I know Ryan air is cheap, but it is so much worse than paying a little extra for a high speed rail train. Almost all HSR trains have free internet, cell service, double the leg room, and cafe cars. Not to mention the train starts in the centre of the city without stressfully tight security and luggage restrictions. I know some people are on a tight budget, but if you book train tickets early, they can be surprisingly cheap, and much better than air travel.
@@abdalhadifitouri131 yes, planes are faster then trains, but for travelling with a plane, there's a lot of extra time, that isn't flying. On shorter routes, trains are faster.
@@boudewijnb ryan air takes few hours for most routes with only few hours of waiting and is between countries meanwhile train takes more time than all waiting and the flying itself combined just to get between cities close to each other
When comparing air travel to train, you're forgetting one major metric: travel from airport to the city center. Trains take you from city center to city center, where the vast majority of people want to go. Often, airports are outside of the city and one must then travel from airport city center which often takes around 45 minutes each way (and also costs €). In addition, airports have security lines requiring an additional 45 minutes of travel; whereas, you can walk right onto a train without hindrance.
It depends. The author is from America I believe, where travel from home to the city center can be hellish, even worse than to the airport. But even where I lived in the UK, travel in to London to catch an international train was way longer than the local bus, or one stop on the train, or even bicycling to the nearest airport. Even in Europe, travel to the airport can be as easy as in to city center. And at one point, the international trains in London had security to go through, longish looking queues. And those inner city rail lines can be at capacity, no room to allow more trains without many kilometers of demolition.
Maybe they should split the train fares the same way as the total cost of going from city-to-airport-to-airport-to-city is split between ground and air transport. Travelers often don't factor in ground travel costs, so if there are "station fees" that are proportional to ground transport from an airport and the train fares are the only part of the final bill advertised, that might help market train travel.
"In addition, airports have security lines requiring an additional 45 minutes of travel; whereas, you can walk right onto a train without hindrance." For now.
Right now you can add in 2-3 hours of extra time in security in some airports. There's a Europe-wide lack of security personnel on airports so they can get absolutely swamped.
A case study in trains vs planes: Shibuya-Shi to Hiroshima-Shi, a route my wife and I end up on every time we're in Japan. Many sources will tell you that's a 1.5 hour flight vs 4.5 hours by Shinkansen. Both are approximately the same cost. What no one tells you is flying involves taking a 1.5 hour train ride to Narita Airport, getting to the airport at least hour early, and Hiroshima Airport is an hour outside city center. When all is said and done, it takes at least five hours and lots of tedium before you're in Hiroshima city center. Conversely, going by Shinkansen, it's around 15 minutes from most train stations around Tokyo to the Shinkansen terminal in Shinagawa station, waiting on the platform for another 5 to 15 minutes for your train to show up, then relax on the Shinkansen for 4.5 hours, before landing directly in Hiroshima city center. Shinkansen offers far more leg room, and much more comfortable seats. At the same cost, and same time after including all peripheral factors, one of these routes is far easier and far more relaxing.
That is the big advantage trains have on mid distance travel. Trains are so much more convenient and comfertable even then legacy airlines. And the cheap airlines like ryanair usually use small airports even further away from the city they are serving with more limited connectivity. Airtravel could easilly be done away with acros most europe if the train network was better interconnected and run as efficient. Which it seems is something the eu also realises. Let's hope it now finaly happens.
The way the Japanese did HSR is the best. Of course, other countries had constraints they had to work with (political, geographical and infrastructure). Dedicated and optimized tracks for high speeds, stations in the city centers and fantastic equipment and most importantly, political will and vision to see this project through over the past 60 years. It’s not perfect and came at great cost, but the original designers and visionaries of the Shinkansen can rest assured in their graves that their legacy lives on as planned.
@@baronvonlimbourgh1716 About the remote airports Ryanair uses. Before I had real money, I had great fun travelling around Europe by low-cost airlines to those secondary airports. The trick was to choose flights to interesting places, regardless of the city they claim to serve. Take Italy. When low-costs fly to Milan or Venice, they don't fly to the main airports there but to places up to 80 kms away. That's Bergamo and Treviso respectively, but both towns are well worth a visit, and well connected to Milan and Venezia. Paris-Beauvais is 90 kms from Paris but Beauvais has one of the world's finest (and largest) gothic cathedrals among other things. Girona and Tarragona aren't Barcelona but Girona is a medieval gem and Tarragona is replete with Roman monuments. Murcia, which they call Alicante-South is gorgeous, Rodez is a lovely town in France's central hills, and Nuremberg has great museums. I could go on for days.
@@ixlnxs sure, that can be a great way to discover and have fun. But that is chosing your destination depending on where flights go to. That is generally not how people holliday or use air travel. And i don't think a majority uses ryanair that way. It is a great example of induced demand and how these cheap airlines create their own markets.
"Airports exist effectively everywhere" (17:30) is a very American view. If you want an airport that has actual service to useful other places you need to go to the nearest major city. Rails on the other hand do exist almost everywhere. Even small towns can have local train lines, and if they do not then there is probably a frequent bus service to the nearest town that does.
In Spain we seem to like to build lots of expensive, unused shit: there are lots of abandoned airports and some of the high speed rail routes at some point were used by less than 10 people per day if I remember it well. I feel like we should focus more on making local infrastructure better first and then building infrastructure less people would be benefited from (for example: L9 in Barcelona is 15 years late, while La Sagrera and Sant Andreu stations are more than 20 years late on its construction, and the region of Extremadura is a meme here for not having railway xd) And don't make me talk about corruption on construction projects, that's even worse...
Yup, that is the difference. Sure you need to put down train tracks, but you can put a station anywhere on the path, every small village along the route can have a train station where the train can stop. But not every village can build an airport. They tend to be close big urban cities. So if you don't live there, you have to take the train to the airport anywhere.
So true, especially in india trains make this country livable since everywhere, be it a village a city or a town u can reach there by train, but airports here aint so good. I live in banglore india and the airport is literally 55kms from the city lol so trains are vastly better to reach a nearby city
I honestly cannot wait for a fully interconnected high speed rail network in Europe. It took me a full day of travel to get from Copenhagen to Bath, and that was on almost entirely high speed rail. Being able to get from say London to Barcelona entirely on high speed rail, even on a single ticket (not an interrail pass), would be the dream.
London to Barcelona is actually quite doable with High-speed rail. London to Paris by Eurostar takes less than three hours. After switching in Paris, a TGV leaves twice a day to Barcelona. This, in total, takes about 11 hours. I agree that I could still be a lot faster. If the same Eurostar would pass Paris, which an existing high-speed line makes possible (LGV Interconnection Est) and would head straight for Barcelona with only stops in cities like Lyon and Montpellier, this trip could easily be done in 9 hours. The future Montpellier-Perpignan high-speed line will cut journey times by another hour roughly.
But it's always going to be much more expensive and much slower than a budget airline. It would be cool for sure, but... unless you're a rail enthusiast, trains will never be able to compete with planes for long distance.
@@QuantumBraced I would not make that call so easily to be fair. If you look at prices for low-cost trains, then you see that they can easily compete with planes on quite some routes. For example, a trip from Tourcoing in the very North of France, to Montpellier in the very south, can cost as little as 16 Euros with Ouigo, and takes 5 hours and 9 minutes. These cities lay 800km apart. Barcelona-Madrid can be as cheap as 7(!) Euros with Avlo trains or 9 Euros with Ouigo trains and take between 2:30h and 3:00h. No budget airline can compete with that. Now, you may argue that the first route is entirely French, and Ouigo is part of French state operator SNCF which only offers these cheap tickets by Ouigo to be able to raise prices for their Inoui services, which take up the majority of the high-speed trains in France. However, on the Barcelona-Madrid route, Ouigo also offers trains for these low prices. This means that it brings them money. They can make money by offering these low fares. And exactly that makes budget trains a very interesting case beside regular, more premium services like TGV Inoui, AVE and Frecciarossa. They can make money, even by offering lower fares than airlines. Of course, demand should be high enough. The trains probably have to be almost sold out in order to make money. But as long as that is the case, these trains can theoretically be cheaper than planes on many routes. Of course, there is a certain distance limit. Tourcoing-Montpellier is very competitive by train while being an 800km route, but with every extra km, of course, planes have an extra advantage, because trains will never have a higher top speed than planes. However, this time-element can be earned back by the price element. Flying will become more expensive from 2025, as the EU will not give free CO2-rights to airlines anymore. This means that on routes like Paris-Barcelona, there can easily be an extra 30 Euros of costs for the airline per passenger, just because of these CO2-rights that they have to purchase. For a premium airline like KLM or British Airways, this might not even the biggest issue, as their tickets are relatively expensive anyway. But for a price fighter like Ryanair, an extra 30 euros can mean doubling their ticket price from 30 to 60 Euros. And CO2-rights are exactly something trains have little to do with. In fact, they might even receive extra free rights, the EU has stated. These rights can be sold by these train companies. One other thing where trains are very good at, is serving several stops along the route. The Tourcoing-Montpellier route is not served by airlines, simply because there probably is not enough demand. This results in flight times between these cities of 5 hours and 10 minutes with transfer, funny enough 1 minute slower than the train. Here extra check-in and security times are not counted yet, as well as time to and from the airport. Ouigo, on the other hand, probably also does not sell enough tickets from Tourcoing to Montpellier, but can also collect passengers from Paris, Lyon, Valence and Nîmes or drop them off at these stations. This is a major advantage of rail, because a stop is very short compared to the theoretical comparable stop time for planes. Smaller cities that cannot have airline service can still have rail service, while routes between big cities often have enough demand for budget high-speed rail anyway. So yeah, trains will be slower on very long distances, often above 1000km. However, they definitely can be cheaper than flying, especially from 2025.
I think the Thalys service should've been mentioned in this video. It's a french-operated train network that spans France and the neighboring countries Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany. Their trains are able to operate in the different rail standards of all countries seamlessly, avoiding any need for changing the locomotive at borders. This is part of an EU effort to connect Paris, Brusseles, Cologne, Amsterdam and London by rail, with dedicated border crossing tracks and guidelines on how trains have to work in order to operate in all countries.
Excellent point! It would've been nice if those services have gotten some praise. They're also a great example of how interoperability has generally not been solved on the infrastructure side, by adopting common international standards for overhead line systems and train protection, but on the train operator side, by buying trains that provide the flexibility to work with all the different systems. That said, Thalys *was* originally a case of governments collaborating to create an international offering, having originally been owned (and still partly being owned) by government-owned train operators.
Yes indeed, also a huge miss in this video is the European rail traffic management system (ERTMS) which will standardizes all the different systems in use by the various countries in to one European system. Thus not needing to change locomotives or install expensive alterations for different countries, and also making it easier for the train operators to cross borders and operate trains cross border. Also missing the colab between DB & NS having a semi-highspeed route between Amsterdam-Cologne- Basel connecting also 3 countries, with also stops in big cities in between.
I traveled through many european countries by train recently, and I fell in love with Thalys. Very short travel times, very cheap tickets, and still had by far the best service.
The issue with continental train travel in Europe is that Germany sits at the center of most connections. And unfortunately, Germany decided in the 80s that there is no need for a dedicated high speed rail infrastructure. This means that high speed trains have to slow down in most parts of Germany and are often plagued with massive delays. Changing this now is almost impossible. It would cost hundreds of billions to buy up new land and build a dedicated HSR network.
I think there are a few wrong assumptions in this video. 1. Europe did not choose to develop these networks, they mostly existed in some form or another. look at how Germany spends money on the road network compared to the train network. They are not developing much, they are barely maintaing a functional network. 2. Trains compete with Airplanes on Tourist flights. This is in my opinion the fatal flaw in this video. Most Countrys are trying to stop short-distance "hops" via planes and target buisness travelers. Here Rail comes into play. It makes sense to construct high speed rail between Frankfurt and Cologne since these are major buisness hubs. There was no incentive to interconnect these high speed segments further to London because that is already aircraft teritory (time-wise). 3. France is a bad example. Treat France like a gigantic hub-and-Spoke country. Want to get anywhere, better go through Paris. There are only a few interconnecting trains that leave out paris. Germany is a better example. 4. No advocacy for night-trains. Biggest advantage of rail. Enter a Train in Munich at 22:00 and wake up in Rome the next morning. Amazing! The general terms and conditions apply (Trainstation closer to city than airport, Shinkansen to TGV/ICE is no fair comparision, and so on and so forth). I Agree that cross-Border-Rail needs to get better buit itinerarys are not the problem. A centralized Booking system is needed, that takes all operators into account and gives you one Ticket with full passenger-rights. Check out John Worth on Twitter and his corssBorderRail Project, very insightfull.
France is such a bad example that it has its own math problem, the French railway metric (German: Französische Eisenbahnmetrik). It demonstrates how there can be other possible metrics for pathfinding etc than the usual euclidean direct-route.
Or at least agree on a standardized QR code or something for the ticket. A few years ago I was able to get a ticket with MÁV from Budapest to München, but only as a paper ticket. However if I split the journey up to the 3 countries I could've got digital tickets. I think they now improved on this recently, but only on the hungary-Germany railjets, not the swiss one for example.
Here in England we were told our railways were being opened to the market, yet there is next to no competition. Instead, there is a network of private monopolies which pay their shareholders dividends out of government-subsidies.
Unfortunately it seems like yeah England is the counter example... It worked quite nicely in Japan, Germany, Italy and Spain... Maybe because England don't really have high speed lines ? Most regional trains in Europe did not have privatization.
@@danielsykes7558 No, the way Britain privatised its railways is naive. This video isn't talking about privatisation at all, it's talking about liberalisation. That means you keep your state-owned railways, but you allow private companies to run competing services on routes they believe will be profitable. Entirely different kettle of fish.
The absolute only thing that I am afraid of is that the high-speed network in Europe is going to be like buses in the UK. To travel from the outskirts of Manchester to the city centre, you have to get two tickets from two different bus operators with zero connectivity assurance. In Germany we have the trains which guarantee you arriving and we have so called public transport associations which bundle all different companies under one ticket. I want that for Europe's international high speed rail network.
here a bus ticket lasts for full trip on that bus or u can change busses as many times as you want for 30 minutes. Very convenient in a city where youd switch bus 2-3 times. But only in that city
To be fair Manchester is currently trying to implement a London-style connected transport network so it’s easier & cheaper to travel into/across the region, including busses AND trains (and trams) It’s all under one company though ran by the council rather than several different ones. I have high hopes for it
And yet DB doesn't even offer this kind of guarantee for services in which even though you book through them, has to transfer onto the train of another state operator like SNCF from France, or Thalys in the Benelux.
There is also a major flipside to rail privatization that i wish would have been mentioned in the video: Private companies will usually only run services on routes between major cities, while public rail operators also have to serve non-profitable routes to small cities and villages. This is why private companies can easily undercut the public rail operators in ticket prices and still be profitable. The loss in ticket sales to the public rail operators as a result of the new market competition can therfore be seen as a handout to the private competitors by the taxpayer.
To be fair, though, many countries (my perspective is from the US) basically do the same to other forms of transportation as well. A lot of commercial traffic is moved by road and a greater share of the damage done to roads is done by trucks, while the entire tax base shoulders the bill for it. Air traffic is usually handled by public ATC. In the US, the FAA handles that while the TSA handles all security and many publicly-run airports are subsidized by taxes, tolls, or parking fees. The way I see it, all these European governments are doing is treating the rails the same way roads and air infrastructure are treated - as public necessity rather than private property.
Wendover and other channels are unrepentant shills for neoliberal gutting of all aspects of public infrastructure. They can't wait to whitewash the next pump and dump scheme of the billionaire owner class for peanuts.
A small correction, it takes a maximum of 10 minutes to walk from Euston to St Pancras. The stations are incredibly close. It’s a 1 minute tube journey too. Also, it is possible to book a through ticket from Paris to Manchester.
Yeah it'd be easier to point out the parts that aren't completey made up. Idk who this American is lecturing us about Europe, doubt he's even been on a European train
You do have to know the way to walk it. I remember once arriving in St Pancras from Brussels with very little time to catch a train to Liverpool. Getting down into the Tube taking the train and emerging into Euston station took more than a minute but I made the connection with seconds to spare. On that occasion I was travelling on separate tickets. Theoretically it is possible to buy Eurostar tickets to destinations beyond London but in practice I found it very difficult.
The main problem of rail transport in Europe is not at all a question of market liberalisation. In fact, there is no example of railway liberalisation that has led to a long-term improvement in service. The main problem is related to the infrastructure. In addition to the lack of high-speed tracks to connect different countries, there are different industrial standards between countries and even within countries. For example, the track gauge is not the same in Spain as in the rest of Europe, so it is technically not possible to use the same vehicles between Spain and the rest of Europe. Then there are different electrifications. The Germanic countries use electricity at 15000V 16.7hz, Italy works with 3000V 50hz, France has had the intelligence to use 3 different electrification voltages (25000V, 3000V and 1500V). And finally, the safety systems integrated into the tracks are not the same. France uses crocodile, TVM300, TVM 430, ETCS1 and ETCS2, Switzerland uses ETCS 1 and 2, Germany uses ETCS 1 and 2 and ZUB, etc. So a company that would like to make a Prague-Barcelona train via Munich, Zurich, Geneva, Lyon, Marseille, would have to buy machines capable of accepting 3000V DC, 15'000V AC, 25'000V AC and 1500V DC, be equipped with ETCS 1, ETCS 2, TVM 300, TVM 420, ZUB, LZB, PZB and crocodile. And with this train, it would not be possible to run outside the high-speed line in Spain because the track gauge would be different. Moreover, if the transport company operates multiple lines, it would have to have several different trains fleets, as it is still other systems in other countries. This is why international trains are rare in Europe: it is excessively complicated to produce international trains, which only represent a very small share of the market. And you can easily see that this is the real problem, because between different countries that use aproximately the same standards (Switzerland, Germany and Austria), the international service is of excellent quality. Liberalisation will not change these industrial barriers, only strong political action can overcome this problem
Thank you!! Moreover, market liberalisation has a hidden catch: the profits go away from the public and into private hands, while the risk remains at the government side, because transport is a service that must remain guaranteed. The disastrous working conditions that were created in the aviation industry due to its liberalisation are now also beginning to develop in the European railway industry. There's just so much more important things to consider than dull growth, amount of passengers and cost. Envision a life where a person sleeps in Barcelona, works in London and travels every day up and down because it's cheaper at the bottom of the bill. Is that the world we want to live in?
In many cases, the liberalization is even significantly worsening the situation - most connections taken over by private operators end up with lowered capacities, delays, no replacement trainsets in case of malfunctions, and lower comfort. In borderline cases even travel safety is worsened (less train maintenance, less qualified staff, old rolling stock, etc.), which is an enormous red flag. All this is to lower costs and improve the pure gain into private pockets (and since most regional train lines are heavily paid for by the state anyway, bye-bye tax money). I traveled most of Europe by train, and private operators are usually the worst experience you can have - both regional and long-distance. Trains are PUBLIC transport; they should be provided mainly by the state (not for free necessarily). That isn't to say these operators can't have private competition, but it needs to be held to standards, ESPECIALLY in SAFETY!
@@monder1060 i know. There is only one reason to liberalise. And I'm talking about a slight liberalisation. Slight liberalisation (i.e. the tendering of concessions for lines) allows, in the federal states, to organise each type of transport on the scale that is politically relevant. For example, in Switzerland, national transport is organised by the SBB, which is owned by the federal state, regional transport is generally organised by companies owned by the canton (for exemple TPF in canton Fribourg or BLS in canton Bern), and urban transport in large cities is organised by companies owned by the municipalities (for exemple TL in Lausanne or BernMobil in Bern). But in this case it is a peudo-liberalisation because there is no private actor. There is just competition between public agencies. And there is no choice for the passenger: it's the concession of the line that is put out to tender, but once the concession is granted, the system operates as a monopoly.
You are mostly right, but Spain actually uses standard gauge in most of their High Speed Rail infrastructure. There are also some variable gauge trains that can run on both iberian and standard gauge
@@bastian7323 Yes, there are variable gauge machines. But as I said, it is an additional industrial complexity that requires specific equipment and specific investments, but only a very small part of the market. In fact, the proof is that Spain has one of the lowest rates of use of its high-speed network in the world. In most countries, there are many high-speed trains that start from a medium-sized city, run for a hundred km on the standard network and then finish the journey to a large city via the high-speed network. This allows the number of destinations that can be reached with high-speed trains to be multiplied without the need to invest large sums of money in high-speed lines. Spain cannot do this, which is why its network is largely underused. This shows that even if the technical solution of the variable gauge bogie exists, in reality it is almost never used because it is too complex. Moreover, this inability to use the standard network has a perverse effect on high-speed trains. In the event of a disturbance on a high-speed line, it is impossible to bypass the disturbed area. For example, last year the line between Bellegarde and Bourg-en-Bresse in France collapsed, making it impossible for Geneva-Paris TGVs to pass through for several months. The trains were simply diverted to another line to the south, which made the journey 20 minutes longer, but the trains were able to continue running. In Spain, the slightest problem on a high-speed line blocks all traffic until the track is cleared
I live in Austria near the tripoint with Germany and Switzerland and I use international trains here every day. They are excellent compared to almost everywhere else in Europe and only run by state owned railways (DB, SBB, ÖBB). On my daily commute I will use a ÖBB local train into Switzerland and there I can connect onto other swiss domestic services departing 3 minutes later. If I want to visit my family in Germany, I'll take an austrian local train to the next larger station, where an international high speed train, coming from Switzerland and jointly operated by the three state owned companies, will take me to Munich where I can get a connection onto a DB ICE minutes later. That works because all three companies synchronize their schedules and offer joint tickets to everywhere in the respective countries. Flixtrain runs part of the route too, but they are never an option for me, because they just don't integrate with the rest of the journey. They can do point to point, but they add zero value to the entire network. Ouigo uses TGVs equipped for both France and Spain, but purely inside Spain. They waste vehicles that could be used for Paris to Barcelona services, which would be much better for the network, but probably don't make as much money as domestic spanish routes. Or Trenitalia, who now run a service from Milan to Lyon minutes apart from an SNCF service, yet at the same time refuse to support the joint DB-ÖBB Eurocity connecting Munich to Verona. Sure, it may be profitable, but the outcome for the passengers could be much better, if instead of competing for money, the different operators would work together like they do between Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And Flixtrain doesn't really operate to Switzerland. Yes, the terminus station is Basel Badischer Bahnhof, which is on swiss territory, but owned and operated by Deutsche Bahn under german operational rules. Flixtrain wouldn't even be allowed to continue to Basel SBB, because services that don't integrate with the coordinated timetable and accept the swiss national ticket system are simply not allowed in the country.
@ maybe, but Switzerland is more of a standard-sized country with a model you could export in many countries as well as it has all kinds of landscapes. Singapore is all-flat, densely populated and very small in size!
@ Weird comparison there, but sure. Does Singapore have tiny villages in the alps that are nonetheless fairly well connected by public transportation? It would make more sense to compare Singapore to dense metro areas like Paris (or Tokyo, although Tokyo metro area has a much higher population and larger area than Singapore)
Sleeper trains are the thing I miss the most after I moved to Berlin from Moscow. In Russia you can get over 1000 km overnight in pretty much any direction, and have a decent sleep lying down, but in Berlin I only have sleeper train connection to Zurich, Vienna, Stockholm and Amsterdam, and the trains are ancient. If you travel in a bed, you don't need the super high speed rail, it's actually sometimes better to go slower so that the train doesn't start too late/arrive too early, travel time overnight should be at least 8 hours
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 Russia has invested so much into its train infrastructure specifically because the country is so large. Trains vastly outperform other forms of land-based transportation due to their efficiency. It'd be great if we could get such investment into them in the US too (which is sad because the US used to have one of the most developed rail networks in the world). Plus, it'd make our roads better because we wouldn't have to drive as much.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 to be fair it's only well developed and updated on most popular directions, mostly through the European part, and on mid range only. It makes sense to take a train overnight (500-1000 km depending on a train), but when it's 16 hours or longer (1000 or more), you'd rather fly. The Transsiberian is pretty much for tourists only now.
The Russian Railways used to operate direct trains to western Europe as well. A direct sleeper train had operated between Paris and Moscow since the 1980s but, in 2020, sadly was withdrawn. I'm glad I got to experience it once in 2017, though. It passed through Strasbourg, Erfurt, Berlin, Poznan, Warsaw, Terespol, Brest, Minsk, Orsha, Smolensk on the way and it was a very interesting and enjoyable way to start my holiday in Russia. Russia is still a great place to visit though, even if its harder now. The culture, history, people, architecture are like nowhere else. Also, everything is so much bigger in Russia than anywhere else in Europe.
Yeah I don't understand why night trains aren't more common. I'd much rather start my trip at 12PM and arrive at 9AM taking 9 hours with a slow sleeper train than have to wake up at 4AM so I can rush to the station at 5AM and catch the high speed train that gets there at the same time by blasting down the tracks at 300km/h the whole way. If you're a tourist, this also saves you one day of hotel room expense. Same when traveling by car, I always start my trip at night so I get there in the early morning and I still have a whole day, and also the roads are empty and it's a pleasure to drive.
I like your videos, but like some people in the comments, I disagree with a lot of what you said here. As a European, I don't think trains need competition/to be opened to the market. It is proven by the opening to competition in France, where most companies want to compete with the SNCF (French national railway company) on its profitable railway lines (between Paris and Lyon for example).This creates an issue where the nationalized company, who are made by the government to operate in non-profitable areas (namely the regional trains which need to be subsidized), start having competition in the only places where they gain money. If it creates more demand and they manage to stay afloat, fine. If they get killed on the profitable lines/start making less money there, the overall balance of the national company starts losing money, and guess which lines get cut: regional trains. Competition doesn't necessarily mean opening more lines/more services, since these are only driven by the potential of earning profit. Smaller cities and regional centers are then thrown into a deadly spiral: less trains because of the market, less people want to live there, less demand so even lesser trains etc.. When the state is providing transportation as a service to its citizen, this doesn't happen as much (depending on the state's objectives of course)
Also, companies are often driven by short term profits. They are often unable to think more than 5 years ahead, with investors wanting a return on their money, and that sooner than later. (There are of course counter examples to this, but I think you can agree it is the main trend). States have the ability to think about what will good for the country in 10, 20, 30+ years. Of course this is limited by our democratic processes, where our leaders want to please the citizens for re-elections, but still they have to think about what the citizens want for the long term in order to get re-elected.
In Germany, for regional lines there is a different kind of competition: train operators compete about who offers the best service for the lowest subsidies (from the regional governments, which in turn gets money assigned for this purpose by the federal government). This seems to work out relatively well (both DB Regio and many private companies operate lines), and is independent of the long-distance direct customer-facing competition.
@@PauxloE this sounds like the system the UK has, although the private companies are paid directly by the national government. During the pandemic, the government had to step in to take over since the private companies couldn't make a profit. We aren't returning to the old system!
People complaining about liberalization of rail after watching a that demonstrated quiet well that liberalization has lead to great growth in rail and even more in air transit.
ÖBB (Austrian State Railways) are doing it right. They have brought back international night services across most of Europe and plan to expand greatly.
@@funkyhetzer6624 Really? I live in Austria and we don't have specific prices for the Railjet... We only have general prices for distances, no matter what train you take. Also in comparison to Germany it's way cheaper.
@@funkyhetzer6624 Overpriced in comparison to what? Rail travel is very often cheaper than travelling by car if you factor in all costs of owning and operating a car. And air travel is heavily privileged as well: airlines pay _no_ taxes on fuel, no sales tax on international tickets, ATC is basically free as well, and landing fees on airports also dont cover the costs (airports make the majority of revenue with the duty free shops - which again don't contribute to the country's taxes).
@@dezzmotion4475 Eh, well, no, you don't really base prices on distance unless it's a local line, and that's mostly because that travel portion is subject to local transport authority pricing and it's zonal. It's a mess, really. For long distance trains, it's a mix of distance and also demand, not to mention the immediacy. If I wanted to buy a ticket from Vienna to Melk, or from Vienna to Salzburg, I can expect to either pay 20€ at the dumbest time imaginable, maybe even 15€ if it's not only dumb, but also 2 months into the future, or I can get screwed and pay 80€ if I want to go right now. Or this weekend. And even worse, the price also depends on where I'm traveling from and to. It can be cheaper to buy a ticket from a random village east of Vienna, or even from Bratislava than to buy a ticket from Vienna to wherever you want to go. Because more people travel from Vienna, so naturally they should be taxed for that and pay 70€ for a ticket instead of 35€. So, all in all, Austria and Germany can't really compete on ticket prices because they employ the exact same pricing model. That's also why talking about ticket prices in these regions is very difficult and stories differ wildly. I only know of Belgium where train prices are truly only based on distance travelled, exclusing countries east of the Iron Curtain where this exact nationwide pricing strategy mostly remains to this day, but even that's changing.
@UCFITX-OVvmIcwzKCFenJ9kQ because some people still find it funny. It’s an innocent joke that shows you enjoy the show and like the stuff Sam puts out. Be nice. You might find the joke old, but not everyone is a jaded and boring as you are.
Low-cost high-speed trains are a very interesting and successful concept. They attract different passengers than usual high speed trains, most of them don't take the train regularly. Conversely, most frequent train users don't take them, because of impractical schedules or stop locations, and also often they have passes and frequent traveler programs that don't work on these trains, so both systems have similar prices for them. I travel by TGV many times per year, and I've used Ouigo only once in ten years, and only because there were no regular TGVs at the time I wanted to travel. I don't snob them, they're just impractical and as expensive as regular trains for me, as I have a -27 year old SNCF card.
Personnally, I also have the card you're talking about and it still makes sense for me to use OuiGo sometimes (I'm talking specifically of the Paris-Lyon route). OuiGo is just so cheap, if you book a ticket several months in advance it has very interesting prices. Though I think you're right about the impractical schedules.
@@joseville Yes, I get 30% off on all long-distance trains (except Ouigo) and sometimes there are extra sales. On short and medium-distance trains (TER), I get between 0 and 50%,depending on the region
You know what's also interesting? A country that has more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined. And it is all state funded and operated. If they can do it, so can we. Instead of having these pathetic low cost slow trains.
Great video, but you left out two key aspects : - First, since Europe has been united only recently by regulations, national rail has been built with different rules, which means that for instance, the voltage differs from country to country. This means the trains you use nationally cannot always cross the border, so you have to have specialised machinery if you want to open a cross-country service. It's possible, since it exists, it's just a hurdle more. - You still have to account for geography. Though it's not an issue to put a line between France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, because all of those borders are really flat, it's much harder to cross the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, and the Alps between France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and even Germany. It's definitely possible to have train lines, but not high speed ones (which explains why Switzerland doesn't have any high speed lines, even though they have some of the most efficient and qualitative network), and crossing remains difficult. Today, it's only through huge investment like rail tunnels that mountains can be navigated efficiently time wise, like between Lyon, France and Turin, Italy (a good example of very high cross-border investment in Europe).
