Europe’s Experiment: Treating Trains Like Planes
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2022
- Sign up for the CuriosityStream/Nebula bundle for just $14.79 a year to watch Extremities right when it comes out on August 4th: CuriosityStream.com/Wendover
Watch Jet Lag: The Game at / jetlagthegame
Buy a Wendover Productions t-shirt: standard.tv/collections/wendo...
Subscribe to Half as Interesting (The other channel from Wendover Productions): / halfasinteresting
RUclips: / wendoverproductions
Instagram: / sam.from.wendover
Twitter: / wendoverpro
Sponsorship Enquiries: wendover@standard.tv
Other emails: sam@wendover.productions
Reddit: / wendoverproductions
Writing by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation led by Josh Sherrington
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster
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.
@@DctorSkillz1 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.
"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
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 RUclipsr 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 😂
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
"Dense and efficient networks of passenger railways"
*Shows British trains*
Man, this is the best comedy channel on RUclips
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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 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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@MatthiasGorgens 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!
@@MatthiasGorgens 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)
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.
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!
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.
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 RUclips. 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!
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.
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
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
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
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?
Woah 😂😂 what's the with that random stock footage of Harvey Price boarding a Lumo service at 7:10?? That cracked me up!
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).
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.
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
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
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
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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi there, UK rail staff here,
Regarding the Eurostar Paris - London via Manchester section.
First of all, Through ticketing is possible if booked with Eurostar, with special onward and discounted tickets for the UK for this very purpose (CIV).
Secondly, If there is a delay to service 1, they are legally obligated to rebook you onto the next available or provide an alternative (such as hotel) if booked as one of the above through journeys with a CIV ticket. Domestically in the UK this also applies as per NRCOT.
Yes indeed one can at most UK rail stations, on showing a eurostar booking, book a tkt to "London International (civ). thus if the UK train is delayed and one then misses one's eurostar , with the lon civ tkt, eurostar are then obliged to put you on their next service..
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
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
@@SobolOMSI 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
I moved from a city of 200,000 in australia where we had 3 bus routes that came every hour and trains once a day every other day to a city in germany where i can catch a train to the next city pretty much whenever i want, really can not explain how amazing it is.
Where is this train route from Australia to Germany?
Several things
-If having to use more than one site to book your ticket is too much work, you shouldn't travel in the first place.
-Comparing the most expensive train fare to the cheapest plane fare is just a bad move. I like planes too but that doesn't mean I will take them over a train just because i like seeing the clouds from above.
-Changeovers from one train to the other are not a big deal. Plan accordingly and you might be able to eat dinner on the way too.
-If you can travel between two cities in less than 6 hours, you shouldn't have a plane flying between these cities anyway. Bad for the environment. Stop that.
-The comfort - FreeWifi, you see the scenery, you go from city center to city center directly and you can get on and or off in smaller cities in between too and save time that way.
-You don't have to commute for an hour plus to the next airport before you even start the journey.
-You don't have that Ryanair nonsense like "*if you don't check in online, you will have to pay a fee of €55 and check in at the airport"
-Even if High Speed Lines just are built domestically, they reduce travel times due to them being shortcuts effectively.
-Transport is a basic necessity. The state should take care of it by offering convenient services to smaller cities as well. These services don't always bring in money but rather make losses. I don't want private operators to swoop in, take the profitable routes, leave the unprofitable ones to the state operator and leave a higher bill to the taxpayer just so some shareholders can get a bit of extra cash by commercialising something that should not be commercialised.
From my city to Amsterdam there exist direct route trains and flights. The plane costs almost 4 times as mich as the train. And I have the luck that my 600k people city has an airport. If it didn't the next airports with a direct flight are almost as far away as Amstedam itself. So I would take a train in the wrong direction that takes almost as long as the train to my destination, only to then book a flight in the opposite direction. Plus the flight is much more expensive and will take longer than just taking the direct train.
But by your plan the state will have to take on the unprofitable lines as well. Also, you have the bureaucratic inefficiencies endemic to any day to day management.
@@grumblesa10The goal is for the unprofitable lines to be state owned because what other firm would keep those lines open. Making less populated areas accessible by public transport makes for greater social mobility and a potential to iron out inequality to a degree, which private firms understandably don't have as their priority.
Also the management is its own thing, you have that same issue whether it is privatised or state owned, importantly the management ought be competent regardless of ownership.
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.
