It's also a cultural thing in Japan to be honorable with the service you provide. If a critical connection in Japan gets delayed it can have huge impact. Thanks

It's also a cultural thing in Japan to be honorable with the service you provide. If a critical connection in Japan gets delayed it can have huge impact. Thanks to the vertical split of ownership you can always blame a specific operator for some outage. In Holland we often see a blame game where the operator blames the network owner. The network owner pretty much has a monopoly here. > the Dutch system is already in the top 3 of punctuality I've oftentimes tried to find such numbers but have never been successful. There's some efforts that attempt to compare European countries (I think Holland is not 3rd here). But not worldwide comparisons. The problem is also that countries have different ideas on what constitutes a train being "on time". Meanwhile in Europe 76% of all freight transport is still happening on the road. In Holland 72% of all private person-kilometers are happening on the road. Switzerland has an amazing rail network which is state owned (although it started out from privately owned companies). But also in Switzerland 75% of all person-kilometers are on the road. Let's say we'd want to get those trucks off the road and onto our wonderful railway network. I think it wouldn't even be possible. Could we run all those freight trains on the same railways as the passenger trains? We'd probably need separate specialized lines. Then we need to quadruple its capacity to accommodate for all the road kilometers. How much would that cost? Perhaps it's cheaper to subsidize electric vehicles. I'm not particularly against trains. Fine if it's viable. But I don't see how it will become the answer to the global warming problem. Also because of the other arguments mentioned in this thread (The hub and spokes model being inefficient).