This is one important factor. As an example there are trains that go over the Öresund bridge from Sweden to Denmark. But all the trains have to have special equipment to be able to switch over to the kind of electricity used in Denmarks rail system since it differs from Sweden. So halfway across the bridge the power used changes. Then add the fact that different countries use different standards for the actual rails, which makes it physically impossible to use the same trains everywhere. The add that different countries use different singaling (which EU is trying to fix with ERTMS) so that the trains cannot cross borders. This makes it so that even if you can book one ticket to get from Stockholm to Berlin, you will have to change trains 2-3 times or if you go with a night train you will be on the same train but the train will change locomotives and use a train ferry along the way. Add to that the cost and travel time is both several times that of flying, then its not very enticing. The travel time is also a big factor if you want to go on a long weekend. You will have to use more vacation time to spend the same amount of time on your destination.
Switzerland could have high speed train services but the country is too small for it to be profitable on a national scale. If you can cross the Swiss alps north to south in 2 hours there's not much need for much more expensive much faster trains
@@tobias9619 Yes and no. I can definitely tell you that there would be demand for higher speed between cities like Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Basel, Zurich, and others. Today, depending on where you're going, and especially to the south where there are less direct connections (and more mountains), it's quicker by car. From north to south might not take much time, but even though the cities are close from one another, it still takes half a day to get from one side of Switzerland to the other (for reference, takes less than an hour by plane). It's very much a question of space and convenience, where high speed would probably have more drawbacks than anything. Also, I don't think the SBB works only on a profitability model. It definitely is subsidised, though even if it wasn't, it would probably be viable under some conditions.
Your first point in particular reminds me of when I was in Europe for study abroad some years back and how, when taking the train between Berlin and Prague, we ended up having an extensively longer stop in Děčín each way in order to swap between the Czech (České dráhy) and German (Deutsche Bahn) locomotives.
That's what private companies want. They will play along a few years and then once they have the public service in their hands the rest of Europe will end up like the UK railway system
Another factor that wasn't mentioned is that airports many of the budget airlines use are much further away to the destination/departing city. Sometimes requiring an hour or more of Taxi or train. Airport security, baggage limitations, delays and cancelations make most routes better by train.
ill have you know not all people live around train stations either... and the bus or car ride that will get you to and from the stations significantly raise the carbon footprint of trains
@@LoneWolf-wp9dn maybe in the USA. In europe, we just take the metro or tram to the train station. All are electric powered, and even small towns have substantial tram systems
@@lik7953 i lived in europe all my life... traveled in about all the countries and lived in 3 for extended periods... not all people live next to trains stations or metro stations and trams dont go to suburbs... at times it was really difficult even to get a cab to the station... get out of your bubble
The Adam Something channel has a different perspective, which I find myself agreeing with. The fact that there are no continent-wide rail width or electrification standards really limits the ability to travel internationally. Private industry can clamour all they want, but it is usually public money that funds this infrastructure. I just wish my country would get a decent, even moderate-speed rail network going. Genuinely quicker to drive interstate in so many cases.
Agreed. This video feels like an overly optimistic view of someone who's rarely - if ever - actually traveled by rail in Europe, and only read documents about it (and lives in a country that's basically a public transport dumpster fire, except for maybe a select few cities). Adam Something definitely has a better, and more technical explainer video.
Huge resistance from environmentalists and local government on any project of that scale, and a huge uphill battle of getting people to use the system, and of course private industry won't take it on because of how long it would take to be profitable (if it's even possible). Trains are used a lot in the US, but only in high population areas. Not only that, but he auto industry and the oil industry have been extremely successful in keeping ground transportation stuck in the past.
Agreed. I felt like I got a lot more out of Adam's much shorter video because he addressed the specific and major hurdles for international rail in Europe rather than just vaguely hinting that national systems weren't well connected. I think Wendover is also giving credit where it's not really due when it comes to airlines. Sure, deregulation may have helped, but "deregulation" of the airline industry was not the only thing happening and it amounted to simply allowing some competition to operating in a highly regulated environment. The entire international air traffic and airport system is highly standardized due to regulations. Innovations were also being made in the industry, like larger, more efficient planes and the hub and spoke routing system. None of that is really possible trains, it's a mature technology with much less room for easy improvement, especially without significant up front investment, and significantly less opportunity for routing improvements because fixed connections are required between nodes. Furthermore, the end-user experience of being able to book connecting flights seamlessly and have customer protections and operator obligations in the event of delays really has nothing to do with privatization and deregulation of airlines, but are the direct result of regulations requiring data publishing and consumer protection agencies. The same can easily be done for rail travel if there is political will.
Those are fixable problems that the EU is dealing with. I The EU invests a lot of money helping countries to renew, adaped to a single standard on mainlines creating nine main cross European corridors. Among the the big projects now are the baltic rail and the base tunnels between Italy and Austria and Italy and France. There is also an increcing advancemen in the employment of the European signaling system (ETCS) that is also being employed in many non Europeanil countries around the world. No obe is going to replace all rail infraestructura tomorrow but the main lines will be stadarized and there are solutions for uing different gauges nd electrificarion systems. Spain is using the Iberian gauge and have been using for years trains tht can changebtheir gauge with a simple device, it only tames a few minutes and trains with multiple electrificarion support o exist. The new high speed Talgo avril train (that shoud debue atvthe start of 2023) support both gauge change and 4 different electrification standards. It is currently going theogh the approval process in France. As mentioed, in the not so distance future this process will be made by the EU for all membets.
I fail to see how this doesn't conflict with the conclusions you drew in the video on UK rail privatisation (which I mostly agreed with as a resident here). I feel like all that will happen if rail is pursued for profit is that shareholders will simply extract profit from the popular routes and all others will be left to rot (like the UK). The entire idea of railways and other public transport having to produce profit is short-sighted and fails to produce the economic benefits we would get from people travelling more and spending their money in different places. The main benefit of the nationalised providers would be the integrated ticketing and schedule you're hoping for here, instead of all the private operators getting in the way of a good public service.
@@djp3637 that was always the intention of HS2, to take passengers of the over congested routes and make those journeys more palatable for people put off by the crush. There were plans to upgrade those northern routes (leeds-Manchester) including plans for a transpennine tunnel (I'll believe it when I see it on that last one though)
I like how in the beginning his complaint was that there was a stop in London where you had to change trains; then the solution he provides is more trains with less centralization? A simpler solution is guaranteeing if the connection is missed, your new ticket is payed for. What people really find convenient about air travel is being able to book all of your flights on different companies through third party companies (which could just be one system if nationalized) and then having that insured if a connection is missed, not the fact that hopper flights exist at all.
@L W DB motivated by mainly profit has also become more interested in fancy mall like stations than expanding service. Which backfired in many instances.
@@Mrphilipjcook exactly, and now they’ve undercut that intention by ensuring the WCML and ECML will remain congested beyond Birmingham. When it could’ve removed traffic from the mainlines all up England.
Your analysis on French riviera's coastal cities might be right, but you forgot to take into consideration 2 key factors. The first is that extending the currently existing network is difficult due to geographical "bottlenecks", especially between Cannes and Fréjus, and between Nice and Monaco, making work such as adding rails or upgrading current network an engineering challenge. The second thing is that you mentioned "small cities between Cannes and the Italian border", while in between there is Antibes (80 000+ inhabitants), Nice (French 5th largest cities) and Monaco (major tourism and work place). The current network is already highly saturated for years.
That's why upgrading the network is a real challenge for the SNCF there, despite being the 2sd busiest tourist destination behind Paris. Excellent video by the way, I learnt a lot !
I recently moved back to the US after spending a year in Paris and I can say the system within France is very convenient and interconnected. Every single mode of transportation can be viewed and booked with the SNCF connect app. The prices in the video were accurate and typical but didn’t mention booking in advance. I would often take day trips to the south of France to visit friends since if I booked even a week ahead the tickets would only be about 20€ each which is about half what an airplane ticket on easy jet would cost
I mean France is smaller than Texas, so it would make sense that it's more coordinated. Small countries have always had to be efficient with their space, and that's why transportation efficiencies are so critical.
@@mediocreman2 What a strange example. The distance between the two largest metro areas in Texas (Houston and Dallas) is LESS THAN HALF of that between the two biggest metro areas in France (Paris and Marseille). So, when discussing profitable HSR routes, Texas is really small compared to France. Some very sparsely populated rural areas don't count. Europe is larger than the whole of the US, but there's no point in concentrating on that, as it's the population centers that count.
@@mediocreman2 Only metropolitan France is smaller than Texas, France is also some oversea territories like Guyane in South-America. Long distances... on a plane.
@@VideoDotGoogleDotCom The USA is crazy big, it literally spans all of Europe not including russia, Finland, sweden and norwary(covers the populous part of sweden though).
I also find it ironic that the video lists one of the main problems of rail travel that you often can't book an international ticket from end to end, and suggests having a bunch of smaller companies, all with their own ticketing solutions, which would make it even more difficult in many cases to book that end-to-end ticket. In fact, there are many places where it used to be possible to book an end-to-end ticket _nationally_ , but due to all the different operators, it's now a confusing mess instead.
I don't think it's as much of a problem anymore. We went from Milan to Luxembourg and had to switch trains in Bern, Zurich, and Koblenz, with 4 different rail providers. And yet, we had a ticket which stated all of those lines on them - though we were taking a later train than on the ticket for the last leg (Koblenz to Luxembourg) because of a delay out of the hands of the rail service (a suicidal person was on the rail lines and the trains had to wait until police could remove the person). The women who checked our tickets did see the time was different but since it was otherwise the same ticket, it didn't seem to be a problem for them as she gave us our tickets back without a word.
@@steveweidig5373 I'm not saying it doesn't work - and I'm glad it worked in your case. What you described is what that kind of a trip _should_ look like. Unfortunately, many routes don't have that kind of luck...
@@steveweidig5373 You had one ticket for all trains - that's the point. That works with the state railway companies, because they cooperate and sell each others tickets. But have fun doing this with a Flixtrain, especially if you want to connect to a regional train.
this vid is a roller-coaster of fact vs opinion. quite good facts about the issues of international travel and then goes on into opinion about the liberalisation of rail transport. Cooperation is the concern, primary concern with standardisation. no private company will build a HSR line between countries, at least if they don't receive a significant proportion of their funds back from the governments of those countries. liberalisation could very well work, but to act as if it is even remotely comparable to sir travel in terms of liberalisation is insane. I think Eurail is onto a good thing, Trans-European cooperation improves transport significantly weather nationalised or not
At least here in Germany the main problem with train travel isn't so much a lack of connections, but rather delays and cancelations. And the main reason for that is not the rolling stock (though the maintenance level of many DB trains is rather awful), but the tracks. One one hand, the maintenance of the tracks is even worse that for the trains (DB has to pay for maintenance themselves, while the federal government pays for track replacements. So DB just does no maintenance at all and just runs down the tracks until they are broken, so that they get them replaced "for free"), on the other hand, around important hubs like Cologne, the existing tracks are HORRIBLY congested. If your train goes into Cologne on time, it will continue with at least 30 minutes of delay, on average. It's so bad, that last year DB's on time percentage (trains with less than 5 minutes of delay) fell under 50%. So it's not going to get better until we have major investment in rail infrastructure (tens, if not hundreds of billions of euros), and until then I don't see how additional operators are going to improve anything, they're probably only going to add to the congestion issues, making overall service worse for everyone...
Yeah I can recall once where I had to travel for 9 hours to stuttgart from a village near Freiburg. The journey was supposed to be 1 hour. But due to cancellations, etc etc and no available routes we had to keep waiting. Not very pleasant to say the least. If that’s the reality with their transport system it is one of the worst
I just went from Zürich to Amsterdam and back after two weeks by train. I had a direct night train to Amsterdam, which had 3 hours delay due to a fire near the track (Böschungsbrand) near Bonn. Due to the long delay, the train company decided to not go to Amsterdam, but stop in Utrecht instead. A trainload of people overcrowded the next local train from Utrechht to Amsterdam. For the return journey I had to switch trains in Frankfurt and Basel. The scheduled train from Amsterdam to Frankfurt was re-scheduled to only go to Düsseldorf on that day. Luckily, the train from Frankfurt to Basel had 1 hour delay, so I could actually catch up with it in Mannheim. Unfortunately, the train added more delay due to foreign objects on the tracks on the remaining route, and due to the long delay the train company decided not to go to Basel (Swiss side), but stop in Basel Bad (German side), which caused further delay for the passengers.
The laws guiding infrastructure and taxing are designed incredibly shortsighted in Germany. The lawmaking bodies simply don’t have the people smart enough to wargame a law before it comes out.
To expand upon that: If you want to know why there is so much cancellation, what connections are most likely affected and if you're able to understand German, I highly highly recommend the talk "BahnMining" from David Kriesel which is available as a video here on TH-cam. He data mined all train rides over a year and what he found out about how our train network works here in Germany is really interesting!
This video misses out on one very important fact: Trains, fundamentally, are not like planes. Yes, they are both modes of transport. Yes, it's good when both are cheap. But the difference is that planes are not mass transit systems like trains are. The number of people who commute by plane is negligible, and the mode of transit in general is very badly suited for that task. Trains however _are_ mass transit, or at least can be. Although long distance trains can be compared to flying, regional trains cannot, and here's where my worry is: typically, the most profitable part of the railway system is the high-speed service. It's not clear from the video and I don't know from elsewhere what the pricing looks like for companies to operate on the rail infrastructure, but for the most part it won't make sense for companies to operate the regional trains that are really the important ones when it comes to public benefit and environmental impact. In Italy we've already begun to see this. Over the last few years Trenitalia has been announcing all sorts of great high-speed routes at a fairly low price (e.g. Milano to Paris), but at the same time they've been quietly deemphasizing regional trains. Italo has been operating as a competitor to Milano, and that's great, but most of the country has no competitor to bring the price down on regional trips. Those are held down I believe through government funding, however in many places lines are closed or service so bad as to be unusable. Additionally, the more the government thinks of trains as a commercial sector rather than a public service to be funded and directed for the good of the people, the worse off I think we'll be. That's the kind of thinking that got Britain its privatized network, and we saw where that got them. Actually, that's a good point- How come Britain's privatization mess not make it into this video? It would seem like a prime example of what happens if you rush towards deregulation on a public service. Additionally, as others have pointed out, privatizing and then allowing companies to swoop in and make their for-profit booking sites to take advantage of the confusion is a terrible solution to the problem. At present, if I need to take a train from Italy to Austria, I have a grand total of two booking sites to look at. If I need to get to Germany, make that three. Rather than making it a healthy half-dozen and then capitalizing on the resulting mess, why don't we, and I know this is gunna come across as a huge breakthrough of an idea, just make a site and app for booking trains across the EU, funded as a service by the EU? I know you mentioned countries don't like publishing their schedules, but if that's an insurmountable issue your proposed app won't have the timetables for ex-national/quasi-still-national operators anyway. It really doesn't make much sense to me as an argument for nationalisation. All in all, it really doesn't strike me as one of your better videos, I'm afraid. It feels like you got convinced it was a good thing and then were bound and determined to prove that point. Honestly I think this is a step backwards from a sustainable future where anyone can take the train to where they need to go, but let's be honest if our government is anything to judge by they're well and truly sold on the idea that electric cars are the future. It really makes me sick.
The main reason UK privatization was such a shitshow is that instead of opening the actual network to private competitors, like the EU is doing, they basically balkanized it in dozens of private monopolies that never compete with each other. In addition, they didn’t have a public operator to offer baseline service and keep the market honest. You know what’s worse than a government monopoly? A private monopoly.
Having cars is pointless if you aren't allowed to actually drive yourself, though, which is what they really want. Still, things will get better one day and we'll be converting the old ones to run on hydrogen gas, AND building more railways.
Exactly! I see more and more high speed trains here (I'm from Dijon, the main city between Paris and Lyon), but I've never seen so few regional trains. Going anywhere eastward or westward without even leaving Burgundy is becoming an ordeal.
Hi Sam, I think you are mixing some things up in this video: 1. interoperability: a major problem of train lines is and was that Europe lacks a common standard beyond 1435mm gauge. This ends up in very different regulations, (safety) requirements and requires a lot of efford - for trains and staff alike. While programs like ETCS and european corridors that are partially funded by the EU are continuosly trying to decrease the barrier, and in many cases this works, it is not a system that is efficient and widely available. Therefore crossborder trains are harder to implement and more costly to operate, especially for smaller and newer firms. 2. you are touching on why budget train companies will succeed but you do not address how train lines get funding, often by government contracts. It is here were direct competition is very present already. While operating on the free market outside of these contracts is what you show here, it is a risky approach with only few routes that actually work. In addition, many countries in Europe start to fund railway use in a way, where price differences don't matter anymore to the consumer. Look at the €9 ticket in Germany or the Klimaticket in Austria for instance. All in all I do not think we will see a budget airline like development because operating a plane between two airports is easy and more importantly, can be adapted quickly if required. This is absolutely not the case with trains, which run on a more or less fixed schedule that is furthermore capacity contrained. Also staff and trains have to be equipped and trained for the route, something that takes time and costs money, somethign pilots don't have to worry so much about once they have their rating
@@paulchataigneron4984 it's not actually really true. Only countries it will most probably happen is Germany or France, what's totally forgotten here are Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania etc. In all central-european countries it is far more likely to find train staff speak english beside their native language. Although in Germany I usually found staff actually speaking english, but that was only on DB ICE, not sure how about DB Regio or even other ones. I'm dissapointed how he completely missed cross-border Regio trains, that are actually a thing (Berlin-Gorzów Wielkopolski for example, or Lubeck-Szczecin, Zielona Góra-Guben, and even more) and those are important, as much as say connections Berlin-Warsaw, Paris-Stuttgart. Railway in Europe suposed to serve even small cities, not only major european capitals, but that's completely different story
@@Sobol3D I think what Paul means is that in addition to English, staff have to speak the local language. A German conductor would have to speak polish to be allowed to operate a crossborder train - that‘s at least my experience with trains running between Austria and Italy. i absolutely agree that the huge amount of crossborder regional trains have not been mentioned at all
@@jakobeng1303 the problem is that there is mostly regional trains across borders. That means to do inter city travel across long distances you have to switch trains at least twice.
@@jsplit9716 that‘s more often than not incorrect, many international trains do exist - especially between nations that have cross border regional trains
A couple of corrections: It is possible to book by train Manchester to Paris and vice versa as one combined itinerary and Torquay is still a prosperous and popular holiday destination. A key omission was mention of the significant and well used international links provided by Thalys and OBB NightJet, which combine to understate rail's importance in those markets. Across Europe, long international journeys with one or more change en-route are still very commonly undertaken and need not only make use of the well known high speed lines. They are also much, much more straightforward than the normal airport torture. For this reason rail and in fact road transport also take a large share of journeys beyond the standard 3-4 hours commonly quoted, even on routes that have direct flights. Even before using an airport became two to three hours of torture a surprisingly high proportion of the population really don't like air travel that much and will happily both take longer and pay more to avoid it - in a way that is just too difficult in the US. The huge volume of local road traffic across land boarders in densely populated areas makes the rail share of longer distance international journeys in Europe seem much smaller than its true significance.
Re connections, I remember there being an easy way to do it previously, but can't seem to find it now, is there directions on how to do it? It was well advertised before, but now the Eurostar site seems to be targeted towards Continental connections from a brief look?
As a logistics nerd: Trains are ridiculously efficient, compared to basically everything else. So if you can transport goods or people on rail, do it. For transport on land, rail is the best we have right now. And we don't need fancy new technology to do it, we can simply improve upon a well established platform.
As a physics amateur I can agree: Rolling on rails is much more efficient than driving or flying, only ships can compete. But there are so many direct and indirect state payments made for all types of transport, that physics only plays a minor role in how routes and prices are calculated.
true and yet, people still invest and support on capsules and other "futuristic" fancy shit that have no real advantage to them except speed and even then, is pretty ineffective. Just make more modern trains and add on to the current rail network with double tracks, no need for that fancy yet impractical stuff
@@davidthornton3346 What a weird question, as if the very rare (and well needed) train strike would negate a good daily experience during the rest of the year. Still better by orders of magnitude than driving everyday.
@@Basauri48970💀💀💀I was going to say the same thing in reponse to your comment. Theres strike information, and yes it's way better than driving and sitting in traffic. Trains are WAY more relaxong compared to a soul crusing drive. When trains are delayed and cancelled tsain operators provide fair compensation for yhe inconvenience caused.
@@TimofejsAmelins-k8z Exactly. I also find it very grating when people who enjoy work rights, 1 month holiday entitlement, a 40h work week, etc complain about strikes. How did they think we got those? May everyone exercise their right to strike forever and never give up in the struggle for better work conditions and fairer wages.
This might be the first Wendover video to which I feel like I know more about the topic than contained in the video. Let me add a bit of information that might be interesting: There are two international high-speed-projects existing in Europe. Next to the mentioned Eurostar there is the Thalys, which was mainly born because Belgium and the Netherlands are so small that high-speed-rail only maks sense on an international level. It connects Brussels with Amsterdam, Paris and Cologne. Though these are the only international-only products, the rail networks are not as sepeated as it appears in the video. Germany-Paris services for example are served by a quite successfull cooperation between DB and SNCF. The routes Munich/Stuttgart-Paris and Frankfurt-Paris can be booked through either operator, no matter whether it's a TGV or ICE, and they basically make one schedule for these lines and split the operation. Still, there is a lot of room for improvement and international standards like ETCS for train interoperability and new international infrastructure are probably the right way to go. There is improvement happening right now, but slowly. Still, Europe has already proven that international rail services are quite possible. The Trans Europe Express network was a working international long-distant train network, though lack of standardisation was much worse back then. It died to the raise of air travel, but some see it as a template for what we should work on today. Fun fact about Flixtrain's cars: DB had an affordable long-distance train product in the 90s which was called InterRegio. For reasons, they suspended service in the early 2000s and let open a niche. Flixtrain is now filling this niche, using the exact same cars that DB used in InterRegio trains. Flixtrain operating an international service to Switzerland is both correct an kinda wrong at the same time. They operate a train to Basel Badischer Bahnhof, which is located in the country of Switzerland but is operated by DB by german guidelines. It is more of a border station to terminate trains that can't enter switzerland and only a few meters in. So Flixtrain basically operates to the border, but the station happens to lie on the swiss side. It's not what you think of by "international connection". Also, Flixtrain probably will not get further into Switzerland, as there is no political will for private operators on swiss tracks. As Switzerland has a completely political guided, non-liberalized rail network that is performing magnificent, I kind of doubt that liberalization is what we need in Europes rail traffic. It basically is giving the responsibility out of political into the magic market's hands with not much more than the hope things will get better. Of course it's nice for private investors to earn money on high-demand routes, but there is no place for competition on low-demand routes, where one operator alone is barely profitable and on routes which capacitiy is already exceeded (which is at least in germany quite common). The infrastructure is in private hands anyway and state-owned operators will stay in operation to ensure a minimum of service. The weird mix we now have seems ineffective to me, while a purely planned economy has proven to be quite effective in the rail segment in many countries, e.g. Switzerland, Japan, Spain.
Absolutely. And I think a hub and spoke HSR network across Europe along lines which naturally link large cities works best. There are or are under construction several such lines. But care does need to be taken as to how long services on them are. You don't need a direct service from southern Italy to Paris. You can split the journey up. Same with say, London to Berlin or Rome. It would just be easier to have people change in Paris to a relevant service.
@@tams805 That's another thing where the Swiss show us how things work. You don't need a direct service if you have an integrated schedule, which you can't have if you let companies just do what they want on the tracks. A franchise-system would still work, but I'm not a friend of that either, based on the experiences we have with it in german regional rail.
Wendover and other channels are unrepentant shills for neoliberal gutting of all aspects of public infrastructure. They can't wait to whitewash the next pump and dump scheme of the billionaire owner class for peanuts.
slight correction to your point about there being no will for private operators on Swiss tracks. There is will for that and there are already private operators running trains on the Swiss network (bls or Deutsche Bahn for example). The "problem/hurdle" that Flixtrain faces is that Switzerland requires all its operators to work within the integrated Swiss timetable. If Flixtrain is willing to do that then they can operate services beyond Basel Badischer Bahnhof to Bern/Zurich/Geneva etc. Because unlike Germany, where there is no integrated nationwide timetable that includes long-distance services like the ICE (yet). Switzerland has had one for 40 years now and they most certainly aren't dropping that for one German train company. DB, as mentioned, already offers ICE services into Switzerland to places like Bern, Interlaken, Chur and Zurich and these services are integrated into the Swiss timetable (which is why they more often than not get stopped in Basel if they are delayed too much).
@@Empress2345 BLS is "private" but mainly owned by Bern and Federal Republic. I ment "private" as not legally private but economically private with private investors, independent from governments. As far as I'm aware they're not a friend of getting new operators, are they?
Rail Baltica is worth mentioning. It is still under construction but it will be a high speed rail connecting all the baltic states. By extent it also shortens the trip to Finland and Poland :)
I hope the idea of a train between Helsinki and Tallinn will one day be reality... Sure the boat is cheap and fairly quick but a train would be amazing
Having just had a vacation in Europe; I couldn't help but notice how much more enjoyable it was using the train between countries than taking a flight. We used the train between Geneva and Milan and then Paris to London. The Paris to London leg was a bit of a hassle due to the immigration checks but the Geneva/Milan leg was seamless. And although the trip took 4 hours, I preferred that to the hassle of checking in at an airport. What I didn't realise was how disconnected the system was all over Europe. This video cleared that up.
Its connected, its just not all that fast cause the lanes are national and not international. For example there are times where you have to travel through slow trails before catching on a fast one, increasing travel times uneccesarly. Still it's possible to travel from Spain to Poland but it takes way more than a flight because of Train speeds.
It is starting to become more integrated. Thalys connects uk, belgium, netherlands, france and germany seamlessly with high speed rail as well. So there are islands with great connectivity around europe, the task now is connecting these all together into a europe wide system. Which will happen eventually, it just takes time.
I literally took the Eurostar home (the Netherlands) from London yesterday after filming some videos about the Underground. this international high-speed train is so relaxed you'll want to have it everywhere. in addition, it also helps in achieving the climate goals. thanks for your video!
It is so superior to flying. I live in NL for studies and travel back home to see family every six months or so, and being able to (a) take liquids, toiletries, and basically unlimited luggage on the train is superb, alongside better leg room, food, drink etc. and (b) being able to leave the train in the city centre or domestic rail terminal to catch adjoining trains is vastly superior to taking lengthy journey extensions to airports. During off-peak times, tickets are regularly 55 EUR each way from Rotterdam to LDN St. Pancras, with a journey time of 3.5 hours. You can usually arrive at the station 35 mins before safely without having to worry too much about missing the journey. It is not that different from flying, with additional security checks and taxi times (which at Schiphol are significant). The primary issue at the moment I guess is capacity, that as soon as the summer holidays begin, flights stay as low as 45 EUR yet I couldn't find train tickets for under 200 EUR.
And how much was your ticket? Achieving climate goals is a noble goal, but if it costs 10x as much AND takes much longer it’s a tough sell. PS in America almost all trains runs on nice sooty Diesel.
I just booked a traintrip thats a little more expensive and a lot less convenient with 3 different tickets and a ton of stops to sweden from nl. It sucks tbh
Regarding the Eurostar - you used to be able to buy through ticketing from Eurostar directly, so you could begin the journey from most major UK cities outside of London. These tickets were also covered by the international railway conditions of carriage (CIV) which meant that if your connecting train to London is late and causes you to miss your booked Eurostar connection, you'd be entitled to be re-booked on the next available departure. Unfortunately the option to book through ticketing disappeared back in March 2020 when Eurostar 'upgraded' its ticketing system and it still looks to be MIA.
@@tomriley5790 Why would that be the reason? If you're already going to London, going to any other major UK city from there has nothing to do with the EU, surely?
@@billylardner Having a ticket that is valid on an EU train operator and a UK train operator was east when the UK was in the EU, and hard when the UK left the EU.
This is really an opinion piece, even though it's presented as fact. It also leaves out important aspects. Air travel is also subsidized, whether directly or indirectly (e.g. no kerosene tax but a diesel tax, or putting money into unprofitable airports). Environmental costs also play much less of a role in air travel than they do in rail travel, even though rail is much more environmental.
International air travel is also exempt from VAT, which you do pay when booking trains, a price advantage of around 20% depending in the country you buy the ticket in.
Well said! I am also here to learn how to invest after listening to a lady on tv talk about the importance of investing and how she made 7 figure in 3 month, somehow the video taught me nothing and left me even more confused, I'm a newbie and I'm open to ideas on how to invest for retirement
@@rajeshupadhyay5683lookup Teresa Jensen White, this is her name online, she's the real investment prodigy since the crash and have help me recovered my loses
I am a university student in Poland and therefore I take a whole lot of trains. I am in fact writing this sentence about to go on a train. There are two major groups in Poland regularly taking trains and these are people commuting to work from outside of major cities, going on local trains; and students going back home for weekends. Trains over here are not designed to be like airlines. Very many train routes are local, connecting medium-sized cities and stopping in every single village on the way, like a bus would. It's great for commuters and works great combined with the long distance intercity trains. Our trains are not meant to be like airlines. Part of that might be that Poland doesn't have many domestic flights either and they aren't necessarily that popular. But trains are local and/or budget means of transport, that's why they're so popular with students. They're very cheap compared to other countries mentioned in the video (normal ticket for the 2 hour train I take is around 50 zł which is less than 11 euros and you can pay even less if you choose regional instead of intecity and with various discounts there are, mostly for school and university students). It's the budget way of traveling, usually cheaper than just driving, especially if you're traveling alone. The main problems are that trains are famously unreliable (which actually isn't the case or at least definitely not to the degree they're said to be, unless you go by Deutsche Bahn in Germany) and that in some regions there isn't enough infrastructure so there are no good connections (taking a train journey in eastern Poland might turn out to be problematic if you decide to travel between smaller cities because sometimes there just isn't any rail there. That's however a regional problem that most of Europe certainly doesn't have)
Railway privatization was a major failure in the UK, and it also has caused some huge problems in Germany. The idea that privatization would fix the railway issues is such nonsense and I wish you had gone more into these problems.
Because they weren’t actually privatized. They just added profit incentives to the very same monopolistic, bureaucratic and still basically state-owned monoliths. Of course that only makes things worse. Privatization has to come with breaking up the monopoly. Competition automatically causes fresh air and thereby progress.
Makes no sense. How can a structure spanning multiple counties/states be privately held. And are you going to shake your fist at each car crossing your track "get off my lawn"
@Ye Japan doesnt prove anything, it is geographically more or less a line and highly populated so it is one of the easiest countries to have railservice for. In europe private companys will simply neglect smaller villages and citys because they dont make any or alot of profit. Privatisation simply doesn´t work unless it is highly regulated and subsidized.