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"🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
In France, there was (there still is, but in standby) a plan to connect Nîmes to Spain with high speed railway (you can see that the high speed railway stop à Nîmes, then the high speed trains use normal railway until Spain). But the accident of a regional train at Bretigny-Sur-Orge in 2013 changed plans: the president Hollande decided to reallocate most of the budget for high speed railway to the regional railways. Problem: call for tender of a lot of projects related to high speed railway have already been done and contracts have been signed. It happens in Montpellier: a new high speed railway train station was planned, outside of the city, just as you have with the station of Aix, Avignon, Valence TGV. The contract was signed, the station had to be build anyway. So..... so they built it, and they built a normal railway to this station. They reroute 2 or 3 TGV from the Montpellier St Roch station (historical station, inside the city) to this station. A kind of ghost station with 2 trains per day. Now, it has some more trains. But now, Montpellierans have to take a bus to this train station where they can get it directly in the center of the city before. And for absolutely no advantages: this is not a high speed railway (yes, the train is a high speed train, but it will go at a normal speed until the high speed railway at Nîmes), this is just a consequence of a political decision over a catastrophe. If they had think before, I think the decision would have been more nuanced and would have take existing elements into decision.
An app like Trainline makes the whole process easier, still all the same hassle with multiple tickets but it’s so much easier to purchase and keep track of
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
Speed doesn’t matter if the loud baby can go to another bogie
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?
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
Financial management is a crucial topic that most tend to shy away from, and ends up haunting them in the near future
Investment now will be wise but the truth is investing on your own will be a high risk. I think it will be best to get a professional👌
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.
The best european train ever was "L'orient Express" he crossed the frontiers without difficulties and was managed by the same company. So nowadays we can't have same trains as the Orient express due of non-standardised technologies.
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".
If you have overlooked Westbahn in Austria, its also intresting to check out, they also offer international Travel connecting Vienna to Munich.
Before they only traveled between Vienna and Salzburg.
When Westbahn started the cut the ticketcosts on the route in half.
Another very intresting Project that is currently in planning is the connection between Vienna and Berlin via Prague.
It will be paid for by all three countries and is probaly exactly what you are asking for in the video.
westbahn is awesome!
I was pleasantly surprised to see how many people below are commenting on the major drawbacks that privatising rail causes. One major issue - speaking as an economist - is that it's just impossible to create a truly competitive market for trains. You can't have 10/15 separate trains running on the same rails at the same time competing and driving down prices, it's just impossible. By design, railways will always tend towards monopolies or a small number of very powerful companies holding significant market power. In both of these cases, it's far better for these to be national companies operating not for profit, but for quality service, rather than powerful private companies using their market power to price gouge.
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
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
Great review! I try to travel as much as possible in Europe by trains and very familiar with this cross-border (hopefully only current) problem. It's funny that you made an example on the route from Quimper to Marceille. Several years ago I needed to get from Quimper to Castellan (a bit to the North from Nice). I ended up taking a 5 am-ish (slow) train from Quimper to Nantes, flight from Nantes to Nice and then c. 2 hours by bus (goes only once a day, hence 5 am start in Quimper) to Castellan. Also, a couple of years ago I needed to get from Munich to Vaduz in Lichtenstein: it took me almost 5 hours on 3 trains and a bus. I live in London and travel to Switzerland quite often. While there is an aforementioned Eurostar and then TGV to Lyon, there is pretty much nothing between Lyon and Geneva (I think there is a service, but the change from TGV is very tight and then there is nothing until the next day). And nothing from Lyon to Italy (ok, fair enough, they would have to dig under the Alps for this).
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.
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!
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.
The other day I took the Madrid - Valencia line, 300km/h the whole time, took about 1h30, double the seat size than a plane, free wifi : 19.90€ (on a Friday evening!)
It's getting better and better, I love it
When I was thinking about to visit my aunt living in Bruxelles (and I live in Poland) there were the options: 1) by car, spending the whole day and 200 EUR on fuel etc.; 2) by trains, spending the whole day, with a few transfers and you had to find and book each leg separately - there's no single booking system in EU, and total cost was something around 200-300 EUR; 3) 5-6 hours and 60 EUR with one of low-costers (including commuting to and from the airports). So, the choice is obvious.
Yup, and for me it would be the exact opposite, with booking a flight to Amsterdam would be 4 times as expansive ad the direct train route.
