The creator of this video is being dubious with his very exaggerated claims about the train system in Europe. I've traveled Europe and the UK by train and it's not the nightmare he's making it out to be.
He ignores the normal travel before air travel that was affordable to the average person was in place. Britain to Paris was the first international train route thanks to the boat train. He has no idea about what came before.
Or the fact that in most cases, those prices are only available during certain moments. When they started to name prices, my first though was that this video was made before COVID, those prices feels insanely cheap. I tried to plan to fly to Prague from Paris, and prices are much higher than before COVID. Sure if I wait and try to take a plane for tomorrow I'll get one for 80€, but I have a planned event there, I can't "hope" for a plane ticket to drop in price. It's a bit unfair to show such prices as if they were an average.
I've walked further from one airport terminal to another to make a flight connection than the distance from St. Pancras to Euston! An alternative to walking is the tube - and train platform to tube platform is closer than many terminal trains to departure gates.
I agree, this is a bad example. It's an easy connection between St Pancras and Euston. A better example would be Bristol or Cardiff. Connecting from St Pancras to Paddington takes ages.
This was not always so. Direct trains existed between Paris and Moscow ! Paris and Lisbon (the Sud Express). Cologne and Oslo (the Nordpilen) and London and Istanbul (the Orient Express). Second error this video makes is that whilst booking a specific train from London to Manchester is the cheapest option, an open (anytime) ticket would allow the traveller to just catch the next train to Manchester and trains run between London and Manchester every 20 minutes. All daytime trains within Britain (not Eurostar) can be boarded without a seat reservation (Eurostar requires a seat reservation and so do overnight sleepers between London and Scotland and Cornwall). Most European cities have just one mainline station, so walking / taking the subway / tube / metro between terminals can be avoided. London has 14 termini (it was 16, but Holborn Viaduct and Broad Street closed) within a 4 mile core, and a very good tube between them. Paris has 6 termini and again a very good metro and RER between them (additionally, by changing at say Lille, instead of Paris, some cross-platform transfers are possible). What the video misses, is the speed of city to city by train over planes. For example, factoring it taking @ 1 hour to get from the city centre to the airport and having a 2 hour check-in on a European flight; the train is significantly quicker. London to Paris by air takes 1 hr (to the airport) + 2 hrs (check-in) + 1 hr (flight) + 1 (to the city centre) = 5 hours. Eurostar does door-to-door in 2 hours 15 mins. London to Brussels by air again takes 5 hours, but Eurostar does it in 1 hour 50 mins. London to Amsterdam by air takes 5 hours, and Eurostar does it in 4 hours. Although TGV trains do go to Calais, the LGV Nord only goes as far as Dunkirk. France currently has EIGHT high speed lines completed and TWELVE more under construction ! While using just one connection you can London to Cologne in 4 hours by train (by changing at Brussels), etc. Although a bridge / tunnel between mainland Italy and Sicily is planned; currently there are train ferries, where the train is put onto the ship at Villa San Giovanni and off again at Messina. Train ferries were once used between Britain and France, between the islands of Denmark, between Denmark and Sweden and Germany etc. But nowadays the one to Sicily is one of the last passenger train ferries left. I have flown both trans-Atlantic and across Europe and I have never been compensated for a delayed flight. Whereas delay compensation is normal for trains. I have even had free tickets to Inverness and Paris this way. America and Canada already do four international train routes: New York to Toronto (on AMTRAK's Maple Leaf), New York to Montreal (on AMTRAK's Adirondack), Seattle to Vancouver (both with AMTRAK and Rocky Mountaineer) and Skagway to Carcross (with the White Pass & Yukon Route). While the AMTRAK Maple Leaf takes 14 hours, I have done it, just to see the scenery and enjoy a more comfortable travelling experience. I have also done the WP&YR from Skagway Alaska to Carcross Yukon for the scenery alone. Within Europe, the political hatred you refer to, wasn't really a thing in peacetime, but obviously the Russia/Ukraine war has effected travel. The main problem barring international travel in Europe was the fact neighbouring railways often chose different electrical systems, different signalling systems, and even some different track gauges and loading gauges. This meant the early Eurostar, routed on classic non-high speed routes, had to be built to the narrower British loading gauge, and although the track gauge was the same, it required three different voltage systems and different signalling systems. Therefore, the European Union got the railways of Europe to agree to a common standard (called Technical Specifications for Interoperability) so trains could work across borders seamlessly, without having to duplicate, triplicate and quadruple on board train equipment. Operationally, the railways had to agree common methods of working too. Quite the opposite to a "tangled mess" as you say, the EU used best practice calling upon the collective expertise of 28 nations, and economies of scale reduced costs by a factor of 28. I represented the railways of Britain at two EU forums, to design and agree EU directives, when we were an EU member. The EU directives were incorporated into national legislation. In Britain, this involved internal consultation with 98 stakeholders, and a further 800 companies within the rail industry to produce a Green Paper. This then went to the CBI and TUC as an external consultation document called a White Paper, before going before the UK parliament, for a First Reading at the House of Commons (where the public could ask their MP to vote aye or nay), and a Second Reading at the House of Lords, and only after going through several years of to and fro, before the Sovereign (Queen Elizabeth 2, back then) signed it off at Royal Assent. So it was a myth, the British public had no say; it is also a myth to say the process was somehow not sovereign, when the Sovereign presided over the process - the clue is in her title for F sake !
Thanks. I did wonder about Berlin to Moscow, but wasn't sure it was still running in light of recent events. Is the Vienna Moscow part of the same train or a separate train ? Thanks for the support.
As somebody that lives in Europe… I had to turn this video off as the commentator has literally no clue what he is talking about with prices and connections etc
22:40 this isn´t really the case due to the Schengen Agreement and EU-Regulations. the main problem of international train routes is that as the railway system is very old, every country developed their own system of signals, train influencing systems and electric systems. a german train usually can´t drive to let´s say Spain, simply because the dispatch guy can´t see the train in his system, the train can´t use the electric system provided and the train conductor doesn´t know the signals. we try to fix that by using ETCS, the European Train Control System and trains that can use multiple electric systems, but ETCS still isn´t implemented in most railway connections
8:12 You ask a question about the bypass that the TGV takes to go to Calais and do not understand why the line does not go there directly. The TGV takes a detour to serve the city of Lille which is a much larger city than Calais. The passage through Calais is important to be connected to England. But the passage through Lille is justified by the importance of the city.
Just only seen 2 and half minutes and I have to comment. It is simply not true that you have to travel to London and then buy another ticket for a connection to Manchester. You can get tickets direct in Paris... I have traveled from Rome to southern England (outside London) by train. Bought the tickets in Rome. Also travel every year from Switzerland to England... also possible to buy everything here at the main Station, or even on-line! NO stress at all; oh, and Euston is right next to St. Pancras, NOT a 20 minute walk.
If you arrive in London on eurostar, you have a number of choices without having to walk to Euston to get to Manchester, you could stay at St Pancras and get a train to Sheffield and then change at Sheffield for one to Manchester. There's also trains to the North of England from King's Cross. Because most of our city's and towns have good rail links, there's numerous ways of getting to places.
@@Jungfrun1 yeah true, there is an underground/tube station at St Pancras, I suppose it depends on the time of day you arrive, the underground gets very busy at morning and evening rush hour, last thing you want to do is be amongst all that with loads of luggage 😆
The loop mentioned on the route from Paris to Calais is Lille. This is the only major town enroute but now provides a junction to Brussels for both Paris and London with high speed services extending to Amsterdam
The video is pretty much rubbish. Most major rail stations in Europe are located within the centre of cities. Old and very well developed cities. There's a practical limit on how you connect cities in Europe unless you're going to have major rail hubs on the edge of cities rather than at the heart of them. That still isnt really a major problem. 20 minutes to transfer from Kings Cross to St Pancras? It's not exactly a long time. You might spend that long transferring between terminals at a major hub airport. Then there's the argument about the problems linking major cities like Paris and Madrid. Does the US have a train service linking it with Mexico?
It's obvious to me that the creator of the video on European trains has little to no experience using them. Trains shine in transport from cities that can be reached in around 3-4 hours at most, like Barcelona-Madrid. Longer than that, flying becomes the best option. That's why trains joining Madrid and Paris, for example, have never been a priority, since it would probably take 6 or 7 hours on a high speed train, when one can fly between these two cities in about two and a half hours. A high speed train between LA and San Francisco, or LA-Las Vegas would be great. It takes longer to get to the airport, going through security, lifting off and landing than the flight itself, so a high speed train would be faster connecting cities that are not very far away.
To your question of getting tracks built in different countries, THATS WHY WE HAVE THE EU 😊 The EU have made agreement about these things, like with a lot of other infrastructure.
That's the key about the EU, it's about getting countries cooperating with each other and creating universal standards among each other. We've seen that already in many sectors across the EU, it looks like the same could happen with train services over the coming decades. The real key with train services is the interconnectivity throughout the EU countries and popular destinations, as well as high speed trains, and that will likely create a lot of growth as well as lot more of us wanting to travel.
"Green" countries like Germany, Netherlands, Nordics are having promising projects with passenger rail transportation. There is difference in rail width between "west and east" so countries with former russian influence have to build their network anyway from scratches.
At 2:30 - 3:00 there's a somewhat misleading statement. It's true that if do trip France - UK which involves changes you're going to lose your second ticket if your first train makes you miss the connection and you bought the tickets separately (which you must do because there's no way to buy connecting trains in the UK, neither via Eurostar nor via EU railway company). However, WITHIN THE EU since a couple of years ago, if you miss a connection thru no fault of your own, and you bought the entire trip (all the legs/trains) IN A SINGLE TRANSACTION (which nowdays is relatively easily done using DB's website, and many other railway companies' websites too), even if the single trains/legs ARE RUN BY DIFFERENT COMPANIES, you're automatically entitled to ask for a place on the next suitable train (or decide to cancel the trip, and get a partial refund). So ever since a couple of years, missed connections are not something one should worry about. Why on each Wendower Production choose the only case in which this does not work (i.e. a trip the involves the UK; this is due to Brexit), baffles me...