@@xhelloselm railways in the UK were more or less as privatized as they can be. With railways there are limitations to liberalization given that it must be a highly coordinated system. In order to optimally utilize rail networks (which given the fact that they usually run at capacity is very important) everything has to be timed and regulated to a tee. Your vision of how privatization should work is coming awfully close to the neoliberal equivalent of “that’s not real socialism”
It all depends on how it's Done, from my experience the biggest problem with publicly owned railway is there is no incentive to be cost effective/efficient/innovative, I understand the perspective that it's a public serivce like health care and shouldn't have to be self funding. But from my experience working in the rail sector the amount of money that's wasted is eye watering and no one cares, not even management/higher ups in the company cause its all subsidised by the Government.
Germany introduced a €9 per month ticket valid with all buses, trams and a lot of trains in the entire country. Just yesterday I travelled 13 hours to and fro with that ticket. Normally just this journey would have cost me €150
Wow that must be brand new, and a Zuper deal! How could you beat that price? That’s about a 94% discount, just considering 1 day of travel. If you traveled 30 days it would be about 99.5% discount.
@@Polynom1995 correct. it's only for 3 months. Doesn't mean the savings for the public in 3 months isn't huge. I've travelled to so many places which weren't previously viable due to the ticket costs. In September the costs will go back to normal
@@Polynom1995 it actually is entirely "sustainable" if you understand transportation infrastructure not as an industry meant to generate profit (which is how it's been seen for the past 40-odd years, leading to the sorry state DB is in today) but an investment a country makes into its own mobility, generating profit elsewhere in a distributed manner. Unfortunately, neoliberal business philosophy requires profit to be capturable in a controlled manner at the point of investment. In other words, if rich people can't be guaranteed to get the majority of the pie, they will not spend money on it, and it's not going to happen.
Did you miss all the all the overcrowded trains being overrun by travellers? Or are you just so willing to ignore obviously bad policies if it gets you free stuff.
The irony is, the UK tried rail privatization back in the 90s and now it's heading back the other way as private operators go bankrupt British Rail has to take the routes back over. Prime example, the LNER, the main train line from London to the north and up into Scotland, Virgin operated the route for years before walking away from it and had developed a bad reputation for shitty service, as soon as it became a state run route again reviews dramatically improved. Cross border service must happen and HSR speeds need to keep going up to the point where the EU needs to likely consider maglev on the long haul lines, without this they can't meet their long term sustainability goals and still keep a comparable or better freedom of movement across the EU to keep their economy going.
I guess there must be a sweet spot between too much competition and too little competition where the needs of customers and companies are satisfied best.
@@simtill Lol the UK never had "too much competition" on train service. Companies would sell your kidneys mid-ride if they were allowed, the only company able to fully satisfy the needs of the customers is the state.
Yeah, the problem isn’t so much public/private (trains must be very heavily regulated by their nature. It is a coordinated system after all), but rather investing enough to achieve the results you want. In Germany, for example, many of the existing main lines are so heavily congested that you simply won’t eek better efficiency or reliability out of them without building relief lines. Which is exactly what DB/govt is doing. Much like a highway, if there’s too much traffic you’re gonna have problems…
@@simtill trains run best with a nationalised coordinating public body running them. Saying there needs to be "competition" is just being ideological.
It wasn't always like that. There used to be lots of international trains in Europe, and relatively cheap fares could be found. Not usually as low as today's budget airlines, and not if you wanted to sleep in a proper sleeper car, but there were for example special fares for people under 26. And of course there was the Interrail pass, which gave you a month of free travel on all (or most) trains in Europe for about 200-250 €.
I'm travelling from York to Amsterdam next month, it's hugely more convenient to get a train to London, walk 2mins to St. Pancras, then get another train straight into the center of Amsterdam, than to fly, and works out to be slightly cheaper on the dates I'm travelling too. The advertised ticket price for flights is great if you're travelling solo and without baggage, but once you start adding things on it quickly increases, whereas bags & seat selection are included in rail (national & Eurostar) tickets.
Night trains solve some of the problems with long travel times, especially if the night portion is uninterrupted by stops. Your hypothetical train from Brittany to the Mediterranean coast would work as a night train. I've been on a few, and they can be comfortable.
Night trains are literally the best method of travel on the planet. I took the Edinburg to London night train and it not only gave me essentially a free extra day of vacation, it was far less expensive than flying, tickets were cheaper and I avoided the taxi ride to the airport and the train from the airport into London, and I got the best night of sleep I’ve had in probably 25 years. Red eye flights are also fairly awesome though TBH
To add a little detail on this video : international connections exists for last few years, between some borders. You mentioned Netherlands/Belgium/France/Germany. This connection exists, and is VERY efficient, thanks to Thalys (that's the only one I know personally). I am french, from Paris region, but lived and worked in Cologne, Germany, before moving to Stuttgart, Germany. I used to take the plane to go back home see my family. Since Thalys, a rail company specialized in Germany-France connections, I could not take the plane ever again for that route. Cheaper or equally expensive (rarely >100€ - usually between 50-70€), FAR more comfortable, FAR more flexible (especially regarding luggage sizes and numbers), and taking at the city center to arrive at the city center. Cologne-Paris is done in 3 hours, 2,5h faster than by car, and same as airplane (if you count going in and out of the airport), and stop in Belgium in between). 3,5h for Stuttgart-Paris For the much higher convenience, comfort and flexibility, even if trains on those routes were pricier than planes, I would stick to trains. But that is a specific case. It is just a good example on how much this is needed. It remains an exception. Try to do the same from eastern Germany to Lyon, and it becomes a nightmare, as explained in the video. I can't wait to see those international connections develop!
While it's a good example of what it could be, the Thalys connects some of the biggest metropolitan areas right at the center of the Blue Banana. The Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area is insanely populated, as is the one of Paris, and as are Netherlands and Belgium. It makes so much sense to have this service here, but not all places are equally highly populated.
@aliss liou What's your pointr? How adding a company with its own trains on rails that already exist is paid by the taxpayer Sure, my taxes pay to maintain the infrastructure. But I would pay either way, since it is shared with public (or ex public) providers. And given the great services it gives, I am happy that what I paid for bad service yesterday now pays for great service.
Eastern Germany to Lyon is quite easy. Take the ICE all the way to Basel, change into the IC to Geneva and then the local train to Lyon. Or... Just take the ICE to Frankfurt, then the Thalys to Paris and then the TGV to Lyon. Tallinn to Faro or Lulea to Athens. That's a different kind of cookie :-D
You have to consider the overnight option too. The Austrian railway (ÖBB) operates a vast network of overnight trains which in my opinion has pretty good coverage across most of Europe. And, in the case of overnight trains, the long travel time is less of a hurdle - in many cases, they deliberately make the time longer so that you can have a decent amount of sleeping time
I know this is quite the popular discussion point now, but I think it ignores an important issue. Many of the people who travel a lot are in their 30s and 40s. That means they are also the ones likely to have family and kids. Ask me what I would choose if I have the choice of leaving my family on Tuesday night for meetings on Wednesday and not coming back until Thursday morning or taking a 6am flight on Wednesday and be back for a good night kiss the same night...
A great idea but… These trains stop a lot. In some stations the trains splice and dice which involves a fair amount of shunting. Not sure if that is conducive to a good night’s sleep.
If a delayed Eurostar service into London St Pancras International (LSPI) makes a passenger miss a coach or train connection, Eurostar can get the passenger rebooked either before arrival at LSPI or at LSPI
The other problem with Eurostar is that it is ridiculously expensive. 2-3x as much as you will pay for travel to somewhere else in the UK from London, and 4-5x as expensive as the equivalent onward travel in France.
Yup. I really would've loved to take the Eurostar to London in 2019, but not only would it have taken longer (I would've tolerated that, as a rail fan), but it would've been far pricier than a cheap plane ticket.
Eh, if you book early, it’s quite affordable. If you book a few months in advance, the London Paris journey by train costs around the same as travelling to Heathrow, taking the flight, and taking the train from CDG
I just checked again out of curiosity, and it actually wouldn't take that much longer with a good connection if you account for airport times... but even booking over a month ahead there's no way to do it for less than 200€ (including the connection from the German city I lived in at the time), one way. In a world where you can get a Ryanair ticket for literally a tenth of that, there's no way I could possibly justify paying that much. I was a student at the time, and I paid 400€ for the entire week, including transit and accommodations in London. Paying the same 400€ just to go there and back is insane.
@@lik7953 if you fly via Heathrow, sure. But when you can get a ticket to Stansted for under 20€ (and pay that much again for the train to the city) each way...
The downside to all of this (at least in Spain): More investment on high speed, long distance travel while public companies neglect regional lines to compete with the new players. As an example, in the Barcelona metropolitan area trains malfunction frequently or take a ridiculous ammount of time to go between neighboring cities. It takes 2 hours to go Barcelona-Madrid, but it took me 3 hours on a regional train to go Barcelona-Tarragona, wich is like a seventh of the lenght of the first route. And this is without speaking of service in the county side, which is even poorer if it exists at all in some regions. Millions of people crammed for work or school every morning don't care about cheaper trains to Madrid, they just want a shorter and less hellish daily commute!
To be exact: Germanies HSR has a lot of missing pieces. Spain HSR is truly impressive in terms of tracks. I assume Germany has more services due to the population size. Regional trains are less comfterbale and you cant book a seat in advance. But the coverage of the regional trains is truly insane if you compare it with most countries. But with luggage or when you have to go a long distance they arent suitable in my view. And its not rare to go over one or two hours with the regional train after you arrived with the HSR somewhere.
But not offering these competing services on the barcelona madrid route would simply not improve the situation elsewhere either. I don't believe this only became a problem after these new competitors where allowed on the system. It is just a structural problem with local investment in infrestructure. Even though they are both about rail, they are not related to eachother.
And if local trains were more reliable people wouldn’t drive as much.. I bet the carbon savings could be even greater. I think the focus is often too much on HSR and not enough on high quality local or regional service
Living in London, it's often the case that traveling from home/city centre(ish) to the airport can take upwards of an hour and often costs nearly as much as a budget flight itself. Imagine paying £50 for a roundtrip flight to southern Europe, but then having to fork out another £30 just for the roundtrip train from central London to the airport (plus the cost of public transport from home to the train station in the first place). Then you land at your destination, where the airport is also likely to be well outside the city proper, and you better HOPE you arrive at a convenient time where bussess/shuttles/trains operate airport-city centre, because if you've taken a budget flight to a mid to small sized city it's more likely you'll arrive after those options close and your only option left is to book an uber to get you to your accommodation. And that's without considering that you need to arrive at the airport at least 2 hours early each way, be ready to take off half your clothes and contents from your luggage to go through security, deal with delays where you're already effectively 'stuck' inside the departure area and can't do anything else, or when the plane lands and can't park at a gate, so you're sitting in that cramped space for even longer without any alternatives, and then you finally have to go pick up your luggage, which depending on luck can take ages to arrive as well. Plus the luggage limits that occasionally take you by surprise and you have to pay extra for going 1kg above the weight limit, or having to agree to let your carry-on with your valuables be put on the hold because it won't fit inside the cabin. All in all, even the cheapest and quickest flight will still easily take a whole day of your vacation time each way and come with lots of hidden costs and stressful situations and lots of queueing/waiting/delays, etc. Trains cut down on these issues SIGNIFICANTLY, as long as you're not going an absurdly long distance and the trains and stations are in moderately good condition.
We also need to remember that the reason trains in the Uk are so expensive and crap is due to liberalisation. Trains should always be a government service provided to the people. Think of it less as air travel and more like national road infrastructure. It does't exist to pull a profit but to better interconnect the country leading to economic growth from reduced travel times rather than ticket sales. One of the main reasons for low cost airlines being so cheap is the huge subsidies that airlines receive. These subsidies should be gradually moved into more high speed rail. What europe needs now is to build more high speed track, especially across borders and most of the issues described in the video will be solved. Also by avoiding liberalising the rail network and allowing private businesses to run trains any profits generated won't be invested back into better infrastructure. Private corporations are too risk aversive to even think about getting a contract to build more rail.
I have friends with off-spring who excitedly message them with "Hey, I've just booked a cheap flight to Marseille/Barcelona/wherever - can you pick me up at the airport?" leaving my friends witha 100-mile round trip to pick them up and the same for the return journey. Cheap flights for some, but not for the people having to meet them.
One of the problems that isn't mention on the video is the track gauge: depending on how you count it, Europe has around 3-5 different track gauges. This means that the majority of trains that run in the Iberian peninsula can not run in the rest of the continent, and vice versa; and the same for Eastern Europe and Ireland. If there was to be a direct connection between, for example, Lisbon (or Madrid) to Paris, most of the infrastructure would have to be built from scratch. And it's unlikely that a private company will carry such burden as building and maintainin the rails
Solutions have been developed for this issue. Talgo make a variable gauge bogie that allows trains to cross the border between Spain and France while only incurring a minor slowdown for the transition to occur.
@@tomesilva877 Im not sure about that. I would assume it would cost more per train set on the line but surely not as much as replacing all of the track in Spain to match that of France/the rest of Europe. Not sure how widespread the use of the variable gauge bogies is, but it seems like it hasn’t been that important for trains to have according to this video.
Another issue is the width of the train cars themselves and the train stations. Trains may be unable to physically fit into the train stations. I remember being told about France buying train cars that would not fit into the train stations they are supposed to go through. It cost them "a few" millions to rectify the issue. Sure you can fix the issue of having different gauges, the train station itself being not wide enough for the train? That is not an easy fix. That requires construction work. Work that ideally doesn't obstruct train service while it happens.
Worth mentioning is also RegioJet, a Czech railway and bus operator, which connects Czech cities and towns with not just the neighbouring countries but also with the more distant ones, e.g. Croatia and Ukraine (by rail). I think it now also operates routes that are completely outside of the Czech Republic.
I would've liked a few words about the insane amouts of direct and indirect subsidies that planes get in comparison to trains, but otherwise a very good video! keep up the good work.
@@bigbaddms For example in Germany, there are almost no taxes on kerosene, while diesel and other fuels are heavily taxed, which allows for these cheap flights.
@@magnus7857 Taxing aircraft fuel is quite complicated, If Germany starts to tax fuel, the plane will not fill up there, instead they will fill up at another airport. To effectively tax aircraft fuel, it would need to be done globally.
@@justahamsterthatcodes I agree that taxing Jet A1 directly is hardly feasible but it can be done by charging a proportional fee to the passenger ticket using a nations airport based on the prediction of fuel consumption for that line. I don't like taxes but paying +50% fuel taxes everytime I have to refuel the car to go to work while those slob penniless turists can travel from so far away for literally 30 bucks is even worse, especially with the current fuel prices. I would like a bit more expensive plane tickets in exchange for cheaper car fuel, mantaining state income stable.
@@justahamsterthatcodes You can't effectively fly return flights to Germany without filling up there. Your argument is a fallacy. A policy like this would be especially effective EU wide.
I think the problem with market liberalisation in rhe rail industry is that private companies will only focus on the most profitable routes, while the state-owned companies have to run the unprofitable, but not less important lines. Currently the state-owned companies fund this by running proftitable lines, but in this case this money would lack to finance the other important routes.
If the line has at least some profit, it is attractive for business, because little money is also money. Another issue is that the line should be profitable in principle and not sag at a loss for long periods of time, because small companies will not be able to survive long-term losses. It is difficult for me to imagine how an important line can be unprofitable, it is obvious that the main advantage of the railway is scalability and if the railway cannot cope with a certain scale, there are problems in the organization of this railway: whether it is unrealistic standards, lack of unification, poor technical condition, incorrectly chosen technologies, etc.
The problem with competition on this is that yes, you may get a new fancy inter european high speed train, but you destroy the everyday smaller regional lines, that do not generate enough revenue. That is what is currently happening in France, smaller regional lines close, and ticket prices rise, since the state cannot compensate the losses anymore... Basically, you get a shiny expensive tourist train, and you leave out everyone else since it's not profitable anymore. That's exactly what happened when Europe introduced competition on rail freight, It almost disappeared in the last 20 years since its not profitable...
@@thastayapongsak4422 if you throw a HSL towards certain areas, those areas regional lines get less ridership because the HSL can simply act as regional in that area
In an ideal system, the profitable high-speed rail will compensate for the losses of regional rail - this can especially be true, if the infrastructure provider is truly independent from the rail operator (unlike SNCF's and DB's extremely pathetic attempts at doing this), and the government makes it so extremely expensive (or outright bans) to cancel a railway track that it's more worth it to keep it running (or the operator is obligated to do so). This obligation works in some Central European countries already - for example, in Czechia, if a railway gets either 300 passenger or 11 freight trains a year, it cannot be legally cancelled/put out of service. What can happen of course, is that it won't get upgraded anymore if it gets the bare minimum, however service will still be preserved - provided that the region / state wants to keep running train there - these are independent on one another and essentially keep each other in check on even slightly important railways (+ try cancelling a service and getting elected again, not happening)
There are technical barriers to international service. Different "loading gauges" (width), electric voltage, and in the case of Spain, track gauges. England having invented railways has the oldest national network, but thus also the legacy of having the tightest structural limitations. Most continental trains are too wide, and Bi-Level trains too tall to fit in UK's rail network
*cough* Belgium *cough* Belgium was the second country with a railway and the first country in the world to have a national railway network. So although it's old as well it never the less has an extensive trail network and is well connected to the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg. It's railway is still public property. The proof that privatization doesn't work can be seen in the UK. Privatization just leads to undercutting to the point that the customer pays for everything for less product. So you can choose to spend lots of hours to wait, lots of money for even just having a bag, fly cheap to the middle of nowhere OR you spend a bit more, spend less time waiting, have more comfort, more security and end up in the city or village that you want to be.
Other than the iberian penninsula and Britain, I believe the main issues are train control systems and line voltage. But the thing is, both of these can be solved with a fifteen-minute or half-hour stop to change locomotives. Sure, it's not fantastic, but certainly not something that should prevent international routes from being travelled. There is the minor hiccup of EMUs being really in fashion right now though, and very few companies investing in regular carriages...huh.
If international high speed actually becomes a thing in Europe all countries should agree on having the same gauges, same voltage etc. on the high speed tracks.
@@StefanMaring That's definitely true, although high-speed international travel is only part of the equation. Intercity trains, at least in my country, are way more affordable and therefor often a better choice for the casual traveller.
There’s some amazing projects happening to improve international connectivity by rail at the moment. A tunnel for a direct line between Hamburg and Kopenhagen, multiple enormous tunnels between France-Italy and Germany-Italy, and the new high speed baltic line are the most impressive.
as a european who takes almost only trains when I leave my country and also has travelled often in the past few years I have some thing to say: What is not mentioned at all for train tourim in Europe is the existance of the Interrail Ticket which allows you with one purchased ticked explore (with some esceptions) every corner of europe within a month. And due to my location(switzerland) I had travelled a lot through Germany and I have to say that they decreased some routs interly like the overnight train between Zürich and Amsterdam and some other connections. But overall with increasing digitalisation I have to admit that prices are over the years getting cheaper for rail travel!
interrail is great but regional trains are sooo slow and always delayed in every country so you miss your connection and sometimes you don't even reach the city that you booked your accommodation because regional trains last leave around 10ish (depending on the country) and i found myself stuck in random cities a lot while interrailing europe. there's soo many trains you have to buy seat reservations for which 1) makes it really expensive and 2) takes away the fun of being spontaneous and flexibel while using your interrail ticket
Interesting prospects indeed. There are, however, some points more to consider: - Half the passengers of the new companies switched operators. The routes these newcumbers sit on are the profitable routes. The state-owned companies on the other hand need to service both the popular and lower-demand lines which they finance with the profitable routes. If the service is not to be reduced the tax payer effectively needs to subsidise the profit of private companies. - International rail connection: There are big legal barriers to cross-country rail travel. At each border the train driver realistically needs to be replaced because they need to be certified in each country and speak the local language. When traveling from Austria to Slowenia and then to Italy at both borders even the motor coaches were replaced for whatever reason.
There are also technical barriers. There are multiple different electricity systems in use, for example. From 1Kv DC to 25 KV AC, trains need to be able to handle it all. Also systems, that ensure safe operations of trains are different between nations. So excanging trains on the border will continue at least mid-term.
The first point is a major problem and the reasenon I'm boycotting Flixtrain. The second one will hopefully be solved soon by new EU laws. Especially for new HSR connections this could be critical.
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@@Skullair313 we have the trains figured out. Changes still happen as there's a limit how far a loco can travel from its home country. This is why there's a loco change on the Paris-Vienna nightjet in Germany. The dutch loco is'nt allowed to travel further. The crew changes can be avoided too, but they're expensive. In general adapting English as a common language a'la the aviation industry could be a great long term solution IMO.
@@Skullair313 you also need to consider signalling, track gauge, etc. I know the work is there to unify it all but the largest difference between air and train is the infrastructure. As long as your plane can get airborne your golden. You don’t have to maintain thousands of miles of track, its infrastructure and the thousands of workers that need paying. Maintain your plane and the sky is free.
Main issue with this - What happens with the less active routes? Main issue in e.g Sweden is that MTR and Flixtrain steals tons of customers from the state SJ on the most profitable routes (Göteborg - Stockholm), while leaving SJ alone on the less active routes making them regularly shit down routes and reducing service...
That’s the classic thing with competition : private companies get all the benefits from the great routes, while the public company still runs small routes, for way, way less profit (usually they’re subsidised but still)
Yeah, same concern in France. If the historical operator SNCF is the only one operating the smaller lines, while having competition on the busy money-making lines then how are they going to maintain the rail network which is said to be so expensive that the government has to fund it ? I have yet to see a convincing response to this which is not "just close the small lines" or "the market will figure it out".
Well, high rail fees for the popular routes, low or none for the unpopular routes to compensate? Or you demand of operators that they have to offer service to unpopular routes to get access to the popular ones.
@@neodym5809 Yes. Since this is the system they are replacing, a system with one operator that has a state mandated mission to supply n number of routes n number of days, win or lose. A often lost variable in this equation is that privatisation (at least on Sweden) has _ALWAYS_ resulted in a negative effect on the country side, all be it public transportation or vehicle control stations or hospitals. This seems to fall into that same trap, since I am guessing no private company would allow to run shit routes to compensate for the one route that actually brings in cash, killing the entire monetary incentive
Increased demand might be misleading here. Seems more like a unrecognized lack of supply. Train service isn't just about individual lines and individual trains. To be useful to customers, trains have to be treated as a system. Just because one line keeps running mostly empty doesn't mean that there isn't enough demand to match its capacity. Customers don't demand lines, customers are in the market for connections, and they require the connections at certain times. I think this is a very interesting case study of supply and demand being in a "false equilibrium".
Yeah but with different operators comes the main issue of tickets: if train A is late, operated by someone else than train B, good luck getting the next one. Rail future is not with competition, but with cooperation, like it used to be. Just look at the DB-SNCF in cooperation trains, running TGVs and ICE from Paris to Cologne.
This is true between London and Birmingham, the two operators of that route don't accept each other's tickets. If you miss one train, the next one from the same operator could be over an hour away. IMO more competition will only complicate the user experience even more.
There is no doubt that low-cost rail competion will worsen the existing service. That was what has happened with conventional airlines. Current low-cost rail operators mainly operate with few stops and only in high demand stations. Most of the passengers will not use a connection. You could also argue that Ryanair have the same issue as they have no responsibility for missing connections, and yet Ryanair is growing.
@@LightbulbTedbear2 this is one reason I always bought tickets for a particular route and never just for a particular train departure, even if they cost 2-3x as much. Getting the next connection, whatever it is, or even just electing to not board a particularly crowded train from one operator, makes it all worth it.
Never mentioning at least some of the international railway projects currently under construction in Europe seems a bit lazy for a 20 minute video about insufficiently connected European high-speed rail networks. For example: Brenner tunnel between Italy and Austria (50 km), Mont d'Ambin tunnel between France and Italy (60 km), Fehmarn Belt tunnel between Germany and Denmark (20 km).
@@dennispremoli7950 This line still has to be built, unfortunately. Turin-Milan has been built already indeed. Perhaps you mean the new Trenitalia Frecciarossa service from Paris to Milan? This train is quicker than the TGV because it, instead of its French counterpart, can travel on this Turin-Milan high-speed line. However, the Lyon-Turin route still has to be built, although having seen at least some construction already.
@@dennispremoli7950 what? there is no such thing? (except from the Mont d'Ambin tunnel which the original commenter posted about and will be well into the 2030's before it opens)
At the end of the day, rail is better than planes. You can stand up, you get more space, and stations can be built right in the middle of the city center instead of requiring a lot of space outside the city. Ofc for rail to work, cities need to be places worth going to. This is one of the main issues we have in the US: restrictive zoning laws keep city centers in most cities flat and uninteresting. In fact, in most cities in the US, the train station is surrounded by parking lots. The US needs to do away with restrictive zoning and allow train stations to be city centers with apts, businesses, etc.
Definitely false. Rail is far inferior to planes. It is slower, much more expensive and much more restrictive on destinations. I'd rather spend those extra hours at my destination. Trains are outdated and have been for decades.
@@CedarHunt tell us you're American without telling us that you're an American. You know trains abroad are different right? Give them a try, make a passport
@@CedarHunt Planes burning fossil fuels are unsustainable in the long term. Oil is a finite resource and any future replacement will be much less cost effective. And that's before you consider the disastrous effects on the climate. Electric high speed trains, while slower than planes for long distances, can be fully powered with renewable energy making them the much better long term solution.
This video is essentially an ad for the deregulation and privatization of rail service, not mentioning at all the decline in service that tends to result from it as well as the fact that *cheap flights are heavily subsidized* , by the means of things like tax exemptions on tickets and kerosene, as well as a plethora of small subsidies and socialized burdens of air travel.
@@MrPentacz Privatization will always focus on the biggest share of the market if money is the main focus. Unprofitable (or less profitable) lines or station stops will be cast off in order to increase profits. That's how "the market" works. But the problem with doing that in public transit is that it makes the network as a whole less fine grained and versatile.
Due to the infrastructure (trains need rails), only a limited number of trains can run on the same route. The number of trains is limited by the infrastructure; the higher the number of operators, the lower the service provided. In this video, some elements are discussed. For the case of a Paris-Manchester journey, the presence of several operators forces the traveller to buy two tickets. In a deregulated rail market, it is likely that a single operator will only sell its own (and not other operators') offerings. Similarly, if a train is late, passengers who have a connection are re-routed on a train from the same operator: the more operators there are, the fewer trains there are and the longer the re-routing time for delays. It can also be noted that rail services in Europe are valued by passengers according to the density of the offer (notably the frequency of trains). More people will be attracted if trains are regular and offer flexible, all-day routes through the timetable (not everyone wants to leave at 6am or 9pm). Fragmentation of supply between different operators leads to operators moving away from "off-peak" hours to focus on profitability at the expense of quality of supply. By running a high number of operators on the same network, a major comparative advantage of rail is broken: frequency and regularity of service. Deregulation is, over and above the essential considerations relating to maintenance, social law, infrastructure safety, etc., nonsense from the point of view of the passenger.
I agree with your concern. However, this problem can be solved. For that, two things need to happen. First, one should be able to buy one ticket for a complete trip. This is already possible in quite some cases. For example, I can buy tickets from Amsterdam to Milan via Dutch railway company NS International, a route where I will travel on different trains from different companies. This 1-ticket system is crucial, and I believe that from 2025, it is mandatory that ticketing systems of different railway companies across Europe should work together, making it a lot easier to book a trips in a few clicks, even if this trip includes transfers. Second, if I miss one of my trains because of a delay of a previous train, I should either get my money back or be allowed to travel on the next train. This is the most tricky part. Because, what if my TGV from Paris to Barcelona is delayed and I miss my low-cost Avlo train to Madrid? Will I have only have access to the next Avlo train, which might run only the next day, or will I get access to the next train on this route? In the latter case, this could also be a Ouigo, AVE or, soon, Iryo train. This is quite tricky. If I paid 7 Euros, which Avlo tickets are sometimes being sold for, is it logical to give me access to a more expensive AVE service if my TGV is delayed? I do not have the answer for that. ''The number of trains is limited by the infrastructure; the higher the number of operators, the lower the service provided.'' This is true, but do not underestimate the capacity of rail lines. For example, Barcelona-Madrid will see Iryo entering service from November, which will add 16 trains in each direction every day. However, still, there is quite some capacity left on this route. If used correctly, rail lines have A LOT of capacity.
With high speed, that problem is somewhat reduced. The Madrid-Barcelona line for example is only high speed so the time, 2 and a half hours is similar to what a plane ride would take. You have higher rotation on the more popular lines, because they travel faster you can have more companies providing service since their time using the line is so little. For international travel that problem increases. Now there is only one route that connects Barcelona with Paris, it takes 6 hours and its more than the plane ride, but unless you're flying in first class you will be more confortable in the train. Downside is you have to spend 6 hours doing the route so each train is traveling more time, limiting the line no matter how fast they go because the trip is very long Most of this problems will balance out because as the distance increases the appeal for the train decreases. Unless you're doing the trip at night in a bed compartment, going by plane is better. But of course if an alternative of slower and older trains-really cheap fares-plus discounts to younger people can mean that maybe it will be the ideal mode of transport for people in their twenties as fuel gets more expensive. Same goes for older folk that most likely will enjoy a slower ride but with confort in a train and travel over Europe than get all stressed out in an airport
In the air industry, there are sites, at least in America, that sell bookings that connect multiple airlines. No reason for a similar thing can't happen for European trains. As for the number of operators, if there are at least two sets of rails for every line, then you can have as many trains on the track as you physically have room for.
the problem with frequency can also be mitigated by differentiation of local and long distance trains. local trains need high frequency because the are used for daily needs, but long distance is more used for travels, so high frequency isn't essential. On popular routs budget lines might prefer off peek hours so they have not to compete about the right of way.
2:49 Misleading. You shouldn't just count the costs and time from airfield to airfield (=plane ticket) versus train station to train station (=train ticket), because that's not your start nor your destination. Especially when the "London" airfield is Southend or Stansted, your plane lands in the middle of the countryside pastures between mooing cattle; you're still hours away from the Big Ben or wherever you're going. Similarly, not all 17 million of us Dutchies live at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport ( the Netherlands are bigger than just Amsterdam). You should always count from door to door. Walking, cycling, busing, training/flying, border-checking, and waiting: the entire thing. I've done several trips to London in 2018 and 2019 (pre-Brexit; I don't know how it's now). I went by plane and by train, and from door to door both return trips were about 180 euros. The big difference is that flying takes TEN HOURS (twice), and the train SIX HOURS (twice). Plus, flying is way more pollutive to the environment (obviously).