Its only 40 euro from Franfurt Oder to Aachen on the slow trains, price is the same brought on the day can take as much baggage as you can carry. Takes all day but is cheap.
Great personal exemple of anecdotal evidence
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.
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.
Local effects of the EU directive here in Norway:
- Train services broken up into a bunch of different companies that communicate inefficiently
- Problems that occur take a long time to fix because of unclear responsibilities
- More expensive tickets
- Lower pay for workers in train companies
This is all pretty new so we'll see how it shakes out, but I don't believe in privatization of national infrastructure. It's too important.
Yeah, I expected a lot better of this video tbh. There are exciting developments in European rail, but they are primarily in the return of night trains. A free market is next to impossible in a rail network because there are physical limitations, so it comes with all the typical problems of competition without much of the upside.
Norway is not member of the EU.
@@walideg5304 I believe the directive applies anyway as Norway is a member of the EEA. The Norwegian state tried to make the argument that it didn't in the 2000s in order to continue operating freight services between Narvik and the Swedish border, but lost that battle in the end. That said, in the end the decision to put Norway's passenger rail operations out to tender was made by the conservative previous government, who may well have done this even if there had been no directive.
The infrastructure is still public, but there can be multiple operators. The directive just allow competition. Italy has been having low prices and good service on its high speed railway network because there are two operators competing. Other public companies from other countries have trains on the Italian network. It was problematic at the beginning, but now it works great. The problem you listed arise due to how directives are implemented. It is not easy by any mean, and I am sure Norway can get it right.
Then again, there's so much horrendous bullshit with how the railways are operated that we didn't need the EU for everything to degrade.
I wonder how many friends of important politicians needed new jobs when they split everything into the what, 5-7 different private companies that each need their own C-suite?
(BaneNOR, Vy, EnTur, Norsk Tog, that company that owns the vending machines, FlyToget, CargoNor...)
Really really good video. Super loaded with statistics and valuable information. Thank you for all your efforts!
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...
@@matthewcreigh6624 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.
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_
one aspect of inter rail transport missing: electric system, signaling and safety standards
for instant: germany run with 15kV 16,7hz, italy on 3kV DC, france on 25kV 50hz and 1,5kV DC, all have diferent signaling and safety standards, though there is EU regulation fixing that
The biggest problem:
Rail connections are not public to third parties. Means I can not enter Departure and Arrival and get a connection involving multiple rail operators and book it in one booking.
Booking flights is much simpler and more transparent.
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.
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.
I have travelled from Cologne to London with my mother last weekend. We took ICE and Eurostar trains with a 1 hours layover in Brussels going to London and because the schedule was kind of spotty coming back we flew direct from London to Cologne.
Our ICE to Brussels was missing half the carriages because of a malfunction to that part of the train and we had to wait an extra 2,5 hours in Brussels because our Eurostar was delayed because of obstruction on the tracks. Our flight back was on time and we didn't have any delays our queueing at Terminal 2 in Heathrow.
However the first thing my mother said after we arrived back in Cologne was "Next time we'll stay a night longer so we can take the train both ways. It might take longer but it's simply the more comfortable way to travel." and I totally agree with her.
Yes, we had disruptions with our rail journey and there are issues with the number of connections or the price of certain routes, but in the end it is the far superior way to travel. You can start your journey right from the city center, you don't have to go through extensive security checks, you have far more legroom, you can take as many bottles of water with you as you like and so on.
I just hope that challenged by their new competition the legacy rail operators like DB, SNCF and others will introduce more services on existing and new connections. That is exactly what we need to make rail the dominant form of travel within Europe
A liberalised market in the UK has been awful; a lack of investment, billions to shareholders, state bailouts of rail companies, expensive tickets and a failure in service levels.
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.
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)
Tell me you're American without telling me you're American
As a French person I can say privatisation forced by the EU is extremely useless and foolish. The public funded all the rails which is the most expensive upfront cost and now some private companies are going to be able to sell tickets for easy profits. It's cheaper because the public paid for it.
In Spain it works
but its also the public that benefits from those cheaper tickets and hospitality + tourism industries benefit from all those extra tourists.
In Czech republic, introducing competition made trains cheaper and more convenient.
in italy competition by italo to trenitalia has been great, they have been obliged to become more efficient, cheaper, faster, cleaner! The netional company trenitalia actually become stronger and hoarded cash to pay for new trains to be run in France and Spain. You will see that SNCF will step up the game, because trenitalia is offering a good service at competitive fares.