There is a project to build a bridge between Sicily and the continent called "The Messina bridge project" which is being developed by the current government, but there is no direct link yet, there eventually won't be anytime soon. As for now, the highspeed train FrecciaRossa arrives at a station called "Villa San Giovanni" right on the tip of Italy, you hop off at this station, you walk two/three minutes to the ferry terminal and you take a 3$, pedestrian-only ferry which is owned by the state rail company. It leaves you right next to the Messina station in Sicily where you can take regional trains, btw the Sicilian rail network is still very underdeveloped, so a reason why many people are against building the Bridge is because they want those resources to go to developing the existing network. The other and increasingly less popular (because slower) option is to take a slower train(not the high-speed one) which is actually loaded on a ship while you are in the train and then is unloaded at Messina where it continues on the Sicilian Network and arrives in Palermo (the capital of Sicily). There are some cool videos about this, you don't see a train being loaded on a ship while you are in the train often..
Last time I went to Sicily my car was on a train on a ferry. Unfortunately I couldnt sit in my car... I would've been in a car, on a train, on a ferry in the sea lol
@@claudiavictoria3929 Oh wow, never heard of that option lol. There are also passenger trains being loaded and I'm pretty sure you can stay on them while traversing.
Sometimes things are not fully understood if you use political maps or rather "plain" physical maps. The really needed map is a 3D physical map, where you can realize the huge barriers that Alps and Pyrenees separate these countries. By the way, there is an actual working tunnel under the Alps in Switzerland (Saint Gottard), and 2 more *huge* ones are being built to route traffic from Italy to Germany through Austria (Brenner Base Tunnel), and from Italy to France (Tunnel Euralpin Lyon-Torino). The 3 of them add up about 25 billion euros. There are no tunnels needed in the Pyrenees, because the ends are coastal routes, there aren't important cities in the middle of the mountain range (and France wouldn't be willing to pay anyway).
It is not technically true that there is no connection between certain places. So let's take the first example in the video of London St Pancras to Euston Station. If you arrive from Paris or Lyon into London and you want to go to Manchester, you do this.... Paris/Lyon - Eurostar to London St. Pancras - Take the Victoria Line on the London Underground from Kings Cross St Pancras (1 minute out of the Eurostar station) to Euston Station - that is a 1-2 minute journey on the Victoria Line (It is the next stop southbound on the Victoria Line). So the exchange in that case would be in a matter of minutes, providing you have booked your on going train in advance (which is easy enough to do in the UK via Trainline online etc).
Minute 8:18 - Why? Because in Europe we hav a lot of laws to protect environment and agricolture. In that empty space ther is probably a protected area. We try to avoid destroing landscape and nature for railways and highways
It makes it sounds as if it's difficult to travel from one country to the next. That's not true. But you don't get high-speed everywhere. And sometimes you need to take a metro to get to the next train station. The latter is probably not going to change.
The "air train" on a single concrete rail at 7:05 was a French project in the 1970s, there was still a 20 km long concrete rail for decades after the project was abandonned. Rennes-Paris: 216 miles. For the tracks, all countries don't have the same tracks, yet, so all trains can't go there, though they have already changed them in many places, but not everywhere.
Minute 14:05 - There isn't a bridge nor a tunnel from Calabria to Sicily. Most of Italians don't want it. Many governments studied it and the costs to be done is higher than we want. The majority of Italians think that a project like that can be done AFTER more important issue we need to solve expecially in the welfare. More money to workers, optimization of health care, job support, safety net, unumployed support, social housing. We need to take care a bit more of our worker class before thinking to spend so much money on that bridge
At 7:07 that's a hovercraft preparing to cross the English Channel, circa 1975. They are no longer used. The crossing lasted about 25 minutes, but could be pretty rough.
Weird- if Euston to St Pancras takes him 20 mins he's going at less than 1 mile per hour- you can practically see one from the other there are also tubes trains and taxi's available if you can't manage a 5 min walk.Also train travel in Europe is almost never done by individual journeys- you get an Interail pass, travel for one price between set dates. I think he's been listening to his travel agent without actually doing any research on ticket types.
Inter rail pass is for Europeans visiting Europe, like a tour, not really regular trips or single trips. The video is about overall train travel in Europe, so mostly for Europeans traveling between their home country to the next one. And if you're living in Brussels or Paris and traveling to Manchester, you'll have to book individual journeys.
@@KyrilPG Not really- yes Interail doesn't include the UK or Eurostar- but someone from the UK who wants to travel around Europe can still buy an Interail pass and travel around Europe-you just have to do the Eurostar separately, also true of Europeans coming to the UK. Eurostar was so expensive to build it has always been separate from other rail companies, on both sides of the Channel. So yes traeling from Manchester to Paris specifically needs separate journeys, (remember Mancuians are not Europeans) but if you want to travel from Manchester and all around Europe you combine with an Interail pass, if you are travelling from London and all around Europe you need a Eurostar ticket and an Interail pass-which will work from Paris onwards.
@@lauraholland347 Yes Eurostar is included in the Interrail pass, you just have to make a reservation. But my point is that the video wasn't focusing specifically on tours, but on train travel as a whole. Most rail travelers are not touring Europe but doing either regular or single / one-time roundtrips. For an Interrail pass you have to select a number of days on which the pass is active. And it only includes 1 trip outbound and 1 trip inbound for your country of residence. If I want to visit my friends in Barcelona or Berlin, or if a businessman based in Brussels wants to have a meeting / work stay in Manchester, the Interrail pass is basically useless. It's not made for round trips, the global Interrail pass is made for an international outbound trip, several trips in other countries and an international return trip to your home country during a set period.
@@KyrilPG That's interesting, concerning Eurostar,however I knew an Interail pass isn't generally useful for a round trip, that's on purpose as all train companies want to maximise the profit they can get from business customers, that's probably not going to change, no matter what companies move into the field.
If you like to explore Europe by train I recommend the Interrail Ticket...There are several options you can book and easily travel around many european countries... I did it in my youth in the early 1980`s which was a nice experience.... yes there are some cities where you need to change the train station to reach your final destination ( but it`s no big deal)...Paris is a good example for that....coming from the east like Belgium, Germany etc. you are arriving at Gare du nord and if you want to continoue to southern France or Spain you need to go to Gare d`Austerlitz... Imagine in the 1980`s there was no internet to get information and we managed it well 😉😆😂
8:20 why the strange route to Calais? The route is going via Lille a major city and multi town conurbation in northern France. For Eurostar it’s the station where routes from London split south to Paris etc and north to Brussels etc.
There are more and more integrated rail services in Europe…And, thank God, the return of international night sleeper trains - Eminently civilized and efficient. Direct HSR international (high speed) services from Paris, for example: Paris to: Brussels, Cologne, Amsterdam, London, Antwerp, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Essen. Night trains: Paris - Vienna, Berlin, and many more in the pipeline…. Great for CO2 emissions too.
Ryanair offers low-cost point-to-point connections (sometimes quite small destinations), with 1 or 2 flights per week on average. The train does not have this flexibility, and can only go from hub to hub. Otherwise it is not profitable. 6:50 Aerotrain,a train sliding by air (like a hovercraft) on a concrete rail in the shape of an inverted T. Powered by a turbine driving a ducted propeller, it reached 250 km/h, an aircraft engine was then installed (a Pratt & Whitney JT8D7) and it reached 430 km/h....in 1974.
The problem with a tunnel or a bridge between Sicily and mainland Italy is one and a halfold. Half, we're talking about a very geological active region. Mt Etna and Stromboli would have to be taken into the equation. Yes, Japan has a bigger problem with 'seismics', but do they have a 20 mile tunnel anywhere? Technically, this is something that could probably be overcome, putting in a couple of more €. That's why I estimate only half a point. The much bigger issue: Not enough people go to Sicily. There's not enough travel to justify a multi-multi billion project like that. It's simply not as viable as a connection between mainland Europe and London. Or connecting the whole of Scandinavia with Germany. Well, there aren't enough people that travel from Scandinavia to Germany, you might ask. Correct. But there's a huge amount of fright that's going both ways. A mindboggeling amount of freight... For a Sicilian tunnel or bridge, the economic numbers simply don't add up. No burocratic issues, just economic numbers.
Ha, London Euston is a quick 5 minute walk from St Pancras. Not sure where he gets his 20 minutes from. As others have said, much closer than changing terminals within one airport, or even walking within a terminal in some cases.
Minute 15:57 - It depends on the company and the price. If you want to have an "insurance" to be compensated, you usually take the highe price flight... like a "luxury" flight. If you go for the cheap one, you usually don't have any compensation for delay, only for cancellations (that sometimes happens for wheather conditions) and sometimes, for very cheap flight, you don't have compensation for cancellations, only a new free ticket for the same destination to be used in around 6 months. Thus it's mainly a customer choice: spend less and risk delay or spend more and be sure to have compensation
I work on the railway infrastructure in the uk and i have traveled in europe on the train aswell yes euro star is only connected to london but at least 4 major train stations in london alone and connections are easily made to get st pancreas station to get the euro star ive done italy via train and rome is connected to most major european cities
Nearly every country has a different rail system, but the EU wants to unify these systems. There are even different voltages in different coutries, but modern trains can run with multiple voltages.
this bizarre train is in fact a French experimental train in the 70s, it was a train with a turbine like an airplane and which moved on an air cushion! it worked very well, it was well above all the standards of the time and was very advanced...but the project was not carried out due to the oil crisis.
