In terms of business when you can buy a 30 euro easy jet ticket or a 200 euro train ticket, not a lot of people are going to be able to afford the train. In many parts of Europe, trains are not price competitive with air connections. And also a lot slower.
Here in Germany, there are a lot of domestic flights under 1 hour that connect places that would be 4-6 hours away by train. Even with the inconvenience of being treated like cattle, having to travel for an hour to get to and from the airport on both ends, etc. it's still a net gain. And often it's cheaper too. And it's the difference between needing a hotel or being able to travel back and forth on a single day. Early morning and evening flights are usually packed.
Trains should be dirt cheap but they aren't. A round trip to my parents with a 4.5 hour train journey costs me around 110 Euros every time I do it. The fuel expenses for the same journey by car are about the same.
Reason: Deutsche Bahn is a state protected monopoly that has little to no real competition and is run in a super inefficient way. So companies that have to burn enormous amounts of kerosene are able to compete on price. That's insane. There are buses competing with train journeys in Germany charging 30-40% of the train ticket price. Sometimes less. Do buses have better fuel economy than trains? Of course they don't.
So, yes, these luxury trains will be drop in the ocean in terms of actually cutting down on that. I doubt they will be profitable at all. At those prices, filling the trains will be a challenge. Though there is a market for people with a conscious and a wallet that want to go places but feel bet about flying there.
This is a fairly big issue. Trains just feel like a worse deal in Germany.
I want to choose the train more often, but I don't want to stand up for a whole leg of the journey. I also struggle to justify paying the same price as if I drove there myself, and significantly more than if I flew, yet lose either the flexibility or the time savings.
Yeah, riding train in Germany is just too expensive. Unfortunately I still have to use it because currently it is more flexible than the bus lines. I really hope that the competition will drive the train prices down, but that's something I don't believe in...
Visiting my girlfriend at the other and of Germany costs 220 Euro if I pay the full price. Sometimes you get cheaper tickets but that's still too much. Just visiting each other twice a month cost about 400 Euro which woudl be better invested in a vacation or something similar.
Thanks for the detailed info. I honestly don't know the details well enough and hence framed my comment as a bit of an open question. This makes me wonder, in Germany it is possible to get a decently priced domestic train ticket or at least a comparable price to a domestic flight but one needs to book far in advance whereas this isn't the case when booking a flight. If it's not subsidies and taxes what is making train travel so uncompetitive with flying?
Really? I live in Munich. Whenever I want to travel to other large German cities, I've found flying to be much cheaper than going by train. The only reasonably priced tickets seem to be the local ones. I don't understand how people can afford train prices unless they have a discount or someone else paid.
I think we're missing the context of gas prices here. German gas prices are far higher than in the US, making train more cost-effective. We don't have cheap flights, except apparently Berlin-Frankfurt, so we can't rely on air travel the same way the US does. This overall makes train travel much more attractive in Germany. Then there are things like regional tickets, day tickets, BahnCard discounts, etc.
I would love to use trains more in Europe, but their prices cannot compete with cheap flight providers at all, 30ish EUR flights pretty much from any country to any country in Europe are hard to beat
The problem at least in parts of Europe is that trains are not always competitive in terms of pricing, especially when it comes to fast connections. Airplane tickets are sometimes just stupidly cheap.
Also, in Germany trains are very often late or have other issues.
Nevertheless, I agree that it's more relaxed to go by train most of the time (unless it's super crowded) and I'll sometimes pay extra for that comfort.
Trains can also be pretty quaint in Europe today now that low cost airlines like Easyjet and Ryanair offer cheap flights to most major cities. I live in Berlin and even domestic trains are far more expensive than domestic flights to medium and large cities.
From what I see here in Germany, 5h train rides are not an issue for many people. It's just that on major routes, flying is very competitive.
I don't like the fact, but flying is cheaper in many cases, and inside the EU security is (in my experience) not that annoying. I mean, I have a 50% rebate card and even inside Germany, there are quite a scenarios where trains are only cheaper than flying if I take regional trains, at which point the time advantage of flying suddenly is quite large, and coaches become an agressivly priced alternative. And that despite the fact that I have a 50% rebate card for trains.
Start to cross borders and it gets worse.
EDIT: not to say that trains are not used, but especially among young people coaches, ride shares or flying are strong alternatives. Trains are great for short distances and if you want to go somewhere that is hard to reach otherwise.
"functioning" is an exaggeration. Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time. They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled. They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.
I think the author has a very valid point when it comes to the cost of rail tracks. It's something the proponents always conveniently ignore. On top of that, a rail station has quite a limited capacity, especially if it's inside the city. The travel time between, e.g., Berlin and Paris is something like four to five times as long as by plane.
So unless someone develops a low-maintenance, high-capacity fast train, planes with ecofuel are probably going to win any fair competition.
It's not just the desire to travel by air, it's the economics. When I first moved to Germany I looked into doing a few trips by train, but the flights were much cheaper.
It kind of baffles me that the only long distance trains that are still being done on European scale are prestigious high speed trains (usually connecting Brussels to X) that are much more expensive than plane tickets or anything else really.
When I travel for work within Germany or just to a neighboring country, I want to get to get from A (which happens to be near Stuttgart) to B as fast as possible. Taking a plane from Stuttgart is even faster, but since climate change is real, I am now trying to avoid flying as much as possible. Hence, Deutsche Bahn. Going by high-speed train is also very comfortable if you reserve seats and do not have to transfer often.
