Yeah why doesn’t Europe have trains?
Europe definitely doesn’t have trains already.
Still too much plane for local journeys
And is France train are not cheaper than planes or buses… Which is stupid, they should start to properly taxe Airlines
They’re building high speed rails connecting major European cities as we speak, we’ll be good
Do you happen to use Dvorak?
Sorry for the random question out of this air, but the in/is typo is something that happens a lot to me while being nearly impossible on “standard” keyboard layouts.
No, and I have no idea how I could do this, could be my brain rephrasing after I started writing
And it would be BEPO(dvorak-fr) for me but on the phone I don’t really find any advantage
We do. Not as much as we used to because privatisation is a plague upon mankind, also we have very diverse geography which makes developing new lines prohibitively expensive, even more so when you’re a private company. Add to that a lack of political backing and yeah, it’s all rather turgid, even if there are some extremely recent talks concerning transeuropean night trains and such.
Those are going to be for our nice flat and speedy routes no doubt, but hey, it’s an effort in the right direction.
But yeah, things are not gonna get better fast as long as we are cursed with privatisation. What a shit show to see our glorious TGV reduced to a shell of its former self.
Meanwhile I just got an article yesterday that Wuhan is now connected to the super high speed network and the first 450kph train now connects it to Shanghai. Last time I was there the train was already TGV levels of speed and much more modern, and only a year later they are leaving us on the fucking dust…
China sees investment in mass transit as a loss leader. It costs more to put in than it generates in fairs, but the boost to connected economic zones pays back the cost several times over.
The US sees investment in mass transit as a detriment to the airline, automotive, and fossil fuel industries. It would shrink the economy in three places where the nation has tried to goose growth for the last 60 years.
For real. If those idiot neighbours would stop fucking around, we get trains from Wuhan to Bordeaux in about a week. It’s a real game changer.
What if we told them they could keep killing each other, just on the train, and then we’d make a murder mystery about it?
I never really understand why historically trains were so rare in the US. They had loads of trains at one point left over from the industrial Revolution and then they seemed to decide to get rid of them all. Even Beaching didn’t shut down that many lines
We still have them all, we just prioritize moving cargo on them.
Oil and auto industry were literally buying tram tracks to dismantle them and make the roads only for cars. For the curious:
How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAoRail lines were converted to highways. They weren’t simply removed and abandoned, they were cannibalized to clear space for more lanes
Yeah, we have trains at home… (greece)
My total journey from Berlin home this week was about 50 minutes late, and the connection after the ICE was not pretty.
Yeah, but that’s not a rail problem, that’s a Deutsche Bahn problem.
In Romania, CFR makes DB look like the most competent shining lights of progress by comparison.
Track that hasn’t been properly maintained since the fall of communism (and we keep lowering max speeds because of it). Rolling stock consisting of hand-me-downs. Constant engine breakdowns.
And the worst part? Due to political shenanigans finding inventive new ways to siphon money out of the company, it’s still managed to find a way to go bankrupt again, meaning another government bailout.
Yes, not just DB too, but the local transit agencies too. Its a wonder that it all works so well DESPITE decades of mismanagement and austerity.
50 minutes isn’t that bad tbh. I dont remember the last time I flew that there wasn’t a delay. Hell even the whole arriving 2 hours before ,finding parking, going through security is all so much more of a hassle.
I’d much rather walk 5 minutes to the local subway head to the hauptbahnhof and wait 50 extra minutes for my train. I can at least go get a reasonably priced coffee while I wait.
It was bad enough. Schlimmer geht immer.
Also, comparing flights and trains doesn’t really work, I think. The getting into the plane time alone makes it too different.
Apparently Germany’s problem is that they run all the high-speed trains on the normal lines which means all of the normal trains have to work around them. Obviously you can’t have a normal train in front of a high-speed train so if the high-speed train is delayed by even a small amount it has a knock-on effect where a bunch of local service trains have to sit around waiting for the line to clear.
Everyone else runs high-speed rail on their own tracks. So everyone gets to do what they want and not affect anybody else.
The French do it better than the Germans, which is just not an acceptable state of affairs.
I’ve heard flights are sometimes also late or even cancelled
I’m from Europe. What’s a train?