It seems that you don't understand there's a thing called the European union now and this is part of what the man in the video spoke of with the eu's fourth attempt at passing rules and laws to connect countries internationally. And no Europeans are not explorers like American so they do not have any real desire to just travel for the heck of it to another country. Maybe somewhere for a vacation and that they take a plane for... The EU has created lines of business though that require people to travel internationally now. The real issue is track development and infrastructure, High-Speed rail is expensive, and unlike before we're all of these railway operators were generally government-sponsored now they are private and need to show that they can make money.
You have no idea how cheap flights there are. Things like € 10-15 used to be common prior inflation. Now it's more in the range of € 20-30, but still a very ok price for ~1000km flight.
Paris to Rennes is about 220 miles - about the same as from where you are (near Providence, IIRC) to New York City. There's not much in the way of bureaucratic border problems in the EU - certainly not in the West of Europe - though things would get a bit thornier in the southeast (places like Serbia, Kosovo, Northern Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria don't always get on well, for instance).
14:05 The strait is about 2 miles wide. Politicians have been promising to build a bridge for the last 60 years but in truth currents are very strong there. Ancient Greeks thought 2 giant monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, would sink ships that dared to cross it 😂 So if you need to go to Sicily, you can either catch a ferry or a train transported across before being split into two parts and continuing on the island's rail tracks 😊
Yes, there are Compensation Rules within the EU for Airtravel Delays. I've received them a few times and you don't have to go through much hassle to get them. You can get them if: If your flight is within the EU and is operated either by an EU or a non-EU airline If your flight arrives in the EU from outside the EU and is operated by an EU airline If your flight departs from the EU to a non-EU country operated by an EU or a non-EU airline The compensation is a fix amount: - 250€ for Flights of 1500 km or less - 400€ for more than 1500 km within the EU and all other flights between 1500 and 3500 km - 600€ for more than 3500 km
Just imagine Humphrey listening to this. The Eu was trying to make rail travel easier? XD They're not meant to be well connected. You can move tanks and soldiers pretty easily on trains. This obnoxious chap seems to think the primary purpose of a train network is to move laptoperati from brunch to brunch.
The problem in London is, that England was the first country to introduce trains for traveling. But their idea was not to build a railway network but only to build a connection from London to one other city. Therefore the line was not built into the city but only to the edge of the city. Then came a second line to a city in a different direction, and they built a second station at the edge of town in the direction of that city. For that reason, London has no central station, but a lot of separate stations to serve different directions. If you have to step over, you might have to go to a different station by Underground, or bus or Taxi. In Germany, all big cities have a central station where you can change trains and direction just by going to a different track, and I think that most European cities do have a central station. Paris has a similar problem as London. They have also different stations for different directions and you might have to use the Metro (Underground) to change trains.
The guy who made this video presumably works for an American petro-chemical company desperate to dissuade Americans from finally ditching gas guzzling automobiles and airplanes and establishing the kind of comfortable, efficient high speed rail network that the developed world enjoys.
East Coast of UK most trains go to kingscross just over the road from St Pancras and eurostar. I have done it a few times from the north east of Scotland just a bit south of Aberdeen and when you factor in getting to the airport etc this basically can take me to Paris or Brussels with one train change just by crossing a road. Th fly it would take travel to the airport in Edinburgh or Aberdeen if it has flights ( not always direct or cheap) and a lot of hassel re airports. If given a choice I prefer the train
When calculating costs for air traffic and trains, don't forget the transfer from airports to cities. Trainstations are usually situated where town-centers are.
Oh and if the train to London is delayed so much that you miss the preferred train to Manchester, you just take the next one! Duh! its not so hard. You don't need a company to re-book it for you, you just get on the next one... simples.
What makes cross border train connections more difficult is also different electrification systems (AC vs DC, different voltage, different frequencies) and mostly national train control systems that transmit information about signals (traffic lights for trains) and maximum track speed into the drivers cab and ensure that trains don’t run over red signals or ride to fast. Improved technology has made multi-system trains easier to build but supporting multiple electrification schemes still adds cost to a train. A new European Train Control System (ETCS) has been in development for decades and started to be rolled out in the 2000s. It is supposed to replace more than 20 different national systems in the long term. Switzerland and Luxembourg have already converted their network, several other smaller countries have announced plans for a full conversion. Since it is highly computerised, there are multiple software versions that are not always compatible with each other.
London is a bad example of a place to change trains, at least compared with France, where there are a lot more trains from regional capitals to other regional capitals without the need to change trains in Paris. It's not always possible of course, but a lot of routes allow this (eg try Lille to Marseille - you don't need to change in Paris).
23:00 This is why EU is so crucial body to keep all these countries working together. EU and Schengen countries allow hassle free movement and EU provides funding along with two countries to get the connections built. Railway is the best green option for traveling and there are only benefits for every nation and the continent in long term. Its just shortsighted politics that keep pushing it back.
Walk from St Pancras to Euston, 2:21? Strange most of us would take the tube, it's only been there for a century and a half! This is deliberately done to sound worse than it really is?
The fact is since the mid 1800s it's been possible to travel around Europe, Baltic, Russia and to Constantinople (now Istanbul) via the Balkans. Not to mention the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok. So it's possible to get to most places on the continent and has been for around 170 years. Britain up to 1980 had the famous Boat-Train from London to Paris and beyond. There used to be a European guide to European rail travel since 1853 by the English publisher Bradshaws who had produced British railway travel guides and timetables since 1839. So once again a flawed American video about Britain and Europe. Also his pricing ignores the many discounts and rail cards available. Budget air travel started on mass in the 1960s not when he said and it's got cheaper ever since.
Airlines are exempt from paying compensations for delayed or cancelled flights if the causes are out of their control, like bad weather, closed airports, etc. However, if they can't prove that the fault is not theirs they pay compensations in money, for hotels and food or alternative means of transport.
@ 8:57 the video shows a high speed line in Alsace , along the Rhine River -this is an upgraded line following the classic route enabled for 250km/h since 2022 - used by ordinary trains up to 200km/h and opened with this alignment since 1842…!
7:07 A very old thing (1930ies?) and it wasn't used for a long time. It was calles "Schienenzepp" (german for rail-airship). And the thing at the back is a tunneled propeller.
In Austria for 80 bucks a month you can traven with any type of public transport in the country (Klimaticket) including high speed trains that usually go at 300km/h
14:05 There is currently no connection by Land, but building a bridge to Sicily has been a massive talking point in Italy for ages now. The problem is that it's so complex and huge that it would be ungodly expensive, something like over 10 billion. It would also be the longest and tallest bridge in the world however and would have to withstand very strong earthquakes so it's not like that price tag is unreasonable
The 'Everglades' type vehicle that you commented upon was the 'Hovercraft', a vehicle that is able to travel on a cushion of air. This was a British invention that is still in use in some areas but now largely defunct in terms of commercial passenger travel. In the 60's and 70's however there were two cross Channel routes that offered a faster crossing. Great fun when the sea was smooth but rather like being in a washing machine in rougher weather!
7:00 aerotrain. the french idea of having a really good high speed train. essentially a hovercraft on a concrete ramp, wonderfully smooth ride, and it's essentially just a concrete track, no rails no nothing. but they went with the TGV.
Cross border rail infrastructure generally starts by the governments of the two countries hammering out an agreement on improving the connection. Essentially both countries promise each other to build the infrastructure one their respective side of the border. The EU usually pays a contribution to such projects to entice the national governments to invest in cross-border infrastructure. For example, there is a 18 km tunnel under construction under the Baltic Sea connecting a German island with a Danish island, enabling a fairly straight line connection between Hamburg and Copenhagen. Both countries signed a treaty many years ago in which it was agreed that Denmark would pay for the tunnel as well as upgrading its connection from its main island towards their end of the tunnel and Germany would do the same on their side of the tunnel (which includes another shorter tunnel under sea to reach the mainland). Then there is Rail Baltica, a higher speed railway line from Tallinn, Estonia at the Gulf of Finnland, south through all three Baltic states to Warsaw, Poland. There are similar projects under way for a new 58 km rail tunnel under the Alps between France and Italy (Lyon-Turin) and one 55km under the Alps in from Austria to Italy (where Germany is upgrading their lines from Munich to the Austrian border) and a 30 km from Germany to the Czech Republic (still in the planning phase).
The LGV Nord route from Paris to the tunnel at Calais goes on a detour to Lille (metropolitan area of 1 million people) after a lot of lobbying by Lille's mayor at the time. There was talk of building a more direct route from the tunnel to Paris but I don't know if it'll happen.
Hi Jibby. Well, connections can be made at all hubs. Its the same thing as a stopover in an airplane, where you need to get out and change to another plane. However, it's much less complicated on rails, where very often its just a case of getting out on one platform, and your connection departs from the adjoining platform.
I can drive 1 hour to SFO, fly 4hours 22 minutes to BNA, rent car and drive home in 1.5 hours. 2200 miles in 7 hours or 314 miles an hour. I've been on the California Zephir, City of San Francisco, the French TGV, Italian trains, French trains, on an English train that broke down entering the station (Victoria) while the railway workers just slept on a shed roof and we the passengers waited an hour for the railway workers to fix the problem. Scottish trains were equally unimpressive. The European trains I've been on were usually almost empty. I imagine they must be heavily subsidized with taxes or salary taxes on working people.
It really does depend on where you are going. For instance, I wouldn't take the plane from my house to London - about 200miles. But I'll quite happily drive to the nearest city (20mins) park the car, and then get a direct train into London (by car that takes about 3h.30m. Train less than 2hours). When I get to London, I don't have to worry about parking the car or paying the congestion or ULEZ charges. There is the Underground, which links all the mainline terminals in London (no long walks - where he get that idea from?). That can get you quickly to most places in no time at all. And for the money, you can get from Heathrow airport to even the East end of London, fairly quickly and much cheaper than going either by car or taxi. Getting tickets is an absolute doddle Takes at most, 5mins by the app. And if you book early enough, very cheap. Maybe McJibbin needs to do a take on China's high speed trains. Like the Japanese, they are at another level. Meanwhile the US is stuck in a time warp.
ruclips.net/video/xl1kEpuaOq0/видео.html yep there are a set of rules that make the airlines less likely to overbook flights, unlike the current situation in the US....