So in italy the public paid trenitalia and when competition came, everything got better. Be open to competition and against unefficient monopoly, nationalism is old stuff!
Isn't that the case in all means of transportation? What about buses on public highways?
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.
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.
I was in Madrid recently and was trying to get to Porto via train. It was crazy how shitty the connections were given how robust each separate rail network is.
Watching this again reminded me of what surprised me about Termini Station in Rome. Years ago, I booked a Trenitalia sleeper thinking that it will be the only way to take a train from Rome to Sicily. But when I got to Termini station I was surprised to see so many companies. I chalked it up as other national train companies. But I was wrong. Considering that only long distance train option in the US is Amtrak, I guess I couldn't wrap my head around it.
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.
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.
^
OK, I have been travelling constantly for the past couple years on my quest for 100 countries (at 93 now). If I can choose between Ryanair or a comfortable fast train, I will ALWAYS pick the train. Not only does it usually get me downtown to downtown, which means I can save the expense and time of getting to the airport and back, the seating is more comfortable, the view is more interesting and it is easier to get up, walk around, maybe go to a bar car, etc. I am currently in Ankara Turkey and when I found out there is a high speed train to Istanbul (400 km) I immediately booked tickets instead of enduring a one hour flight (which is really almost half a day with transfers to the airport, security, etc). Not only that, I could book a business class ticket for $17.50!! TOTALLY worth it! I am actually looking forward to that travel day. So yeah, up your game Europe and elsewhere and get more high speed trains built - and I am looking at you North America!!
Ryanair to Budapest lands in Czech Republic !
As a European railway and transport engineering student I really enjoyed your video, but would like to add a few things. As some people in the comments already described, historically reasoned, there is an abundance of different infrastructure-linked hindrances to international train travel.
Train Control:
Unlike in the US, every train has to use train control. These Train Control systems differ from country to country, though. For example, Germany uses PZB and LZB alongside ETCS, France uses KVB and TVM, the dutch use ATB etc. etc. There is also a European Train Control System (ETCS) that is currently being installed Europe-wide but it can only unfold its potential if nearly all lines have ETCS installed so a train can cross borders having only this one train control system installed. Nowadays, a train that crosses borders has to be equipped with all the train control systems of the countries it wants to run in. Only Switzerland has yet abolished its national Train Control System Indusi and replaced it with ETCS on all tracks.
Electrification:
Again, unlike in the US, European trains run on Electricity. This is a good thing, as electric trains actually run fast, they're efficient and clean, but not every train can run on every electricity. (Yes that's simplified and not 100% engineeringly correct but it's sufficient for understanding the issue.)
Germany, Switzerland and Austria have a united rail electricity network which also is the biggest resonant earthed electricity network worldwide. These three countries use 15 kV 16,7 Hz AC power.
A European "standard" for High Speed lines has evolved with more and more lines being equipped with 25 KV 50 Hz AC power. This type of electrification comes with a couple of advantages, being able to supply higher energy loads more efficiently than DC networks and it can be installed more easily than the 16,7 Hz network of Germany. 25 kV 50 Hz is used on HSR lines in France, Italy (with one exception), Belgium and the Netherlands, also on electrified lines in Hungary and western Czechia.
In a lot of countries there are still DC lines used and Italy even runs one highspeed line on DC power, which from an engineering pov is insane. 3 kV DC and 1,5 kV DC are common in nearly all European countries except Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Track Gauge:
A different track gauge is certainly the most difficult obstacle to overcome, as a train can be equipped with multiple Train control systems or multiple electric systems relatively easy but the wheels usually have a fixed distance from one another. There are trains that can change their gauge but they are incredibly complex, expensive and need track changing installations that again are incredibly complex and expensive. Fortunately, track gauge is only a problem in a few countries as most of Europe uses standard gauge (1435 mm) but the all conventional and some high speed lines in Spain and Portugal use 1668 mm while the Baltics and Russia use a 1520 mm gauge. Finland uses 1524 mm.
Clearance Profile:
Trains needs some room in order not to crash into one another. Even if the track gauge is the same, clearance profile can differ. For example, there has been a private Swedish company (Snälltåget) offering a night train from Sweden to Germany for a while. When the Swedish national railway started to operate one, too, they had to rent sleeper cars not because they lacked own cars but rather because their cars were too wide for German tracks and couldn't operate over here.