This video has an undue focus on the "benefits" of competition. Coordinating services across borders requires the very opposite of competition, and opening the rails up to open-access providers will allow them to cream off the profitable core routes, starving the less profitable parts of the network, while fragmenting and complicating ticketing EVEN MORE. What we need is not more liberalisation and competition, we need rail to be given the same level of subsidy as road and air (zero tax on fuel, or free infrastructure construction anyone?) in order for it to really join up Europe. And the final section of the video really underlines why the premise of the video is false. Developing good, long distance services will require coordinated investment in the right areas. This is going to be needed irrespective of the set-up of the market for services, and induced demand for better rail service would still happen if public service companies provided the right services with the right fares. This video is all about a solution in search of a problem.
@@xhelloselm wrong look at the uk that used that model since the 1980s after a period of time competition fails the big guys win and sky rocket the prices while keeping the service as bad as it was the budget one. This video is so bad.
@@06greg the uk is a bad example in that aspect though. The rail infrastrucrure is just bad and limited and not connected to the mainland. In the uk there is a hard cap on capacity, that limits the amount of induced demand that can be generated and thus the competition goes over the already existing routes and same business travelers. At that point the one that gains enough advantage the earliest will basicly monopolise the entire market. This was entirely predictable to happen. This is what happens when market fundamentalists get their hands on these sorts of things. They are completely blind to these obvious problems with free market ideology and will simply push things trough damn the concequences. That is why the usa can't have nice things either. Nuance is the key thing here. The french, spanish example is much more important in showing if this is the right path to take or not. The legacy airlines still operate on the same passenger numbers they would have had if low cost carriers did not exist mostly serving business travel and long haul tourism. The low cost airlines pretty much created their entire market themselves. If domestic rail can do domestic travel and new operators could focus on international travel via rail it could be succesful.
Some countries only offer package deals when auctioning routes to operators. 2 profitable lines and a bunch of service lines that are important but not profitable at the moment. So the profitable lines can not be concentrated in one operator that ditches the non profitable ones. There are all sorts of schemes like this one that can mittigate thes issues in order to capture the bennefits of liberalisation without falling in the pitfalls asociated with it. It does require proper oversight and willingness to change the way things are done along with how the market develops and a dedication to ensuring rail connectivity as a social service. Here a country like the uk with it's devicive first past to post system is also a bad example. A 2 party system operating at more extreme sections of the spectrum is also detrimental to ensuring longterm dedication and especially investment in these non profitable services.
With your model train travel will never outcompete plane travel. Domestic monopolies are completely uninterested in running international services or offering the best customer service experience. An example from Sweden: the state operator SJ has for years vehemently and vocally opposed bicycles on trains, but due to the open rails in Sweden, competitors offering bicycle transport on trains have been able to service the customers wishing to bring a bicycle with them. Before these operators the only alternative for bike travellers was to take the plane, bus or drive a car. The number of niche travel scenarios is endless and a state monopoly will never have an incentive to service them, so a true rail revolution cannot happen without competition. EU work on a common ticketing system and adoption of ERTMS are also vital for a vibrant rail market in Europe, competition alone will bring a revolution, but it is a necessary building block.
if you are deciding between flying or travel by train and you are going for efficiency consider the amount of time to drive to the airport, wait at the airport (including going through security) and the cab ride from the second airport to your destination. Compare that time to the time to simply board a train and then take the local public transit at your destination.
Exactly. There is a small airport in my city that does a direct trip to Amsterdam and is about 40 mins per tram. The main train station is about 20 mins per tram and also has a route directly to Amsterdam. The flight costs 4 times as much as the train. And if there wasn't an airport directly there, the next two are half the distance to Amsterdam in toe other direction. So I would have to take a train to them anyway.
NightJet are worth a mention here. They have a wide range of overnight services connecting most major European cities. It reduces the issue of travel time quite considerably.
What wasn't mentioned is the fact the EU has done a lot of work to separate ownership, operation and maintenance of the tracks and other infrastructure to entities seperate from their legacy national government owned rail companies. It used to be that one company owned all the tracks in the country and would solely operate the services. The EU has forced a break up of these traditional monopolies. Side note: as you mentioned in your Amtrack video, they don't own the tracks themselves, but instead they are owned by freightrail companies instead of seperate semi public/private entities like in Europe these days.
The EU constantly surprises me. They use their power to actually place good policies in place. Of course, an American will come in and trivialize this by saying "Look! Private companies good! Governments bad!"
That seems to be an important reason why this idea works. If there's only one company running everything they won't be able to get every route people want.
Lmao thats an understatement. However, also I heard a point being raised by someone. Compared to Japan, Uk cities are closer together so UK don't need the same level of trains as Japan. Your thoughts🤔
Something that you left out is that a lot of the international rails although not high speed still are connected with the highspeed rails and the high speed trains a lot of times can just travel over the low speed rails to the next high speed rail in the next country. There also has been a way to buy basically all the tickets from one local point for a while now in the form of interrailing. Interrailing gives european citizens the a way to book multiple days of free travel in a month time. This way you can travel for 7 separate days for a low price with still the comfort of the more standard trains.
Yup. He would basically replace the major city to major city high speed train with a flight. So unless you tend to live directly next to the airport (and don't mind the noise) and want to travel to the other airport, you still need some method of transport that gets you to and from the airports. In which case trains are super convenient, because they exist basically everywhere and go to everywhere.
This is pretty interesting as someone who just travelled from Budapest to Copenhagen by train, and realized how the German network is so expansive it just does not function. Making train travel more efficient would not just be awesome in terms of planning a vacation, but also better for the environment
2:00 Manchester is only the 11th largest city in the UK. Birmingham is the second largest. And you could get a train from Kings Cross/St. Pancreas to Manchester without walking to Euston.
I would much rather take a train than a flight if prices were at least comparable. However, unless you have some discount card, trains cost exorbitant amounts in Western Europe.
For context, Budapest - London (which are not two extremeties on the continent) is somewhere €500-800 (depending when you book the tickets) on the rails. Back in the heydays of aviation, the same journey was €20-40 with a plane. Even if I consider some additional fees that one incurs (you have to get to the airport somehow, fast track, etc.), it's basically one magnitude more expensive.
@@blanco7726 If people can take train rides for weeks then I don't think I would mind a single 24 hour block of traveling. I have had multiple-day train journeys and they are manageable
14:10 fun fact, iryo is a subsidiary company partially owned by Trenitalia, Italy's main Railway provider. Just shows how competitive the market has become.
As a consumer I fucking hate this, when I want to go from A to B I don't want to have to spend 1h researching different companies, finding the best prices, installing app and creating accounts, understanding the rule, etc. I just want to get a freaking ticket from A to B. They really need to impose some strict cooperation between companies for ticketing and transfers, otherwise it's going to be a clusterfuck.
You're the kind of customer that keeps the companies in profit. They probably barely break even on the cheapest fares, so they're going to make you hunt for them or pay more for convenience.
Regiojet is running trains from Czechia to Croatia. Picking up some passengers also in Slovakia on the route. The trains consist of up to 16 cars, much longer than usual passenger trains. The service is low speed and often massively delayed, because of problems of the tracks. The big difference for passengers is, that the vacation begins when boarding the train, unlike when driving by car or taking an airplane. So basically once you are in your compartment, you treat it as a temporary hostel room. Parents play games, drink beer and chat while kids play in the next compartment. Often families make trips together in this manner. Groups of young people do not even need a sleeper wagon, they are OK with sleeping in regular coaches on the seats, while getting an even better price.
For a person like me, this sounds like the exact APPEAL of the whole thing. I would not take want to take trains where I am alone by myself for 8 hours straight. If I wanted privacy or being alone, I would take a plane. That's missing your target customers.
Just had a trip from Amsterdam to London for 80 euro one-way by eurostar train, and 100 euro back. in 4 hours to London instead of 4 hours in a queue at schiphol amsterdam airport. At that time there were no cheaper plane tickets to find, and we arrived in the center of London instead of one of London's airports that lie more than 100 km's from the city. Which would add a lot to the total travel cost.
Took the high speed rail in italy when I visited in May, and it was an excellent experience. Show up 10 minutes before the train leaves, buy tickets at the station for 50 euros, and get to the next large city in an hour, no hassle with security whatsoever, and you end up right in the middle of the city when you get off the train. The trains were clean, modern, and had plenty of space. Only comparable to high speed trains in China, although arguably better, since Italy is such a small country.
I'm a bit surprised you're this much in favour of privatizing the rail. Privatization of rail has largely been a failure worldwide. The UK is a famous example, but my own country it doesn't do much better. The simple problem at hand is that while private rail may or may not compete better (a big claim that needs bigger sources), it tends to cut services in areas where it hurts the most vulnerable people. Tiny communities that weren't doing all so well are now even more cut off from the rest of the world, cutting down their opportunities even further. Rail is not something that should make money directly. It is better suited as a force multiplier for the rest of your country's productivity. And no liberalisation or whatever is going to cause private companies to want to lose money. Which is fine. But let's not let them take up space on our existing networks, then.
Japan has a mix of public rail operators in more rural regions e.g. JR Shikoku, IR Ishikawa & private ones in more urban ones e.g. Tobu, Seibu, JR East around Tokyo
But is it a failure? British Rail under the British Transport Commission model or in other words traditional state ownership was an abject failure -- it steadily shrank from 1948 to 1968 and suffered from chronic underinvestment. Out went the BTC, to be replaced by a corporate board. But they didn't do much to start with -- the main thing to emerge was InterCity, a successful makeover of primary express services and a success almost from the start. Only with the abolition of BR's geographical operating regions sectorization and branding across the whole network from 1982 did things start to improve across the whole network. Ridership started to improve on local services as well as long distance services, albeit slowly; and revenues went back into some much needed capital investment. But since privatization ridership has gone up much faster, as the sector model is built upon with more new options, despite the deterrent effect of grossly inflated ticket prices. Now, here's the wrinkle. Government subsidy has also gone up with privatization. Is the outcome worth it? Probably. Ridership almost tripled from sectorization in 1982 to 2019 right before covid. But would this have happened without the subsidy? It's a good question; BR old timers will point out they were already on to something with sectorization, and could have delivered a similar outcome with lower fares than the private franchises due to avoiding the middlemen of train leasing companies and other outsourced services that BR's privatization created so many of. But the emerging experience in the EU suggests those private franchises themselves need not less competition, but more, because for now, like their sectorized predecessors under BR, they're localized monopolies and showing the pathologies you get with monopolies. Then again, Britain's network is far more intensely utilized than in most of Europe, and the question is where on earth they would accommodate new operators that are sprouting up all over continental Europe. The needs there are for investment, investment in longer trains to make better use of existing capacity, investment in better signaling to create more capacity, investment in new track and stations to ease bottlenecks and boost capacity still further. And that's something these train operating companies need government help for just as you see with road transport and to a certain extent with aviation as well.
I agree. He focused on trains as a method of transportation, but he forgot to mention that their existence as a transport is a consequence of their use for cargo haul. They excel at logistics inside a country, and they will continue to do so, not to mention many towns, at least here in Spain, benefit from the existence of a railway that would be pointless from just transport economics
I was looking for this comment! I did it last year, and for the extra money, I'll take the train rather than the cheap planes (but transport to and from the airport plus all the nightmarish security/check-in situations at so many airports at the moment.
I think it's worth noting that as these railways were (re)developed post-WW2, there was a real national security concern about having your railways able to link up directly with other countries because that meant they could use *your* railways to ship troops into your country if they invaded you (or if the Russians invaded)
Apparently, the Spanish were also paranoid an enemy nation could exploit their railways during an invasion, so they used a different gauge to make it that much harder
It turns out to be pretty easy to wreck the tracks. Ruin the sleepers between the rails. (And for more harrassment for the enemy ruin the foundation too)
You can go also from Paris (France) to Barcelona (Spain) directly by TGV too and it's not new (1100 Km) . It takes for now 6h30. It will be faster in the futur. There is still a part of the line which is not fast between Montpellier and Perpignan. About 165 Km to work on. Half of the remain is already planed (Montpellier - Bezier).
Here in Portugal we have a 200km/h line between Lisbon and Porto, but it's already being updated. There's a discussion here about lines specifications, with can isolate Portugal from trains from Spain, and, off course, from Europe trains
@@MrAronymous Cause they where thinking about change some standards for high speed trains. We don't have a train connection with Madrid since the beginning of covid, now they're planning resume this by the end of 2023. I'll try to now more about the standards and comment here again
@@MrAronymous It's exactly the Iberian gauge. EU wants to make a stardard for all Europe and Portugal it's against. They don't want to change everything, just the faster lines that's connect with another countries. Portugal fast line that goes from Faro to Braga in on EU radar
It's interesting to see the regular ticket approach to trains. This (if you are a Dutch citizen) is something you really do not even worry about. Here, we use to OV-Chipkaart which is essentially a card which you use to check in. You are free to bord any national train (with the exception of the DB ICE trains, those do require some additional paperwork) and just go on your journey. When you arrive at your desitnation, you check out again, and you pay the fare price of that route. Now, people of course would try to avoid checking in and out. They solved this issue by adding gates ot most stations, making it impossible to enter or leave if you do not check in and out.
Sadly that isn't possible in Germany at the moment, since there's no uniform ticket model for the whole country, each region has its own tariff association and ticketing system, so one card for the whole network would mean we'd have to standardise tickets across the country, and have DB get rid of its different pricing for long-distance trains...with our current lethargic politics that's never gonna happen lol
@@leDespicable Before the ov-chipkaart we had stamp cards for busses, different tickets for the main rail network and secondary networks, and the prices for train tickets were also not directly based on distance. It took a decade to fully implement it. Sure German politics gets in the way, but it really should be possible, be it with time and effort. Especially since the system was not designed by the government but rather a joint venture by the major operators. (Dutch railways + transport organization of 3 major cities + the largest bus operator)
I've been interailing across europe for 7 weeks, and i can say that some international train connections are better than others. And if i flew everywhere i'd be spending way less. Altough it is something i would do again because its still better than waiting in a line in an airport
It takes me 3h 30m to travel from Amsterdam to Paris by train. By plane is probably a bit faster. But the train station is in the middle of the city. You don't need to spend so much time to go through security and go through the airport itself. You pay less for ticket. More nature friendly. More leg space. Free wi-fi. Arrival is in the middle of the city. No need to wait for luggage on arrival. Not risking to have anything inside your luggage broken.
You forgot the best: Deutsche Bahn is now a Star Alliance member. As far as I know it is already possible to book ONE ticket for train + plane (Lufthansa). Also, Lufthansa has now Busses (!). You can collect miles by travelling by bus, as a connecting route or even the whole travel if faster than plane. You can basically now (or in near future) combine the best of both worlds for your trip.
Speaking of the north of Italy: I believe things will improve with the opening of the new Turin-Lyon HS railway, once it's finished. Travelling from Milan to Switzerland is very easy (Milan-Zurich takes 3 hours, Milan-Geneva takes 4 hours by train). Milan-Paris is affordable (tickets start from 29 euros) and takes around 7 hours by train. Milan-Lyon currently takes 5 hours. There should be more trains to reach München, in my opinion... and the North East of Italy needs more railway lines. The beaches north of Venice receive millions of tourists in the summer months and there is no railway line to go to these seaside resorts. Verona is connected to München, Treviso and Venice are well connected to Wien by train, but the line is slow. Domestic and international connections to Trieste need to be improved: there's no HS in Friuli Venezia Giulia, trains to Ljubljana are regional and Zagreb isn't even connected to Italy via railway. There is no Trieste-Wien train either, which is shocking, in my opinion. Railway lines travelling from Milan to the south of France also need to be improved. There should be a Milan-Marseille train... traffic will increase once the Milan-Genoa HS line opens in 2025/6.
There are some tracks scheduled to be build in south Germany since several years. They were planned to be completed when the new tunnel through the alpes will be finished. But it seems to be more difficult to build tracks between villages and towns than through hard rock. Because all citizens tell, the track should rather go through the neighboring towns land than through theirs'.
@@multa7053 I actually can't wait for it! I love visiting Germany, Austria and central Europe - the Brenner Tunnel will simplify and reduce train travel across Italy and the rest of Europe
@@carlomontecarlo7881 Yes, it will! You can already visit it as a guest but it's not being used currently because it's still under construction. It will be the longest tunnel for trains in the world then. It mainly reduces the distances Franzensfeste/Fortezza - Innsbruck and Munich. I've visited it a few years ago and it's huge. You should definitely visit it. And if you're visiting it, better stay in South Tyrol than in Austrian Tyrol. South Tyrol is way better in every aspect. If you're looking for Austria, better go to Kärnten or something.
I’ve got to say I am concerned about budget rail services. It’s part of the drive to lower costs-at all cost-through outsourcing and foreign-registered entities to pay staff less and offer fewer benefits. This is happening throughout society, and airlines are just one example. And as wages stagnate, the allure of budget travel options becomes stronger. It’s a race to the bottom and in the long run the only winners are the investors and shareholders.
Everybody wins. Your ticket prices go down, and the companies make more profit. Its simple comparative advantage. Have the countries/regions that can do the thing best for the cheapest do the thing.
@@thepuncakian2024 That "Econ 101" view of it is remarkably simplistic. How are the savings and profits generated? By paying workers less. They, in turn, have less money to return to the economy. The consumer that gets cheaper train tickets may well be seeing their own wages stagnate or fall in real terms. The only ones walking away with more money at the end of the day are the business owners and shareholders.
@@TheShortStory Most of the people who are working for these outsourced and foreign-registered entities aren't in your country anyways. They're the ones who are "getting paid less", not you. And relatively speaking they aren't necessarily even getting paid less. If they'd be making $2 an hour at another job or $3 an hour working for the budget airline company, then that's a win for them, and a win for the consumer who's paying less for their tickets. The only people that lose out are admittedly the ones that were working for the airlines before they started getting outsourced, and unfortunately many end up losing their jobs. But in the long run everyone is better off, as the increase in savings from cheaper ticket prices more than offsets the loss in revenue for those employees, many of who will be able to find a new job anyways.
@@thepuncakian2024 "Most of the people who are working for these outsourced and foreign-registered entities aren't in your country anyways." You are envisioning a certain kind of business where that's the case. Mostly, it's not. Most jobs need to be done in person, on location, by someone that can commute to the area. Be it cleaning services, maintenance, security, customer assistance, dispatch-hell even coding an app requires front-end developers that know the local language. Your view of this issue seems to be very narrowly targeted on IT/remote support roles, which are a small minority of all the services we utilise in our daily lives. The economic model we're relying on also works only as long as there's a lower-cost laborer somewhere else we can shift the work to. It is not sustainable, and I reiterate: in the long run the only winners are the owners of capital.
@@TheShortStory Ok, then I was mistaken. I assumed we were on the same page as to what outsourcing means, but apparently not. If a majority of the people that work in that sector are indeed from the countries where that business is being conducted, then that's not outsourcing. So then your statement of "its a part of the drive to lower costs... through outsourcing and foreign-registered entities" is incorrect. Also, being cheaper doesn't always mean the employees are being paid less. Take a store like Aldi for example, their food is cheaper, but a majority of their cost savings comes from the reduction in number of employees working at their stores compared to their competitors, such as not having to pay people to organize the shelves or collect the shopping carts, saving them money. The employees that do work there still make a comparable wage to their competitors, otherwise they wouldn't be working there and working for said competitors instead. For example with budget airlines, you'll see self-check-in kiosks where you check-in and tag your bags yourself and simply just hand the bag to the employee, saving time and reducing the number of employees they need to hire. If customers had serious qualms about the employees for these budget services being underpaid then they wouldn't be using them en masse like they are. Savings are much more important to the vast majority of people than the prospect of a relatively small number of employees working in this sector to begin with, potentially being underpaid. If they were being paid so much less than their traditional competitors, then that would be much more heavily reflected in their service. Underpaid workers typically don't make happy or friendly workers. Customer service at budget airlines isn't as good as the traditional airlines, sure, but it is currently not to the point where the service is so bad that people aren't buying tickets from them. If it gets to that point, then they'll be forced to pay their employees better, that or lose market share. Tl;dr: People like cheap shit. Let them buy cheap shit. Lastly, if you're not an owner of capital, then be an owner of capital! Its not very difficult, just put some money into the stock of these budget services. Their gains can be your gains too.
The real probleme with train is topography. If there's a big hill or a mountain to cross, plane will fly over but train either have to go trough (and it will become more expensive) or circle around (which will make the trip longer)
This is exciting. I've travelled most of those international routes you mentioned (London to Paris, Paris to Amsterdam, Italy to Munich via the night train, Prague to Budapest) and they are all great. I actually found them quite cost competitive, even before factoring in the cost of transport to and from airports (which can be a huge chunk of the overall journey, esp in the case of budget air travel from London). Even the night trains were competitive compared to transport + a night in a hotel that is covered by such a journey, and they are obviously more efficient time wise. when you consider the time spent traveling through an airport, and then on to and from your actual destination, high speed rail definitely stacks up. Its more pleasant during the journey, and its a lot more pleasant doing a single direct trip between city centres, than having to deal with airports. But it was surprising to see how long some obvious routes were, esp between Germany and the western countries. As you say at the end, the key, and key difference to air travel, is the route infrastructure. especially high speed rail, which is very expensive and requires a lot of planning and issues with environmental concerns and having to resume land. And when it comes to existing rail, some nations use different signalling systems or even rail guages making compatibility difficult. Construction of new corridors will likely require the buy in of the two nations involved, with some EU body overseeing the management of it. Individual governments will have to decide if its worth it, and even if its worth subsidizing, their side of an international corridor.
20 minutes from St Pancras to Euston (1:46)? Only if you're at death's door! 5-10 minutes at the most (I've done it many times), and there's a tube connection if you're too lazy to walk! And Birmingham is the second city of the UK, not Manchester. Pretty much all the other criticisms in the first couple of minutes stem from the fact the connections are transnational (and in the case of the UK, multicompany - Eurostar only take you to London, you have to get a train operated by a completely different company to go anywhere else). These days, SNCF has collaboration agreements with Deutsche Bundesbahn and TrenItalia, so each will run trains on the other's high speed lines - and I've used all three this year. SNCF to travel from Mannheim to Paris, TranItalia to travel from Paris to Lyon, SNCF to get from my home in Normandy to Paris. Eurostar is therefore not an exception (6:26) And I'd argue that Frankfurt is more important than Paris economically. Planes tend to be cheaper, because aviation fuel is taxed differently, something campaigners have long been trying to get rectified for reasons of both fairness and environmentalism (planes are much more polluting). I could go on, but that'll do for one comment, other than to say work is ongoing to level the playing field between planes and the train services of 27 different nations of the EU, plus the UK.
I also came here to correct Sam about Manchester being the second largest city of the UK....... Not even close. I'm pleased to see someone else has called this mistake out.
Let me explain my situation 😂, I live on the corner of the German, French and Swiss border. I use trains twice a day for many years. I have worked for more than five years in the industrial part of the train industry. The initial cost of setting up track is huge but often people disregard the fact that tracks need maintenance and a lot more than you think. That's why it's subsidised by the state. High speed tracks are even more expensive and complex. In Japan they have a separated network for high speed to insure quality and time. We're I live I can see the difference between the Swiss network that is reliable and on time, servicing each little stations. Whereas in France where there is a mixed network, some high-speed portion are reserved for high speed only. I see that the service is only linking routes than can generate money. They are closing little stations. Removing trains, and replacing a working service by something that became painful to use. Yes, you may find low fares ticket like easyJet but if don't plan your route it will be more expensive than before the deregulation. Over the last twenty years we got high speed which was nice, but then we lost smaller trains, closed stations, deregulated prices and the main issue became reliability... Infrastructure and train not working, transfer missed. The last year's they even separated sectors inside France which created the same problems from one sector to another. I see the train used by the middle class, the poor using low cost coaches. The richer using cars or regular flights from Swiss or Air France the prices are quite similar to Train but the expensive par is the parking ticket at the airport. I do miss the service. And I don't see how low cost trains will help the day to day users.
While it is true that the swiss network is indeed better, you can't expect the same network for France which is a country way less dense than Switzerland. Switzerland is made of lot of valleys and mountains, as less people live in the mountainous area, they're mostly concentrated in the valley which is ideal for trains. It's no coincidence that the two best countries for the rail network extensiveness are Japan and Switzerland (two dense and mountainous country where the population is concentrated in valleys and coastal area). France instead is full of plains sparsely populated which is is not ideal for a train network so you can only expect to see the bigger lines linking the big cities getting more and more important and the smaller lines closing. I'm french, yeah it's sad but it's not economically feasible.
@@flx4305 Good points, I should explain myself. I'll only talk of what I know, since I am a user, an actor and maybe a bit of a train's nerd. I'll talk about the lines between Montbéliard-Mulhouse. Belfort-Porrentruy. Basel-Strasbourg. While the construction of a dedicated track (LGV) brought here a fast link to Paris and Lyon as well as a solid connection to Zürich. I fully agree with you that terrain is always playing a catalyst role. Whereas in Japan they decided to build multiple set of track for the most busy lines (cf some dedicated to the shinkansen) in switzerland they rely on the ponctuality of the operators in order to fully saturate the dense network with often both ways single tracks. Moreover in both case they didn't forgot small stations which are still in use (with the exception of those in Japan where there are no user due to the population decline) Switzerland does have a lot of specialized train that are made to operates in mountains. My point is that France has made a choice to let down smaller stops & stations and in the same time opening to new actors routes on demand. I am clearly not happy with the decision, cause I remember using those omnibuses which were popular among elderly and people without cars. I might be sad seeing them gone over here. Is it a good decision or a bad one, who am I to tell. :) We'll see.
I have travelled from London to Paris, then to Brussels, then to Luxembourg City and on to cologne all by train during the summer. I would only take plane for long distance travel but its nothing compared to the fun experience of trains, witnessing the beauty of the countryside is just itself WOW, huge ass legroom, no restrictions on luggage, quite cheap, all in all better than planes.
Trains in Europe are pretty good, considering you do go from city centre to city centre. This means you don't have to book a taxi or pay for parking fees at an airport. I would say the only downside of trains is that international trains are limited. But buses are great for international travel. They can be very affordable even for long distances.
I know Ryan air is cheap, but it is so much worse than paying a little extra for a high speed rail train. Almost all HSR trains have free internet, cell service, double the leg room, and cafe cars. Not to mention the train starts in the centre of the city without stressfully tight security and luggage restrictions. I know some people are on a tight budget, but if you book train tickets early, they can be surprisingly cheap, and much better than air travel.
Trains are slower though
@@abdalhadifitouri131 yes, planes are faster then trains, but for travelling with a plane, there's a lot of extra time, that isn't flying. On shorter routes, trains are faster.
@@boudewijnb ryan air takes few hours for most routes with only few hours of waiting and is between countries meanwhile train takes more time than all waiting and the flying itself combined just to get between cities close to each other
Time is money, mate. Ain’t no one got time to travel on a slow train.
@@DoctorSkillz trains are way more pleasant than planes and u don't need to deal with airport bullshit. That's an easy 2 extra hours
When comparing air travel to train, you're forgetting one major metric: travel from airport to the city center. Trains take you from city center to city center, where the vast majority of people want to go. Often, airports are outside of the city and one must then travel from airport city center which often takes around 45 minutes each way (and also costs €). In addition, airports have security lines requiring an additional 45 minutes of travel; whereas, you can walk right onto a train without hindrance.
It depends. The author is from America I believe, where travel from home to the city center can be hellish, even worse than to the airport. But even where I lived in the UK, travel in to London to catch an international train was way longer than the local bus, or one stop on the train, or even bicycling to the nearest airport. Even in Europe, travel to the airport can be as easy as in to city center. And at one point, the international trains in London had security to go through, longish looking queues. And those inner city rail lines can be at capacity, no room to allow more trains without many kilometers of demolition.
Maybe they should split the train fares the same way as the total cost of going from city-to-airport-to-airport-to-city is split between ground and air transport. Travelers often don't factor in ground travel costs, so if there are "station fees" that are proportional to ground transport from an airport and the train fares are the only part of the final bill advertised, that might help market train travel.
"In addition, airports have security lines requiring an additional 45 minutes of travel; whereas, you can walk right onto a train without hindrance."
For now.
@@zaixai9441 In Spain you have to go through airport-type security before you can enter trains.
Right now you can add in 2-3 hours of extra time in security in some airports. There's a Europe-wide lack of security personnel on airports so they can get absolutely swamped.
A case study in trains vs planes: Shibuya-Shi to Hiroshima-Shi, a route my wife and I end up on every time we're in Japan. Many sources will tell you that's a 1.5 hour flight vs 4.5 hours by Shinkansen. Both are approximately the same cost. What no one tells you is flying involves taking a 1.5 hour train ride to Narita Airport, getting to the airport at least hour early, and Hiroshima Airport is an hour outside city center. When all is said and done, it takes at least five hours and lots of tedium before you're in Hiroshima city center.
Conversely, going by Shinkansen, it's around 15 minutes from most train stations around Tokyo to the Shinkansen terminal in Shinagawa station, waiting on the platform for another 5 to 15 minutes for your train to show up, then relax on the Shinkansen for 4.5 hours, before landing directly in Hiroshima city center. Shinkansen offers far more leg room, and much more comfortable seats.
At the same cost, and same time after including all peripheral factors, one of these routes is far easier and far more relaxing.
That is the big advantage trains have on mid distance travel. Trains are so much more convenient and comfertable even then legacy airlines.
And the cheap airlines like ryanair usually use small airports even further away from the city they are serving with more limited connectivity.
Airtravel could easilly be done away with acros most europe if the train network was better interconnected and run as efficient. Which it seems is something the eu also realises.
Let's hope it now finaly happens.
The way the Japanese did HSR is the best. Of course, other countries had constraints they had to work with (political, geographical and infrastructure).
Dedicated and optimized tracks for high speeds, stations in the city centers and fantastic equipment and most importantly, political will and vision to see this project through over the past 60 years. It’s not perfect and came at great cost, but the original designers and visionaries of the Shinkansen can rest assured in their graves that their legacy lives on as planned.
Also air travel causes more pollution than electric high speed trains
@@baronvonlimbourgh1716 About the remote airports Ryanair uses. Before I had real money, I had great fun travelling around Europe by low-cost airlines to those secondary airports. The trick was to choose flights to interesting places, regardless of the city they claim to serve. Take Italy. When low-costs fly to Milan or Venice, they don't fly to the main airports there but to places up to 80 kms away. That's Bergamo and Treviso respectively, but both towns are well worth a visit, and well connected to Milan and Venezia. Paris-Beauvais is 90 kms from Paris but Beauvais has one of the world's finest (and largest) gothic cathedrals among other things. Girona and Tarragona aren't Barcelona but Girona is a medieval gem and Tarragona is replete with Roman monuments. Murcia, which they call Alicante-South is gorgeous, Rodez is a lovely town in France's central hills, and Nuremberg has great museums. I could go on for days.
@@ixlnxs sure, that can be a great way to discover and have fun. But that is chosing your destination depending on where flights go to. That is generally not how people holliday or use air travel. And i don't think a majority uses ryanair that way.