If you’re on a long tube that travels quickly on the ground from one city to another, and everyone is talking in Spanish, you’re in a train.
If you’re in a long tube that travels quickly on the air from one city to another, and everyone is talking English, you’re on a plane
I was in Switzerland and the trains there are incredible. Even the tiniest village in buttfucksburg, nowhere has a train connecting it to the rest of the country.
I’m not sure about other countries but one thing Amtrak has over planes is that they’re more disability accessible. Still making improvements on legacy equipment but they’re under the ADA, whereas airlines lobbied themselves out of it, which is why they never bothered to create wheelchair spaces or accessible bathrooms or even seats a normal human can occupy comfortably.
tbf if airlines had to serve people they could not be profitable
Not my problem.
you say that but could you say that to an A class shareholder on the verge of tears over not being able to retire at 50 they might even have to work
Ha!
I would, and look them in the eyes the whole time while smiling.
If high speed rail becomes popular, all that stands between the current freedom and ID-required tickets and fingering by agents is one terrorist attack, staged or not.
What do you mean there’s already been terrorist attacks on trains but nobody really cares because it’s a train.
Shhh! It’s an american, he can’t comprehend high speed trains.
They are already wildly popular in diverse regions in europe btw.
Who, me? The furthest west I’ve been was Wales.
Sorry, I thought someone who didn’t know speedtrains aren’t already wildly popular, and has already been targeted by terrorists must be american. Take that as you like 😉
one terrorist attack
Had one in 2004, didn’t result in security theater (though its mishandling did almost certainly result in the ruling party losing the election).
What are you going to do with a hijacked train? The moment you hijack it they’ll just shutdown power. Hostages? Good luck there are like 30 carts on the train all of which have window break tools and emergency door open tools.
Look at Germany or France. High speed trains are everywhere and there is no ID requirement beyond maybe a ticket check if you’re unlucky.
What are you going to do with a hijacked train? The moment you hijack it they’ll just shutdown power. Hostages? Good luck there are like 30 carts on the train all of which have window break tools and emergency door open tools.
Only for Eurostar and some other international trains you get some checks when boarding, especially since Brexit.
There’s barely any checks they basically glance at your passport and go, yep you have a passport, you can pass.
Presumably if there was an arrest warrant out for you there’s a chance they might do something, but then again they are French so you’d have to catch them at a good time.
Yes indeed if you want to be safe book a train that leaves between 12:00 and 14:00 that’s when they’re at the bistrot for lunch.
Who said anything about hijacking? Think explosives etc.
Or driving it into a sky scraper !!!
What if the train is the size of Chrysler building? 🤯
Ok. Thinking explosives. Where are high speed trains being attacked by explosives? I don’t hear much in Germany, France, China, or Japan.
Didn’t cause security theater, though. 🤷♂️
Those are dense packed commuter trains from more than 20 years ago. Sort of the opposite of comfortable high speed long distance trains now days.
If you search for “bomb train” you’ll get results but it might be worth looking deeper than the headline.
Those are dense packed commuter trains from more than 20 years ago
So, even fucking worse when it comes to number of victims.
If you search for “bomb train” you’ll get results
I don’t need to search for it, it was all over the news for months.
And yet, we got over it.
We’re taking about high speed trains here. Independent of that, regarding attacks on commuter trains getting over it without American style tsa is a good thing.
Those countries arent full of Americans though. If a thing exists Americans will try to attack it.
Don’t jinx it.
My point is once a terrorist attack happens, there will be TSA like checks for getting on high speed trains.
My city (Mumbai) has seen multiple local train bombings so the newly built metro lines have baggage scanner at the entry.
Don’t jinx it.
As I said in another reply, too late, by twenty-one years.
And yet, no TSA-like bullshit.
Commuter trains aren’t high speed trains though.
True (though the AVE also stops at Atocha, as it did back in 2004).
They also tend to carry more passengers, which means the number of victims was significantly larger than if it had been an AVE.
And yet, your prediction of a nine-eleven-like security theater didn’t come to pass. 🤷♂️
Somebody didn’t watch Christophe Lambert’s The Hunted…
Or Under Siege 2.
