weren't).
Avanti West Coast are part owned by Trenitalia, who are mostly owned by the Italian Government. Trenitalia also owns c2c who run the London, Tilbury and Southend franchise.
The northern railways were run by a succession of similarly named companies before being returned to the UK Government as operator of fast resort.
The whole thing is a tangled mess of the worst kind of vampire capitalism: sucking up subsidies, bleeding companies dry by overloading them with debt, providing terrible service, then handing the drained husk back to the government once they've bled them to death.
I've concluded that the private companies that replaced the UK publicly owned companies are run to be a front for borrowing money and sucking up subsidies to pay to shareholders. The train companies are no better than the water companies, though they seem to be better at obfuscating what they are doing.
It's the same formula over and over again: you borrow; pay as much of it as you can out to shareholders; run a minimal service to bring in just enough money to pay the debt payments; invest the minimum to allow you to keep operating and if possible, you do it through transfer pricing with other companies in the parent companies' structure. When your creditors eventually catch up with you, you go cap in hand to the government looking for a bailout and if that fails, you hand the franchise back before forming a new company to bid again.
Southern Water, for instance, uses 1/3 each bill to pay debt payments. Even Network Rail, who are owned by the British Government, are paying 1/3 of their income to service their debts.
This is very similar to the "hollowed-out firms" of the UK who distribute more to shareholders than they generate in net income—1/5 of FTSE 350 paid out on average 178% of their net earnings after tax in 2010-1019.
It's all a con and we are chumps.
Further reading
This unfathomable financial overview of the rail system in England:
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/A-financia...
This summary of who owns the British Railways:
https://weownit.org.uk/who-owns-our/railways
This article about water profits:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/...
Hollowed-out firms:
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-02/Tran...