It is a great example of induced demand and how these cheap airlines create their own markets.
"Airports exist effectively everywhere" (17:30) is a very American view. If you want an airport that has actual service to useful other places you need to go to the nearest major city. Rails on the other hand do exist almost everywhere. Even small towns can have local train lines, and if they do not then there is probably a frequent bus service to the nearest town that does.
In Spain we seem to like to build lots of expensive, unused shit: there are lots of abandoned airports and some of the high speed rail routes at some point were used by less than 10 people per day if I remember it well. I feel like we should focus more on making local infrastructure better first and then building infrastructure less people would be benefited from (for example: L9 in Barcelona is 15 years late, while La Sagrera and Sant Andreu stations are more than 20 years late on its construction, and the region of Extremadura is a meme here for not having railway xd)
And don't make me talk about corruption on construction projects, that's even worse...
Yup, that is the difference. Sure you need to put down train tracks, but you can put a station anywhere on the path, every small village along the route can have a train station where the train can stop. But not every village can build an airport. They tend to be close big urban cities. So if you don't live there, you have to take the train to the airport anywhere.
🤣
In Belgium we somehow have FIVE airports...
We used to have way more train stations but sadly many are removed or downgraded
So true, especially in india trains make this country livable since everywhere, be it a village a city or a town u can reach there by train, but airports here aint so good. I live in banglore india and the airport is literally 55kms from the city lol so trains are vastly better to reach a nearby city
I honestly cannot wait for a fully interconnected high speed rail network in Europe. It took me a full day of travel to get from Copenhagen to Bath, and that was on almost entirely high speed rail. Being able to get from say London to Barcelona entirely on high speed rail, even on a single ticket (not an interrail pass), would be the dream.
You have plenty of time to sort your ticket out on that day of travel. If time is an issue, take a flight.
London to Barcelona is actually quite doable with High-speed rail. London to Paris by Eurostar takes less than three hours. After switching in Paris, a TGV leaves twice a day to Barcelona. This, in total, takes about 11 hours.
I agree that I could still be a lot faster. If the same Eurostar would pass Paris, which an existing high-speed line makes possible (LGV Interconnection Est) and would head straight for Barcelona with only stops in cities like Lyon and Montpellier, this trip could easily be done in 9 hours. The future Montpellier-Perpignan high-speed line will cut journey times by another hour roughly.
Just for comparison thats an 18 hour drive across 6 contries
But it's always going to be much more expensive and much slower than a budget airline. It would be cool for sure, but... unless you're a rail enthusiast, trains will never be able to compete with planes for long distance.
@@QuantumBraced I would not make that call so easily to be fair.
If you look at prices for low-cost trains, then you see that they can easily compete with planes on quite some routes. For example, a trip from Tourcoing in the very North of France, to Montpellier in the very south, can cost as little as 16 Euros with Ouigo, and takes 5 hours and 9 minutes. These cities lay 800km apart. Barcelona-Madrid can be as cheap as 7(!) Euros with Avlo trains or 9 Euros with Ouigo trains and take between 2:30h and 3:00h. No budget airline can compete with that.
Now, you may argue that the first route is entirely French, and Ouigo is part of French state operator SNCF which only offers these cheap tickets by Ouigo to be able to raise prices for their Inoui services, which take up the majority of the high-speed trains in France. However, on the Barcelona-Madrid route, Ouigo also offers trains for these low prices. This means that it brings them money. They can make money by offering these low fares. And exactly that makes budget trains a very interesting case beside regular, more premium services like TGV Inoui, AVE and Frecciarossa. They can make money, even by offering lower fares than airlines. Of course, demand should be high enough. The trains probably have to be almost sold out in order to make money. But as long as that is the case, these trains can theoretically be cheaper than planes on many routes.
Of course, there is a certain distance limit. Tourcoing-Montpellier is very competitive by train while being an 800km route, but with every extra km, of course, planes have an extra advantage, because trains will never have a higher top speed than planes. However, this time-element can be earned back by the price element. Flying will become more expensive from 2025, as the EU will not give free CO2-rights to airlines anymore. This means that on routes like Paris-Barcelona, there can easily be an extra 30 Euros of costs for the airline per passenger, just because of these CO2-rights that they have to purchase. For a premium airline like KLM or British Airways, this might not even the biggest issue, as their tickets are relatively expensive anyway. But for a price fighter like Ryanair, an extra 30 euros can mean doubling their ticket price from 30 to 60 Euros. And CO2-rights are exactly something trains have little to do with. In fact, they might even receive extra free rights, the EU has stated. These rights can be sold by these train companies.
One other thing where trains are very good at, is serving several stops along the route. The Tourcoing-Montpellier route is not served by airlines, simply because there probably is not enough demand. This results in flight times between these cities of 5 hours and 10 minutes with transfer, funny enough 1 minute slower than the train. Here extra check-in and security times are not counted yet, as well as time to and from the airport. Ouigo, on the other hand, probably also does not sell enough tickets from Tourcoing to Montpellier, but can also collect passengers from Paris, Lyon, Valence and Nîmes or drop them off at these stations. This is a major advantage of rail, because a stop is very short compared to the theoretical comparable stop time for planes. Smaller cities that cannot have airline service can still have rail service, while routes between big cities often have enough demand for budget high-speed rail anyway.
So yeah, trains will be slower on very long distances, often above 1000km. However, they definitely can be cheaper than flying, especially from 2025.
I think the Thalys service should've been mentioned in this video. It's a french-operated train network that spans France and the neighboring countries Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany. Their trains are able to operate in the different rail standards of all countries seamlessly, avoiding any need for changing the locomotive at borders. This is part of an EU effort to connect Paris, Brusseles, Cologne, Amsterdam and London by rail, with dedicated border crossing tracks and guidelines on how trains have to work in order to operate in all countries.
Excellent point! It would've been nice if those services have gotten some praise.
They're also a great example of how interoperability has generally not been solved on the infrastructure side, by adopting common international standards for overhead line systems and train protection, but on the train operator side, by buying trains that provide the flexibility to work with all the different systems.
That said, Thalys *was* originally a case of governments collaborating to create an international offering, having originally been owned (and still partly being owned) by government-owned train operators.
Yes indeed, also a huge miss in this video is the European rail traffic management system (ERTMS) which will standardizes all the different systems in use by the various countries in to one European system. Thus not needing to change locomotives or install expensive alterations for different countries, and also making it easier for the train operators to cross borders and operate trains cross border.
Also missing the colab between DB & NS having a semi-highspeed route between Amsterdam-Cologne- Basel connecting also 3 countries, with also stops in big cities in between.
I traveled through many european countries by train recently, and I fell in love with Thalys. Very short travel times, very cheap tickets, and still had by far the best service.
Took a Thalys then a TGV in nothern France in the same day. Thalys was WAAAAAAAY better
The issue with continental train travel in Europe is that Germany sits at the center of most connections. And unfortunately, Germany decided in the 80s that there is no need for a dedicated high speed rail infrastructure. This means that high speed trains have to slow down in most parts of Germany and are often plagued with massive delays. Changing this now is almost impossible. It would cost hundreds of billions to buy up new land and build a dedicated HSR network.
I think there are a few wrong assumptions in this video.
1. Europe did not choose to develop these networks, they mostly existed in some form or another. look at how Germany spends money on the road network compared to the train network. They are not developing much, they are barely maintaing a functional network.
2. Trains compete with Airplanes on Tourist flights. This is in my opinion the fatal flaw in this video. Most Countrys are trying to stop short-distance "hops" via planes and target buisness travelers. Here Rail comes into play. It makes sense to construct high speed rail between Frankfurt and Cologne since these are major buisness hubs. There was no incentive to interconnect these high speed segments further to London because that is already aircraft teritory (time-wise).
3. France is a bad example. Treat France like a gigantic hub-and-Spoke country. Want to get anywhere, better go through Paris. There are only a few interconnecting trains that leave out paris. Germany is a better example.
4. No advocacy for night-trains. Biggest advantage of rail. Enter a Train in Munich at 22:00 and wake up in Rome the next morning. Amazing!
The general terms and conditions apply (Trainstation closer to city than airport, Shinkansen to TGV/ICE is no fair comparision, and so on and so forth). I Agree that cross-Border-Rail needs to get better buit itinerarys are not the problem. A centralized Booking system is needed, that takes all operators into account and gives you one Ticket with full passenger-rights. Check out John Worth on Twitter and his corssBorderRail Project, very insightfull.
Paris already goes to Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and others direct
France is such a bad example that it has its own math problem, the French railway metric (German: Französische Eisenbahnmetrik). It demonstrates how there can be other possible metrics for pathfinding etc than the usual euclidean direct-route.
@@PhilfreezeCH UK seems to use the French style metric. It's annoying.
something like skyscanner for rail tickets?
Or at least agree on a standardized QR code or something for the ticket. A few years ago I was able to get a ticket with MÁV from Budapest to München, but only as a paper ticket. However if I split the journey up to the 3 countries I could've got digital tickets. I think they now improved on this recently, but only on the hungary-Germany railjets, not the swiss one for example.
Here in England we were told our railways were being opened to the market, yet there is next to no competition. Instead, there is a network of private monopolies which pay their shareholders dividends out of government-subsidies.
I hope Europe learns from your mistake because this TH-camr surely hasn't bothered
This is exactly what privatization did. This video is so naive
Unfortunately it seems like yeah England is the counter example... It worked quite nicely in Japan, Germany, Italy and Spain... Maybe because England don't really have high speed lines ? Most regional trains in Europe did not have privatization.
@@danielsykes7558 No, the way Britain privatised its railways is naive. This video isn't talking about privatisation at all, it's talking about liberalisation. That means you keep your state-owned railways, but you allow private companies to run competing services on routes they believe will be profitable. Entirely different kettle of fish.
England does have state / government run train services just that it's run by other countries governments 😂
The absolute only thing that I am afraid of is that the high-speed network in Europe is going to be like buses in the UK. To travel from the outskirts of Manchester to the city centre, you have to get two tickets from two different bus operators with zero connectivity assurance. In Germany we have the trains which guarantee you arriving and we have so called public transport associations which bundle all different companies under one ticket. I want that for Europe's international high speed rail network.
here a bus ticket lasts for full trip on that bus or u can change busses as many times as you want for 30 minutes. Very convenient in a city where youd switch bus 2-3 times. But only in that city
You can buy a system 1 any bus day ticket, or weekly pass.
To be fair Manchester is currently trying to implement a London-style connected transport network so it’s easier & cheaper to travel into/across the region, including busses AND trains (and trams)
It’s all under one company though ran by the council rather than several different ones. I have high hopes for it
And yet DB doesn't even offer this kind of guarantee for services in which even though you book through them, has to transfer onto the train of another state operator like SNCF from France, or Thalys in the Benelux.
Yes, but there are plans for greater Manchester to have a single public transport ticket system like London does. Thanks Andy Burnham!
There is also a major flipside to rail privatization that i wish would have been mentioned in the video: Private companies will usually only run services on routes between major cities, while public rail operators also have to serve non-profitable routes to small cities and villages. This is why private companies can easily undercut the public rail operators in ticket prices and still be profitable. The loss in ticket sales to the public rail operators as a result of the new market competition can therfore be seen as a handout to the private competitors by the taxpayer.
yeppp
To be fair, though, many countries (my perspective is from the US) basically do the same to other forms of transportation as well. A lot of commercial traffic is moved by road and a greater share of the damage done to roads is done by trucks, while the entire tax base shoulders the bill for it. Air traffic is usually handled by public ATC. In the US, the FAA handles that while the TSA handles all security and many publicly-run airports are subsidized by taxes, tolls, or parking fees. The way I see it, all these European governments are doing is treating the rails the same way roads and air infrastructure are treated - as public necessity rather than private property.
@@cco53587 that's what's already done. Liberalization puts this in jeopardy
Wendover and other channels are unrepentant shills for neoliberal gutting of all aspects of public infrastructure. They can't wait to whitewash the next pump and dump scheme of the billionaire owner class for peanuts.
@@cco53587 difference here is that trucks transport our stuff. To our tax paying factories.
A small correction, it takes a maximum of 10 minutes to walk from Euston to St Pancras. The stations are incredibly close. It’s a 1 minute tube journey too. Also, it is possible to book a through ticket from Paris to Manchester.
Yep, i noticed a lot of mistakes with this video!
Yeah it'd be easier to point out the parts that aren't completey made up. Idk who this American is lecturing us about Europe, doubt he's even been on a European train
You do have to know the way to walk it. I remember once arriving in St Pancras from Brussels with very little time to catch a train to Liverpool. Getting down into the Tube taking the train and emerging into Euston station took more than a minute but I made the connection with seconds to spare. On that occasion I was travelling on separate tickets. Theoretically it is possible to buy Eurostar tickets to destinations beyond London but in practice I found it very difficult.
Yeah, Wendover really messed a bunch of this video up lol
just did this 1 hour ago lmao
The main problem of rail transport in Europe is not at all a question of market liberalisation. In fact, there is no example of railway liberalisation that has led to a long-term improvement in service. The main problem is related to the infrastructure. In addition to the lack of high-speed tracks to connect different countries, there are different industrial standards between countries and even within countries. For example, the track gauge is not the same in Spain as in the rest of Europe, so it is technically not possible to use the same vehicles between Spain and the rest of Europe. Then there are different electrifications. The Germanic countries use electricity at 15000V 16.7hz, Italy works with 3000V 50hz, France has had the intelligence to use 3 different electrification voltages (25000V, 3000V and 1500V). And finally, the safety systems integrated into the tracks are not the same. France uses crocodile, TVM300, TVM 430, ETCS1 and ETCS2, Switzerland uses ETCS 1 and 2, Germany uses ETCS 1 and 2 and ZUB, etc. So a company that would like to make a Prague-Barcelona train via Munich, Zurich, Geneva, Lyon, Marseille, would have to buy machines capable of accepting 3000V DC, 15'000V AC, 25'000V AC and 1500V DC, be equipped with ETCS 1, ETCS 2, TVM 300, TVM 420, ZUB, LZB, PZB and crocodile. And with this train, it would not be possible to run outside the high-speed line in Spain because the track gauge would be different. Moreover, if the transport company operates multiple lines, it would have to have several different trains fleets, as it is still other systems in other countries. This is why international trains are rare in Europe: it is excessively complicated to produce international trains, which only represent a very small share of the market. And you can easily see that this is the real problem, because between different countries that use aproximately the same standards (Switzerland, Germany and Austria), the international service is of excellent quality. Liberalisation will not change these industrial barriers, only strong political action can overcome this problem
Thank you!!
Moreover, market liberalisation has a hidden catch: the profits go away from the public and into private hands, while the risk remains at the government side, because transport is a service that must remain guaranteed.
The disastrous working conditions that were created in the aviation industry due to its liberalisation are now also beginning to develop in the European railway industry.
There's just so much more important things to consider than dull growth, amount of passengers and cost. Envision a life where a person sleeps in Barcelona, works in London and travels every day up and down because it's cheaper at the bottom of the bill. Is that the world we want to live in?
In many cases, the liberalization is even significantly worsening the situation - most connections taken over by private operators end up with lowered capacities, delays, no replacement trainsets in case of malfunctions, and lower comfort. In borderline cases even travel safety is worsened (less train maintenance, less qualified staff, old rolling stock, etc.), which is an enormous red flag. All this is to lower costs and improve the pure gain into private pockets (and since most regional train lines are heavily paid for by the state anyway, bye-bye tax money). I traveled most of Europe by train, and private operators are usually the worst experience you can have - both regional and long-distance. Trains are PUBLIC transport; they should be provided mainly by the state (not for free necessarily). That isn't to say these operators can't have private competition, but it needs to be held to standards, ESPECIALLY in SAFETY!
@@monder1060 i know. There is only one reason to liberalise. And I'm talking about a slight liberalisation. Slight liberalisation (i.e. the tendering of concessions for lines) allows, in the federal states, to organise each type of transport on the scale that is politically relevant. For example, in Switzerland, national transport is organised by the SBB, which is owned by the federal state, regional transport is generally organised by companies owned by the canton (for exemple TPF in canton Fribourg or BLS in canton Bern), and urban transport in large cities is organised by companies owned by the municipalities (for exemple TL in Lausanne or BernMobil in Bern). But in this case it is a peudo-liberalisation because there is no private actor. There is just competition between public agencies. And there is no choice for the passenger: it's the concession of the line that is put out to tender, but once the concession is granted, the system operates as a monopoly.
You are mostly right, but Spain actually uses standard gauge in most of their High Speed Rail infrastructure. There are also some variable gauge trains that can run on both iberian and standard gauge
@@bastian7323 Yes, there are variable gauge machines. But as I said, it is an additional industrial complexity that requires specific equipment and specific investments, but only a very small part of the market. In fact, the proof is that Spain has one of the lowest rates of use of its high-speed network in the world. In most countries, there are many high-speed trains that start from a medium-sized city, run for a hundred km on the standard network and then finish the journey to a large city via the high-speed network. This allows the number of destinations that can be reached with high-speed trains to be multiplied without the need to invest large sums of money in high-speed lines. Spain cannot do this, which is why its network is largely underused. This shows that even if the technical solution of the variable gauge bogie exists, in reality it is almost never used because it is too complex.
Moreover, this inability to use the standard network has a perverse effect on high-speed trains. In the event of a disturbance on a high-speed line, it is impossible to bypass the disturbed area. For example, last year the line between Bellegarde and Bourg-en-Bresse in France collapsed, making it impossible for Geneva-Paris TGVs to pass through for several months. The trains were simply diverted to another line to the south, which made the journey 20 minutes longer, but the trains were able to continue running. In Spain, the slightest problem on a high-speed line blocks all traffic until the track is cleared
I live in Austria near the tripoint with Germany and Switzerland and I use international trains here every day. They are excellent compared to almost everywhere else in Europe and only run by state owned railways (DB, SBB, ÖBB). On my daily commute I will use a ÖBB local train into Switzerland and there I can connect onto other swiss domestic services departing 3 minutes later. If I want to visit my family in Germany, I'll take an austrian local train to the next larger station, where an international high speed train, coming from Switzerland and jointly operated by the three state owned companies, will take me to Munich where I can get a connection onto a DB ICE minutes later. That works because all three companies synchronize their schedules and offer joint tickets to everywhere in the respective countries. Flixtrain runs part of the route too, but they are never an option for me, because they just don't integrate with the rest of the journey. They can do point to point, but they add zero value to the entire network.
Ouigo uses TGVs equipped for both France and Spain, but purely inside Spain. They waste vehicles that could be used for Paris to Barcelona services, which would be much better for the network, but probably don't make as much money as domestic spanish routes. Or Trenitalia, who now run a service from Milan to Lyon minutes apart from an SNCF service, yet at the same time refuse to support the joint DB-ÖBB Eurocity connecting Munich to Verona. Sure, it may be profitable, but the outcome for the passengers could be much better, if instead of competing for money, the different operators would work together like they do between Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
And Flixtrain doesn't really operate to Switzerland. Yes, the terminus station is Basel Badischer Bahnhof, which is on swiss territory, but owned and operated by Deutsche Bahn under german operational rules. Flixtrain wouldn't even be allowed to continue to Basel SBB, because services that don't integrate with the coordinated timetable and accept the swiss national ticket system are simply not allowed in the country.
the only thing that frustrates me about our trains here in austria is that driving tends to be a lot faster than rail on most routes
Switzerland is the best country in the world in terms of rail services. Watch the recent Justbikes video about this topic, very insightful
@@FlyingMaxFr Switzerland is pretty good, but it doesn't beat Singapore in terms of trains.
@ maybe, but Switzerland is more of a standard-sized country with a model you could export in many countries as well as it has all kinds of landscapes. Singapore is all-flat, densely populated and very small in size!
@ Weird comparison there, but sure.
Does Singapore have tiny villages in the alps that are nonetheless fairly well connected by public transportation?
It would make more sense to compare Singapore to dense metro areas like Paris (or Tokyo, although Tokyo metro area has a much higher population and larger area than Singapore)
Sleeper trains are the thing I miss the most after I moved to Berlin from Moscow. In Russia you can get over 1000 km overnight in pretty much any direction, and have a decent sleep lying down, but in Berlin I only have sleeper train connection to Zurich, Vienna, Stockholm and Amsterdam, and the trains are ancient.
If you travel in a bed, you don't need the super high speed rail, it's actually sometimes better to go slower so that the train doesn't start too late/arrive too early, travel time overnight should be at least 8 hours
I've always been amazed at the idea that Russia has such a developed train system. It's just such a big place.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 Russia has invested so much into its train infrastructure specifically because the country is so large. Trains vastly outperform other forms of land-based transportation due to their efficiency. It'd be great if we could get such investment into them in the US too (which is sad because the US used to have one of the most developed rail networks in the world). Plus, it'd make our roads better because we wouldn't have to drive as much.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 to be fair it's only well developed and updated on most popular directions, mostly through the European part, and on mid range only. It makes sense to take a train overnight (500-1000 km depending on a train), but when it's 16 hours or longer (1000 or more), you'd rather fly. The Transsiberian is pretty much for tourists only now.
The Russian Railways used to operate direct trains to western Europe as well. A direct sleeper train had operated between Paris and Moscow since the 1980s but, in 2020, sadly was withdrawn. I'm glad I got to experience it once in 2017, though. It passed through Strasbourg, Erfurt, Berlin, Poznan, Warsaw, Terespol, Brest, Minsk, Orsha, Smolensk on the way and it was a very interesting and enjoyable way to start my holiday in Russia.
Russia is still a great place to visit though, even if its harder now. The culture, history, people, architecture are like nowhere else. Also, everything is so much bigger in Russia than anywhere else in Europe.
Yeah I don't understand why night trains aren't more common. I'd much rather start my trip at 12PM and arrive at 9AM taking 9 hours with a slow sleeper train than have to wake up at 4AM so I can rush to the station at 5AM and catch the high speed train that gets there at the same time by blasting down the tracks at 300km/h the whole way. If you're a tourist, this also saves you one day of hotel room expense.
Same when traveling by car, I always start my trip at night so I get there in the early morning and I still have a whole day, and also the roads are empty and it's a pleasure to drive.
I like your videos, but like some people in the comments, I disagree with a lot of what you said here. As a European, I don't think trains need competition/to be opened to the market. It is proven by the opening to competition in France, where most companies want to compete with the SNCF (French national railway company) on its profitable railway lines (between Paris and Lyon for example).This creates an issue where the nationalized company, who are made by the government to operate in non-profitable areas (namely the regional trains which need to be subsidized), start having competition in the only places where they gain money. If it creates more demand and they manage to stay afloat, fine. If they get killed on the profitable lines/start making less money there, the overall balance of the national company starts losing money, and guess which lines get cut: regional trains.
Competition doesn't necessarily mean opening more lines/more services, since these are only driven by the potential of earning profit. Smaller cities and regional centers are then thrown into a deadly spiral: less trains because of the market, less people want to live there, less demand so even lesser trains etc.. When the state is providing transportation as a service to its citizen, this doesn't happen as much (depending on the state's objectives of course)
Also, companies are often driven by short term profits. They are often unable to think more than 5 years ahead, with investors wanting a return on their money, and that sooner than later. (There are of course counter examples to this, but I think you can agree it is the main trend). States have the ability to think about what will good for the country in 10, 20, 30+ years. Of course this is limited by our democratic processes, where our leaders want to please the citizens for re-elections, but still they have to think about what the citizens want for the long term in order to get re-elected.
In Germany, for regional lines there is a different kind of competition: train operators compete about who offers the best service for the lowest subsidies (from the regional governments, which in turn gets money assigned for this purpose by the federal government). This seems to work out relatively well (both DB Regio and many private companies operate lines), and is independent of the long-distance direct customer-facing competition.
@@PauxloE this sounds like the system the UK has, although the private companies are paid directly by the national government. During the pandemic, the government had to step in to take over since the private companies couldn't make a profit. We aren't returning to the old system!
@@jakkjhyu The UK state owns the physical rail network. The train operators just run the train services using leased trains.
People complaining about liberalization of rail after watching a that demonstrated quiet well that liberalization has lead to great growth in rail and even more in air transit.
ÖBB (Austrian State Railways) are doing it right. They have brought back international night services across most of Europe and plan to expand greatly.
Sadly their national high speed train, the „Railjet“ is sadly overpriced aswell as other train classes.
Same with the swedish Snälltåget. It runs from Stockholm to Malmö and overnight through Denmark and further into Germany before ending in Berlin.
@@funkyhetzer6624 Really? I live in Austria and we don't have specific prices for the Railjet... We only have general prices for distances, no matter what train you take. Also in comparison to Germany it's way cheaper.
@@funkyhetzer6624 Overpriced in comparison to what?
Rail travel is very often cheaper than travelling by car if you factor in all costs of owning and operating a car.
And air travel is heavily privileged as well: airlines pay _no_ taxes on fuel, no sales tax on international tickets, ATC is basically free as well, and landing fees on airports also dont cover the costs (airports make the majority of revenue with the duty free shops - which again don't contribute to the country's taxes).
@@dezzmotion4475 Eh, well, no, you don't really base prices on distance unless it's a local line, and that's mostly because that travel portion is subject to local transport authority pricing and it's zonal. It's a mess, really.
For long distance trains, it's a mix of distance and also demand, not to mention the immediacy. If I wanted to buy a ticket from Vienna to Melk, or from Vienna to Salzburg, I can expect to either pay 20€ at the dumbest time imaginable, maybe even 15€ if it's not only dumb, but also 2 months into the future, or I can get screwed and pay 80€ if I want to go right now. Or this weekend. And even worse, the price also depends on where I'm traveling from and to. It can be cheaper to buy a ticket from a random village east of Vienna, or even from Bratislava than to buy a ticket from Vienna to wherever you want to go. Because more people travel from Vienna, so naturally they should be taxed for that and pay 70€ for a ticket instead of 35€.
So, all in all, Austria and Germany can't really compete on ticket prices because they employ the exact same pricing model. That's also why talking about ticket prices in these regions is very difficult and stories differ wildly. I only know of Belgium where train prices are truly only based on distance travelled, exclusing countries east of the Iron Curtain where this exact nationwide pricing strategy mostly remains to this day, but even that's changing.
this man is realllly dedicated to involving planes in his vids
wendover productions was watching planes, trains, and automobiles the movie and he was just like.. " what if it was just planes, planes, and planes"
Better than bricks lol
welcome to wendover productions
@UCFITX-OVvmIcwzKCFenJ9kQ because some people still find it funny. It’s an innocent joke that shows you enjoy the show and like the stuff Sam puts out.
Be nice. You might find the joke old, but not everyone is a jaded and boring as you are.
High speed trains are just planes without wings.
Low-cost high-speed trains are a very interesting and successful concept. They attract different passengers than usual high speed trains, most of them don't take the train regularly. Conversely, most frequent train users don't take them, because of impractical schedules or stop locations, and also often they have passes and frequent traveler programs that don't work on these trains, so both systems have similar prices for them.
I travel by TGV many times per year, and I've used Ouigo only once in ten years, and only because there were no regular TGVs at the time I wanted to travel. I don't snob them, they're just impractical and as expensive as regular trains for me, as I have a -27 year old SNCF card.
Personnally, I also have the card you're talking about and it still makes sense for me to use OuiGo sometimes (I'm talking specifically of the Paris-Lyon route). OuiGo is just so cheap, if you book a ticket several months in advance it has very interesting prices. Though I think you're right about the impractical schedules.
Does an old SNCF card get you better prices?
@@joseville Yes, I get 30% off on all long-distance trains (except Ouigo) and sometimes there are extra sales. On short and medium-distance trains (TER), I get between 0 and 50%,depending on the region
You know what's also interesting? A country that has more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined. And it is all state funded and operated. If they can do it, so can we. Instead of having these pathetic low cost slow trains.
they are evidently not a "very successful concept" since most of them fail to live on without government life support
Great video, but you left out two key aspects :
- First, since Europe has been united only recently by regulations, national rail has been built with different rules, which means that for instance, the voltage differs from country to country. This means the trains you use nationally cannot always cross the border, so you have to have specialised machinery if you want to open a cross-country service. It's possible, since it exists, it's just a hurdle more.
- You still have to account for geography. Though it's not an issue to put a line between France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, because all of those borders are really flat, it's much harder to cross the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, and the Alps between France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and even Germany. It's definitely possible to have train lines, but not high speed ones (which explains why Switzerland doesn't have any high speed lines, even though they have some of the most efficient and qualitative network), and crossing remains difficult. Today, it's only through huge investment like rail tunnels that mountains can be navigated efficiently time wise, like between Lyon, France and Turin, Italy (a good example of very high cross-border investment in Europe).
This is one important factor. As an example there are trains that go over the Öresund bridge from Sweden to Denmark. But all the trains have to have special equipment to be able to switch over to the kind of electricity used in Denmarks rail system since it differs from Sweden. So halfway across the bridge the power used changes.
Then add the fact that different countries use different standards for the actual rails, which makes it physically impossible to use the same trains everywhere.
The add that different countries use different singaling (which EU is trying to fix with ERTMS) so that the trains cannot cross borders.
This makes it so that even if you can book one ticket to get from Stockholm to Berlin, you will have to change trains 2-3 times or if you go with a night train you will be on the same train but the train will change locomotives and use a train ferry along the way. Add to that the cost and travel time is both several times that of flying, then its not very enticing. The travel time is also a big factor if you want to go on a long weekend. You will have to use more vacation time to spend the same amount of time on your destination.
There's HSR track between Spain and France
Switzerland could have high speed train services but the country is too small for it to be profitable on a national scale. If you can cross the Swiss alps north to south in 2 hours there's not much need for much more expensive much faster trains
@@tobias9619 Yes and no. I can definitely tell you that there would be demand for higher speed between cities like Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Basel, Zurich, and others. Today, depending on where you're going, and especially to the south where there are less direct connections (and more mountains), it's quicker by car. From north to south might not take much time, but even though the cities are close from one another, it still takes half a day to get from one side of Switzerland to the other (for reference, takes less than an hour by plane). It's very much a question of space and convenience, where high speed would probably have more drawbacks than anything.
Also, I don't think the SBB works only on a profitability model. It definitely is subsidised, though even if it wasn't, it would probably be viable under some conditions.
Your first point in particular reminds me of when I was in Europe for study abroad some years back and how, when taking the train between Berlin and Prague, we ended up having an extensively longer stop in Děčín each way in order to swap between the Czech (České dráhy) and German (Deutsche Bahn) locomotives.
"Dense and efficient networks of passenger railways"
*Shows British trains*
Man, this is the best comedy channel on TH-cam
Be glad he didn't show American ones lol
That's what private companies want. They will play along a few years and then once they have the public service in their hands the rest of Europe will end up like the UK railway system
In fairness, Britain and Germany probably have the densest rail networks in Europe.
Amtrak:
@@karlosbricks2413British railways definitely aren't efficient. They are both a joke and a nightmare.
