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I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a ro

I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300. Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against something like a bus or shared car. The economics of trains should be able to be better than just about anything.

ojagodzinski 7y ago
Jet fuel is tax free, energy and diesel for trains is not. https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/ https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/
- yostrovs 7y ago
  Wrong explanation. Jets still use more energy dollars per person flying and you're not taking account of subsidies for trains, though there are others for planes as well.
- kds3 7y ago
  Aren't EU trains electrified yet?
  - martinrlzd 7y ago
    Yes, most of them are electrified.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive They’re more expensive because they’re better.
- postingawayonhn 7y ago
  No, they're more expensive because they have higher infrastructure costs. Building and maintaining hundreds of kilometers of track costs a lot.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Prices are set by what the market supports due to the value the product provides, not what the product costs to deliver.
    - postingawayonhn 7y ago
      Yes and no. The market has to at a minimum cover the cost of operation otherwise businesses will stop operating.
      - WilliamEdward 7y ago
        Not true, many industries don't return profit and are yet subsidised by the government out of necessity anyway, eg: farming.
Hamuko 7y ago
Well firstly, you don't need to do any work on the terrain that the plane operates on. Meanwhile a train will require contiguous tracks. That might not be a huge hurdle if you need to get between two places with flat land between them, but add water, mountains, forests and whatnot, and that makes it much harder to get a train from one place to another. An airplane just needs two airstrips.
- fiblye 7y ago
  But once a track is built, it doesn’t take much maintenance to keep it running for decades or even a century. There are places in this world that can’t even manage to repair streets, but have trains operating daily with little trouble. It seems like costs would come down at some point in first world nations, or it’d be worthwhile to subsidize the creation of railways more significantly. I know governments do try to to some extent, but riding trains is expensive almost everywhere. It doesn’t make sense to be cheaper than even roads, which need constant maintenance, intense infrastructure, and cleanup.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    It takes quite a lot of maintenance unfortunately. Rails need constant work to keep them in good condition. So does the ballast. Signalling involves miles of cables, lights, radio towers and motors that also degrade. The stations need staff, gates, ticket kiosks, displays. A frequent need is to add capacity. Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty. It's essentially just about scaling air traffic control systems. Adding capacity in a rail line can involve major earthworks, rebuilding bridges, totally replacing the signalling and so on. Roads are easier to maintain and pay for themselves without subsidies just via fuel tax. There's no station infrastructure. No stations means no expensive employees. People drive cars themselves and cars can be driven safely even on quite degraded roads. Signalling is entirely local and so doesn't require much cabling, on high speed routes (motorways) there's usually little or no signalling required. Laying tarmac is much cheaper than laying rails. Finally of the few people needed to maintain and run the roads, many are private sector and un-unionized e.g. gas station employees. The government employees only do repairs and so don't have much strike power. Contrast to the railways which in Europe are frequently shut down for weeks at a time by strikes of drivers or crew. The capital investment in trains is worth it for only one reason - it's the highest capacity form of transport in seats per hour. It's got nothing to do with greenness which is at any rate a very ambiguous case to make when you consider all the factors. Trains can be less green than planes in many ordinary situations.
Carpetsmoker 7y ago
I flew from Amsterdam to Dublin for €19. I then took the train from Dublin to Cork for ... €60. The distance from Amsterdam to Dublin is about 750km, three times as long as Dublin-Cork (you can also take the bus for €15 or some such, but last time I did that I got rather carsick, so I figured I'd take the train, not knowing how expensive it was!)
- radicalbyte 7y ago
  You can go from one side of The Netherlands from the other for about €20 on the train and you can have unlimited train travel for €350 a month (and considerably less for a given route).
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    Yes, but we're kind of unique in our standardized national public transport system. Undoubtedly our small size as a country helps there.
    - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
      Well, Ireland is just 6.5 million people, not exactly a large country, and I think Germany's DB is more or less similar to the Dutch NS? I lived in the UK for a while, and things are really complex there with a patchwork of private companies. Either way, I stopped complaining about the Dutch trains very shortly after moving there :-)
      - vanderZwan 7y ago
        We have one transport card that works for all public transport providers. You cannot book trains in advance - all distances have a fixed price (not counting international trains). In many other countries there are regional commuter trains like that, but with national trains the prices vary on how early you book, like with planes.
      - radicalbyte 7y ago
        The thing is the UK trains used to be much better. Then the Tories privatized them and we ended up with this mess of private companies owning different regions of the country. Apparently that leads to competition because if taking a train from the City to Luton is too expensive they can just take a train from Leeds to Glasgow.
notahacker 7y ago
Airlines do one hop, and revenue optimise by having the aircraft near-full on that hop, which entails an aggressive pricing model especially since there's usually direct competitors showing up in the same flight search. They also make a lot of ancillary revenue from charging you another $30 for your luggage. Long distance trains usually have several intermediate stages they can sell tickets on, often with no public transport competition, and there's really no incentive for them to price-cut on a London-Barcelona route involving several other companies and very little customer interest.
- hackeraccount 7y ago
  This is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I'm not sure what the fix is - having multiple companies sharing the same track seem dubious but maybe that's answer. Either that or let a bunch of companies put down redundant lines.
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    EU intervention. It worked for getting rid of roaming prices for mobile phone carriers in Europe, and that also requires cooperation between different carriers. Why wouldn't something like that be possible for rail?
    - thu2111 7y ago
      EU intervention solves nothing. Forcing roaming prices down just pushed up other tariffs, which didn't matter to the Commission because their ideological goal is to unify Europe into a single country, not get people the best mobile deals. It was only possible at all because the phone industry already built all the infrastructure for roaming on it's own. The problem is lack of demand. The article posits there is huge untapped demand for night trains but there isn't. Rail companies can and do run services on each others tracks but rail lines are frequently at capacity, timetabling wise, so it's not always easy to just drop in and run extra trains in the same way many airports have free slots for extra planes. And of course airlines are still mostly national too. Indeed it's best kept away from the EU. It has a habit of suspending transport and trading rights as part of unrelated political disputes with its neighbors in order to pressure them to obey Brussels. If you want train connections to be mysteriously severed because of some dispute with the UK or Switzerland over fishing or trade unions then asking the EU to organise it is the right way to go. If you'd like train timetables to be set taking into account what the railways can do, leave it to the private sector and get governments out of the way.
sfifs 7y ago
Coming from Asia, I have always been shocked at how expensive trains are in Europe vs. here and how flights are cheaper. I would suspect someone is profiteering in the value chain... probably the construction and maintenance industries which tend to be the usual means of political graft... And that cost gets charged to passengers. It's a lose lose situation... Bad for environment, bad for people, bad for economic efficiency. The whole point of a rail network in a nation's economy is to be an economic force multiplier, not to be a profiteering entity
JeanMarcS 7y ago
I’ll add to all the other comments good explainations that as trains use tracks, it all depends on where are all the other trains and when. So fast trains (at least in France that you should have cross to go to Barcelona) must have very specific time tables and get along with local trains, when airplanes don’t and can go straight. It adds constraint. (Ok, I know planes have routes too, but it’s much easyier to do timetables)
MaulingMonkey 7y ago
> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. I recently watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA which covered much of the cost breakdowns - especially for American passenger rail. TL;DR: * Labor is expensive. That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train. The faster speed of an equivalent plane ride means you're not paying pilots for as long, or allows them to make more trips. * Rail is expensive. You have to buy the land between point A and point B. You have to build the rails, bridges, crossing guards, with lots of labor to build and maintain it all, with plenty of regulatory burdens to work through (ecological, safety, eminent domain, ...). The sky between airports, on the other hand, is free. I've seen some suggestions that the sweet spot for trains is in medium length routes ("too far to drive, too near to fly"), with short haul routes being dominated by road vehicles (cars, taxis, buses) and long haul routes being dominated by airplanes (fast, don't need to buy/lease/maintain rails across thousands of miles)
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train. A driver, a ticket inspector, and someone to run the café? Three people? Shared amongst a few hundred passengers? Is that really a significant cost?