Operational Restrictions:
Every country or Railway Infrastructure Company has its own ideas and rules on how to run and operate trains. I learned and know a lot about the German railway operations but operations are very different from country to country. While in Germany, we operatively distinguish stations and "free track", this distinction is not made in the UK. The rules on how to behave and conduct rail travel are very different, signals look different, etc. This means that a conductor cannot run a train across borders apart from very select exceptions. A ECE train from Munich to Zurich is driven by a German train driver on its way from Munich to Lindau, where an Austrian colleague takes over and drives the train to Buchs. There, a Swiss guy has to overtake to take the train to its destination. This is incredibly complex and makes train runs across multiple countries difficult to plan and prone to delays and unreliabilities.
What that means:
The DACH-Countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) use compatible electrification, train control, gauge and have similar operation standards. We can see that cross-border train connections work incredibly well between these countries. ICE High speed Trains run from Vienna to all important German cities. EC and IC services connect most of Germany to Salzburg, Graz, Klagenfurt, Innsbruck, etc. ICE Trains also go to many Swiss cities, Zurich, Basel and a couple of others regularly. The Austrian Railways even own a couple of class 411 German ICE high speed trains (ICE-T Trainsets) that are registered in Austria as a symbol of partnership.
This example shows that international cooperation can work well with train travel. Is the technological compatibility the sole reason for this?
No.
Frankfurt to Paris operations are incredibly reliable and work good as well. ICE and TGV trains connect these two cities regularly and on this route, the train driver and train crew don't even change as they have a special training to be able to work in both countries.
Especially with modern technologies, it is not that difficult to install multiple train control systems or electrical systems in one train. French TGV trains have to have multiple electric systems anyway as there is more than one electric system in France alone and modern locomotives like the Siemens Vectron and Taurus can operate in nearly all European countries? So why do some international connections work well and others don't even exist?
The most important factor, as mentioned in the video, is travel time. High speed lines and even conventional main lines usually only exist domestically. Cross border connections mostly mean traveling on abandoned and forgotten small rail lines after the last major city in the country you're leaving until the next one in the country you're traveling to. Spending time on these kind of tracks makes travel times uncompetitive and unattractive. What makes DACH-connections so good is the fact that proper rail lines exist right to the borders. The German Rheintalbahn line for example goes all the way to Basel, Switzerland, where trains can connect to the Swiss network. Going from Frankfurt to France you only spend a few minutes on "shitty" lines between Offenburg and Straßburg, before going right back onto a French High Speed line.
To make this happen all over Europe, we need political willpower across borders, though. Nobody just randomly builds a multi-million Euro rail line to the border of the neighboring country hoping for your neighbors to do the same thing so we can have cross-border connections. Countries and Infrastructure operators need to cooperate to make international projects come true - like the channel tunnel, so we can have a well-interconnected European rail network.
Outlook:
The good thing is, we are working on it. There are a couple of projects that are being planned, built right now or have been completed recently that support international connections. France and Spain have build a modern, 350 km/h (230 mph) line across the border from Fighters to Perpignan. Austria and Italy are building the worlds longest tunnel unter the alps to reduce travel times between Innsbruck and Italy by one hour (!). Germany is upgrading and renewing its Berlin - Frankfurt/Oder lines for better services to Poland and then we should not forget the incredible megaproject of the Fehmarnbelttunnel that is currently being built - a new Tunnel under the sea from Germany to Poland, including high speed lines in both countries to reduce Hamburg to Copenhagen Travel times by more than 2 hours from 4:30 to about 2:00.
I just noticed that Ive written way too much and should probably go to bed now - but I hope you enjoyed my ted talk and I thank you for reading this 1400 word essay. Let's be optimistic and look forward to the future - I did this week by traveling on the all new nightjet trains and they're awesome.
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
7:14 Harvey price collab
Amazing to see those exciting developments, and a highly interesting and insightful video!
Thé TGV is absolutely incredible. I take it whenever possible (often Rennes -> Paris). I just recently did Avignon -> Paris and it was only 3hours 30 minute. Travelling an entire country in that little time is just crazy
I've travelled Bordeaux-Paris in under 3 hours. Fantastique !!
@@mariomolins5161 C’est absolumment top ça. Je fais Biarritz - Paris pas mal souvent et dès que l’on arrive à Bordeaux de Biarritz, c’est hype rapide
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.