Yeah, no shit… Just go to your nearest station 5 minutes before departure instead of wasting hours in security checks and at gates sounds terrific.
The last time I booked an internaional ICE from northern Germany to Bruxelles, the return connection and its follow up connection were cancelled. Best connection to get back would have been a Eurostar but tickets weren’t transferable and the guy at the station wouldn’t even sell me one. Had to take three short distance trains just to cross the border back to Germany, ended up about five hours late.
National trains are often a mess already but with international connections you’re just lost. Booking night trains would be awesome, go to bed in Hamburg and wake up in Barcelona sounds like a dream. Instead, they all go to Vienna, which is nice to go there but isn’t helpful for European connectivity as a whole.
National rail can be (at least) perfectly decent, which it is in the Netherlands. Too bad the EU wants to have it be fucked up by ‘competition’: the European Commission just now sued the Dutch state for giving the consession for the main part of the railway network to the national rail company NS.
And waiting 5 hours for the Deutsche Bahn to arrive. I don’t really care for the prices but German trains are a nightmare to travel with
Kinda agree. Good when smooth, but when bad it’s bad.
I once booked a train months in advance. Got there and the train got cancelled. No notice just not there. I waited in queue for 30 mins. Person told me catch the next one in 1 hour.
I did. The conductor on the train came along and threaten to throw us off as it was not the correct ticket. There was just no rational option.
Otherwise I love the train.
Conductor is out his mind. If your train is cancelled, you have any right to use another train. Where is the problem?
@Cherry @snowflockeYeah, still happens alot you end up being 2 hours late or even more and that happens on regional connection
Trains are still extremely expensive when compared to flights to the same destinations. Unfortunately…
And multiply those costs for a family. Trains receive more subsidies per km in Europe but cost far more for the distance. I say this as someone who prefers trains. They’re just not that efficient compared to planes. There are solid use cases like local commuter trains and for shipping. For longer journeys, planes are a clear winner for time and cost.
Yes true but the range of how far train can be preferable above plane can be expanded if network better run on a European level and some big strategic investments (not that different from what France did in the 80’s and 90’s) on quite a few very often travelled routes. Amsterdam-Berlin is an easy example, but there are many like that. Currently on many routes the plane>train is like ~300 km, while on many that could become 600-700km with either high speed tracks or more sleeper train options or better connections. On some big routes the train>plane is up to 700-800 km already.
I think I agree directionally but I keep coming back to the efficiency issue. The longer the journey, the more inefficient the cost becomes relative to planes. It scales linearly. More and more money would need to be poured into a less and less efficient transport method. Once you hit 4-600km, flying is almost always faster. Faster tracks and trains for direct routes are INCREDIBLY expensive to build and maintain and staff.
From a fuel efficiency point of view, trains are still way more efficient, and a dense coverage of airports is also extremely expensive to maintain.
But it is also a bit unfair to compare prices of low cost airlines that use subsidized airports and tax exempted fuel to mostly state owned rail companies. A fairer comparison would be Lufthansa prices or vise versa Flixtrain.
Trains are more fuel efficient, but there is a lot more which goes into the cost of these transport modes than fuel.
I’m comparing these modes of transport because they both receive subsidies, including tax exemptions for avgas. The EU subsidises air travel (in many ways) to the tune of around €30–40 billion annually depending on what you include and what you consider to be a “subsidy.” Using similar criteria, rail is subsidised to the tune of €40–75 billion per year. So rail gets a lot more investment despite it serving 16% fewer travel kilometers per year in the EU than air travel.