I should also point out that if you book timely, you can often get German train tickets very cheaply at the 'Sparpreis', which starts at 29 Euro. When we had less money, we would often reserve tickets in the minutes after the 'Sparpreis' became available.
tl;dr you can travel cheaply in German by high-speed train. You just have to plan your trip and book tickets timely.
It's actually absurd that it costs me ~£15-25 to fly from London Stansted to Hamburg (1 hr flight), but 145 euros (one way) to get the high speed train to Munich (6 hours).
The regional trains are absurd. The platforms are completely congested with human bodies, and even the long double decker trains are often totally full. To me it seems that there simply aren't enough services every day to carry the capacity of people who want to use the trains. Even before the 9 euro ticket it was borderline unusable. I did a midday Monday journey last September from Hamburg -> Lübeck -> Stralsund -> Samtens and each part of the journey apart from the last was totally full. Lübeck -> Stralsund was ran by nah.sh but it was an absolutely tiny train with even barely any standing room, let alone seating. Germans just accept it and groan, in classic German fashion: this is how it is, it's not going to change, just accept it.
It perhaps not much of a consolation, but it is just as well that railway infrastructure itself ages slowly. Public transport is considerably less expensive in Germany compared to my country (Britain, specifically England): a German Deutschlandticket costs €49 per month and provides unlimited rail travel on non-express lines, and unlimited local bus travel. A typical 5 hour rail journey - one off, one way - booked months in advance currently costs about €200 in Britain. It's a high-quality service, but not in any way affordable for the majority of workers to commute with.
The reason I bring this up is to say that Germany is still doing a great job at making rail public transport available, despite the crumbling infrastructure. As long as it can still get you from A to B reliably and safely, it is making a positive contribution to reducing the carbon footprint of travel. Hopefully, by the time that the infrastructure has degraded to the point where the service is dangerous or out of capacity, various components will have become slightly cheaper as well (rail crimping, for instance).
In germany (currently month 2 of 3) there is an ticket for 9€ per month for using local public transport. Millions of tickets are sold and people are using the so much that the trains are litterally full. And the users are still enduring it.
For those who don't know it: german trains have an lowsy reputation at best, no cooling in the summer, no heating in the winter and every user has to plan for the case the train is 15 minutes or more late or broke on the way down.
I just took the Barcelona-Paris train a few months ago and paid 119 Euros for a 1st Class ticket. I think it was 79 Euros for a 2nd class ticket. I was just looking at buying tickets for my entire family of four from Munich to Berlin for this summer, and the price is 95 euros for the entire family.
That doesn't really jibe with what the author is complaining about. I get that there will be instances where the old system better serviced some parts of the network, but I believe for the vast majority of the people using the train, high speed lines have been an absolute boon.
As someone using the German railway for a large distance destination couple a weeks ago it was a total disaster, we got stranded in a unfamiliar German city. Deutsche bahn told us they didn’t have any of their (partner) hotel rooms left. Just arrange something yourself. That was very nice because all the hotels were full anyway. It took us another 2 hours of calling to find something. I was exhausted when I finally checked in somewhere at 1 am.
I try to avoid flying, but the German railway is giving me nightmares. I frequently travel through Germany and it is the exception if there aren’t any large issues.
The article itself is very thin when giving its reasons. I’m sure it’s oké for people without the money to spend, but I would rather pay more for increased reliability. If the German summers are similar to how the Dutch maintains their railways, I’m sure they will plan a ton of construction while the masses of people that usually take the trains for work are on holiday. So I’m inclined to see this promotional as compensation for bad summer train service.
Cross border rail travel is a mess. We had online booking of flights across countries and airlines since forever, and thousands of booking sites seem to be able to hook into the booking backends like Amadeus and provide multi hop booking. Doing the same for train travel isn’t nearly as easy. This should be priority one.
The second priority should be cost. Train travel should never be more expensive than even low cost airline tickets. Within the EU this would seem fixable by taxing and subsidies to just move money from air travel to train ticket subsidies. Tax funded subsidies is a clumsy instrument but it’s needed.
Here in Germany, there are a lot of domestic flights under 1 hour that connect places that would be 4-6 hours away by train. Even with the inconvenience of being treated like cattle, having to travel for an hour to get to and from the airport on both ends, etc. it's still a net gain. And often it's cheaper too. And it's the difference between needing a hotel or being able to travel back and forth on a single day. Early morning and evening flights are usually packed.
Trains should be dirt cheap but they aren't. A round trip to my parents with a 4.5 hour train journey costs me around 110 Euros every time I do it. The fuel expenses for the same journey by car are about the same.
Reason: Deutsche Bahn is a state protected monopoly that has little to no real competition and is run in a super inefficient way. So companies that have to burn enormous amounts of kerosene are able to compete on price. That's insane. There are buses competing with train journeys in Germany charging 30-40% of the train ticket price. Sometimes less. Do buses have better fuel economy than trains? Of course they don't.
So, yes, these luxury trains will be drop in the ocean in terms of actually cutting down on that. I doubt they will be profitable at all. At those prices, filling the trains will be a challenge. Though there is a market for people with a conscious and a wallet that want to go places but feel bet about flying there.
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