Was that the one with the Apple Newton sending a fax?
in china there are similar security checks for high speed rail
Has to harm billionaire asset to matter. Killing the rest of us is a game billionaires already enjoy and would applaud the Panem twist of a visiting team
I’m sure they’d finger you if you asked nicely, and have showered recently.
I hope they don’t find any lump
Are you sure? There’s at least one lump I hope they find, but it’s kind of deep up in there.
We don’t even have that stuff on flights here (at least within Schengen). On my last 4 flights I had to show my ID once and the security check is just standing in the scanner thing for a second.
I never had actual cavity search but it varies within Shengen. Germany is the least pleasant, always some problem. Last time they insisted on searching a preschooler.
As someone who boycotted the TSA for like 5 years and only took Amtrak, the tickets are not always cheaper. I mean sure, you can get across the country for like $100.
Even when I was doing Boston-Baltimore on the Acela, it was routinely slightly cheaper to fly.
Amtrak is not cheaper, but trains in other countries are. Because Amtrak, specifically, sucks.
Not always. Flying from Amsterdam to London is cheaper and faster than taking the train. The train is usually sold out because people still prefer it, but…
Flying is way cheaper in Europe. Partially because trains are taxed much higher than flying.
AmTrak is designed to suck. Freight lines own most of the rails, and while they are required to give priority to passenger trains, they avoid this in several ways. Like having the freight trains too long to fit on side rails so the passenger trains are required to stop instead to make way.
Amtrak on the east coast is decent, it’s offensively bad on the west coast and most places in the middle of the country.
Honestly I think it’s just sticker shock. I would say that as soon as we get some people would be more willing to get more, but no, because people are hesitant to expand existing rail. MARTA please expand, I beg you. Oh great spirits of public transit, I pray that you soften the NIMBYs’ hearts.
It’s so upsetting that every small town in my state has an old historic train stop but none of them are actually passenger train stops anymore. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. I am 15 minutes from my town’s historic train stop which is a steak house now. My parents are about the same distance from theirs, probably even closer, but it’s a museum or something. Can I just take a walk to the train, ride down, and see them? Nope. Gotta deal with the hellscape that is metro Atlanta traffic.
soften nimby hearts
They can soften the nimbys’ hearts, but ill take them cooked to charcoal if that’s what it takes.
Glorious coal for scenic steam locomotives. It’s a win-win
Still cleaner than even the cleanest electric car, just by physics.
Copilot’s deep think says it would take a 2K passenger train to be more environmentally friendly than 2K electric cars, given a coal-steam train and electric cars recharged by a coal fired power plant.
But that’s irrelevant, electric cars lose the coolness factor against steam trains. Choo-choo electric drivers!
copilot’s deepthink says
I cannot express the depth of disappointment i feel here.
Suffice to say that this is not an answer, and if you think it is; you’re going to get a lot of people hurt very badly someday. I sincerely hope you are never responsible for so much as brunch.
Well I don’t know anyone who works in either designing mass transportation nor makes environmental impact analysis, so no one could give me an accurate guess, hence why I specified that I asked.
I cannot express the depth of disappointment i feel here.
I even let it ‘think’ some extra time, come on
I sincerely hope you are never responsible for so much as brunch
I’ll make it my goal to ensure I’m supervising every single brunch you’re going to for the rest of our lives
There are rough numbers to be foubd, math to be done. Not enough for real work, but enough for guessing a rough course, or knowing when it’s close.
In theory, you could make a carbon-neutral coal-burning steam locomotive. You would need to make synthetic coal out of atmospherically-captured CO2. But in theory it would be possible…
Nope. Thermodynamics.
You’d just be making batteries at that point
And the making wouldn’t be free
Is there any parody porn about TSA? I want to masturbate to it. As long as it’s not too noncon (like TSA in real life), I don’t really care about the details (I’m ok with any gender, large insertions/fisting, etc.).
Is there any parody porn about [a thing]?
Yes. The answer is always yes.
TSA exists, therefore…
Train infrastructure is so underfunded (thx oil) that you can still get the fingering at most train stations for a really reasonable fee.
