In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by patmorgan23 » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:43 PM UTC

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…

Europe is not small. And lots of European countries are investing/have invested heavily in their rail networks, especially compared to the United States.

Spain and France have extensive high speed rail and regular rail networks. There's an EU level initiative to connect all the national rail networks and facilitate the creation of robust pan-euorpean rail services.

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

#72

Post by hnaccount_rng » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:46 PM UTC

hannob wrote: post #51

erk__ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is daily trains between all the countries you named (at least those that share a border) most of them are no different than any other border crossing with exception of the trains going to and from England as you have to go through security for that one. I don't remember ever having a bad experience crossing a border when I was on InterRail some years back.

I don't have experience with InterRail, but the bad experience often starts with buying a ticket. The amount of "we cannot sell you that ticket, we can't even tell you the price" I have gotten when checking international connections is wild. It is slowly improving (I just checked a particularly absurd example where Deutsche Bahn was unable to sell a ticket to switzerland through if it wasn't bought a long time in adv…

Oh that's nothing. 5 years ago DB couldn't sell you all tickets within Germany (if you didn't cross a Verkehrsverbund boundary the local train company could refuse to license that right to DB). So yeah. Improving ;)

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

#73

Post by pvg » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:46 PM UTC

GrumpySloth wrote: post #63

pvg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This point is repeated many times throughout the article. It’s not picking, unless you mean I should ignore half the article.

That may be but pasting a quote of a quote just to do some contentless sneering is exactly the sort of comment the guideline is about.

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

#74

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:46 PM UTC

muspimerol wrote: post #28

kibwen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially in small Europe What's small about the scale of Europe in this context? Even taking the extremely conservative measurement of Madrid to Berlin, that's 1200 miles/2000 km, which is comparable to the entire length of the Japanese isles, or the distance from Beijing to the South China Sea, or the distance from Boston to Minneapolis and/or Miami. Speaking as an American, I'd be over the moon if our passenger…

The scale of the country is an excuse in many cases. There are densely populated areas in many parts of the USA, but nearly all of Europe is densely populated. The EU has an average density of 112 people per square km compared to 36 in the USA. The USA still can and should do better, but there are important geographical differences to the EU. And as an aside, I don't think many Europeans are taking the train from Mad…

As a child, at about 11 to 12, so about 1981/82 I took the train from Bonn am Rhein to Madrid, and back to Bonn from Aguilas or Alicante. Alone!

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

#75

Post by chabons » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:47 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

This illustrates that many times induced demand is a good thing as it shows that more people are having their needs met

The way I see it, induced demand is just a way of saying that all modes trend towards equilibrium. If you invest more in trains, they become more attractive, and people gravitate towards them. The same is true of cars, busses, etc... How each mode of transport scales influences whether you want to induce demand for it.

AFAICT trains scale pretty well in terms of space and environmental impact, and point-to-point latency decreases as more trains are run (and transfer times decrease), so it's pretty nice to induce demand for it.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:48 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #13

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…

> especially in small Europe What's small about the scale of Europe in this context? Even taking the extremely conservative measurement of Madrid to Berlin, that's 1200 miles/2000 km, which is comparable to the entire length of the Japanese isles, or the distance from Beijing to the South China Sea, or the distance from Boston to Minneapolis and/or Miami. Speaking as an American, I'd be over the moon if our passenger…

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by muspimerol » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:48 PM UTC

ericmay wrote: post #41

scott_w wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU has an average density of 112 people per square km compared to 36 in the USA. Isn't that a misleading statistic, though? It's not like the USA is an evenly spread wasteland in comparison to Continental Europe. It's more like pockets of high population density throughout, which trains can handle perfectly well. Russia and Ukraine are similar in that they're pockets of cities separated by miles of steppe. Both…

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.

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

#78

Post by Nextgrid » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:50 PM UTC

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…

> Flying always comes with security hassle

Unfortunately that is not the case, the security theater seems to be slowly contaminating rail too.

The Barcelona->Paris connection has some bullshit security on the Barcelona side (luggage x-ray & plastic trays for laptops), and I think the Eurostar had some of this on the London side too.

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

#79

Post by jhoechtl » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:52 PM UTC

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #69

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…

You also have Thalys in .de which is not just get in. The same goes for Eurostar. Maybe more, but I don't know about them. That aside, some could do 350kph in theory, but there are no tracks anywhere which are certified for more than 330kph in regular daily operations. With the additional constraint of limiting that to 280 kph max after several fuck ups, which I don't know about if that limit was lifted, or not. And…

> lichthupenden and warnblinkenden Nieten in Nadelstreifen trying to overtake the Normalos,

Thank you, made my day. Austrian btw.

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

#80

Post by INTPenis » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 8:52 PM UTC

You can visit 10 countries in 24 hours by train in Europe. It's a challenge but it's possible.

I'm aiming to break my record with 11 countries, but we'll see.

The problem is that even though the balkans are a lot of countries, the rail is very slow compared to going north and east towards Slovakia and Poland.