Another factor that wasn't mentioned is that airports many of the budget airlines use are much further away to the destination/departing city. Sometimes requiring an hour or more of Taxi or train. Airport security, baggage limitations, delays and cancelations make most routes better by train.
ill have you know not all people live around train stations either... and the bus or car ride that will get you to and from the stations significantly raise the carbon footprint of trains
@@LoneWolf-wp9dn still way better than planes though
@@LoneWolf-wp9dn maybe in the USA. In europe, we just take the metro or tram to the train station. All are electric powered, and even small towns have substantial tram systems
@@LoneWolf-wp9dn I've yet to know anywhere in Europe where you are close to an airport but not a bus stop or train station
@@lik7953 i lived in europe all my life... traveled in about all the countries and lived in 3 for extended periods... not all people live next to trains stations or metro stations and trams dont go to suburbs... at times it was really difficult even to get a cab to the station... get out of your bubble
The Adam Something channel has a different perspective, which I find myself agreeing with. The fact that there are no continent-wide rail width or electrification standards really limits the ability to travel internationally. Private industry can clamour all they want, but it is usually public money that funds this infrastructure.
I just wish my country would get a decent, even moderate-speed rail network going. Genuinely quicker to drive interstate in so many cases.
Agreed. This video feels like an overly optimistic view of someone who's rarely - if ever - actually traveled by rail in Europe, and only read documents about it (and lives in a country that's basically a public transport dumpster fire, except for maybe a select few cities). Adam Something definitely has a better, and more technical explainer video.
Huge resistance from environmentalists and local government on any project of that scale, and a huge uphill battle of getting people to use the system, and of course private industry won't take it on because of how long it would take to be profitable (if it's even possible). Trains are used a lot in the US, but only in high population areas. Not only that, but he auto industry and the oil industry have been extremely successful in keeping ground transportation stuck in the past.
Agreed. I felt like I got a lot more out of Adam's much shorter video because he addressed the specific and major hurdles for international rail in Europe rather than just vaguely hinting that national systems weren't well connected.
I think Wendover is also giving credit where it's not really due when it comes to airlines. Sure, deregulation may have helped, but "deregulation" of the airline industry was not the only thing happening and it amounted to simply allowing some competition to operating in a highly regulated environment. The entire international air traffic and airport system is highly standardized due to regulations. Innovations were also being made in the industry, like larger, more efficient planes and the hub and spoke routing system. None of that is really possible trains, it's a mature technology with much less room for easy improvement, especially without significant up front investment, and significantly less opportunity for routing improvements because fixed connections are required between nodes.
Furthermore, the end-user experience of being able to book connecting flights seamlessly and have customer protections and operator obligations in the event of delays really has nothing to do with privatization and deregulation of airlines, but are the direct result of regulations requiring data publishing and consumer protection agencies. The same can easily be done for rail travel if there is political will.
Those are fixable problems that the EU is dealing with. I
The EU invests a lot of money helping countries to renew, adaped to a single standard on mainlines creating nine main cross European corridors. Among the the big projects now are the baltic rail and the base tunnels between Italy and Austria and Italy and France.
There is also an increcing advancemen in the employment of the European signaling system (ETCS) that is also being employed in many non Europeanil countries around the world.
No obe is going to replace all rail infraestructura tomorrow but the main lines will be stadarized and there are solutions for uing different gauges nd electrificarion systems.
Spain is using the Iberian gauge and have been using for years trains tht can changebtheir gauge with a simple device, it only tames a few minutes and trains with multiple electrificarion support o exist.
The new high speed Talgo avril train (that shoud debue atvthe start of 2023) support both gauge change and 4 different electrification standards. It is currently going theogh the approval process in France. As mentioed, in the not so distance future this process will be made by the EU for all membets.
Adam's main concern was the lack of a centralised service.
I fail to see how this doesn't conflict with the conclusions you drew in the video on UK rail privatisation (which I mostly agreed with as a resident here). I feel like all that will happen if rail is pursued for profit is that shareholders will simply extract profit from the popular routes and all others will be left to rot (like the UK).
The entire idea of railways and other public transport having to produce profit is short-sighted and fails to produce the economic benefits we would get from people travelling more and spending their money in different places. The main benefit of the nationalised providers would be the integrated ticketing and schedule you're hoping for here, instead of all the private operators getting in the way of a good public service.
@@djp3637 that was always the intention of HS2, to take passengers of the over congested routes and make those journeys more palatable for people put off by the crush. There were plans to upgrade those northern routes (leeds-Manchester) including plans for a transpennine tunnel (I'll believe it when I see it on that last one though)
You can have integrated ticketing for private rail as well.
I like how in the beginning his complaint was that there was a stop in London where you had to change trains; then the solution he provides is more trains with less centralization? A simpler solution is guaranteeing if the connection is missed, your new ticket is payed for. What people really find convenient about air travel is being able to book all of your flights on different companies through third party companies (which could just be one system if nationalized) and then having that insured if a connection is missed, not the fact that hopper flights exist at all.
@L W DB motivated by mainly profit has also become more interested in fancy mall like stations than expanding service. Which backfired in many instances.
@@Mrphilipjcook exactly, and now they’ve undercut that intention by ensuring the WCML and ECML will remain congested beyond Birmingham. When it could’ve removed traffic from the mainlines all up England.
Your analysis on French riviera's coastal cities might be right, but you forgot to take into consideration 2 key factors. The first is that extending the currently existing network is difficult due to geographical "bottlenecks", especially between Cannes and Fréjus, and between Nice and Monaco, making work such as adding rails or upgrading current network an engineering challenge. The second thing is that you mentioned "small cities between Cannes and the Italian border", while in between there is Antibes (80 000+ inhabitants), Nice (French 5th largest cities) and Monaco (major tourism and work place). The current network is already highly saturated for years.
That's why upgrading the network is a real challenge for the SNCF there, despite being the 2sd busiest tourist destination behind Paris.
Excellent video by the way, I learnt a lot !
It's especially funny since both Antibes and Nice are in fact bigger cities than Cannes itself lmao
I recently moved back to the US after spending a year in Paris and I can say the system within France is very convenient and interconnected. Every single mode of transportation can be viewed and booked with the SNCF connect app.
The prices in the video were accurate and typical but didn’t mention booking in advance. I would often take day trips to the south of France to visit friends since if I booked even a week ahead the tickets would only be about 20€ each which is about half what an airplane ticket on easy jet would cost
I mean France is smaller than Texas, so it would make sense that it's more coordinated. Small countries have always had to be efficient with their space, and that's why transportation efficiencies are so critical.
@@mediocreman2 What a strange example. The distance between the two largest metro areas in Texas (Houston and Dallas) is LESS THAN HALF of that between the two biggest metro areas in France (Paris and Marseille). So, when discussing profitable HSR routes, Texas is really small compared to France. Some very sparsely populated rural areas don't count.
Europe is larger than the whole of the US, but there's no point in concentrating on that, as it's the population centers that count.
@@mediocreman2 Only metropolitan France is smaller than Texas, France is also some oversea territories like Guyane in South-America.
Long distances... on a plane.
@@jandron94 we dont count that lmfao
@@VideoDotGoogleDotCom The USA is crazy big, it literally spans all of Europe not including russia, Finland, sweden and norwary(covers the populous part of sweden though).
I also find it ironic that the video lists one of the main problems of rail travel that you often can't book an international ticket from end to end, and suggests having a bunch of smaller companies, all with their own ticketing solutions, which would make it even more difficult in many cases to book that end-to-end ticket. In fact, there are many places where it used to be possible to book an end-to-end ticket _nationally_ , but due to all the different operators, it's now a confusing mess instead.
I don't think it's as much of a problem anymore.
We went from Milan to Luxembourg and had to switch trains in Bern, Zurich, and Koblenz, with 4 different rail providers. And yet, we had a ticket which stated all of those lines on them - though we were taking a later train than on the ticket for the last leg (Koblenz to Luxembourg) because of a delay out of the hands of the rail service (a suicidal person was on the rail lines and the trains had to wait until police could remove the person). The women who checked our tickets did see the time was different but since it was otherwise the same ticket, it didn't seem to be a problem for them as she gave us our tickets back without a word.
@@steveweidig5373 I'm not saying it doesn't work - and I'm glad it worked in your case. What you described is what that kind of a trip _should_ look like. Unfortunately, many routes don't have that kind of luck...
@@steveweidig5373 You had one ticket for all trains - that's the point. That works with the state railway companies, because they cooperate and sell each others tickets.
But have fun doing this with a Flixtrain, especially if you want to connect to a regional train.
this vid is a roller-coaster of fact vs opinion. quite good facts about the issues of international travel and then goes on into opinion about the liberalisation of rail transport.
Cooperation is the concern, primary concern with standardisation. no private company will build a HSR line between countries, at least if they don't receive a significant proportion of their funds back from the governments of those countries. liberalisation could very well work, but to act as if it is even remotely comparable to sir travel in terms of liberalisation is insane.
I think Eurail is onto a good thing, Trans-European cooperation improves transport significantly weather nationalised or not
the breaking up of train providers sounds like neoliberal dogmatism
At least here in Germany the main problem with train travel isn't so much a lack of connections, but rather delays and cancelations. And the main reason for that is not the rolling stock (though the maintenance level of many DB trains is rather awful), but the tracks.
One one hand, the maintenance of the tracks is even worse that for the trains (DB has to pay for maintenance themselves, while the federal government pays for track replacements. So DB just does no maintenance at all and just runs down the tracks until they are broken, so that they get them replaced "for free"), on the other hand, around important hubs like Cologne, the existing tracks are HORRIBLY congested. If your train goes into Cologne on time, it will continue with at least 30 minutes of delay, on average. It's so bad, that last year DB's on time percentage (trains with less than 5 minutes of delay) fell under 50%.
So it's not going to get better until we have major investment in rail infrastructure (tens, if not hundreds of billions of euros), and until then I don't see how additional operators are going to improve anything, they're probably only going to add to the congestion issues, making overall service worse for everyone...
Yeah I can recall once where I had to travel for 9 hours to stuttgart from a village near Freiburg. The journey was supposed to be 1 hour. But due to cancellations, etc etc and no available routes we had to keep waiting. Not very pleasant to say the least. If that’s the reality with their transport system it is one of the worst
I just went from Zürich to Amsterdam and back after two weeks by train. I had a direct night train to Amsterdam, which had 3 hours delay due to a fire near the track (Böschungsbrand) near Bonn. Due to the long delay, the train company decided to not go to Amsterdam, but stop in Utrecht instead. A trainload of people overcrowded the next local train from Utrechht to Amsterdam.
For the return journey I had to switch trains in Frankfurt and Basel. The scheduled train from Amsterdam to Frankfurt was re-scheduled to only go to Düsseldorf on that day. Luckily, the train from Frankfurt to Basel had 1 hour delay, so I could actually catch up with it in Mannheim. Unfortunately, the train added more delay due to foreign objects on the tracks on the remaining route, and due to the long delay the train company decided not to go to Basel (Swiss side), but stop in Basel Bad (German side), which caused further delay for the passengers.
People and new rail companies will increase the pressure on the government to actually do something about the problem
The laws guiding infrastructure and taxing are designed incredibly shortsighted in Germany.
The lawmaking bodies simply don’t have the people smart enough to wargame a law before it comes out.
To expand upon that: If you want to know why there is so much cancellation, what connections are most likely affected and if you're able to understand German, I highly highly recommend the talk "BahnMining" from David Kriesel which is available as a video here on TH-cam. He data mined all train rides over a year and what he found out about how our train network works here in Germany is really interesting!
This video misses out on one very important fact: Trains, fundamentally, are not like planes. Yes, they are both modes of transport. Yes, it's good when both are cheap. But the difference is that planes are not mass transit systems like trains are. The number of people who commute by plane is negligible, and the mode of transit in general is very badly suited for that task. Trains however _are_ mass transit, or at least can be. Although long distance trains can be compared to flying, regional trains cannot, and here's where my worry is: typically, the most profitable part of the railway system is the high-speed service. It's not clear from the video and I don't know from elsewhere what the pricing looks like for companies to operate on the rail infrastructure, but for the most part it won't make sense for companies to operate the regional trains that are really the important ones when it comes to public benefit and environmental impact. In Italy we've already begun to see this. Over the last few years Trenitalia has been announcing all sorts of great high-speed routes at a fairly low price (e.g. Milano to Paris), but at the same time they've been quietly deemphasizing regional trains. Italo has been operating as a competitor to Milano, and that's great, but most of the country has no competitor to bring the price down on regional trips. Those are held down I believe through government funding, however in many places lines are closed or service so bad as to be unusable. Additionally, the more the government thinks of trains as a commercial sector rather than a public service to be funded and directed for the good of the people, the worse off I think we'll be. That's the kind of thinking that got Britain its privatized network, and we saw where that got them.
Actually, that's a good point- How come Britain's privatization mess not make it into this video? It would seem like a prime example of what happens if you rush towards deregulation on a public service.
Additionally, as others have pointed out, privatizing and then allowing companies to swoop in and make their for-profit booking sites to take advantage of the confusion is a terrible solution to the problem. At present, if I need to take a train from Italy to Austria, I have a grand total of two booking sites to look at. If I need to get to Germany, make that three. Rather than making it a healthy half-dozen and then capitalizing on the resulting mess, why don't we, and I know this is gunna come across as a huge breakthrough of an idea, just make a site and app for booking trains across the EU, funded as a service by the EU? I know you mentioned countries don't like publishing their schedules, but if that's an insurmountable issue your proposed app won't have the timetables for ex-national/quasi-still-national operators anyway. It really doesn't make much sense to me as an argument for nationalisation.
All in all, it really doesn't strike me as one of your better videos, I'm afraid. It feels like you got convinced it was a good thing and then were bound and determined to prove that point.
Honestly I think this is a step backwards from a sustainable future where anyone can take the train to where they need to go, but let's be honest if our government is anything to judge by they're well and truly sold on the idea that electric cars are the future. It really makes me sick.
What a great comment.
Well thought out opinion
The main reason UK privatization was such a shitshow is that instead of opening the actual network to private competitors, like the EU is doing, they basically balkanized it in dozens of private monopolies that never compete with each other. In addition, they didn’t have a public operator to offer baseline service and keep the market honest.
You know what’s worse than a government monopoly? A private monopoly.
Having cars is pointless if you aren't allowed to actually drive yourself, though, which is what they really want. Still, things will get better one day and we'll be converting the old ones to run on hydrogen gas, AND building more railways.
Exactly! I see more and more high speed trains here (I'm from Dijon, the main city between Paris and Lyon), but I've never seen so few regional trains. Going anywhere eastward or westward without even leaving Burgundy is becoming an ordeal.
Hi Sam, I think you are mixing some things up in this video:
1. interoperability: a major problem of train lines is and was that Europe lacks a common standard beyond 1435mm gauge. This ends up in very different regulations, (safety) requirements and requires a lot of efford - for trains and staff alike. While programs like ETCS and european corridors that are partially funded by the EU are continuosly trying to decrease the barrier, and in many cases this works, it is not a system that is efficient and widely available. Therefore crossborder trains are harder to implement and more costly to operate, especially for smaller and newer firms.
2. you are touching on why budget train companies will succeed but you do not address how train lines get funding, often by government contracts. It is here were direct competition is very present already. While operating on the free market outside of these contracts is what you show here, it is a risky approach with only few routes that actually work. In addition, many countries in Europe start to fund railway use in a way, where price differences don't matter anymore to the consumer. Look at the €9 ticket in Germany or the Klimaticket in Austria for instance.
All in all I do not think we will see a budget airline like development because operating a plane between two airports is easy and more importantly, can be adapted quickly if required. This is absolutely not the case with trains, which run on a more or less fixed schedule that is furthermore capacity contrained. Also staff and trains have to be equipped and trained for the route, something that takes time and costs money, somethign pilots don't have to worry so much about once they have their rating
Add language to the mix. Train conductors are required to speak the language of the country they are driving the train (English is not recognised).
@@paulchataigneron4984 it's not actually really true. Only countries it will most probably happen is Germany or France, what's totally forgotten here are Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania etc. In all central-european countries it is far more likely to find train staff speak english beside their native language. Although in Germany I usually found staff actually speaking english, but that was only on DB ICE, not sure how about DB Regio or even other ones.
I'm dissapointed how he completely missed cross-border Regio trains, that are actually a thing (Berlin-Gorzów Wielkopolski for example, or Lubeck-Szczecin, Zielona Góra-Guben, and even more) and those are important, as much as say connections Berlin-Warsaw, Paris-Stuttgart. Railway in Europe suposed to serve even small cities, not only major european capitals, but that's completely different story
@@Sobol3D I think what Paul means is that in addition to English, staff have to speak the local language. A German conductor would have to speak polish to be allowed to operate a crossborder train - that‘s at least my experience with trains running between Austria and Italy.
i absolutely agree that the huge amount of crossborder regional trains have not been mentioned at all
@@jakobeng1303 the problem is that there is mostly regional trains across borders. That means to do inter city travel across long distances you have to switch trains at least twice.
@@jsplit9716 that‘s more often than not incorrect, many international trains do exist - especially between nations that have cross border regional trains
A couple of corrections: It is possible to book by train Manchester to Paris and vice versa as one combined itinerary and Torquay is still a prosperous and popular holiday destination. A key omission was mention of the significant and well used international links provided by Thalys and OBB NightJet, which combine to understate rail's importance in those markets.
Across Europe, long international journeys with one or more change en-route are still very commonly undertaken and need not only make use of the well known high speed lines. They are also much, much more straightforward than the normal airport torture. For this reason rail and in fact road transport also take a large share of journeys beyond the standard 3-4 hours commonly quoted, even on routes that have direct flights.
Even before using an airport became two to three hours of torture a surprisingly high proportion of the population really don't like air travel that much and will happily both take longer and pay more to avoid it - in a way that is just too difficult in the US.
The huge volume of local road traffic across land boarders in densely populated areas makes the rail share of longer distance international journeys in Europe seem much smaller than its true significance.
Re connections, I remember there being an easy way to do it previously, but can't seem to find it now, is there directions on how to do it? It was well advertised before, but now the Eurostar site seems to be targeted towards Continental connections from a brief look?
holidaying in torquay atm 💀💀💀
Torquay is great!
It used to be possible to by a through ticket from Deutschebahn or Trainline International, but it isn’t any more.
"Torquay is still a prosperous and popular holiday destination"🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
As a logistics nerd: Trains are ridiculously efficient, compared to basically everything else. So if you can transport goods or people on rail, do it.
For transport on land, rail is the best we have right now. And we don't need fancy new technology to do it, we can simply improve upon a well established platform.
As a physics amateur I can agree: Rolling on rails is much more efficient than driving or flying, only ships can compete. But there are so many direct and indirect state payments made for all types of transport, that physics only plays a minor role in how routes and prices are calculated.
true and yet, people still invest and support on capsules and other "futuristic" fancy shit that have no real advantage to them except speed and even then, is pretty ineffective. Just make more modern trains and add on to the current rail network with double tracks, no need for that fancy yet impractical stuff
Trains are more efficient, but tracks aren't. Most governments pay for tracks, bridges, tunnels and land lease. Aka the tax payer.
@@panicraptor2837 And who do you think pays for roads, bridges, tunnels, auto company bailouts, airports, airline bailouts, and kerosene subsidies?
@Doctor Whos No I rather have the government cut taxes. Most of its spending goes to subsidization of failing industries and corruption.
I live in Scotland and only started regularly using the train to get into the city for work. It's so much better than driving.
Still feel this way after all the rail strikes? Honestly what a pain in the ass
@@davidthornton3346 What a weird question, as if the very rare (and well needed) train strike would negate a good daily experience during the rest of the year. Still better by orders of magnitude than driving everyday.
@@Basauri48970💀💀💀I was going to say the same thing in reponse to your comment. Theres strike information, and yes it's way better than driving and sitting in traffic. Trains are WAY more relaxong compared to a soul crusing drive. When trains are delayed and cancelled tsain operators provide fair compensation for yhe inconvenience caused.
@@TimofejsAmelins-k8z Exactly. I also find it very grating when people who enjoy work rights, 1 month holiday entitlement, a 40h work week, etc complain about strikes. How did they think we got those?
May everyone exercise their right to strike forever and never give up in the struggle for better work conditions and fairer wages.
This might be the first Wendover video to which I feel like I know more about the topic than contained in the video. Let me add a bit of information that might be interesting:
There are two international high-speed-projects existing in Europe. Next to the mentioned Eurostar there is the Thalys, which was mainly born because Belgium and the Netherlands are so small that high-speed-rail only maks sense on an international level. It connects Brussels with Amsterdam, Paris and Cologne. Though these are the only international-only products, the rail networks are not as sepeated as it appears in the video. Germany-Paris services for example are served by a quite successfull cooperation between DB and SNCF. The routes Munich/Stuttgart-Paris and Frankfurt-Paris can be booked through either operator, no matter whether it's a TGV or ICE, and they basically make one schedule for these lines and split the operation. Still, there is a lot of room for improvement and international standards like ETCS for train interoperability and new international infrastructure are probably the right way to go. There is improvement happening right now, but slowly.
Still, Europe has already proven that international rail services are quite possible. The Trans Europe Express network was a working international long-distant train network, though lack of standardisation was much worse back then. It died to the raise of air travel, but some see it as a template for what we should work on today.
Fun fact about Flixtrain's cars: DB had an affordable long-distance train product in the 90s which was called InterRegio. For reasons, they suspended service in the early 2000s and let open a niche. Flixtrain is now filling this niche, using the exact same cars that DB used in InterRegio trains.
Flixtrain operating an international service to Switzerland is both correct an kinda wrong at the same time. They operate a train to Basel Badischer Bahnhof, which is located in the country of Switzerland but is operated by DB by german guidelines. It is more of a border station to terminate trains that can't enter switzerland and only a few meters in. So Flixtrain basically operates to the border, but the station happens to lie on the swiss side. It's not what you think of by "international connection". Also, Flixtrain probably will not get further into Switzerland, as there is no political will for private operators on swiss tracks.
As Switzerland has a completely political guided, non-liberalized rail network that is performing magnificent, I kind of doubt that liberalization is what we need in Europes rail traffic. It basically is giving the responsibility out of political into the magic market's hands with not much more than the hope things will get better. Of course it's nice for private investors to earn money on high-demand routes, but there is no place for competition on low-demand routes, where one operator alone is barely profitable and on routes which capacitiy is already exceeded (which is at least in germany quite common). The infrastructure is in private hands anyway and state-owned operators will stay in operation to ensure a minimum of service. The weird mix we now have seems ineffective to me, while a purely planned economy has proven to be quite effective in the rail segment in many countries, e.g. Switzerland, Japan, Spain.
Absolutely.
And I think a hub and spoke HSR network across Europe along lines which naturally link large cities works best. There are or are under construction several such lines. But care does need to be taken as to how long services on them are. You don't need a direct service from southern Italy to Paris. You can split the journey up. Same with say, London to Berlin or Rome. It would just be easier to have people change in Paris to a relevant service.
@@tams805 That's another thing where the Swiss show us how things work. You don't need a direct service if you have an integrated schedule, which you can't have if you let companies just do what they want on the tracks. A franchise-system would still work, but I'm not a friend of that either, based on the experiences we have with it in german regional rail.
Wendover and other channels are unrepentant shills for neoliberal gutting of all aspects of public infrastructure. They can't wait to whitewash the next pump and dump scheme of the billionaire owner class for peanuts.
slight correction to your point about there being no will for private operators on Swiss tracks. There is will for that and there are already private operators running trains on the Swiss network (bls or Deutsche Bahn for example). The "problem/hurdle" that Flixtrain faces is that Switzerland requires all its operators to work within the integrated Swiss timetable. If Flixtrain is willing to do that then they can operate services beyond Basel Badischer Bahnhof to Bern/Zurich/Geneva etc. Because unlike Germany, where there is no integrated nationwide timetable that includes long-distance services like the ICE (yet). Switzerland has had one for 40 years now and they most certainly aren't dropping that for one German train company. DB, as mentioned, already offers ICE services into Switzerland to places like Bern, Interlaken, Chur and Zurich and these services are integrated into the Swiss timetable (which is why they more often than not get stopped in Basel if they are delayed too much).
@@Empress2345 BLS is "private" but mainly owned by Bern and Federal Republic. I ment "private" as not legally private but economically private with private investors, independent from governments. As far as I'm aware they're not a friend of getting new operators, are they?
Rail Baltica is worth mentioning. It is still under construction but it will be a high speed rail connecting all the baltic states. By extent it also shortens the trip to Finland and Poland :)
Very feasible financially if it can reach St. Petersburg. Seems politically unlikely now though.
I hope the idea of a train between Helsinki and Tallinn will one day be reality... Sure the boat is cheap and fairly quick but a train would be amazing
@@mini_bunney Booze trips would become so much more cheaper and faster between Helsinki and Tallinn
Baltic HSR from Talin to Warsaw would be great...
Because fuck it.
Helsinki would be just as interesting.
Bruh I would love to take a night train from Berlin to Tallinn and have breakfast on the ferry to Helsinki
Having just had a vacation in Europe; I couldn't help but notice how much more enjoyable it was using the train between countries than taking a flight. We used the train between Geneva and Milan and then Paris to London. The Paris to London leg was a bit of a hassle due to the immigration checks but the Geneva/Milan leg was seamless. And although the trip took 4 hours, I preferred that to the hassle of checking in at an airport.
What I didn't realise was how disconnected the system was all over Europe. This video cleared that up.
Its connected, its just not all that fast cause the lanes are national and not international. For example there are times where you have to travel through slow trails before catching on a fast one, increasing travel times uneccesarly. Still it's possible to travel from Spain to Poland but it takes way more than a flight because of Train speeds.
Funnily enough, we also took the train from Geneva to Milan, which surprisingly had just 1 transfer.
It is starting to become more integrated. Thalys connects uk, belgium, netherlands, france and germany seamlessly with high speed rail as well. So there are islands with great connectivity around europe, the task now is connecting these all together into a europe wide system. Which will happen eventually, it just takes time.
I literally took the Eurostar home (the Netherlands) from London yesterday after filming some videos about the Underground. this international high-speed train is so relaxed you'll want to have it everywhere. in addition, it also helps in achieving the climate goals. thanks for your video!
It is so superior to flying. I live in NL for studies and travel back home to see family every six months or so, and being able to (a) take liquids, toiletries, and basically unlimited luggage on the train is superb, alongside better leg room, food, drink etc. and (b) being able to leave the train in the city centre or domestic rail terminal to catch adjoining trains is vastly superior to taking lengthy journey extensions to airports.
During off-peak times, tickets are regularly 55 EUR each way from Rotterdam to LDN St. Pancras, with a journey time of 3.5 hours. You can usually arrive at the station 35 mins before safely without having to worry too much about missing the journey. It is not that different from flying, with additional security checks and taxi times (which at Schiphol are significant).
The primary issue at the moment I guess is capacity, that as soon as the summer holidays begin, flights stay as low as 45 EUR yet I couldn't find train tickets for under 200 EUR.
And how much was your ticket? Achieving climate goals is a noble goal, but if it costs 10x as much AND takes much longer it’s a tough sell. PS in America almost all trains runs on nice sooty Diesel.
@@bigbaddms One for €47 and one for €71. much lower than was said in the video.
@@Hollandstation that's insane. i wish the us had decent trains. it seems to me like amtrak is far inferior to anything europe has.
I just booked a traintrip thats a little more expensive and a lot less convenient with 3 different tickets and a ton of stops to sweden from nl. It sucks tbh
Regarding the Eurostar - you used to be able to buy through ticketing from Eurostar directly, so you could begin the journey from most major UK cities outside of London. These tickets were also covered by the international railway conditions of carriage (CIV) which meant that if your connecting train to London is late and causes you to miss your booked Eurostar connection, you'd be entitled to be re-booked on the next available departure. Unfortunately the option to book through ticketing disappeared back in March 2020 when Eurostar 'upgraded' its ticketing system and it still looks to be MIA.
Also the Eurostar was meant to go to Glasgow
I'd guess - Brexit...
@@MattyC0900 really? thats a shame that it never went ahead
@@tomriley5790 Why would that be the reason? If you're already going to London, going to any other major UK city from there has nothing to do with the EU, surely?
@@billylardner Having a ticket that is valid on an EU train operator and a UK train operator was east when the UK was in the EU, and hard when the UK left the EU.
This is really an opinion piece, even though it's presented as fact. It also leaves out important aspects.
Air travel is also subsidized, whether directly or indirectly (e.g. no kerosene tax but a diesel tax, or putting money into unprofitable airports). Environmental costs also play much less of a role in air travel than they do in rail travel, even though rail is much more environmental.
International air travel is also exempt from VAT, which you do pay when booking trains, a price advantage of around 20% depending in the country you buy the ticket in.
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Financial management is a crucial topic that most tend to shy away from, and ends up haunting them in the near future
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I am a university student in Poland and therefore I take a whole lot of trains. I am in fact writing this sentence about to go on a train. There are two major groups in Poland regularly taking trains and these are people commuting to work from outside of major cities, going on local trains; and students going back home for weekends. Trains over here are not designed to be like airlines. Very many train routes are local, connecting medium-sized cities and stopping in every single village on the way, like a bus would. It's great for commuters and works great combined with the long distance intercity trains. Our trains are not meant to be like airlines. Part of that might be that Poland doesn't have many domestic flights either and they aren't necessarily that popular. But trains are local and/or budget means of transport, that's why they're so popular with students. They're very cheap compared to other countries mentioned in the video (normal ticket for the 2 hour train I take is around 50 zł which is less than 11 euros and you can pay even less if you choose regional instead of intecity and with various discounts there are, mostly for school and university students). It's the budget way of traveling, usually cheaper than just driving, especially if you're traveling alone. The main problems are that trains are famously unreliable (which actually isn't the case or at least definitely not to the degree they're said to be, unless you go by Deutsche Bahn in Germany) and that in some regions there isn't enough infrastructure so there are no good connections (taking a train journey in eastern Poland might turn out to be problematic if you decide to travel between smaller cities because sometimes there just isn't any rail there. That's however a regional problem that most of Europe certainly doesn't have)
Isn't that why we need seperate high speed rail?
none of this is unique to poland
Railway privatization was a major failure in the UK, and it also has caused some huge problems in Germany. The idea that privatization would fix the railway issues is such nonsense and I wish you had gone more into these problems.
Because they weren’t actually privatized. They just added profit incentives to the very same monopolistic, bureaucratic and still basically state-owned monoliths. Of course that only makes things worse. Privatization has to come with breaking up the monopoly. Competition automatically causes fresh air and thereby progress.
Makes no sense. How can a structure spanning multiple counties/states be privately held. And are you going to shake your fist at each car crossing your track "get off my lawn"
@Ye Japan doesnt prove anything, it is geographically more or less a line and highly populated so it is one of the easiest countries to have railservice for. In europe private companys will simply neglect smaller villages and citys because they dont make any or alot of profit. Privatisation simply doesn´t work unless it is highly regulated and subsidized.