Meanwhile, right wing parties in Quebec are fighting against a tramway project in Quebec city, that the entire country agreed to pay for, for which we have already invested half a billion, build stations, etc. They call it “War on cars”.
The US has been fighting for years to put a high speed rail in between DC and New York. Every right-wing neighborhood in between is throwing signs out stop the maglev.
Honest fuck this.
So you love driving and more people on the road will get off the road and take the train. It means you can drive even more! Why wouldn’t you want that.
Because they don’t give a shit about driving? They care a lot more about their family members that own car dealerships, or are involved with the petrochemical industry.
Or they saw that American rightwing grifters talk like this so they are cargo culting the fuck out?
Because the joy of driving isnt getting there fast or the union of man and machine or anything like that.
It’s fucking up other people’s shit.
Where do I enlist?
This again? The answer is no one knows. We heard legends about it but the prophecy says line go up!
tickets are cheaper? if you want to travel the same distance it is far from cheap to travel by train, in Europe at least
try travelling between countries. eurorail is generally 2-3x times more expensive than cheapest airline. Trains have so much capacity and yet even within countries ticket prices are around £20-30 per two hours of travel. Should be much cheaper, governments should give train lines more incentives than airlines but I feel like that is probably the opposite.
yeah it’s outrageous how governments spend millions on airports and then claim that trains are too expensive
Same in the US, and they’re slow. Going halfway across the country (i.e. anywhere interesting) takes ~24 hours, and the cheapest seats (not a room) cost about the same as a regular flight, more if you consider budget airlines. And that’s if there’s a train going where you want to go without ridiculous transfers.
Traveling by ICE in Europe was fucking awesome. 300kph and like $10 euro to go basically anywhere…well 15 years ago it was that cheap. Dunno about now. And I say this as a gear head.
It really depends, if you take a direct line between 2 cities it is easy and cheap but the more times you have to switch trains the more expensive it gets (+ also a lot more problems when a train is delayed).
Such infrastructure should be completely & unlimitedly free for private use.
When Germany did (twice? Forgot the details :/) the experiment with the unlimited EU monthly tickets for 7€ or whatever people were really glad, everyone could travel & see more. And they still talk about that.
The “unlimited” ticket for 9€ (then 49€, now it’s 58€, “conserveratives” hate it so who knows what it’ll be next year) is limited to regional and local transit. No long distance IC/ICE trains with some exceptions where an IC is operating as part of a regional connection.
Thx for the info & insight!
My prediction is that (barring a heavy left shift in politics, i.e. a linke grüne spd government or similar) it will keep getting more expensive until it becomes useless enough that cancelling it is no longer political suicide.
It’s honestly insane to me that it seemingly wasn’t a huge topic in the election (at least I didn’t hear much about it), millions use it and many more benefit indirectly as it lead to better offers for local transport ticket subscriptions.
Ameribro here, I can almost guarantee that your airlines are running at a loss as part of a long term EEE strategy to monopolize long distance travel. Once they’ve got the market cornered, your tickets are going to get A LOT more expensive like ours are. Oh, and they’ll start demanding subsidies from your governments to keep from going tits up because they accidentally the whole thing to their shareholders. Don’t fucking fall for it.
Not to shit on your perfectly reasonable parade, but in Germany there is high speed rail through the whole . takes about 6 hours from top to bottom.
Now look at the scale of the US versus Germany and then the density of people living there. High speed rail makes alot of sense where it’s difficult to build (bosnywash) and does not scale well in terms of time spent traveling.
Its better than car, but won’t replace air travel anytime soon. Sadly.
That statement is a bit too broad for me. You can not only use highspeed rail within Germany but also to reach the countries around it. E.g. Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, (ICE trains) or use the TGV to reach Paris in a reasonable time.
But with the (illegal) border controls currently it’s insufferable. Will travel through France by train in September and I fear that the border controls will totally derail (haha) our time and travel plans.
We decided to use the train because the air connections took us longer since we didn’t want to vacate in a city with an airport and don’t live in one either.
I think parts of the problems of train in the US is that they have a lot of desert in the western part of the country (rocky mountains and such) where public transport just wouldn’t make sense. You don’t have that in Europe.