8:40 1) The Channel is not ocean, but a sea strait . 2) The Channel tunnel is not the only (hs) train project between 2 European countries ! The rail Öresundbridge between Copenhagen and Malmö has a max speed of 200kmh (althought the trains have a 180kmh max). And the bridge was a revolution for the Capital Region of Denmark and the Skane Region in Sweden ! It becaome one metropolitan area, the Öresund Region, with effectively 1 labour market,1 housing market and served by cross border rail operators. There are plans to extend the metro to Malmö . People work and live both sides of the bridge . 14:10 The Messina Strait between Sicily and Mainland Italy is difficult for bridges. The currents and earthquake risk make it complex to build a bridge (aside from the fear of Mafia influence !) . And the depth of 250m is deep for a tunnel .. There have been several plans for a bridge, but all were shelved so far.. 23:31 barriers for international train traffic are historical differences in electricity: 1.5 KV, 3KV, 15KV and 50KV (most common in HST) are used in Western Europe alone. Furthermore, most rail lines stop at a border. The probably biggest limiting is a transparent schedule and ticketing system (of the type is common in aviation nowadays.) . Getting tickets and dealing with delays is hell, if you want to travel from Amsterdam to, say, Valencia... Tecnically a transparent system is possible , but there is also vested interests of national rail operators stopping this happen...
That kink in the route from Paris to the Channel Tunnel is there such that the route form Paris to Bruxelles can use the same tracks. Think of the routes from the tunnel, Paris and Bruxelles as a three-pointed star.
There are bureaucratic issues, of course, but what I've been told by railway friends (and people on here who focus on railway issues) is that the main problems with international routes are differences in signalling systems (which is what the EU directives are meant to harmonise), and differences in timetabling philosophies. The latter is a bit of a nightmare, because every country has its own needs. In Switzerland, punctuality is more important than frequency as their passenger patterns rely on easy interchange (you want your train to arrive at the same time as the connecting service). This means they use clockface scheduling which is synchronised across routes, but at the expense of running fewer services per day. Germany, by contrast, has longer distance routes with high demand so they want to prioritise frequency (so if you miss a train it isn't long until the next one and to get more passenger capacity). This means their trains are much more likely to be delayed, which would wreck the Swiss system. This isn't an easy problem to solve, and I'm not sure budget open-access operators help much (if anything, they'll make it much worse). It's also not a problem computers are great at solving (it is a mathematically hard problem for computers), so a lot of this stuff is still done in people's heads. There are probably some videos here that'll do a better job of explaining it than my inexpert regurgitation :)
In Poland you can still see the partitioning of the country in the (density of) train lines after more than 100 years since it ended. It is not easy to cross those "borders" even after a very long time.
The track gauge is the same among at least the western countries, so the same rolling-stock can traverse countries. I believe the biggest problem is that the train safety systems installed varies between countries, not to mention all the signalling and rail use standards. Another problem could be how different countries connect rolling-stock together and which voltage systems are used on the electrified tracks between countries, it gets quite cumbersome and expensive quite fast not to mention all the red tape involved I imagine.
The signalling safety system problem is being solved gradually by the new standard ETCS signalling that is Europe wide (it just isn't installed in that many places yet as they only generally put it in when the existing signalling system needs replacing) Overhead voltage generally only has 4 Europe wide standards and the vast majority of the high speed lines outside of Germany now use 25kv 50Hz even when the classic lines use something else
There is one exception on the track gauge- Spain and Portugal outside of high speed lines use Iberian gauge instead of standard gauge- though Spain does have trains that can change between Iberian and Standard gauges while moving at slow speed
The price of the ticket is not calculated according to km but according to the tariff zones that you drive through. At least that's what I got from the train station. Which gave the answer that the kilometers didn't matter.
Minute 3:40 - Having to go to another train station is a VERY VERY RARE situation. I never experimented it. In Rome you NEVER need it to go to a major city. The main station serve all major cities. The second and third train stations serve very small towns (like 5000-10000 inhabitants) and sometimes you have to use them to go to these locations. Thus yes, it sometimes happens, but only if you have to visit some specific small locations, never to travel from big cities around Europe. I've never been to London, so I don't know the issue with Manchester that isn't served by the main train station and to be honest I'm a bit surprised by that... It's very uncommon in Europe to have a main city not to be served by the central station of the Capital. It surely never happen in Italy, nor in Rome nor in Milan (the two biggest train stations in Italy)
There was a 'lack of competition' between rail and air routes. Competition on the same rail route is not really needed and space is, in any case, finite. RENFE (Spain) and SNCF (France) are national public companies. The British rail network, on the other hand, is a mess.
this strange train, on ground rails, is a French answer to the German maglev train. This French train runs on an air cushion on cement rails. But would later be reinstated.
high speed trains need high speed tracks - those are costly, and don't connect well together. A high speed train on normal tracks goes at normal speeds, and that is very time consuming.
This guy is wrong, you can buy a ticket from every station anywhere to any thinkable destination. But, if you go further than about a 12 hour ride or something like 6 countries and 36 hours or more, that are destinations , where nearly everyone would take a plane. Also, from Paris there is also a high speed train to Cologne, and countless other stations around europe via distance trains, that do not require spacial highest speed tracks. From any where to everywhere. But the sheer distance limits train riding by nature. You can do it , but you might change trains on the way. There are only two big hub cities ( London and Paris), where you even have to change train stations. All the other cities have singele Main stations, where you only hav to change the platform . Quite normal, as everyone would expect, that for instance from Barcelona to Narvik, Nroway--- that might be clear, that there is no train directly. There are just too many , sheer countless connections. In my town of Hannover for instance, many, may fugitives from Ukraine arrived per train.
hm, i saw ÖBB train driving around in my area.... i am nearly 700km away from Austria! i am 3 local train stations away from an high speed rail station....i can drive from there straight to central Switzerland....have connections to Amsterdam, Warsaw and Paris!
Between Italy and Sicily there is only sea, no bridge no tunnel both are possible but hight difficult to realize, the sea is to deep for the tunnel that must start lots km away from the cost to have the right angle of down lift, the singolar span bridge is the longest ever realized, and it is very active vulcan sydmic zone
I can't say much about international railways besides here in the Netherlands. We've had trains to Germany and Belgium for many years, as well as the high speed trains to Paris as mentioned in the video. The problem with the railways at the moment is especially the fact that travel by plain is still way too cheap. If the airways would have to pay for actual costs, the prices at which tickets could be sold would be much higher. Some years ago a flew from Eindhoven (the Netherlands) to London for 12 Euro. For that price I could maybe travel some 20 km by train. The other problem I'm expecting is with different companies on different lines, getting from one place to the other becomes more complex. I remember from a long time ago, that I was in the UK, and had landed at Birmingham and had to get to Loughborough (about 75 km?). I had to use 3 different trains from 3 different companies (besides standing still for over half an hour). That was not a pleasant experience. I hope there are better options these days. Besides that the low budget trains will always cherry pick. The lines with the high usage will be wanted. The places with less high demand might very well lose their connectivity completely.
Birmingham Airport to Loughborough is still 3 trains and 3 companies. Although the ticketing is fully integrated so it's 1 ticket Birmingham International to Birmingham New St (London northwestern or Avanti,) Birmingham New St to Leicester or Derby (CrossCountry) and Leicester or Derby to Loughborough (East Midlands railway) Would be an absolute pain without integrated ticketing though
@@dasy2k1 To be honest, I can't remember if it was 1 ticket or 3 separate ones. I just remember that due to delays on all 3 the connections where really bad. I spend almost as much time waiting for my next train, as I spend actually in the train. Thank you for clearing this up.
The creator of this video is being dubious with his very exaggerated claims about the train system in Europe. I've traveled Europe and the UK by train and it's not the nightmare he's making it out to be.
So much of the information in this video is either extremely misleading or just plain wrong.
He ignores the normal travel before air travel that was affordable to the average person was in place.
Britain to Paris was the first international train route thanks to the boat train. He has no idea about what came before.
In Germany, a 49 Euro ticket gives unlimited travel all month, with the exception of inter-city trains & long-distance coaches.
Also international on some routes
Same price as a return from London to Brighton.
@@daseteam You can't use it to travel outside Germany.
@@columbus7950 Train travel in the UK is ridiculously overpriced.
@@davidz3879 You can, David. Look it up
The budget airlines are cheap, but they failed to factor in the heavy charges for luggage!!
Or the fact that in most cases, those prices are only available during certain moments. When they started to name prices, my first though was that this video was made before COVID, those prices feels insanely cheap.
I tried to plan to fly to Prague from Paris, and prices are much higher than before COVID. Sure if I wait and try to take a plane for tomorrow I'll get one for 80€, but I have a planned event there, I can't "hope" for a plane ticket to drop in price. It's a bit unfair to show such prices as if they were an average.
I've walked further from one airport terminal to another to make a flight connection than the distance from St. Pancras to Euston! An alternative to walking is the tube - and train platform to tube platform is closer than many terminal trains to departure gates.
I agree, this is a bad example. It's an easy connection between St Pancras and Euston. A better example would be Bristol or Cardiff. Connecting from St Pancras to Paddington takes ages.
I walked 20mins to get from the airport terminal to the gate in Helsinki Airport!
8:15 The loop around is where Lille is, a far larger and more important city than Calais.
