921–930 of 1001 posts
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In the UK the railways used to be kind of bad in the nationalised British Rail days. People moan about the current privatised rail but it mostly works.
Swiss trains are run by a national company and they’re great.
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Although Germans are famously methodical, my experience with German bureaucracy was that it's quite flexible. They will break you, and when you finally give up and seem like you're about to cry, they will roll their eyes, and oblige you, stressing how exceptional and magnanimous they are for letting you get what you want. In reality, they were rooting for you the whole time, but did not want their flexibility to be t…
The best strategy I've found with such bureaucrats is to bike shed them with an obvious but easy problem that you fix with much adieu so they can feel like they've found you out and feel like they've done something. Meanwhile they will ignore all the subtler things that might be much harder for you to deal with.
https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
(p.s. I don't mean to nitpick over a perfectly clear message, but it's "much ado")
DB is weird. They seem to make their own rules and then run the game and “dont tell the rules to anyone”. I was on my way to catch a flight from Munich to my home (Madrid). I didn’t knew that apparently at one point the train splits into two parts and the front part goes to the airport and the other part just goes to the nearby cattle farms and comes back in 3 hours. Google Maps - No idea Citymapper - what? English a…
The weirdest thing in my city is that the bus driver often forgets 1 or 2 stops. There was a kid bursted into tear when she lost her direction on her way back home from school because the bus driver took a "wrong" path.
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Airlines are vague about this (at least in Europe) because different types of problems mean different obligations to compensate passengers. After the incident they will determine what's the least expensive lie they can plausibly give (perhaps the weather will change fast enough that you can blame the weather, perhaps you can't lie about an equipment failure when everyone in the airport sees you swap out the airplane)…
Yet the very fact that airlines routinely do put people up in hotels when flights get cancelled is an example of the exorbitant privilege of air travel (another being tax-free kerosene). Nobody expects this to happen with train travel. Perhaps they should.
The costs of a high speed line are on the scale of 30 millions euros per km, with maintenance of 300,000 €/km/year. A TGV with 740 seats costs around 25 millions euros and has maintenance too. Most of the operating costs are per trip, a TGV typically does 2 to 3 500km trips per day.
A mid-range plane like the A320neo costs around 100 millions euros for 190 passengers and typical operating costs of 5 millions for a 2 flights per day average. A lot of these costs are hourly costs (fuel and maintenance) and airport costs. Fuel is 10%.
In France, trains and especially high-speed trains are heavily subsidised with a lot of tickets paid under various incentivized and subsidized schemes. SNCF (trains and railways) receives between 10 and 20 billions euros per year from various government entities (depending on what you include), i.e. 20% to 35% of revenue. There are also indirect subsidies through corporate tax schemes like commuting exemptions. Finally, long haul buses have long been forbidden and considered a threat to the train monopoly, and after a short golden age of EU-led monopoly breaking, they have been again heavily regulated so they can hardly compete. Similarly, short-haul flights have been almost banned.
The train is more practical but when I hear it is on par with air travel economically and more environment friendly I fail to make sense of the numbers.
The title should be changed. It should be: "Kidnapped by National Express". Because the train mentioned in the article is not operated by Deutsche Bahn, but by National Express, see https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494... National Express is actually a subsidiary of the British train operator Mobico Group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Express_Germany
Shifting the blame away from DB, who is responsible for creating the terrible track conditions and is responsible for the operations, to the train operator, who zero ability to influence what DB is doing is just totally unfair.
DB is at fault here, they lead the train onto the wrong tracks and they also caused the previous delays. Regional trains in Germany have many different kinds of operators. Taking any of them is always miserable in exactly the same way, which is in almost every case caused by DB, because they can not operate the train network.
What is worse is that these operators also get into conflict with the DB trains. E.g. they prioritize a DB train, which is already late, over a regional train, causing delays for regional trains.
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Yet the very fact that airlines routinely do put people up in hotels when flights get cancelled is an example of the exorbitant privilege of air travel (another being tax-free kerosene). Nobody expects this to happen with train travel. Perhaps they should.
I travel mostly by high speed train over very long distances and I fail to see it making more economical sense than air travel, even with taxed kerosene. The costs of a high speed line are on the scale of 30 millions euros per km, with maintenance of 300,000 €/km/year. A TGV with 740 seats costs around 25 millions euros and has maintenance too. Most of the operating costs are per trip, a TGV typically does 2 to 3 500…
However counter-intuitive it may be, air travel is indeed far more energy-intensive, and therefore destructive, than train travel. Mainly due to the exponential increase of wind resistance with speed. On a planet of 9 billion people, airplanes will simply not be a sustainably form of transport by any metric.
Way back in 90's, when I arrived on an Indian Railway station about 10 minutes before the train's scheduled time, I was pleasantly surprised to find the train at the platform. Only when I checked the passenger reservation list, I found this was train from yesterday, late by 23:50 hours. (for the curious... No, I could not get my reserved birth and had to travel on unreserved ticket, but at least I reached destination…
proof or it didnt happen. this is a meme joke. even osho made a joke exactly like this.
I did wait in a single spot for almost 10h, my 5-6h journey became a 15h one, in Serbia in the late 2000s. IIRC, a large part of the railway was down that day, couple hundred km, electricity issue or something. Some people walked off the train, which was in between cities but near the road. I was a student, didn't have an alternative, so I didn't. They didn't organize a replacement bus.
This kind of thing was (maybe not to that extent) common, like once every year or two. They rarely reported on it in media if the cause wasn't notable.
I visited the Dachau concentration camp several years ago on one of the hottest days of the year. Me and my GF packed water, but on that day is just wasn't enough and we ran out towards the end of the day.
We got around the camp and just before leaving we went into the cafe and asked for a drink, but they said sorry the cafe was closed.
Okay, fair enough. In that case we'll just fill our bottles with some tap water then.
"No, you can't do that".
Huh? We really need a drink... We've been on coaches and walking around all day and we've ran out of water.
"Sorry, I can't help".
We have our empty bottles here, could you please just pour us some water?
"No, sorry I can't".
I get she probably wasn't suppose to serve customers after close, but we just wanted her to fill our water bottles with tap water. I may be misremembering now but I'm like 80% sure I asked if I could fill the bottle in the toilet, but she also refused to open to toilets because they were closed.
This whole situation would have been absolutely absurd in the UK.
Germans really seem to like doing everything as per the rules regardless of how inconvenient and ridiculous it is. Even things like crossing roads where generally most Brits will wait for a green light, but if in a hurry many will look for a gap in traffic and just cross. Germans seem to rarely ever do this and you get the sense you are being judged if you do it.
I had lots of weird little experiences like this in Germany but almost passing out from dehydration at a German concentration camp had a certain level of irony to it.
In Dresden we were told that they had issues with the power lines on the Czechia side and had to leave the train. It was still an hour to the border but seemed to be the best place to dump all the people and let them go the merry way the rest of the journey. The basic service was a printed paper directly out of the connection lookup system. No info if this connection is actually the best or makes sense since other travelers will be also on route. We had to switch trains 2 more times and arrived in Prague at around Midnight. Let’s say I really don’t want to take the train anywhere at the moment. Sidestory. Check the current state of the S-Bahn Service (run by DB) in Berlin. One wonder why they bother to announce issues with the system day in and out. They could just switch over and announce when stuff is running smoothly instead.