Why wouldn’t it make sense to cross these areas by train? You don’t need a stop in the desert but before and after sounds sensible to me.
crossing it makes sense, yes, but you could also do so by plane, which is much faster
When you add up all the miles of rail in Europe, how far could you stretch it out over the US?
Here are numbers from 2022 but you still need to do the math
Even if you adjusted for population (550 mil vs 330 mil) you could easily at least connect all the major cities in the US, given how many smaller regional lines there are in Europe too
How are the illegal border controls from outside into Germany on train currently? By car, they didn’t even look us in the eyes when we passed, a complete waste of time.
The Bundespolizei could do actual work instead of just sort of chilling on the borders and checking people that don’t look German enough (presumingly).
I haven’t crossed border by train since they started to do this again. But when I’m travelling within Germany the trains that come from out of country are usually delayed.
Afaik the train is sometimes stopped to check the papers of all passengers. I guess these are the cases with the heavy delay. But they also do controls in moving trains which makes it more tolerable but still…
France has nearly the same population density as Ohio, and it has the TGV, which covers more than 5 times the land area of Ohio. So where’s the Ohio high speed rail network?
This is the scale of Japan compared to the US east coast:
So why aren’t there high speed lines that cover that same distance in the US?
Americans complain about US politicians and US policy on a near constant basis, and yet when comparing the US to other nations its apparently impossible for anyone to have made a stupid or self-serving decision. The US apparently is always operating at the absolute limit of what’s physically possible, and if there’s any deficiency compared to its peers its never because something was done wrong. Its always because “the US is too big” or “we’re too diverse” (what does that even mean? You can’t have nice things because black people exist?).
To be clear there are actual answers to the questions I posed above, but its not either of those moronic excuses.
deleted by creator
what does that even mean? You can’t have nice things because black people exist?
It kind of is though.
Can’t have nice downtown because blacks live their so all the whites go out to the suburbs. End up with shitty inefficient suburb hell and under funded downtown.
No one wants to use public transport because of a sense of crime so only the lowest income people use it meaning further funding loss.
Nothing in America is for “the people” paid by the state except highways, oil and pouring water into the desert everything else needs to run a direct profit ignoring externalities.
Those lines do exist in the US. They are privatized, shitty, and expensive.
China is disagreeing, right now. Not disagreeing with your arguments, but they are definitely pushing a lot more than us because the amount of people you can move is ridonkulous compared to planes and cars, their geography seems to be helping and the technology is getting ridiculous (450kph trains, right now).
Not to shit on your perfectly reasonable parade, but in Germany there is high speed rail through the whole . takes about 6 hours from top to bottom.
Maybe not a great example there, with that running something like 100 km/h average speed.
If you bump those numbers up to be competitive with actually high-performing HSR operators, that trip would take 2-3 hours, immediately killing any competitive edge that air travel would have on those segments - 2-3 hours will basically get you to the airport and through security, you’ll have arrived already if you were on a well-performing train by then.
HSR is the best alternative for any trip up to approximately 800 km, at which point air travel starts beating it out. This is for daytime travel only - trains could be competitive for far longer distances with overnight sleeper service. I’d not be against taking night HSRs going between any points in Europe basically.
Alas, this would require non-shit politicians, which definitely does not exist
The only national passenger train service I know of is Amtrak, which shares its tracks with freight carriers. So the current infrastructure isn’t designed for high-speed rail and freight carriers usually get priority.
Also, The US is really big, so everything isn’t a short train ride away from everything else. If I wanted to visit the Grand Canyon from where I live, it’s over 2,000 miles away. That’s 30 hours of driving just by car.
freight carriers usually get priority.
They’re not supposed to. Passenger traffic on Amtrak should be getting priority but the rail lines basically say “fuck it” and do what they want.
Some asshole Mba/lawyers figured out that if they made the trains physically too long to fit onto the pull outs, then they could just shrug and say “golly, we’d love to pull over for you, but we just can’t lmao” and it’s perfectly fine. It’s called Precision Scheduled Railroading
Seems like an easy solution would be fining the shit out of them for that. Or requiring an expensive permit for overly long trains.