This was not always so. Direct trains existed between Paris and Moscow ! Paris and Lisbon (the Sud Express). Cologne and Oslo (the Nordpilen) and London and Istanbul (the Orient Express). Second error this video makes is that whilst booking a specific train from London to Manchester is the cheapest option, an open (anytime) ticket would allow the traveller to just catch the next train to Manchester and trains run between London and Manchester every 20 minutes. All daytime trains within Britain (not Eurostar) can be boarded without a seat reservation (Eurostar requires a seat reservation and so do overnight sleepers between London and Scotland and Cornwall). Most European cities have just one mainline station, so walking / taking the subway / tube / metro between terminals can be avoided. London has 14 termini (it was 16, but Holborn Viaduct and Broad Street closed) within a 4 mile core, and a very good tube between them. Paris has 6 termini and again a very good metro and RER between them (additionally, by changing at say Lille, instead of Paris, some cross-platform transfers are possible). What the video misses, is the speed of city to city by train over planes. For example, factoring it taking @ 1 hour to get from the city centre to the airport and having a 2 hour check-in on a European flight; the train is significantly quicker. London to Paris by air takes 1 hr (to the airport) + 2 hrs (check-in) + 1 hr (flight) + 1 (to the city centre) = 5 hours. Eurostar does door-to-door in 2 hours 15 mins. London to Brussels by air again takes 5 hours, but Eurostar does it in 1 hour 50 mins. London to Amsterdam by air takes 5 hours, and Eurostar does it in 4 hours. Although TGV trains do go to Calais, the LGV Nord only goes as far as Dunkirk. France currently has EIGHT high speed lines completed and TWELVE more under construction ! While using just one connection you can London to Cologne in 4 hours by train (by changing at Brussels), etc. Although a bridge / tunnel between mainland Italy and Sicily is planned; currently there are train ferries, where the train is put onto the ship at Villa San Giovanni and off again at Messina. Train ferries were once used between Britain and France, between the islands of Denmark, between Denmark and Sweden and Germany etc. But nowadays the one to Sicily is one of the last passenger train ferries left. I have flown both trans-Atlantic and across Europe and I have never been compensated for a delayed flight. Whereas delay compensation is normal for trains. I have even had free tickets to Inverness and Paris this way. America and Canada already do four international train routes: New York to Toronto (on AMTRAK's Maple Leaf), New York to Montreal (on AMTRAK's Adirondack), Seattle to Vancouver (both with AMTRAK and Rocky Mountaineer) and Skagway to Carcross (with the White Pass & Yukon Route). While the AMTRAK Maple Leaf takes 14 hours, I have done it, just to see the scenery and enjoy a more comfortable travelling experience. I have also done the WP&YR from Skagway Alaska to Carcross Yukon for the scenery alone. Within Europe, the political hatred you refer to, wasn't really a thing in peacetime, but obviously the Russia/Ukraine war has effected travel. The main problem barring international travel in Europe was the fact neighbouring railways often chose different electrical systems, different signalling systems, and even some different track gauges and loading gauges. This meant the early Eurostar, routed on classic non-high speed routes, had to be built to the narrower British loading gauge, and although the track gauge was the same, it required three different voltage systems and different signalling systems. Therefore, the European Union got the railways of Europe to agree to a common standard (called Technical Specifications for Interoperability) so trains could work across borders seamlessly, without having to duplicate, triplicate and quadruple on board train equipment. Operationally, the railways had to agree common methods of working too. Quite the opposite to a "tangled mess" as you say, the EU used best practice calling upon the collective expertise of 28 nations, and economies of scale reduced costs by a factor of 28. I represented the railways of Britain at two EU forums, to design and agree EU directives, when we were an EU member. The EU directives were incorporated into national legislation. In Britain, this involved internal consultation with 98 stakeholders, and a further 800 companies within the rail industry to produce a Green Paper. This then went to the CBI and TUC as an external consultation document called a White Paper, before going before the UK parliament, for a First Reading at the House of Commons (where the public could ask their MP to vote aye or nay), and a Second Reading at the House of Lords, and only after going through several years of to and fro, before the Sovereign (Queen Elizabeth 2, back then) signed it off at Royal Assent. So it was a myth, the British public had no say; it is also a myth to say the process was somehow not sovereign, when the Sovereign presided over the process - the clue is in her title for F sake !
Berlin to Moscow, and Vienna to Moscow still exist.
This has got to be the most brilliant, comprehensive and sensible RUclips comment I have ever seen.
Thanks. I did wonder about Berlin to Moscow, but wasn't sure it was still running in light of recent events. Is the Vienna Moscow part of the same train or a separate train ? Thanks for the support.
High praise indeed. Thank you very much.
I wonder if you are Nick Bartlett who lived in Brockenhurst and worked at BR Southampton in the 90s. If yes, you have met me.
As somebody that lives in Europe… I had to turn this video off as the commentator has literally no clue what he is talking about with prices and connections etc
All he say are lies and untrouths! If anyone wishes, consult the appropriate countries OFFICIAL travel websites!
22:40 this isn´t really the case due to the Schengen Agreement and EU-Regulations. the main problem of international train routes is that as the railway system is very old, every country developed their own system of signals, train influencing systems and electric systems. a german train usually can´t drive to let´s say Spain, simply because the dispatch guy can´t see the train in his system, the train can´t use the electric system provided and the train conductor doesn´t know the signals. we try to fix that by using ETCS, the European Train Control System and trains that can use multiple electric systems, but ETCS still isn´t implemented in most railway connections
8:12 You ask a question about the bypass that the TGV takes to go to Calais and do not understand why the line does not go there directly.
The TGV takes a detour to serve the city of Lille which is a much larger city than Calais. The passage through Calais is important to be connected to England. But the passage through Lille is justified by the importance of the city.
And the passage through Lille also helps with connecting to Amsterdam and Brussels
Just only seen 2 and half minutes and I have to comment. It is simply not true that you have to travel to London and then buy another ticket for a connection to Manchester. You can get tickets direct in Paris... I have traveled from Rome to southern England (outside London) by train. Bought the tickets in Rome. Also travel every year from Switzerland to England... also possible to buy everything here at the main Station, or even on-line! NO stress at all; oh, and Euston is right next to St. Pancras, NOT a 20 minute walk.
You mean Kings cross, Euston is Indeed a few minutes away
If you arrive in London on eurostar, you have a number of choices without having to walk to Euston to get to Manchester, you could stay at St Pancras and get a train to Sheffield and then change at Sheffield for one to Manchester. There's also trains to the North of England from King's Cross. Because most of our city's and towns have good rail links, there's numerous ways of getting to places.
Except when they're on strike.
@@superted6960 yeah true 😆
I might have gotten it wrong but when I looked for the closest metro station there is one literally below the London end station.
@@Jungfrun1 yeah true, there is an underground/tube station at St Pancras, I suppose it depends on the time of day you arrive, the underground gets very busy at morning and evening rush hour, last thing you want to do is be amongst all that with loads of luggage 😆
The loop mentioned on the route from Paris to Calais is Lille. This is the only major town enroute but now provides a junction to Brussels for both Paris and London with high speed services extending to Amsterdam
The video is pretty much rubbish.
Most major rail stations in Europe are located within the centre of cities. Old and very well developed cities. There's a practical limit on how you connect cities in Europe unless you're going to have major rail hubs on the edge of cities rather than at the heart of them. That still isnt really a major problem. 20 minutes to transfer from Kings Cross to St Pancras? It's not exactly a long time. You might spend that long transferring between terminals at a major hub airport.
Then there's the argument about the problems linking major cities like Paris and Madrid. Does the US have a train service linking it with Mexico?
It's obvious to me that the creator of the video on European trains has little to no experience using them. Trains shine in transport from cities that can be reached in around 3-4 hours at most, like Barcelona-Madrid. Longer than that, flying becomes the best option. That's why trains joining Madrid and Paris, for example, have never been a priority, since it would probably take 6 or 7 hours on a high speed train, when one can fly between these two cities in about two and a half hours. A high speed train between LA and San Francisco, or LA-Las Vegas would be great. It takes longer to get to the airport, going through security, lifting off and landing than the flight itself, so a high speed train would be faster connecting cities that are not very far away.
To your question of getting tracks built in different countries, THATS WHY WE HAVE THE EU 😊 The EU have made agreement about these things, like with a lot of other infrastructure.
If only the EU wasn’t so corrupt.
That's the key about the EU, it's about getting countries cooperating with each other and creating universal standards among each other.
We've seen that already in many sectors across the EU, it looks like the same could happen with train services over the coming decades.
The real key with train services is the interconnectivity throughout the EU countries and popular destinations, as well as high speed trains, and that will likely create a lot of growth as well as lot more of us wanting to travel.
@@paul1979uk2000 indeed
"Green" countries like Germany, Netherlands, Nordics are having promising projects with passenger rail transportation.
There is difference in rail width between "west and east" so countries with former russian influence have to build their network anyway from scratches.
At 2:30 - 3:00 there's a somewhat misleading statement. It's true that if do trip France - UK which involves changes you're going to lose your second ticket if your first train makes you miss the connection and you bought the tickets separately (which you must do because there's no way to buy connecting trains in the UK, neither via Eurostar nor via EU railway company). However, WITHIN THE EU since a couple of years ago, if you miss a connection thru no fault of your own, and you bought the entire trip (all the legs/trains) IN A SINGLE TRANSACTION (which nowdays is relatively easily done using DB's website, and many other railway companies' websites too), even if the single trains/legs ARE RUN BY DIFFERENT COMPANIES, you're automatically entitled to ask for a place on the next suitable train (or decide to cancel the trip, and get a partial refund). So ever since a couple of years, missed connections are not something one should worry about. Why on each Wendower Production choose the only case in which this does not work (i.e. a trip the involves the UK; this is due to Brexit), baffles me...
