Isn't some of this due to different use cases? The need for the German government to have a train from Berlin to Bremen makes sense in a way that probably doesn't matter if you're not living in Germany, but having a train that connects on the various borders in a compatible way is harder to fund and requires all the other countries to generally agree to do it at the same time.
The likely outcome of a whole-EU train system is something like the US system where Amtrak generally hits the major population centers, but leaves a ton of the US behind because when you talk about Federal priorities, a train from Denver to Dallas isn't a huge priority compared to LA to SF or Boston to NYC. Obviously the EU system would fare better because it's starting from a better base, but it's emblematic of the tradeoff between bottom-up and top-down planning and investment for something like this.
My experience riding trains in Europe as a European is that everything is great when you're traveling domestically (bar the usual complaints from any commuter that exist but differ between any mode of transport) but once you take a train that crosses a border things really fall apart. Especially when it's not some commuter line.
That's one thing I wish the EU really did better - do more to integrate and de-federate the rail systems. There should be no major difference riding the rails in any state. Of course, this is a lofty goal since even within countries usually commuter transport is run by local companies and not even nationally interoperable.
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.
Intercity rail is great. In Germany it allows people to self select the density and lifestyle they desire, while still working in bigger agglomeration. I can see this being a big economic and quality of life benefit.
I’m confused by the numbers: 1100 km in less than three hours would demand an average speed that is higher than 350 km/h. Not much, but still. And how useful can a train be that seems to stop nowhere? A normal number of stops (say ten) would add at least one hour to the traveling time. But, yeah, that is still damn impressive.
I also don’t think that the Munich-Hamburg connection mentioned in the article (somewhat more than 600 km) is very impressive: you will still be in the train for five hours and thirty minutes (you will pay 130 €). Which is not that much faster than the mentioned US connection.
We Europeans have our fair share of problems with upgrading our train networks (as opposed to pretty much starting from scratch). There are dense existing network but those were built decades, maybe even a century ago. Maintaining them is expensive and upgrading them for highspeed trains is probably not much cheaper than starting from scratch would be (new tracks, new course, electrification, etc. – there really is not much you can reuse). Europe is also densly populated, with fewer huge centers. You can’t just send a train 600 km through Germany without stopping at least half a dozen times.
While the German train system can definitely improve, it's hard to come up with many countries that actually have a better service. France and Japan, maybe Spain? I don't know about the Netherlands and Nordics? It's still too rare to have such an extensive network.
I love the experience of travelling in Europe by train, but it certainly is cumbersome and expensive.
I took a car train from Hamburg to Vienna last year. Drive the car into the train, and get a sleeping coach for the 14 hour journey - as comfortable a journey I could ask for. Except it cost about €1000 if I remember correctly for my family. I still preferred it because it negated the need to rent a car in Austria, and also saved in baggage costs on a flight. However, if trains could be scaled up, the costs would come down and become competitive even for people who aren’t needing those perks like baggage and car transport.
The train (and tracks) are not as compatible across Europe as I thought. You can travel from Denmark to Austria by train, but be ready to change from Danish train to German, to Austrian train because of different track or signaling systems. Now, the anxiety is on the passenger to not miss a connection at each of those countries (sometimes at the middle of the night).
If EU regulated the train system as a continent, and brought in a whole “European rail system” and not just a ticketing system that works with individual country systems, that would be the beginning of rail as a great transport option. I still have hopes that it’d happen. I just wish it will happen sooner and in my life time.
I really wish the train network was working better Europe-wide. Maybe there should be a EU train company that integrates the national ones. The network should be able to substitute as many flights as possible.
Right now, even buying tickets or just getting information can be hard, and let's not start with all the local discount cards that you need to use to make it worthwhile.
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.
This is the baffling side of the EU to all outsiders/newcomers. When I first moved here, that was my first thought as well. There is just so much in common, why repeat everything everywhere instead of single effort with branches everywhere?! (police force, consular services, Identity services, and pretty much any Government paperwork one can think of, transportation services etc). However, the population is very localised and divided. The French do it their way, Italians another way, the Germans on their own way etc. It is hard to find gain common ground beyond what EU already represents(which is very good IMO). I do wish doing things at EU level becomes the norm, and individualities slowly disappear.
Imagine a single European rail service (not Euro rail where you can buy a single ticket that will make you take Dutch train, and then connect on a German train, and then on an Austrian train, and if you miss a connection, good luck figuring out your replacement..)
The US has lower population density than Germany, so you need more km of rail to serve the same amount of people. But that only accounts for part of the difference in quality, to be sure
Having taken the trains a few times from Denmark, through to Germany and Austria, it is always anxious because of missing connections and being stranded/inconvenienced along the journey. It is not particularly cheap compared to flights.Got a problem? - first think which train company to call and ask help from - DSB(Denmark), DB(Germany) or OBB(Austrian) and cross fingers that they speak in English :-)
It is very complicated. If there was a single train service that worked all over Europe that is responsible for getting from city A to City B as fast as they could, it would be lovely, but I doubt if we will ever get there given the geo-political differences in Europe.
This is actually an intrinsic difficulty of the German rail network, due its highly interconnected structure, and the fact that it connects to other countries in all directions. The schedules are much more complex to handle than, say, in France where you mostly have a spokes-and-hub topology centered on Paris.
What isn't awesome is cross-border trains, it's always ad-hoc. I think there should be some grand unifying vision of complete cross-border (at least Schengen) connections. Possibly a new EU institution, whatever, because often it looks like every train company is playing in its own playground and cross-border connections are at best an afterthought.
Because of said train infrastructure I'm flying into paris, touring Europe (on trains) then flying out from berlin. Unless they can get the whole EU to agree to it it's probably going to have that affect.
You can't be serious to compare US infrastructure to Germany. In my experience living there, the Deutsche Bahn is not to be trusted to be on time, or run at all. And while Amtrak isn't the shining beacon I'd like it to be at least it gets me from point A to B reliably.
I completely agree - I love the German train system - but we can't get there overnight. While we wait (optimistically) 50+ years for the US transit infrastructure to develop, we need rideshare.
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.
The likely outcome of a whole-EU train system is something like the US system where Amtrak generally hits the major population centers, but leaves a ton of the US behind because when you talk about Federal priorities, a train from Denver to Dallas isn't a huge priority compared to LA to SF or Boston to NYC. Obviously the EU system would fare better because it's starting from a better base, but it's emblematic of the tradeoff between bottom-up and top-down planning and investment for something like this.
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