Well, see, for that to happen, you’d need politicians who aren’t complicit in trying to rip the wiring out of the walls. Also, regulating railroads is hella complicated in the US because we’ve got a bunch of ancient laws that give the railroads more rights than God, to the point where you almost stop being a citizen when you step onto railroad right of way. We COULD deal with that, but it’d be almost as much of an almighty fucking lobbyist shitshow as when we try to regulate oil.
Lmao, money concentration wins over all the things human.
We deserve ourselves as a species.
Not sure if the rest of the species do.
Also, The US is really big
There’s absolutely no good reason why you shouldn’t be able to take a train from LA to Seattle or Miami to El Paso. The US coastline is plenty dense, with highway exits every five or ten miles state after state after state.
I have heard that China has made significant efforts in this area, but that really is a massive change in just over a decade.
Meanwhile, the UK will take as long to build a single high-speed line.The secret is slavery.
The secret to it being affordable, doesn’t mean it can’t be done any other way. Authoritarian government also helped a lot in getting it done this fast but still doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Just not as fast and as cheap as China did.
I guess paying for labour isn’t something that can happen, it has to be slaves.
Well the US has slavery for prisoners(13th amendment), yet STILL no modern rail infrastructure.
I guess paying for labour isn’t something that can happen
In China, the only time you get a good thing is if someone does ten bad things.
Well the US has slavery for prisoners(13th amendment), yet STILL no modern rail infrastructure.
A small price to pay for Christianity, Liberty, and Prosperity
UK deliberately defunded their HR connection between Manchester and London. The Tories sold off the land in a rapid auction, just to make sure Labour couldn’t take over and finish the job after the next election.
With 300mph trains instead is highways that’s 7 hours, k, let’s say 10 hours of leisure, dining, sightseeing.
(vs 2h airport + 4h flight + 1 or 2h airport taxiing & stuff again)The railroad infrastructure seems expensive just bcs it is presented that way (and planes & roads arent).
presentedregulated that way: companies can buy kerosene for airplanes tax-free, but need to pay tax on electricity for trains. Funding for airports and trainstations differ greatly from high ways. Governments hand out money to make the best mode of transportation (from their pov) also the cheapest.Yes.
But else laws got passed bcs it was presented like how airplanes deserve being untaxed (to the cost of taxpayers) but railroad doesn’t.
You can try to change those laws & get the same lobby propaganda in return.
Like how is there always money for another lane but much cheaper infrastructure is crumbling.
Governments hand out money to make the best mode of transportation (from their pov) also the cheapest.
Yeah, no, corruption & short-term gains are the main factors by which the gov decided what is best.
And why more socialist or even communist states tend to have that sorted out better.also the cheapest.
Cars were never that tho.
Yes, the US is really big, and we have a bunch of mountains, but there’s still no good reason why reasonable train infrastructure doesn’t exist. We have train lines from Seattle to LA, SF to Chicago (and transfers to NYC and DC), and NYC to Miami, but they’re all super slow and have to share with even slower freight sometimes.
I live in Utah and know a bunch of people who would take a train to Vegas almost every weekend if it existed and was somewhat fast. I’d take one from SLC to LA if it existed, and I’d consider one across the country if it was reasonably priced. But no, the train takes twice as long as a car for most destinations, and is often more expensive than an airplane, so why would I ever take the train outside of the train being the point (i.e. as a novelty)?
Make them fast and convenient and people will rife them. Apparently Amtrak gets decent usage in the NE because they’re fast and convenient. Do that for the west and people will use them.
Because they like TSA fingering their assholes?
I’ll sometimes go back & go through TSA multiple times, they love that, makes them feel appreciated!
I really really wish I wasn’t American
That’s a sad statement.
Well, technically, you’re not because no one is. America is dead. Some corporate fraudster (redundant to say that, I know), tricked zuckers into fucking anything at all didn’t matter, broke the machines with the cracker, generated his fraud of success (like every corporation, ever), then threw away half the votes so that those idiots discoverrs could fight with those calling out the cracker instead of realizing that they agree that:
That “person” is NOT the president. Never was, but that’s a whole other corporate sham. When no one stopped them, they’re dismanted the whole gorram gov and Auctioned it out after smuggling anything that mattered to the other place doing the same damn shit pretending we’re any fucking different from his trick.