Cross border train tracks are in building and planing, like from Rotterdam to Germany or from Hamburg to Copenhagen or from Berlin to Warsaw
There is a project to build a bridge between Sicily and the continent called "The Messina bridge project" which is being developed by the current government, but there is no direct link yet, there eventually won't be anytime soon. As for now, the highspeed train FrecciaRossa arrives at a station called "Villa San Giovanni" right on the tip of Italy, you hop off at this station, you walk two/three minutes to the ferry terminal and you take a 3$, pedestrian-only ferry which is owned by the state rail company. It leaves you right next to the Messina station in Sicily where you can take regional trains, btw the Sicilian rail network is still very underdeveloped, so a reason why many people are against building the Bridge is because they want those resources to go to developing the existing network. The other and increasingly less popular (because slower) option is to take a slower train(not the high-speed one) which is actually loaded on a ship while you are in the train and then is unloaded at Messina where it continues on the Sicilian Network and arrives in Palermo (the capital of Sicily). There are some cool videos about this, you don't see a train being loaded on a ship while you are in the train often..
Last time I went to Sicily my car was on a train on a ferry. Unfortunately I couldnt sit in my car... I would've been in a car, on a train, on a ferry in the sea lol
@@claudiavictoria3929 Oh wow, never heard of that option lol. There are also passenger trains being loaded and I'm pretty sure you can stay on them while traversing.
Sometimes things are not fully understood if you use political maps or rather "plain" physical maps. The really needed map is a 3D physical map, where you can realize the huge barriers that Alps and Pyrenees separate these countries. By the way, there is an actual working tunnel under the Alps in Switzerland (Saint Gottard), and 2 more *huge* ones are being built to route traffic from Italy to Germany through Austria (Brenner Base Tunnel), and from Italy to France (Tunnel Euralpin Lyon-Torino). The 3 of them add up about 25 billion euros. There are no tunnels needed in the Pyrenees, because the ends are coastal routes, there aren't important cities in the middle of the mountain range (and France wouldn't be willing to pay anyway).
It is not technically true that there is no connection between certain places. So let's take the first example in the video of London St Pancras to Euston Station. If you arrive from Paris or Lyon into London and you want to go to Manchester, you do this.... Paris/Lyon - Eurostar to London St. Pancras - Take the Victoria Line on the London Underground from Kings Cross St Pancras (1 minute out of the Eurostar station) to Euston Station - that is a 1-2 minute journey on the Victoria Line (It is the next stop southbound on the Victoria Line). So the exchange in that case would be in a matter of minutes, providing you have booked your on going train in advance (which is easy enough to do in the UK via Trainline online etc).
Minute 8:18 - Why? Because in Europe we hav a lot of laws to protect environment and agricolture. In that empty space ther is probably a protected area. We try to avoid destroing landscape and nature for railways and highways
Lille actually and it allows to diverge and go to Brussels
It makes it sounds as if it's difficult to travel from one country to the next. That's not true. But you don't get high-speed everywhere. And sometimes you need to take a metro to get to the next train station. The latter is probably not going to change.
The "air train" on a single concrete rail at 7:05 was a French project in the 1970s, there was still a 20 km long concrete rail for decades after the project was abandonned.
Rennes-Paris: 216 miles.
For the tracks, all countries don't have the same tracks, yet, so all trains can't go there, though they have already changed them in many places, but not everywhere.
Minute 14:05 - There isn't a bridge nor a tunnel from Calabria to Sicily. Most of Italians don't want it. Many governments studied it and the costs to be done is higher than we want. The majority of Italians think that a project like that can be done AFTER more important issue we need to solve expecially in the welfare. More money to workers, optimization of health care, job support, safety net, unumployed support, social housing. We need to take care a bit more of our worker class before thinking to spend so much money on that bridge
At 7:07 that's a hovercraft preparing to cross the English Channel, circa 1975. They are no longer used. The crossing lasted about 25 minutes, but could be pretty rough.
Yes, the narrator knows f. all. if you have not already guessed!
Weird- if Euston to St Pancras takes him 20 mins he's going at less than 1 mile per hour- you can practically see one from the other there are also tubes trains and taxi's available if you can't manage a 5 min walk.Also train travel in Europe is almost never done by individual journeys- you get an Interail pass, travel for one price between set dates. I think he's been listening to his travel agent without actually doing any research on ticket types.
Inter rail pass is for Europeans visiting Europe, like a tour, not really regular trips or single trips.
The video is about overall train travel in Europe, so mostly for Europeans traveling between their home country to the next one.
And if you're living in Brussels or Paris and traveling to Manchester, you'll have to book individual journeys.
@@KyrilPG Not really- yes Interail doesn't include the UK or Eurostar- but someone from the UK who wants to travel around Europe can still buy an Interail pass and travel around Europe-you just have to do the Eurostar separately, also true of Europeans coming to the UK. Eurostar was so expensive to build it has always been separate from other rail companies, on both sides of the Channel. So yes traeling from Manchester to Paris specifically needs separate journeys, (remember Mancuians are not Europeans) but if you want to travel from Manchester and all around Europe you combine with an Interail pass, if you are travelling from London and all around Europe you need a Eurostar ticket and an Interail pass-which will work from Paris onwards.
@@lauraholland347 Yes Eurostar is included in the Interrail pass, you just have to make a reservation.
But my point is that the video wasn't focusing specifically on tours, but on train travel as a whole.
Most rail travelers are not touring Europe but doing either regular or single / one-time roundtrips.
For an Interrail pass you have to select a number of days on which the pass is active. And it only includes 1 trip outbound and 1 trip inbound for your country of residence.
If I want to visit my friends in Barcelona or Berlin, or if a businessman based in Brussels wants to have a meeting / work stay in Manchester, the Interrail pass is basically useless. It's not made for round trips, the global Interrail pass is made for an international outbound trip, several trips in other countries and an international return trip to your home country during a set period.
@@KyrilPG That's interesting, concerning Eurostar,however I knew an Interail pass isn't generally useful for a round trip, that's on purpose as all train companies want to maximise the profit they can get from business customers, that's probably not going to change, no matter what companies move into the field.
maybe the guy is American and have to wait for a taxi?
Americans are not familiar with the concept of walking... if its not start or ends at a car!
If you like to explore Europe by train I recommend the Interrail Ticket...There are several options you can book and easily travel around many european countries... I did it in my youth in the early 1980`s which was a nice experience.... yes there are some cities where you need to change the train station to reach your final destination ( but it`s no big deal)...Paris is a good example for that....coming from the east like Belgium, Germany etc. you are arriving at Gare du nord and if you want to continoue to southern France or Spain you need to go to Gare d`Austerlitz... Imagine in the 1980`s there was no internet to get information and we managed it well 😉😆😂
Paris is directly connected with Barcelona by TGV.
8:20 why the strange route to Calais? The route is going via Lille a major city and multi town conurbation in northern France. For Eurostar it’s the station where routes from London split south to Paris etc and north to Brussels etc.
There are more and more integrated rail services in Europe…And, thank God, the return of international night sleeper trains - Eminently civilized and efficient.
Direct HSR international (high speed) services from Paris, for example: Paris to: Brussels, Cologne, Amsterdam, London, Antwerp, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Essen.
Night trains: Paris - Vienna, Berlin, and many more in the pipeline…. Great for CO2 emissions too.
Manchester is not the UK's 2nd largest city or anywhere near it. Birmingham is.
Ryanair offers low-cost point-to-point connections (sometimes quite small destinations), with 1 or 2 flights per week on average.
The train does not have this flexibility, and can only go from hub to hub. Otherwise it is not profitable.
6:50 Aerotrain,a train sliding by air (like a hovercraft) on a concrete rail in the shape of an inverted T.
Powered by a turbine driving a ducted propeller, it reached 250 km/h, an aircraft engine was then installed (a Pratt & Whitney JT8D7) and it reached 430 km/h....in 1974.
The problem with a tunnel or a bridge between Sicily and mainland Italy is one and a halfold.
Half, we're talking about a very geological active region. Mt Etna and Stromboli would have to be taken into the equation. Yes, Japan has a bigger problem with 'seismics', but do they have a 20 mile tunnel anywhere? Technically, this is something that could probably be overcome, putting in a couple of more €. That's why I estimate only half a point. The much bigger issue: Not enough people go to Sicily. There's not enough travel to justify a multi-multi billion project like that. It's simply not as viable as a connection between mainland Europe and London. Or connecting the whole of Scandinavia with Germany. Well, there aren't enough people that travel from Scandinavia to Germany, you might ask. Correct. But there's a huge amount of fright that's going both ways. A mindboggeling amount of freight... For a Sicilian tunnel or bridge, the economic numbers simply don't add up. No burocratic issues, just economic numbers.
Spain is the second in km higspeedtrain in the world after China, Italy is so small .
The 'loop' in TGV Nord is to allow for fast travel to Brussels and points east.
Ha, London Euston is a quick 5 minute walk from St Pancras. Not sure where he gets his 20 minutes from.
As others have said, much closer than changing terminals within one airport, or even walking within a terminal in some cases.
Minute 15:57 - It depends on the company and the price. If you want to have an "insurance" to be compensated, you usually take the highe price flight... like a "luxury" flight. If you go for the cheap one, you usually don't have any compensation for delay, only for cancellations (that sometimes happens for wheather conditions) and sometimes, for very cheap flight, you don't have compensation for cancellations, only a new free ticket for the same destination to be used in around 6 months. Thus it's mainly a customer choice: spend less and risk delay or spend more and be sure to have compensation
I work on the railway infrastructure in the uk and i have traveled in europe on the train aswell yes euro star is only connected to london but at least 4 major train stations in london alone and connections are easily made to get st pancreas station to get the euro star ive done italy via train and rome is connected to most major european cities
have been to almost all over Europe by train and it was all really smooth...
Nearly every country has a different rail system, but the EU wants to unify these systems. There are even different voltages in different coutries, but modern trains can run with multiple voltages.
this bizarre train is in fact a French experimental train in the 70s, it was a train with a turbine like an airplane and which moved on an air cushion! it worked very well, it was well above all the standards of the time and was very advanced...but the project was not carried out due to the oil crisis.