@@xhelloselm railways in the UK were more or less as privatized as they can be. With railways there are limitations to liberalization given that it must be a highly coordinated system. In order to optimally utilize rail networks (which given the fact that they usually run at capacity is very important) everything has to be timed and regulated to a tee.
Your vision of how privatization should work is coming awfully close to the neoliberal equivalent of “that’s not real socialism”
It all depends on how it's Done, from my experience the biggest problem with publicly owned railway is there is no incentive to be cost effective/efficient/innovative, I understand the perspective that it's a public serivce like health care and shouldn't have to be self funding. But from my experience working in the rail sector the amount of money that's wasted is eye watering and no one cares, not even management/higher ups in the company cause its all subsidised by the Government.
Germany introduced a €9 per month ticket valid with all buses, trams and a lot of trains in the entire country. Just yesterday I travelled 13 hours to and fro with that ticket. Normally just this journey would have cost me €150
Wow that must be brand new, and a Zuper deal! How could you beat that price? That’s about a 94% discount, just considering 1 day of travel. If you traveled 30 days it would be about 99.5% discount.
You should add that it's heavily subsidized and is not financially sustainable.
@@Polynom1995 correct. it's only for 3 months. Doesn't mean the savings for the public in 3 months isn't huge. I've travelled to so many places which weren't previously viable due to the ticket costs. In September the costs will go back to normal
@@Polynom1995 it actually is entirely "sustainable" if you understand transportation infrastructure not as an industry meant to generate profit (which is how it's been seen for the past 40-odd years, leading to the sorry state DB is in today) but an investment a country makes into its own mobility, generating profit elsewhere in a distributed manner. Unfortunately, neoliberal business philosophy requires profit to be capturable in a controlled manner at the point of investment.
In other words, if rich people can't be guaranteed to get the majority of the pie, they will not spend money on it, and it's not going to happen.
Did you miss all the all the overcrowded trains being overrun by travellers? Or are you just so willing to ignore obviously bad policies if it gets you free stuff.
The irony is, the UK tried rail privatization back in the 90s and now it's heading back the other way as private operators go bankrupt British Rail has to take the routes back over. Prime example, the LNER, the main train line from London to the north and up into Scotland, Virgin operated the route for years before walking away from it and had developed a bad reputation for shitty service, as soon as it became a state run route again reviews dramatically improved. Cross border service must happen and HSR speeds need to keep going up to the point where the EU needs to likely consider maglev on the long haul lines, without this they can't meet their long term sustainability goals and still keep a comparable or better freedom of movement across the EU to keep their economy going.
I guess there must be a sweet spot between too much competition and too little competition where the needs of customers and companies are satisfied best.
@@simtill Lol the UK never had "too much competition" on train service. Companies would sell your kidneys mid-ride if they were allowed, the only company able to fully satisfy the needs of the customers is the state.
Yeah, the problem isn’t so much public/private (trains must be very heavily regulated by their nature. It is a coordinated system after all), but rather investing enough to achieve the results you want. In Germany, for example, many of the existing main lines are so heavily congested that you simply won’t eek better efficiency or reliability out of them without building relief lines. Which is exactly what DB/govt is doing. Much like a highway, if there’s too much traffic you’re gonna have problems…
@@simtill trains run best with a nationalised coordinating public body running them. Saying there needs to be "competition" is just being ideological.
The most blatant example against privatisation, the shambles that is the UK train system, was indeed conveniently glossed over in the video.
It wasn't always like that. There used to be lots of international trains in Europe, and relatively cheap fares could be found. Not usually as low as today's budget airlines, and not if you wanted to sleep in a proper sleeper car, but there were for example special fares for people under 26. And of course there was the Interrail pass, which gave you a month of free travel on all (or most) trains in Europe for about 200-250 €.
I'm travelling from York to Amsterdam next month, it's hugely more convenient to get a train to London, walk 2mins to St. Pancras, then get another train straight into the center of Amsterdam, than to fly, and works out to be slightly cheaper on the dates I'm travelling too.
The advertised ticket price for flights is great if you're travelling solo and without baggage, but once you start adding things on it quickly increases, whereas bags & seat selection are included in rail (national & Eurostar) tickets.
Yup with LNER or the occasional Cross-rail to London too.
I miss East Coast though
St Pancras! Not "St Pancreas" lol
@@Kavafy Ahh, always make that bloody typo!
Yeah baggage is a problem for sure for planes. If there is too much baggage the plane can't actually take off.
Not as easy if you switch from Waterloo.
Night trains solve some of the problems with long travel times, especially if the night portion is uninterrupted by stops. Your hypothetical train from Brittany to the Mediterranean coast would work as a night train. I've been on a few, and they can be comfortable.
Night trains are literally the best method of travel on the planet. I took the Edinburg to London night train and it not only gave me essentially a free extra day of vacation, it was far less expensive than flying, tickets were cheaper and I avoided the taxi ride to the airport and the train from the airport into London, and I got the best night of sleep I’ve had in probably 25 years. Red eye flights are also fairly awesome though TBH
I took a night train in Malaysia, I couldn't sleep for 14 hours
To add a little detail on this video : international connections exists for last few years, between some borders. You mentioned Netherlands/Belgium/France/Germany. This connection exists, and is VERY efficient, thanks to Thalys (that's the only one I know personally). I am french, from Paris region, but lived and worked in Cologne, Germany, before moving to Stuttgart, Germany. I used to take the plane to go back home see my family. Since Thalys, a rail company specialized in Germany-France connections, I could not take the plane ever again for that route. Cheaper or equally expensive (rarely >100€ - usually between 50-70€), FAR more comfortable, FAR more flexible (especially regarding luggage sizes and numbers), and taking at the city center to arrive at the city center. Cologne-Paris is done in 3 hours, 2,5h faster than by car, and same as airplane (if you count going in and out of the airport), and stop in Belgium in between). 3,5h for Stuttgart-Paris
For the much higher convenience, comfort and flexibility, even if trains on those routes were pricier than planes, I would stick to trains.
But that is a specific case. It is just a good example on how much this is needed. It remains an exception. Try to do the same from eastern Germany to Lyon, and it becomes a nightmare, as explained in the video. I can't wait to see those international connections develop!
While it's a good example of what it could be, the Thalys connects some of the biggest metropolitan areas right at the center of the Blue Banana. The Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area is insanely populated, as is the one of Paris, and as are Netherlands and Belgium. It makes so much sense to have this service here, but not all places are equally highly populated.
@aliss liou Well, in this case, all those private companies are making it easier/faster/more convenient to travel and commute, so might be worth it.
@aliss liou What's your pointr? How adding a company with its own trains on rails that already exist is paid by the taxpayer
Sure, my taxes pay to maintain the infrastructure. But I would pay either way, since it is shared with public (or ex public) providers. And given the great services it gives, I am happy that what I paid for bad service yesterday now pays for great service.
Eastern Germany to Lyon is quite easy. Take the ICE all the way to Basel, change into the IC to Geneva and then the local train to Lyon. Or... Just take the ICE to Frankfurt, then the Thalys to Paris and then the TGV to Lyon. Tallinn to Faro or Lulea to Athens. That's a different kind of cookie :-D
@@djvincekline7338 that’s pretty much the opposite definition of simple :D
You have to consider the overnight option too. The Austrian railway (ÖBB) operates a vast network of overnight trains which in my opinion has pretty good coverage across most of Europe. And, in the case of overnight trains, the long travel time is less of a hurdle - in many cases, they deliberately make the time longer so that you can have a decent amount of sleeping time
I know this is quite the popular discussion point now, but I think it ignores an important issue. Many of the people who travel a lot are in their 30s and 40s. That means they are also the ones likely to have family and kids. Ask me what I would choose if I have the choice of leaving my family on Tuesday night for meetings on Wednesday and not coming back until Thursday morning or taking a 6am flight on Wednesday and be back for a good night kiss the same night...
A great idea but… These trains stop a lot. In some stations the trains splice and dice which involves a fair amount of shunting. Not sure if that is conducive to a good night’s sleep.
great - if you can sleep in a train. Many can't, even without a reason - just can't sleep in a train.
@@patrickmccutcheon9361 I never woke up from shunting on a night train. It's really no big deal.
If a delayed Eurostar service into London St Pancras International (LSPI) makes a passenger miss a coach or train connection, Eurostar can get the passenger rebooked either before arrival at LSPI or at LSPI
Same with the Deutsche Bahn, uou can rebook in the app
@@BlackXGamer1202 How many people know this though? Thumbs-upping so more can see and learn
The other problem with Eurostar is that it is ridiculously expensive. 2-3x as much as you will pay for travel to somewhere else in the UK from London, and 4-5x as expensive as the equivalent onward travel in France.
Yup. I really would've loved to take the Eurostar to London in 2019, but not only would it have taken longer (I would've tolerated that, as a rail fan), but it would've been far pricier than a cheap plane ticket.
Eh, if you book early, it’s quite affordable. If you book a few months in advance, the London Paris journey by train costs around the same as travelling to Heathrow, taking the flight, and taking the train from CDG
I just checked again out of curiosity, and it actually wouldn't take that much longer with a good connection if you account for airport times... but even booking over a month ahead there's no way to do it for less than 200€ (including the connection from the German city I lived in at the time), one way. In a world where you can get a Ryanair ticket for literally a tenth of that, there's no way I could possibly justify paying that much. I was a student at the time, and I paid 400€ for the entire week, including transit and accommodations in London. Paying the same 400€ just to go there and back is insane.
@@lik7953 if you fly via Heathrow, sure. But when you can get a ticket to Stansted for under 20€ (and pay that much again for the train to the city) each way...
Well blame that getlink that overcharges the price to use the eurotunnel!
The downside to all of this (at least in Spain): More investment on high speed, long distance travel while public companies neglect regional lines to compete with the new players.
As an example, in the Barcelona metropolitan area trains malfunction frequently or take a ridiculous ammount of time to go between neighboring cities. It takes 2 hours to go Barcelona-Madrid, but it took me 3 hours on a regional train to go Barcelona-Tarragona, wich is like a seventh of the lenght of the first route.
And this is without speaking of service in the county side, which is even poorer if it exists at all in some regions.
Millions of people crammed for work or school every morning don't care about cheaper trains to Madrid, they just want a shorter and less hellish daily commute!
Yeah, for a guy who made a video about "Empty Spain" on his other channel, it surprises me to see how he can't connect the dots here
same in Germany
To be exact: Germanies HSR has a lot of missing pieces. Spain HSR is truly impressive in terms of tracks. I assume Germany has more services due to the population size. Regional trains are less comfterbale and you cant book a seat in advance. But the coverage of the regional trains is truly insane if you compare it with most countries. But with luggage or when you have to go a long distance they arent suitable in my view. And its not rare to go over one or two hours with the regional train after you arrived with the HSR somewhere.
But not offering these competing services on the barcelona madrid route would simply not improve the situation elsewhere either.
I don't believe this only became a problem after these new competitors where allowed on the system.
It is just a structural problem with local investment in infrestructure. Even though they are both about rail, they are not related to eachother.
And if local trains were more reliable people wouldn’t drive as much.. I bet the carbon savings could be even greater. I think the focus is often too much on HSR and not enough on high quality local or regional service
Living in London, it's often the case that traveling from home/city centre(ish) to the airport can take upwards of an hour and often costs nearly as much as a budget flight itself. Imagine paying £50 for a roundtrip flight to southern Europe, but then having to fork out another £30 just for the roundtrip train from central London to the airport (plus the cost of public transport from home to the train station in the first place). Then you land at your destination, where the airport is also likely to be well outside the city proper, and you better HOPE you arrive at a convenient time where bussess/shuttles/trains operate airport-city centre, because if you've taken a budget flight to a mid to small sized city it's more likely you'll arrive after those options close and your only option left is to book an uber to get you to your accommodation.
And that's without considering that you need to arrive at the airport at least 2 hours early each way, be ready to take off half your clothes and contents from your luggage to go through security, deal with delays where you're already effectively 'stuck' inside the departure area and can't do anything else, or when the plane lands and can't park at a gate, so you're sitting in that cramped space for even longer without any alternatives, and then you finally have to go pick up your luggage, which depending on luck can take ages to arrive as well. Plus the luggage limits that occasionally take you by surprise and you have to pay extra for going 1kg above the weight limit, or having to agree to let your carry-on with your valuables be put on the hold because it won't fit inside the cabin.
All in all, even the cheapest and quickest flight will still easily take a whole day of your vacation time each way and come with lots of hidden costs and stressful situations and lots of queueing/waiting/delays, etc. Trains cut down on these issues SIGNIFICANTLY, as long as you're not going an absurdly long distance and the trains and stations are in moderately good condition.
We also need to remember that the reason trains in the Uk are so expensive and crap is due to liberalisation. Trains should always be a government service provided to the people. Think of it less as air travel and more like national road infrastructure. It does't exist to pull a profit but to better interconnect the country leading to economic growth from reduced travel times rather than ticket sales. One of the main reasons for low cost airlines being so cheap is the huge subsidies that airlines receive. These subsidies should be gradually moved into more high speed rail. What europe needs now is to build more high speed track, especially across borders and most of the issues described in the video will be solved. Also by avoiding liberalising the rail network and allowing private businesses to run trains any profits generated won't be invested back into better infrastructure. Private corporations are too risk aversive to even think about getting a contract to build more rail.
I have friends with off-spring who excitedly message them with "Hey, I've just booked a cheap flight to Marseille/Barcelona/wherever - can you pick me up at the airport?" leaving my friends witha 100-mile round trip to pick them up and the same for the return journey. Cheap flights for some, but not for the people having to meet them.
@@Clivestravelandtrains At that point might as well hand them out a ticket for 100 mile fuel. Or simply suggest they take the train to your town
@@HappyBeezerStudios Agree - I would get the train - but sometimes these "cheap flights" go at 6 am or late in the evening.
China has a much better network, wake up we inferior europeans!
One of the problems that isn't mention on the video is the track gauge: depending on how you count it, Europe has around 3-5 different track gauges. This means that the majority of trains that run in the Iberian peninsula can not run in the rest of the continent, and vice versa; and the same for Eastern Europe and Ireland. If there was to be a direct connection between, for example, Lisbon (or Madrid) to Paris, most of the infrastructure would have to be built from scratch. And it's unlikely that a private company will carry such burden as building and maintainin the rails
Solutions have been developed for this issue. Talgo make a variable gauge bogie that allows trains to cross the border between Spain and France while only incurring a minor slowdown for the transition to occur.
@@jonathanpelletier4910 Is it widely used? I've always heard that gauge changing was a problem in international travel
@@tomesilva877 Im not sure about that. I would assume it would cost more per train set on the line but surely not as much as replacing all of the track in Spain to match that of France/the rest of Europe. Not sure how widespread the use of the variable gauge bogies is, but it seems like it hasn’t been that important for trains to have according to this video.
@@tomesilva877 Spain pretty much fixed the problem from an engineering standpoint.
Another issue is the width of the train cars themselves and the train stations. Trains may be unable to physically fit into the train stations. I remember being told about France buying train cars that would not fit into the train stations they are supposed to go through. It cost them "a few" millions to rectify the issue.
Sure you can fix the issue of having different gauges, the train station itself being not wide enough for the train? That is not an easy fix. That requires construction work. Work that ideally doesn't obstruct train service while it happens.
Worth mentioning is also RegioJet, a Czech railway and bus operator, which connects Czech cities and towns with not just the neighbouring countries but also with the more distant ones, e.g. Croatia and Ukraine (by rail). I think it now also operates routes that are completely outside of the Czech Republic.
^
I would've liked a few words about the insane amouts of direct and indirect subsidies that planes get in comparison to trains, but otherwise a very good video! keep up the good work.
Since you are apparently knowledgeable, why don’t you tell us?
@@bigbaddms For example in Germany, there are almost no taxes on kerosene, while diesel and other fuels are heavily taxed, which allows for these cheap flights.
@@magnus7857 Taxing aircraft fuel is quite complicated, If Germany starts to tax fuel, the plane will not fill up there, instead they will fill up at another airport. To effectively tax aircraft fuel, it would need to be done globally.
@@justahamsterthatcodes I agree that taxing Jet A1 directly is hardly feasible but it can be done by charging a proportional fee to the passenger ticket using a nations airport based on the prediction of fuel consumption for that line.
I don't like taxes but paying +50% fuel taxes everytime I have to refuel the car to go to work while those slob penniless turists can travel from so far away for literally 30 bucks is even worse, especially with the current fuel prices. I would like a bit more expensive plane tickets in exchange for cheaper car fuel, mantaining state income stable.
@@justahamsterthatcodes You can't effectively fly return flights to Germany without filling up there. Your argument is a fallacy. A policy like this would be especially effective EU wide.
I think the problem with market liberalisation in rhe rail industry is that private companies will only focus on the most profitable routes, while the state-owned companies have to run the unprofitable, but not less important lines. Currently the state-owned companies fund this by running proftitable lines, but in this case this money would lack to finance the other important routes.
If the line has at least some profit, it is attractive for business, because little money is also money. Another issue is that the line should be profitable in principle and not sag at a loss for long periods of time, because small companies will not be able to survive long-term losses. It is difficult for me to imagine how an important line can be unprofitable, it is obvious that the main advantage of the railway is scalability and if the railway cannot cope with a certain scale, there are problems in the organization of this railway: whether it is unrealistic standards, lack of unification, poor technical condition, incorrectly chosen technologies, etc.
I assure you, European countries will still give tons of corporate welfare to rail companies regardless of if their state owned or not
The problem with competition on this is that yes, you may get a new fancy inter european high speed train, but you destroy the everyday smaller regional lines, that do not generate enough revenue. That is what is currently happening in France, smaller regional lines close, and ticket prices rise, since the state cannot compensate the losses anymore... Basically, you get a shiny expensive tourist train, and you leave out everyone else since it's not profitable anymore. That's exactly what happened when Europe introduced competition on rail freight, It almost disappeared in the last 20 years since its not profitable...
Why does this destroy smaller regional lines? I don't quite see the connection^^
Well of course the European solution is just to raise taxes on things people actually want to use, so we can subsidize things nobody uses.
Regional lines have different purpose. Why would a high speed train destroy regional? Can you get to your middle sized hometown with an hsr?
@@thastayapongsak4422 if you throw a HSL towards certain areas, those areas regional lines get less ridership because the HSL can simply act as regional in that area
In an ideal system, the profitable high-speed rail will compensate for the losses of regional rail - this can especially be true, if the infrastructure provider is truly independent from the rail operator (unlike SNCF's and DB's extremely pathetic attempts at doing this), and the government makes it so extremely expensive (or outright bans) to cancel a railway track that it's more worth it to keep it running (or the operator is obligated to do so).
This obligation works in some Central European countries already - for example, in Czechia, if a railway gets either 300 passenger or 11 freight trains a year, it cannot be legally cancelled/put out of service. What can happen of course, is that it won't get upgraded anymore if it gets the bare minimum, however service will still be preserved - provided that the region / state wants to keep running train there - these are independent on one another and essentially keep each other in check on even slightly important railways (+ try cancelling a service and getting elected again, not happening)
There are technical barriers to international service. Different "loading gauges" (width), electric voltage, and in the case of Spain, track gauges. England having invented railways has the oldest national network, but thus also the legacy of having the tightest structural limitations. Most continental trains are too wide, and Bi-Level trains too tall to fit in UK's rail network
*cough* Belgium *cough*
Belgium was the second country with a railway and the first country in the world to have a national railway network. So although it's old as well it never the less has an extensive trail network and is well connected to the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg.
It's railway is still public property.
The proof that privatization doesn't work can be seen in the UK. Privatization just leads to undercutting to the point that the customer pays for everything for less product.
So you can choose to spend lots of hours to wait, lots of money for even just having a bag, fly cheap to the middle of nowhere OR you spend a bit more, spend less time waiting, have more comfort, more security and end up in the city or village that you want to be.
the track gauges is more a problem in portugal than spain, portugal has absolutely no lines with the 1435mm standard gauge, only 1668mm
Other than the iberian penninsula and Britain, I believe the main issues are train control systems and line voltage. But the thing is, both of these can be solved with a fifteen-minute or half-hour stop to change locomotives. Sure, it's not fantastic, but certainly not something that should prevent international routes from being travelled.
There is the minor hiccup of EMUs being really in fashion right now though, and very few companies investing in regular carriages...huh.
If international high speed actually becomes a thing in Europe all countries should agree on having the same gauges, same voltage etc. on the high speed tracks.
@@StefanMaring That's definitely true, although high-speed international travel is only part of the equation. Intercity trains, at least in my country, are way more affordable and therefor often a better choice for the casual traveller.
There’s some amazing projects happening to improve international connectivity by rail at the moment. A tunnel for a direct line between Hamburg and Kopenhagen, multiple enormous tunnels between France-Italy and Germany-Italy, and the new high speed baltic line are the most impressive.
as a european who takes almost only trains when I leave my country and also has travelled often in the past few years I have some thing to say: What is not mentioned at all for train tourim in Europe is the existance of the Interrail Ticket which allows you with one purchased ticked explore (with some esceptions) every corner of europe within a month. And due to my location(switzerland) I had travelled a lot through Germany and I have to say that they decreased some routs interly like the overnight train between Zürich and Amsterdam and some other connections. But overall with increasing digitalisation I have to admit that prices are over the years getting cheaper for rail travel!
interrail is great but regional trains are sooo slow and always delayed in every country so you miss your connection and sometimes you don't even reach the city that you booked your accommodation because regional trains last leave around 10ish (depending on the country) and i found myself stuck in random cities a lot while interrailing europe. there's soo many trains you have to buy seat reservations for which 1) makes it really expensive and 2) takes away the fun of being spontaneous and flexibel while using your interrail ticket
Interesting prospects indeed. There are, however, some points more to consider:
- Half the passengers of the new companies switched operators. The routes these newcumbers sit on are the profitable routes. The state-owned companies on the other hand need to service both the popular and lower-demand lines which they finance with the profitable routes. If the service is not to be reduced the tax payer effectively needs to subsidise the profit of private companies.
- International rail connection: There are big legal barriers to cross-country rail travel. At each border the train driver realistically needs to be replaced because they need to be certified in each country and speak the local language. When traveling from Austria to Slowenia and then to Italy at both borders even the motor coaches were replaced for whatever reason.
There are also technical barriers. There are multiple different electricity systems in use, for example. From 1Kv DC to 25 KV AC, trains need to be able to handle it all. Also systems, that ensure safe operations of trains are different between nations.
So excanging trains on the border will continue at least mid-term.
The first point is a major problem and the reasenon I'm boycotting Flixtrain.
The second one will hopefully be solved soon by new EU laws. Especially for new HSR connections this could be critical.
@@Skullair313 we have the trains figured out. Changes still happen as there's a limit how far a loco can travel from its home country. This is why there's a loco change on the Paris-Vienna nightjet in Germany. The dutch loco is'nt allowed to travel further.
The crew changes can be avoided too, but they're expensive. In general adapting English as a common language a'la the aviation industry could be a great long term solution IMO.
But the companies pay for using the rails. so if more trains run on their network, the state owned operators get more money too.
@@Skullair313 you also need to consider signalling, track gauge, etc. I know the work is there to unify it all but the largest difference between air and train is the infrastructure. As long as your plane can get airborne your golden. You don’t have to maintain thousands of miles of track, its infrastructure and the thousands of workers that need paying. Maintain your plane and the sky is free.
Main issue with this - What happens with the less active routes?
Main issue in e.g Sweden is that MTR and Flixtrain steals tons of customers from the state SJ on the most profitable routes (Göteborg - Stockholm), while leaving SJ alone on the less active routes making them regularly shit down routes and reducing service...
That’s the classic thing with competition : private companies get all the benefits from the great routes, while the public company still runs small routes, for way, way less profit (usually they’re subsidised but still)
Yeah, same concern in France. If the historical operator SNCF is the only one operating the smaller lines, while having competition on the busy money-making lines then how are they going to maintain the rail network which is said to be so expensive that the government has to fund it ? I have yet to see a convincing response to this which is not "just close the small lines" or "the market will figure it out".
Well, high rail fees for the popular routes, low or none for the unpopular routes to compensate? Or you demand of operators that they have to offer service to unpopular routes to get access to the popular ones.
@@neodym5809 Yes.
Since this is the system they are replacing, a system with one operator that has a state mandated mission to supply n number of routes n number of days, win or lose.
A often lost variable in this equation is that privatisation (at least on Sweden) has _ALWAYS_ resulted in a negative effect on the country side, all be it public transportation or vehicle control stations or hospitals. This seems to fall into that same trap, since I am guessing no private company would allow to run shit routes to compensate for the one route that actually brings in cash, killing the entire monetary incentive
@@neodym5809 Or, in a shorter comment, just look at the rail in the US. That's an unregulated system, and it works _fiiiiiiiiine_
Increased demand might be misleading here. Seems more like a unrecognized lack of supply.
Train service isn't just about individual lines and individual trains. To be useful to customers, trains have to be treated as a system. Just because one line keeps running mostly empty doesn't mean that there isn't enough demand to match its capacity. Customers don't demand lines, customers are in the market for connections, and they require the connections at certain times.
I think this is a very interesting case study of supply and demand being in a "false equilibrium".
In Japan the rail companies own the various buildings around the rails and stations and lease them out.
This also helps offset costs of tickets
Yeah but with different operators comes the main issue of tickets: if train A is late, operated by someone else than train B, good luck getting the next one.
Rail future is not with competition, but with cooperation, like it used to be. Just look at the DB-SNCF in cooperation trains, running TGVs and ICE from Paris to Cologne.
This is true between London and Birmingham, the two operators of that route don't accept each other's tickets. If you miss one train, the next one from the same operator could be over an hour away.
IMO more competition will only complicate the user experience even more.
There is no doubt that low-cost rail competion will worsen the existing service. That was what has happened with conventional airlines.
Current low-cost rail operators mainly operate with few stops and only in high demand stations. Most of the passengers will not use a connection. You could also argue that Ryanair have the same issue as they have no responsibility for missing connections, and yet Ryanair is growing.
@@LightbulbTedbear2 this is one reason I always bought tickets for a particular route and never just for a particular train departure, even if they cost 2-3x as much. Getting the next connection, whatever it is, or even just electing to not board a particularly crowded train from one operator, makes it all worth it.
Never mentioning at least some of the international railway projects currently under construction in Europe seems a bit lazy for a 20 minute video about insufficiently connected European high-speed rail networks. For example: Brenner tunnel between Italy and Austria (50 km), Mont d'Ambin tunnel between France and Italy (60 km), Fehmarn Belt tunnel between Germany and Denmark (20 km).
As well as the recently (and controversially) opened Milan/Lyon connection.
@@dennispremoli7950 This line still has to be built, unfortunately. Turin-Milan has been built already indeed. Perhaps you mean the new Trenitalia Frecciarossa service from Paris to Milan? This train is quicker than the TGV because it, instead of its French counterpart, can travel on this Turin-Milan high-speed line.
However, the Lyon-Turin route still has to be built, although having seen at least some construction already.
@@dennispremoli7950 what? there is no such thing? (except from the Mont d'Ambin tunnel which the original commenter posted about and will be well into the 2030's before it opens)
This is very true, i was thinking this. ^
Yeah, I said “what about the France-Italy tunnel under the Alps?” when he said the Channel Tunnel was the only such effort.
At the end of the day, rail is better than planes. You can stand up, you get more space, and stations can be built right in the middle of the city center instead of requiring a lot of space outside the city. Ofc for rail to work, cities need to be places worth going to. This is one of the main issues we have in the US: restrictive zoning laws keep city centers in most cities flat and uninteresting. In fact, in most cities in the US, the train station is surrounded by parking lots. The US needs to do away with restrictive zoning and allow train stations to be city centers with apts, businesses, etc.
Funny there are train station exactly as you describe in NYC, And Detroit, and Omaha in fact, all over the country.
Definitely false. Rail is far inferior to planes. It is slower, much more expensive and much more restrictive on destinations. I'd rather spend those extra hours at my destination. Trains are outdated and have been for decades.
@@CedarHunt tell us you're American without telling us that you're an American. You know trains abroad are different right? Give them a try, make a passport
@@VEVOJavier Tell me you don't have an argument without telling me you don't have an argument. 😂
@@CedarHunt Planes burning fossil fuels are unsustainable in the long term. Oil is a finite resource and any future replacement will be much less cost effective. And that's before you consider the disastrous effects on the climate. Electric high speed trains, while slower than planes for long distances, can be fully powered with renewable energy making them the much better long term solution.
This video is essentially an ad for the deregulation and privatization of rail service, not mentioning at all the decline in service that tends to result from it as well as the fact that *cheap flights are heavily subsidized* , by the means of things like tax exemptions on tickets and kerosene, as well as a plethora of small subsidies and socialized burdens of air travel.
cheap flights subsidies - agree, shouldn't exist, but on what is based your assumption that privatization tends to decline service?
@@MrPentacz Privatization will always focus on the biggest share of the market if money is the main focus. Unprofitable (or less profitable) lines or station stops will be cast off in order to increase profits. That's how "the market" works. But the problem with doing that in public transit is that it makes the network as a whole less fine grained and versatile.
@@MrAronymous and you write all of it based on what?
Due to the infrastructure (trains need rails), only a limited number of trains can run on the same route.
The number of trains is limited by the infrastructure; the higher the number of operators, the lower the service provided.
In this video, some elements are discussed. For the case of a Paris-Manchester journey, the presence of several operators forces the traveller to buy two tickets. In a deregulated rail market, it is likely that a single operator will only sell its own (and not other operators') offerings. Similarly, if a train is late, passengers who have a connection are re-routed on a train from the same operator: the more operators there are, the fewer trains there are and the longer the re-routing time for delays.
It can also be noted that rail services in Europe are valued by passengers according to the density of the offer (notably the frequency of trains). More people will be attracted if trains are regular and offer flexible, all-day routes through the timetable (not everyone wants to leave at 6am or 9pm). Fragmentation of supply between different operators leads to operators moving away from "off-peak" hours to focus on profitability at the expense of quality of supply.
By running a high number of operators on the same network, a major comparative advantage of rail is broken: frequency and regularity of service. Deregulation is, over and above the essential considerations relating to maintenance, social law, infrastructure safety, etc., nonsense from the point of view of the passenger.
I agree with your concern. However, this problem can be solved. For that, two things need to happen.
First, one should be able to buy one ticket for a complete trip. This is already possible in quite some cases. For example, I can buy tickets from Amsterdam to Milan via Dutch railway company NS International, a route where I will travel on different trains from different companies. This 1-ticket system is crucial, and I believe that from 2025, it is mandatory that ticketing systems of different railway companies across Europe should work together, making it a lot easier to book a trips in a few clicks, even if this trip includes transfers.