It seems that you don't understand there's a thing called the European union now and this is part of what the man in the video spoke of with the eu's fourth attempt at passing rules and laws to connect countries internationally. And no Europeans are not explorers like American so they do not have any real desire to just travel for the heck of it to another country. Maybe somewhere for a vacation and that they take a plane for... The EU has created lines of business though that require people to travel internationally now. The real issue is track development and infrastructure, High-Speed rail is expensive, and unlike before we're all of these railway operators were generally government-sponsored now they are private and need to show that they can make money.
You have no idea how cheap flights there are. Things like € 10-15 used to be common prior inflation. Now it's more in the range of € 20-30, but still a very ok price for ~1000km flight.
If you are interested in engineering, I recommend the videos, "Millau Viaduc: The World's Tallest Bridge by Megaprojects. It's fascinating
Paris to Rennes is about 220 miles - about the same as from where you are (near Providence, IIRC) to New York City. There's not much in the way of bureaucratic border problems in the EU - certainly not in the West of Europe - though things would get a bit thornier in the southeast (places like Serbia, Kosovo, Northern Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria don't always get on well, for instance).
14:05 The strait is about 2 miles wide. Politicians have been promising to build a bridge for the last 60 years but in truth currents are very strong there. Ancient Greeks thought 2 giant monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, would sink ships that dared to cross it 😂
So if you need to go to Sicily, you can either catch a ferry or a train transported across before being split into two parts and continuing on the island's rail tracks 😊
Yes, there are Compensation Rules within the EU for Airtravel Delays. I've received them a few times and you don't have to go through much hassle to get them.
You can get them if:
If your flight is within the EU and is operated either by an EU or a non-EU airline
If your flight arrives in the EU from outside the EU and is operated by an EU airline
If your flight departs from the EU to a non-EU country operated by an EU or a non-EU airline
The compensation is a fix amount:
- 250€ for Flights of 1500 km or less
- 400€ for more than 1500 km within the EU and all other flights between 1500 and 3500 km
- 600€ for more than 3500 km
Flied from Finland to UK for 7.99€. Under 10 bucks. And from Israel to Poland for a bit under 20€.
'flew' (no, I know not a word of Finnish) ;)
Just imagine Humphrey listening to this. The Eu was trying to make rail travel easier? XD
They're not meant to be well connected.
You can move tanks and soldiers pretty easily on trains.
This obnoxious chap seems to think the primary purpose of a train network is to move laptoperati from brunch to brunch.
The problem in London is, that England was the first country to introduce trains for traveling. But their idea was not to build a railway network but only to build a connection from London to one other city. Therefore the line was not built into the city but only to the edge of the city. Then came a second line to a city in a different direction, and they built a second station at the edge of town in the direction of that city. For that reason, London has no central station, but a lot of separate stations to serve different directions. If you have to step over, you might have to go to a different station by Underground, or bus or Taxi.
In Germany, all big cities have a central station where you can change trains and direction just by going to a different track, and I think that most European cities do have a central station.
Paris has a similar problem as London. They have also different stations for different directions and you might have to use the Metro (Underground) to change trains.
Sicily is 3km from mainland Italy & it won't be financially viable to build a bridge probably.
Pronlem is earthquakes. In 1908 Messina and Reggio Calabria were destroied by a terrifiv eatthquake. , more than 100.000 deads.
The guy who made this video presumably works for an American petro-chemical company desperate to dissuade Americans from finally ditching gas guzzling automobiles and airplanes and establishing the kind of comfortable, efficient high speed rail network that the developed world enjoys.
‘There can’t be a federal approach in Europe as there are so many independent countries…’. Have you heard of the EU?
East Coast of UK most trains go to kingscross just over the road from St Pancras and eurostar. I have done it a few times from the north east of Scotland just a bit south of Aberdeen and when you factor in getting to the airport etc this basically can take me to Paris or Brussels with one train change just by crossing a road. Th fly it would take travel to the airport in Edinburgh or Aberdeen if it has flights ( not always direct or cheap) and a lot of hassel re airports. If given a choice I prefer the train
When calculating costs for air traffic and trains, don't forget the transfer from airports to cities. Trainstations are usually situated where town-centers are.
Oh and if the train to London is delayed so much that you miss the preferred train to Manchester, you just take the next one! Duh! its not so hard. You don't need a company to re-book it for you, you just get on the next one... simples.
What makes cross border train connections more difficult is also different electrification systems (AC vs DC, different voltage, different frequencies) and mostly national train control systems that transmit information about signals (traffic lights for trains) and maximum track speed into the drivers cab and ensure that trains don’t run over red signals or ride to fast.
Improved technology has made multi-system trains easier to build but supporting multiple electrification schemes still adds cost to a train. A new European Train Control System (ETCS) has been in development for decades and started to be rolled out in the 2000s. It is supposed to replace more than 20 different national systems in the long term. Switzerland and Luxembourg have already converted their network, several other smaller countries have announced plans for a full conversion. Since it is highly computerised, there are multiple software versions that are not always compatible with each other.
London is a bad example of a place to change trains, at least compared with France, where there are a lot more trains from regional capitals to other regional capitals without the need to change trains in Paris. It's not always possible of course, but a lot of routes allow this (eg try Lille to Marseille - you don't need to change in Paris).
23:00 This is why EU is so crucial body to keep all these countries working together. EU and Schengen countries allow hassle free movement and EU provides funding along with two countries to get the connections built. Railway is the best green option for traveling and there are only benefits for every nation and the continent in long term. Its just shortsighted politics that keep pushing it back.
One of the videos most full of errors, inaccuracies, with incomplete or wrong data that I have seen here.
Walk from St Pancras to Euston, 2:21? Strange most of us would take the tube, it's only been there for a century and a half! This is deliberately done to sound worse than it really is?
The yank narrator is clearly intent on spreading multiple lies and multiple incorrect info worldwide. For what reason - best ask him!
17:49 Paris--Rennes by road is 355 Km nearly 221 miles
The fact is since the mid 1800s it's been possible to travel around Europe, Baltic, Russia and to Constantinople (now Istanbul) via the Balkans. Not to mention the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok.
So it's possible to get to most places on the continent and has been for around 170 years.
Britain up to 1980 had the famous Boat-Train from London to Paris and beyond.
There used to be a European guide to European rail travel since 1853 by the English publisher Bradshaws who had produced British railway travel guides and timetables since 1839.
So once again a flawed American video about Britain and Europe. Also his pricing ignores the many discounts and rail cards available.
Budget air travel started on mass in the 1960s not when he said and it's got cheaper ever since.
Airlines are exempt from paying compensations for delayed or cancelled flights if the causes are out of their control, like bad weather, closed airports, etc. However, if they can't prove that the fault is not theirs they pay compensations in money, for hotels and food or alternative means of transport.
@ 8:57 the video shows a high speed line in Alsace , along the Rhine River -this is an upgraded line following the classic route enabled for 250km/h since 2022 - used by ordinary trains up to 200km/h and opened with this alignment since 1842…!
7:07 A very old thing (1930ies?) and it wasn't used for a long time. It was calles "Schienenzepp" (german for rail-airship). And the thing at the back is a tunneled propeller.
In Austria for 80 bucks a month you can traven with any type of public transport in the country (Klimaticket) including high speed trains that usually go at 300km/h
14:05 There is currently no connection by Land, but building a bridge to Sicily has been a massive talking point in Italy for ages now. The problem is that it's so complex and huge that it would be ungodly expensive, something like over 10 billion. It would also be the longest and tallest bridge in the world however and would have to withstand very strong earthquakes so it's not like that price tag is unreasonable
The 'Everglades' type vehicle that you commented upon was the 'Hovercraft', a vehicle that is able to travel on a cushion of air. This was a British invention that is still in use in some areas but now largely defunct in terms of commercial passenger travel. In the 60's and 70's however there were two cross Channel routes that offered a faster crossing. Great fun when the sea was smooth but rather like being in a washing machine in rougher weather!
7:00 aerotrain. the french idea of having a really good high speed train. essentially a hovercraft on a concrete ramp, wonderfully smooth ride, and it's essentially just a concrete track, no rails no nothing. but they went with the TGV.
Cross border rail infrastructure generally starts by the governments of the two countries hammering out an agreement on improving the connection. Essentially both countries promise each other to build the infrastructure one their respective side of the border. The EU usually pays a contribution to such projects to entice the national governments to invest in cross-border infrastructure.
For example, there is a 18 km tunnel under construction under the Baltic Sea connecting a German island with a Danish island, enabling a fairly straight line connection between Hamburg and Copenhagen. Both countries signed a treaty many years ago in which it was agreed that Denmark would pay for the tunnel as well as upgrading its connection from its main island towards their end of the tunnel and Germany would do the same on their side of the tunnel (which includes another shorter tunnel under sea to reach the mainland). Then there is Rail Baltica, a higher speed railway line from Tallinn, Estonia at the Gulf of Finnland, south through all three Baltic states to Warsaw, Poland.
There are similar projects under way for a new 58 km rail tunnel under the Alps between France and Italy (Lyon-Turin) and one 55km under the Alps in from Austria to Italy (where Germany is upgrading their lines from Munich to the Austrian border) and a 30 km from Germany to the Czech Republic (still in the planning phase).
The LGV Nord route from Paris to the tunnel at Calais goes on a detour to Lille (metropolitan area of 1 million people) after a lot of lobbying by Lille's mayor at the time. There was talk of building a more direct route from the tunnel to Paris but I don't know if it'll happen.
Hi Jibby.
Well, connections can be made at all hubs.
Its the same thing as a stopover in an airplane, where you need to get out and change to another plane.
However, it's much less complicated on rails, where very often its just a case of getting out on one platform, and your connection departs from the adjoining platform.
6:49 : It's the Aéro-train, french invention by Jean Bertin.
Near the city of Orleans, the rails still exist today and the train too.
I can drive 1 hour to SFO, fly 4hours 22 minutes to BNA, rent car and drive home in 1.5 hours. 2200 miles in 7 hours or 314 miles an hour. I've been on the California Zephir, City of San Francisco, the French TGV, Italian trains, French trains, on an English train that broke down entering the station (Victoria) while the railway workers just slept on a shed roof and we the passengers waited an hour for the railway workers to fix the problem. Scottish trains were equally unimpressive. The European trains I've been on were usually almost empty. I imagine they must be heavily subsidized with taxes or salary taxes on working people.
It really does depend on where you are going. For instance, I wouldn't take the plane from my house to London - about 200miles. But I'll quite happily drive to the nearest city (20mins) park the car, and then get a direct train into London (by car that takes about 3h.30m. Train less than 2hours). When I get to London, I don't have to worry about parking the car or paying the congestion or ULEZ charges. There is the Underground, which links all the mainline terminals in London (no long walks - where he get that idea from?). That can get you quickly to most places in no time at all. And for the money, you can get from Heathrow airport to even the East end of London, fairly quickly and much cheaper than going either by car or taxi.
Getting tickets is an absolute doddle Takes at most, 5mins by the app. And if you book early enough, very cheap. Maybe McJibbin needs to do a take on China's high speed trains. Like the Japanese, they are at another level. Meanwhile the US is stuck in a time warp.
ruclips.net/video/xl1kEpuaOq0/видео.html yep there are a set of rules that make the airlines less likely to overbook flights, unlike the current situation in the US....
8:40 1) The Channel is not ocean, but a sea strait .
2) The Channel tunnel is not the only (hs) train project between 2 European countries ! The rail Öresundbridge between Copenhagen and Malmö has a max speed of 200kmh (althought the trains have a 180kmh max). And the bridge was a revolution for the Capital Region of Denmark and the Skane Region in Sweden ! It becaome one metropolitan area, the Öresund Region, with effectively 1 labour market,1 housing market and served by cross border rail operators. There are plans to extend the metro to Malmö .
People work and live both sides of the bridge .
14:10 The Messina Strait between Sicily and Mainland Italy is difficult for bridges. The currents and earthquake risk make it complex to build a bridge (aside from the fear of Mafia influence !) . And the depth of 250m is deep for a tunnel .. There have been several plans for a bridge, but all were shelved so far..
23:31 barriers for international train traffic are historical differences in electricity: 1.5 KV, 3KV, 15KV and 50KV (most common in HST) are used in Western Europe alone. Furthermore, most rail lines stop at a border.
The probably biggest limiting is a transparent schedule and ticketing system (of the type is common in aviation nowadays.) . Getting tickets and dealing with delays is hell, if you want to travel from Amsterdam to, say, Valencia... Tecnically a transparent system is possible , but there is also vested interests of national rail operators stopping this happen...
"Not just bikes" has great infrastructure videos!
That kink in the route from Paris to the Channel Tunnel is there such that the route form Paris to Bruxelles can use the same tracks. Think of the routes from the tunnel, Paris and Bruxelles as a three-pointed star.
There are bureaucratic issues, of course, but what I've been told by railway friends (and people on here who focus on railway issues) is that the main problems with international routes are differences in signalling systems (which is what the EU directives are meant to harmonise), and differences in timetabling philosophies. The latter is a bit of a nightmare, because every country has its own needs. In Switzerland, punctuality is more important than frequency as their passenger patterns rely on easy interchange (you want your train to arrive at the same time as the connecting service). This means they use clockface scheduling which is synchronised across routes, but at the expense of running fewer services per day. Germany, by contrast, has longer distance routes with high demand so they want to prioritise frequency (so if you miss a train it isn't long until the next one and to get more passenger capacity). This means their trains are much more likely to be delayed, which would wreck the Swiss system. This isn't an easy problem to solve, and I'm not sure budget open-access operators help much (if anything, they'll make it much worse). It's also not a problem computers are great at solving (it is a mathematically hard problem for computers), so a lot of this stuff is still done in people's heads. There are probably some videos here that'll do a better job of explaining it than my inexpert regurgitation :)
In Poland you can still see the partitioning of the country in the (density of) train lines after more than 100 years since it ended. It is not easy to cross those "borders" even after a very long time.
The track gauge is the same among at least the western countries, so the same rolling-stock can traverse countries. I believe the biggest problem is that the train safety systems installed varies between countries, not to mention all the signalling and rail use standards. Another problem could be how different countries connect rolling-stock together and which voltage systems are used on the electrified tracks between countries, it gets quite cumbersome and expensive quite fast not to mention all the red tape involved I imagine.
The signalling safety system problem is being solved gradually by the new standard ETCS signalling that is Europe wide (it just isn't installed in that many places yet as they only generally put it in when the existing signalling system needs replacing)
Overhead voltage generally only has 4 Europe wide standards and the vast majority of the high speed lines outside of Germany now use 25kv 50Hz even when the classic lines use something else
There is one exception on the track gauge- Spain and Portugal outside of high speed lines use Iberian gauge instead of standard gauge- though Spain does have trains that can change between Iberian and Standard gauges while moving at slow speed
Try transiting at JFK or LAX between different terminals and airlines. I’d rather have cranial bore surgery.
The price of the ticket is not calculated according to km but according to the tariff zones that you drive through. At least that's what I got from the train station. Which gave the answer that the kilometers didn't matter.
14:05 There is geologicaly "problematic ground" between Italy and Sicily so there cannot be a tunel of a bridge...
Minute 3:40 - Having to go to another train station is a VERY VERY RARE situation. I never experimented it. In Rome you NEVER need it to go to a major city. The main station serve all major cities. The second and third train stations serve very small towns (like 5000-10000 inhabitants) and sometimes you have to use them to go to these locations.
Thus yes, it sometimes happens, but only if you have to visit some specific small locations, never to travel from big cities around Europe. I've never been to London, so I don't know the issue with Manchester that isn't served by the main train station and to be honest I'm a bit surprised by that... It's very uncommon in Europe to have a main city not to be served by the central station of the Capital. It surely never happen in Italy, nor in Rome nor in Milan (the two biggest train stations in Italy)
There was a 'lack of competition' between rail and air routes. Competition on the same rail route is not really needed and space is, in any case, finite. RENFE (Spain) and SNCF (France) are national public companies. The British rail network, on the other hand, is a mess.
this strange train, on ground rails, is a French answer to the German maglev train. This French train runs on an air cushion on cement rails. But would later be reinstated.
high speed trains need high speed tracks - those are costly, and don't connect well together. A high speed train on normal tracks goes at normal speeds, and that is very time consuming.
Railways a clean transportation to avoid travelling by airplanes busses or cars :)
The train with the fan on the back, I think was a hovertrain, monorail.
This guy is wrong, you can buy a ticket from every station anywhere to any thinkable destination. But, if you go further than about a 12 hour ride or something like 6 countries and 36 hours or more, that are destinations , where nearly everyone would take a plane. Also, from Paris there is also a high speed train to Cologne, and countless other stations around europe via distance trains, that do not require spacial highest speed tracks. From any where to everywhere. But the sheer distance limits train riding by nature. You can do it , but you might change trains on the way. There are only two big hub cities ( London and Paris), where you even have to change train stations. All the other cities have singele Main stations, where you only hav to change the platform . Quite normal, as everyone would expect, that for instance from Barcelona to Narvik, Nroway--- that might be clear, that there is no train directly. There are just too many , sheer countless connections. In my town of Hannover for instance, many, may fugitives from Ukraine arrived per train.
hm, i saw ÖBB train driving around in my area.... i am nearly 700km away from Austria!
i am 3 local train stations away from an high speed rail station....i can drive from there straight to central Switzerland....have connections to Amsterdam, Warsaw and Paris!
Between Italy and Sicily there is only sea, no bridge no tunnel both are possible but hight difficult to realize, the sea is to deep for the tunnel that must start lots km away from the cost to have the right angle of down lift, the singolar span bridge is the longest ever realized, and it is very active vulcan sydmic zone
I can't say much about international railways besides here in the Netherlands. We've had trains to Germany and Belgium for many years, as well as the high speed trains to Paris as mentioned in the video. The problem with the railways at the moment is especially the fact that travel by plain is still way too cheap. If the airways would have to pay for actual costs, the prices at which tickets could be sold would be much higher. Some years ago a flew from Eindhoven (the Netherlands) to London for 12 Euro. For that price I could maybe travel some 20 km by train.
The other problem I'm expecting is with different companies on different lines, getting from one place to the other becomes more complex.
I remember from a long time ago, that I was in the UK, and had landed at Birmingham and had to get to Loughborough (about 75 km?). I had to use 3 different trains from 3 different companies (besides standing still for over half an hour). That was not a pleasant experience. I hope there are better options these days. Besides that the low budget trains will always cherry pick. The lines with the high usage will be wanted. The places with less high demand might very well lose their connectivity completely.
Birmingham Airport to Loughborough is still 3 trains and 3 companies. Although the ticketing is fully integrated so it's 1 ticket
Birmingham International to Birmingham New St (London northwestern or Avanti,) Birmingham New St to Leicester or Derby (CrossCountry) and Leicester or Derby to Loughborough (East Midlands railway)
Would be an absolute pain without integrated ticketing though
@@dasy2k1 To be honest, I can't remember if it was 1 ticket or 3 separate ones. I just remember that due to delays on all 3 the connections where really bad. I spend almost as much time waiting for my next train, as I spend actually in the train.
Thank you for clearing this up.
They miss out on the pleasure of sipping a red wine 🍷 whilst looking at the scenery wizzing by.
'wizzing by' err I must try doing that on a train....