Second, if I miss one of my trains because of a delay of a previous train, I should either get my money back or be allowed to travel on the next train. This is the most tricky part. Because, what if my TGV from Paris to Barcelona is delayed and I miss my low-cost Avlo train to Madrid? Will I have only have access to the next Avlo train, which might run only the next day, or will I get access to the next train on this route? In the latter case, this could also be a Ouigo, AVE or, soon, Iryo train. This is quite tricky. If I paid 7 Euros, which Avlo tickets are sometimes being sold for, is it logical to give me access to a more expensive AVE service if my TGV is delayed? I do not have the answer for that.
''The number of trains is limited by the infrastructure; the higher the number of operators, the lower the service provided.''
This is true, but do not underestimate the capacity of rail lines. For example, Barcelona-Madrid will see Iryo entering service from November, which will add 16 trains in each direction every day. However, still, there is quite some capacity left on this route. If used correctly, rail lines have A LOT of capacity.
This.
With high speed, that problem is somewhat reduced. The Madrid-Barcelona line for example is only high speed so the time, 2 and a half hours is similar to what a plane ride would take. You have higher rotation on the more popular lines, because they travel faster you can have more companies providing service since their time using the line is so little.
For international travel that problem increases. Now there is only one route that connects Barcelona with Paris, it takes 6 hours and its more than the plane ride, but unless you're flying in first class you will be more confortable in the train. Downside is you have to spend 6 hours doing the route so each train is traveling more time, limiting the line no matter how fast they go because the trip is very long
Most of this problems will balance out because as the distance increases the appeal for the train decreases. Unless you're doing the trip at night in a bed compartment, going by plane is better. But of course if an alternative of slower and older trains-really cheap fares-plus discounts to younger people can mean that maybe it will be the ideal mode of transport for people in their twenties as fuel gets more expensive. Same goes for older folk that most likely will enjoy a slower ride but with confort in a train and travel over Europe than get all stressed out in an airport
In the air industry, there are sites, at least in America, that sell bookings that connect multiple airlines. No reason for a similar thing can't happen for European trains. As for the number of operators, if there are at least two sets of rails for every line, then you can have as many trains on the track as you physically have room for.
the problem with frequency can also be mitigated by differentiation of local and long distance trains. local trains need high frequency because the are used for daily needs, but long distance is more used for travels, so high frequency isn't essential. On popular routs budget lines might prefer off peek hours so they have not to compete about the right of way.
2:49 Misleading. You shouldn't just count the costs and time from airfield to airfield (=plane ticket) versus train station to train station (=train ticket), because that's not your start nor your destination. Especially when the "London" airfield is Southend or Stansted, your plane lands in the middle of the countryside pastures between mooing cattle; you're still hours away from the Big Ben or wherever you're going. Similarly, not all 17 million of us Dutchies live at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport ( the Netherlands are bigger than just Amsterdam).
You should always count from door to door. Walking, cycling, busing, training/flying, border-checking, and waiting: the entire thing. I've done several trips to London in 2018 and 2019 (pre-Brexit; I don't know how it's now). I went by plane and by train, and from door to door both return trips were about 180 euros. The big difference is that flying takes TEN HOURS (twice), and the train SIX HOURS (twice). Plus, flying is way more pollutive to the environment (obviously).
Yep this videos i trashy.
And traveling on a train (a typical European train) is lightyears ahead of flying on a plane when it comes to comfort.
This video has an undue focus on the "benefits" of competition. Coordinating services across borders requires the very opposite of competition, and opening the rails up to open-access providers will allow them to cream off the profitable core routes, starving the less profitable parts of the network, while fragmenting and complicating ticketing EVEN MORE. What we need is not more liberalisation and competition, we need rail to be given the same level of subsidy as road and air (zero tax on fuel, or free infrastructure construction anyone?) in order for it to really join up Europe.
And the final section of the video really underlines why the premise of the video is false. Developing good, long distance services will require coordinated investment in the right areas. This is going to be needed irrespective of the set-up of the market for services, and induced demand for better rail service would still happen if public service companies provided the right services with the right fares.
This video is all about a solution in search of a problem.
Liberalized transportation providers, state-owned infrastructure. That’s what works with all the other transportation systems.
@@xhelloselm wrong look at the uk that used that model since the 1980s after a period of time competition fails the big guys win and sky rocket the prices while keeping the service as bad as it was the budget one. This video is so bad.
@@06greg the uk is a bad example in that aspect though.
The rail infrastrucrure is just bad and limited and not connected to the mainland.
In the uk there is a hard cap on capacity, that limits the amount of induced demand that can be generated and thus the competition goes over the already existing routes and same business travelers. At that point the one that gains enough advantage the earliest will basicly monopolise the entire market.
This was entirely predictable to happen.
This is what happens when market fundamentalists get their hands on these sorts of things. They are completely blind to these obvious problems with free market ideology and will simply push things trough damn the concequences. That is why the usa can't have nice things either.
Nuance is the key thing here.
The french, spanish example is much more important in showing if this is the right path to take or not.
The legacy airlines still operate on the same passenger numbers they would have had if low cost carriers did not exist mostly serving business travel and long haul tourism. The low cost airlines pretty much created their entire market themselves.
If domestic rail can do domestic travel and new operators could focus on international travel via rail it could be succesful.
Some countries only offer package deals when auctioning routes to operators.
2 profitable lines and a bunch of service lines that are important but not profitable at the moment. So the profitable lines can not be concentrated in one operator that ditches the non profitable ones.
There are all sorts of schemes like this one that can mittigate thes issues in order to capture the bennefits of liberalisation without falling in the pitfalls asociated with it.
It does require proper oversight and willingness to change the way things are done along with how the market develops and a dedication to ensuring rail connectivity as a social service.
Here a country like the uk with it's devicive first past to post system is also a bad example. A 2 party system operating at more extreme sections of the spectrum is also detrimental to ensuring longterm dedication and especially investment in these non profitable services.
With your model train travel will never outcompete plane travel. Domestic monopolies are completely uninterested in running international services or offering the best customer service experience. An example from Sweden: the state operator SJ has for years vehemently and vocally opposed bicycles on trains, but due to the open rails in Sweden, competitors offering bicycle transport on trains have been able to service the customers wishing to bring a bicycle with them. Before these operators the only alternative for bike travellers was to take the plane, bus or drive a car. The number of niche travel scenarios is endless and a state monopoly will never have an incentive to service them, so a true rail revolution cannot happen without competition.
EU work on a common ticketing system and adoption of ERTMS are also vital for a vibrant rail market in Europe, competition alone will bring a revolution, but it is a necessary building block.
if you are deciding between flying or travel by train and you are going for efficiency consider the amount of time to drive to the airport, wait at the airport (including going through security) and the cab ride from the second airport to your destination. Compare that time to the time to simply board a train and then take the local public transit at your destination.
Exactly. There is a small airport in my city that does a direct trip to Amsterdam and is about 40 mins per tram. The main train station is about 20 mins per tram and also has a route directly to Amsterdam. The flight costs 4 times as much as the train.
And if there wasn't an airport directly there, the next two are half the distance to Amsterdam in toe other direction. So I would have to take a train to them anyway.
id probably still do plane
NightJet are worth a mention here. They have a wide range of overnight services connecting most major European cities. It reduces the issue of travel time quite considerably.
What wasn't mentioned is the fact the EU has done a lot of work to separate ownership, operation and maintenance of the tracks and other infrastructure to entities seperate from their legacy national government owned rail companies. It used to be that one company owned all the tracks in the country and would solely operate the services. The EU has forced a break up of these traditional monopolies. Side note: as you mentioned in your Amtrack video, they don't own the tracks themselves, but instead they are owned by freightrail companies instead of seperate semi public/private entities like in Europe these days.
The EU constantly surprises me. They use their power to actually place good policies in place.
Of course, an American will come in and trivialize this by saying "Look! Private companies good! Governments bad!"
That seems to be an important reason why this idea works. If there's only one company running everything they won't be able to get every route people want.
as a train enjoyer, I feel like i'll die of old age before the UK gets a train system similar to Japan
oh hey it's the pokemon guy
Lmao thats an understatement. However, also I heard a point being raised by someone. Compared to Japan, Uk cities are closer together so UK don't need the same level of trains as Japan. Your thoughts🤔
Something that you left out is that a lot of the international rails although not high speed still are connected with the highspeed rails and the high speed trains a lot of times can just travel over the low speed rails to the next high speed rail in the next country.
There also has been a way to buy basically all the tickets from one local point for a while now in the form of interrailing. Interrailing gives european citizens the a way to book multiple days of free travel in a month time. This way you can travel for 7 separate days for a low price with still the comfort of the more standard trains.
Yup. He would basically replace the major city to major city high speed train with a flight. So unless you tend to live directly next to the airport (and don't mind the noise) and want to travel to the other airport, you still need some method of transport that gets you to and from the airports. In which case trains are super convenient, because they exist basically everywhere and go to everywhere.
This is pretty interesting as someone who just travelled from Budapest to Copenhagen by train, and realized how the German network is so expansive it just does not function. Making train travel more efficient would not just be awesome in terms of planning a vacation, but also better for the environment
2:00 Manchester is only the 11th largest city in the UK. Birmingham is the second largest. And you could get a train from Kings Cross/St. Pancreas to Manchester without walking to Euston.
I would much rather take a train than a flight if prices were at least comparable. However, unless you have some discount card, trains cost exorbitant amounts in Western Europe.
Not even unsure why since you can fit more people on a train if you wanted and still have the legroom
@@biohazardlnfS Planes can make the trip more often because they're faster.
For context, Budapest - London (which are not two extremeties on the continent) is somewhere €500-800 (depending when you book the tickets) on the rails. Back in the heydays of aviation, the same journey was €20-40 with a plane. Even if I consider some additional fees that one incurs (you have to get to the airport somehow, fast track, etc.), it's basically one magnitude more expensive.
@@gyuziburcsany why would you do that by train are you trying to die slowly?
@@blanco7726 If people can take train rides for weeks then I don't think I would mind a single 24 hour block of traveling. I have had multiple-day train journeys and they are manageable
14:10 fun fact, iryo is a subsidiary company partially owned by Trenitalia, Italy's main Railway provider. Just shows how competitive the market has become.
As a consumer I fucking hate this, when I want to go from A to B I don't want to have to spend 1h researching different companies, finding the best prices, installing app and creating accounts, understanding the rule, etc. I just want to get a freaking ticket from A to B. They really need to impose some strict cooperation between companies for ticketing and transfers, otherwise it's going to be a clusterfuck.
You're the kind of customer that keeps the companies in profit. They probably barely break even on the cheapest fares, so they're going to make you hunt for them or pay more for convenience.
@Harry Groundwater Google asked for permission in 2015, but was denied.
You can do that already since years...
@Harry Groundwater google flights actually already lists trains as alternatives, at least for germany
rome2rio
Regiojet is running trains from Czechia to Croatia. Picking up some passengers also in Slovakia on the route. The trains consist of up to 16 cars, much longer than usual passenger trains. The service is low speed and often massively delayed, because of problems of the tracks. The big difference for passengers is, that the vacation begins when boarding the train, unlike when driving by car or taking an airplane. So basically once you are in your compartment, you treat it as a temporary hostel room. Parents play games, drink beer and chat while kids play in the next compartment. Often families make trips together in this manner. Groups of young people do not even need a sleeper wagon, they are OK with sleeping in regular coaches on the seats, while getting an even better price.
For a person like me, this sounds like the exact APPEAL of the whole thing. I would not take want to take trains where I am alone by myself for 8 hours straight. If I wanted privacy or being alone, I would take a plane. That's missing your target customers.
Just had a trip from Amsterdam to London for 80 euro one-way by eurostar train, and 100 euro back. in 4 hours to London instead of 4 hours in a queue at schiphol amsterdam airport. At that time there were no cheaper plane tickets to find, and we arrived in the center of London instead of one of London's airports that lie more than 100 km's from the city. Which would add a lot to the total travel cost.
Took the high speed rail in italy when I visited in May, and it was an excellent experience. Show up 10 minutes before the train leaves, buy tickets at the station for 50 euros, and get to the next large city in an hour, no hassle with security whatsoever, and you end up right in the middle of the city when you get off the train. The trains were clean, modern, and had plenty of space. Only comparable to high speed trains in China, although arguably better, since Italy is such a small country.
I'm a bit surprised you're this much in favour of privatizing the rail. Privatization of rail has largely been a failure worldwide. The UK is a famous example, but my own country it doesn't do much better. The simple problem at hand is that while private rail may or may not compete better (a big claim that needs bigger sources), it tends to cut services in areas where it hurts the most vulnerable people. Tiny communities that weren't doing all so well are now even more cut off from the rest of the world, cutting down their opportunities even further.
Rail is not something that should make money directly. It is better suited as a force multiplier for the rest of your country's productivity. And no liberalisation or whatever is going to cause private companies to want to lose money. Which is fine. But let's not let them take up space on our existing networks, then.
Japan has a mix of public rail operators in more rural regions e.g. JR Shikoku, IR Ishikawa & private ones in more urban ones e.g. Tobu, Seibu, JR East around Tokyo
But is it a failure? British Rail under the British Transport Commission model or in other words traditional state ownership was an abject failure -- it steadily shrank from 1948 to 1968 and suffered from chronic underinvestment. Out went the BTC, to be replaced by a corporate board. But they didn't do much to start with -- the main thing to emerge was InterCity, a successful makeover of primary express services and a success almost from the start. Only with the abolition of BR's geographical operating regions sectorization and branding across the whole network from 1982 did things start to improve across the whole network. Ridership started to improve on local services as well as long distance services, albeit slowly; and revenues went back into some much needed capital investment. But since privatization ridership has gone up much faster, as the sector model is built upon with more new options, despite the deterrent effect of grossly inflated ticket prices. Now, here's the wrinkle. Government subsidy has also gone up with privatization. Is the outcome worth it? Probably. Ridership almost tripled from sectorization in 1982 to 2019 right before covid. But would this have happened without the subsidy? It's a good question; BR old timers will point out they were already on to something with sectorization, and could have delivered a similar outcome with lower fares than the private franchises due to avoiding the middlemen of train leasing companies and other outsourced services that BR's privatization created so many of. But the emerging experience in the EU suggests those private franchises themselves need not less competition, but more, because for now, like their sectorized predecessors under BR, they're localized monopolies and showing the pathologies you get with monopolies. Then again, Britain's network is far more intensely utilized than in most of Europe, and the question is where on earth they would accommodate new operators that are sprouting up all over continental Europe. The needs there are for investment, investment in longer trains to make better use of existing capacity, investment in better signaling to create more capacity, investment in new track and stations to ease bottlenecks and boost capacity still further. And that's something these train operating companies need government help for just as you see with road transport and to a certain extent with aviation as well.
I agree. He focused on trains as a method of transportation, but he forgot to mention that their existence as a transport is a consequence of their use for cargo haul. They excel at logistics inside a country, and they will continue to do so, not to mention many towns, at least here in Spain, benefit from the existence of a railway that would be pointless from just transport economics
You can travel from Paris to Barcelona non-stop, which is definitely farther than London and Amsterdam. Maybe not as far as Milan or Munich though.
I was looking for this comment! I did it last year, and for the extra money, I'll take the train rather than the cheap planes (but transport to and from the airport plus all the nightmarish security/check-in situations at so many airports at the moment.
I think it's worth noting that as these railways were (re)developed post-WW2, there was a real national security concern about having your railways able to link up directly with other countries because that meant they could use *your* railways to ship troops into your country if they invaded you (or if the Russians invaded)
And this is exactly why the Soviets/Russians made their own wider rail gauge. They were incredibly paranoid about such an event.
@@TalesOfWar oh how the turns have tabled
@@TalesOfWar Time to start an invasion from Finland which shares the gauge (well, almost, by 4mm)
Apparently, the Spanish were also paranoid an enemy nation could exploit their railways during an invasion, so they used a different gauge to make it that much harder
It turns out to be pretty easy to wreck the tracks.
Ruin the sleepers between the rails.
(And for more harrassment for the enemy ruin the foundation too)
You can go also from Paris (France) to Barcelona (Spain) directly by TGV too and it's not new (1100 Km) . It takes for now 6h30. It will be faster in the futur. There is still a part of the line which is not fast between Montpellier and Perpignan. About 165 Km to work on. Half of the remain is already planed (Montpellier - Bezier).
Here in Portugal we have a 200km/h line between Lisbon and Porto, but it's already being updated. There's a discussion here about lines specifications, with can isolate Portugal from trains from Spain, and, off course, from Europe trains
Why would Portugal go for a standard that does *not* connect to both Spain and continental Europe? By sticking to Iberian gauge?
@@MrAronymous Cause they where thinking about change some standards for high speed trains. We don't have a train connection with Madrid since the beginning of covid, now they're planning resume this by the end of 2023. I'll try to now more about the standards and comment here again
@@MrAronymous It's exactly the Iberian gauge. EU wants to make a stardard for all Europe and Portugal it's against. They don't want to change everything, just the faster lines that's connect with another countries. Portugal fast line that goes from Faro to Braga in on EU radar
It's interesting to see the regular ticket approach to trains. This (if you are a Dutch citizen) is something you really do not even worry about. Here, we use to OV-Chipkaart which is essentially a card which you use to check in. You are free to bord any national train (with the exception of the DB ICE trains, those do require some additional paperwork) and just go on your journey. When you arrive at your desitnation, you check out again, and you pay the fare price of that route.
Now, people of course would try to avoid checking in and out. They solved this issue by adding gates ot most stations, making it impossible to enter or leave if you do not check in and out.
pssst ICE only requires the upcharge if you don't have a subscription such as student OV or weekend voordeel
Sadly that isn't possible in Germany at the moment, since there's no uniform ticket model for the whole country, each region has its own tariff association and ticketing system, so one card for the whole network would mean we'd have to standardise tickets across the country, and have DB get rid of its different pricing for long-distance trains...with our current lethargic politics that's never gonna happen lol
@@leDespicable Before the ov-chipkaart we had stamp cards for busses, different tickets for the main rail network and secondary networks, and the prices for train tickets were also not directly based on distance. It took a decade to fully implement it.
Sure German politics gets in the way, but it really should be possible, be it with time and effort.
Especially since the system was not designed by the government but rather a joint venture by the major operators. (Dutch railways + transport organization of 3 major cities + the largest bus operator)
I've been interailing across europe for 7 weeks, and i can say that some international train connections are better than others. And if i flew everywhere i'd be spending way less. Altough it is something i would do again because its still better than waiting in a line in an airport
It takes me 3h 30m to travel from Amsterdam to Paris by train. By plane is probably a bit faster. But the train station is in the middle of the city. You don't need to spend so much time to go through security and go through the airport itself. You pay less for ticket. More nature friendly. More leg space. Free wi-fi. Arrival is in the middle of the city. No need to wait for luggage on arrival. Not risking to have anything inside your luggage broken.
You forgot the best: Deutsche Bahn is now a Star Alliance member. As far as I know it is already possible to book ONE ticket for train + plane (Lufthansa). Also, Lufthansa has now Busses (!). You can collect miles by travelling by bus, as a connecting route or even the whole travel if faster than plane. You can basically now (or in near future) combine the best of both worlds for your trip.
Speaking of the north of Italy: I believe things will improve with the opening of the new Turin-Lyon HS railway, once it's finished. Travelling from Milan to Switzerland is very easy (Milan-Zurich takes 3 hours, Milan-Geneva takes 4 hours by train). Milan-Paris is affordable (tickets start from 29 euros) and takes around 7 hours by train. Milan-Lyon currently takes 5 hours. There should be more trains to reach München, in my opinion... and the North East of Italy needs more railway lines. The beaches north of Venice receive millions of tourists in the summer months and there is no railway line to go to these seaside resorts. Verona is connected to München, Treviso and Venice are well connected to Wien by train, but the line is slow. Domestic and international connections to Trieste need to be improved: there's no HS in Friuli Venezia Giulia, trains to Ljubljana are regional and Zagreb isn't even connected to Italy via railway. There is no Trieste-Wien train either, which is shocking, in my opinion. Railway lines travelling from Milan to the south of France also need to be improved. There should be a Milan-Marseille train... traffic will increase once the Milan-Genoa HS line opens in 2025/6.
There are some tracks scheduled to be build in south Germany since several years. They were planned to be completed when the new tunnel through the alpes will be finished. But it seems to be more difficult to build tracks between villages and towns than through hard rock. Because all citizens tell, the track should rather go through the neighboring towns land than through theirs'.
And don‘t forget the Brenner Basistunnel in Italy
@@joachimfrank4134 Yes, NIMBYs - Not In My Back Yard... they're a reality over here, too 😅
@@multa7053 I actually can't wait for it! I love visiting Germany, Austria and central Europe - the Brenner Tunnel will simplify and reduce train travel across Italy and the rest of Europe
@@carlomontecarlo7881 Yes, it will! You can already visit it as a guest but it's not being used currently because it's still under construction. It will be the longest tunnel for trains in the world then. It mainly reduces the distances Franzensfeste/Fortezza - Innsbruck and Munich. I've visited it a few years ago and it's huge. You should definitely visit it. And if you're visiting it, better stay in South Tyrol than in Austrian Tyrol. South Tyrol is way better in every aspect. If you're looking for Austria, better go to Kärnten or something.
I’ve got to say I am concerned about budget rail services. It’s part of the drive to lower costs-at all cost-through outsourcing and foreign-registered entities to pay staff less and offer fewer benefits. This is happening throughout society, and airlines are just one example. And as wages stagnate, the allure of budget travel options becomes stronger. It’s a race to the bottom and in the long run the only winners are the investors and shareholders.
Everybody wins. Your ticket prices go down, and the companies make more profit. Its simple comparative advantage. Have the countries/regions that can do the thing best for the cheapest do the thing.
@@thepuncakian2024 That "Econ 101" view of it is remarkably simplistic. How are the savings and profits generated? By paying workers less. They, in turn, have less money to return to the economy. The consumer that gets cheaper train tickets may well be seeing their own wages stagnate or fall in real terms. The only ones walking away with more money at the end of the day are the business owners and shareholders.
@@TheShortStory Most of the people who are working for these outsourced and foreign-registered entities aren't in your country anyways. They're the ones who are "getting paid less", not you. And relatively speaking they aren't necessarily even getting paid less. If they'd be making $2 an hour at another job or $3 an hour working for the budget airline company, then that's a win for them, and a win for the consumer who's paying less for their tickets. The only people that lose out are admittedly the ones that were working for the airlines before they started getting outsourced, and unfortunately many end up losing their jobs. But in the long run everyone is better off, as the increase in savings from cheaper ticket prices more than offsets the loss in revenue for those employees, many of who will be able to find a new job anyways.
@@thepuncakian2024 "Most of the people who are working for these outsourced and foreign-registered entities aren't in your country anyways." You are envisioning a certain kind of business where that's the case. Mostly, it's not. Most jobs need to be done in person, on location, by someone that can commute to the area. Be it cleaning services, maintenance, security, customer assistance, dispatch-hell even coding an app requires front-end developers that know the local language. Your view of this issue seems to be very narrowly targeted on IT/remote support roles, which are a small minority of all the services we utilise in our daily lives. The economic model we're relying on also works only as long as there's a lower-cost laborer somewhere else we can shift the work to. It is not sustainable, and I reiterate: in the long run the only winners are the owners of capital.
@@TheShortStory Ok, then I was mistaken. I assumed we were on the same page as to what outsourcing means, but apparently not. If a majority of the people that work in that sector are indeed from the countries where that business is being conducted, then that's not outsourcing. So then your statement of "its a part of the drive to lower costs... through outsourcing and foreign-registered entities" is incorrect. Also, being cheaper doesn't always mean the employees are being paid less. Take a store like Aldi for example, their food is cheaper, but a majority of their cost savings comes from the reduction in number of employees working at their stores compared to their competitors, such as not having to pay people to organize the shelves or collect the shopping carts, saving them money. The employees that do work there still make a comparable wage to their competitors, otherwise they wouldn't be working there and working for said competitors instead.
For example with budget airlines, you'll see self-check-in kiosks where you check-in and tag your bags yourself and simply just hand the bag to the employee, saving time and reducing the number of employees they need to hire. If customers had serious qualms about the employees for these budget services being underpaid then they wouldn't be using them en masse like they are. Savings are much more important to the vast majority of people than the prospect of a relatively small number of employees working in this sector to begin with, potentially being underpaid. If they were being paid so much less than their traditional competitors, then that would be much more heavily reflected in their service. Underpaid workers typically don't make happy or friendly workers. Customer service at budget airlines isn't as good as the traditional airlines, sure, but it is currently not to the point where the service is so bad that people aren't buying tickets from them. If it gets to that point, then they'll be forced to pay their employees better, that or lose market share.
Tl;dr: People like cheap shit. Let them buy cheap shit.
Lastly, if you're not an owner of capital, then be an owner of capital! Its not very difficult, just put some money into the stock of these budget services. Their gains can be your gains too.
The real probleme with train is topography. If there's a big hill or a mountain to cross, plane will fly over but train either have to go trough (and it will become more expensive) or circle around (which will make the trip longer)
This is exciting. I've travelled most of those international routes you mentioned (London to Paris, Paris to Amsterdam, Italy to Munich via the night train, Prague to Budapest) and they are all great. I actually found them quite cost competitive, even before factoring in the cost of transport to and from airports (which can be a huge chunk of the overall journey, esp in the case of budget air travel from London). Even the night trains were competitive compared to transport + a night in a hotel that is covered by such a journey, and they are obviously more efficient time wise.
when you consider the time spent traveling through an airport, and then on to and from your actual destination, high speed rail definitely stacks up. Its more pleasant during the journey, and its a lot more pleasant doing a single direct trip between city centres, than having to deal with airports.
But it was surprising to see how long some obvious routes were, esp between Germany and the western countries. As you say at the end, the key, and key difference to air travel, is the route infrastructure. especially high speed rail, which is very expensive and requires a lot of planning and issues with environmental concerns and having to resume land. And when it comes to existing rail, some nations use different signalling systems or even rail guages making compatibility difficult.
Construction of new corridors will likely require the buy in of the two nations involved, with some EU body overseeing the management of it. Individual governments will have to decide if its worth it, and even if its worth subsidizing, their side of an international corridor.
20 minutes from St Pancras to Euston (1:46)? Only if you're at death's door! 5-10 minutes at the most (I've done it many times), and there's a tube connection if you're too lazy to walk! And Birmingham is the second city of the UK, not Manchester. Pretty much all the other criticisms in the first couple of minutes stem from the fact the connections are transnational (and in the case of the UK, multicompany - Eurostar only take you to London, you have to get a train operated by a completely different company to go anywhere else). These days, SNCF has collaboration agreements with Deutsche Bundesbahn and TrenItalia, so each will run trains on the other's high speed lines - and I've used all three this year. SNCF to travel from Mannheim to Paris, TranItalia to travel from Paris to Lyon, SNCF to get from my home in Normandy to Paris. Eurostar is therefore not an exception (6:26) And I'd argue that Frankfurt is more important than Paris economically. Planes tend to be cheaper, because aviation fuel is taxed differently, something campaigners have long been trying to get rectified for reasons of both fairness and environmentalism (planes are much more polluting). I could go on, but that'll do for one comment, other than to say work is ongoing to level the playing field between planes and the train services of 27 different nations of the EU, plus the UK.
I came to the comments hoping someone corrected them about Manchester being the second city
I also came here to correct Sam about Manchester being the second largest city of the UK....... Not even close. I'm pleased to see someone else has called this mistake out.
Let me explain my situation 😂, I live on the corner of the German, French and Swiss border. I use trains twice a day for many years. I have worked for more than five years in the industrial part of the train industry.
The initial cost of setting up track is huge but often people disregard the fact that tracks need maintenance and a lot more than you think. That's why it's subsidised by the state. High speed tracks are even more expensive and complex.
In Japan they have a separated network for high speed to insure quality and time.
We're I live I can see the difference between the Swiss network that is reliable and on time, servicing each little stations. Whereas in France where there is a mixed network, some high-speed portion are reserved for high speed only. I see that the service is only linking routes than can generate money. They are closing little stations. Removing trains, and replacing a working service by something that became painful to use. Yes, you may find low fares ticket like easyJet but if don't plan your route it will be more expensive than before the deregulation. Over the last twenty years we got high speed which was nice, but then we lost smaller trains, closed stations, deregulated prices and the main issue became reliability... Infrastructure and train not working, transfer missed. The last year's they even separated sectors inside France which created the same problems from one sector to another. I see the train used by the middle class, the poor using low cost coaches. The richer using cars or regular flights from Swiss or Air France the prices are quite similar to Train but the expensive par is the parking ticket at the airport. I do miss the service. And I don't see how low cost trains will help the day to day users.
While it is true that the swiss network is indeed better, you can't expect the same network for France which is a country way less dense than Switzerland. Switzerland is made of lot of valleys and mountains, as less people live in the mountainous area, they're mostly concentrated in the valley which is ideal for trains. It's no coincidence that the two best countries for the rail network extensiveness are Japan and Switzerland (two dense and mountainous country where the population is concentrated in valleys and coastal area). France instead is full of plains sparsely populated which is is not ideal for a train network so you can only expect to see the bigger lines linking the big cities getting more and more important and the smaller lines closing. I'm french, yeah it's sad but it's not economically feasible.
@@flx4305 Good points, I should explain myself. I'll only talk of what I know, since I am a user, an actor and maybe a bit of a train's nerd. I'll talk about the lines between Montbéliard-Mulhouse. Belfort-Porrentruy. Basel-Strasbourg. While the construction of a dedicated track (LGV) brought here a fast link to Paris and Lyon as well as a solid connection to Zürich. I fully agree with you that terrain is always playing a catalyst role. Whereas in Japan they decided to build multiple set of track for the most busy lines (cf some dedicated to the shinkansen) in switzerland they rely on the ponctuality of the operators in order to fully saturate the dense network with often both ways single tracks. Moreover in both case they didn't forgot small stations which are still in use (with the exception of those in Japan where there are no user due to the population decline) Switzerland does have a lot of specialized train that are made to operates in mountains. My point is that France has made a choice to let down smaller stops & stations and in the same time opening to new actors routes on demand. I am clearly not happy with the decision, cause I remember using those omnibuses which were popular among elderly and people without cars. I might be sad seeing them gone over here. Is it a good decision or a bad one, who am I to tell. :) We'll see.
I have travelled from London to Paris, then to Brussels, then to Luxembourg City and on to cologne all by train during the summer. I would only take plane for long distance travel but its nothing compared to the fun experience of trains, witnessing the beauty of the countryside is just itself WOW, huge ass legroom, no restrictions on luggage, quite cheap, all in all better than planes.
Trains in Europe are pretty good, considering you do go from city centre to city centre. This means you don't have to book a taxi or pay for parking fees at an airport. I would say the only downside of trains is that international trains are limited. But buses are great for international travel. They can be very affordable even for long distances.
So like, what the video was all about? lol.