  - MaulingMonkey 7y ago
    If they're each pulling down $100k/year (this is slightly bellow amtrack average!) or ~$50/hour in total comp, 3x50x10 = $1500 right there for none of the support staff - managers, staff back in the control rooms switching signals, staff on call for maintainence issues - and none of the associated costs of putting the staff up in hotel rooms on account of being 10 hours away from home when their shift is over, etc. Spread it out over 300 riders and that's perhaps only $5 for the trip and your 1:100 employee:rider staffing ratio. Not so bad! Of course, there are also 44 hour routes. Or less popular routes without 300 passengers that are run for political reasons, or because they feed passengers into the more popular routes. Or the popular routes when run off-peak, so passengers can still use the route even if they may occasionally need some flexibility in when they travel. The video suggests amtrack employs 1 person per 4 riders, not per 100! For a route half the distance (DC to New York - 3.5-5 hours) they attribute $25/ticket to labor costs. You've got stories like this where Japan is keeping open a train station for a single passenger - do you think that route has 300 people on it there? And this is in a country where trains are popular and some routes are packed to the brim in the middle of rush hour: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/01/japan-keeps-this-defunct-train-station-running-for-just-one-passenger/423273/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/01/japan-keeps-t...
Shivetya 7y ago
Because politics. Trains are very national in the EU and even after this many years that still gets in the way of effective train based transportation. Plus heavy rail is flat out expensive to put down and maintain and the cars are and engines themselves all contribute the initial cost of establishing a line as well as maintenance. Then the kicker compared to airline travel, you cannot simply reroute a train. It is stuck to its rail line, as in you cannot simply move a train to service a route that needs it now. You could tax the airline industry into the ground but it will not fix the reality that trains simply are not flexible, similar to how light rail in cities is not ideal for the majority of cities that employ it; for many city transportation systems light rail eats away a disproportionate amount of the budget impacting bus availability as well - it is a money pit A previous financial times article [0] explains some of the political problems but far too many still do not understand the logistical side of rail lines. [0]https://www.ft.com/content/e77dc48e-7894-11e8-8e67-1e1a0846c475 https://www.ft.com/content/e77dc48e-7894-11e8-8e67-1e1a0846c...
- radicalbyte 7y ago
  Privatized trains are worse, in the UK they've just given the go ahead for a $140 billion high speed rail project, HS2. A decade ago we build HS1, a 67 mile track between London and the Channel Tunnel, for a total of $7.6 billion ($112m / mile). HS2 is longer but its 330 miles of tracks will cost $400m / mile. The project costs make absolutely no sense: London is a special weird place in the UK where everything you build is twice as expensive as in the rest of the country. Considering most of HS1 was in London and most of HS2 is outside of London, this budget makes absolutely no sense. What makes the whole thing even more insane is that the endpoints are not connected to the rest of the infrastructure. You have a 30 minute trip between HS1 and HS2. So if you're travelling from Birmingham to Paris you'll have to switch trains in London. For the money they're spending on this it's crazy that you're not getting it.
  - captainbland 7y ago
    My understanding is that basically HS2 is massively over-specced compared to HS1. It wants high throughput and extremely high speed (80-100mph faster than HS1). I guess you could probably shave a few tens of billions off just by slowing the line down a bit - using ballast rather than concrete slab and such. See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51415590 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51415590 The only other thing I'd add is that Euston is easily within walking distance of St Pancras. But given all this already extraordinary cost it seems like you might as well connect St Pancras and Euston HS lines and have the odd Eurostar service run from Birmingham.
krn 7y ago
> To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300. That's because you are comparing standard railway companies with low-cost airlines. I believe that it would also cost around $300 to fly from London to Barcelona and back with British Airways or Iberia. The era of low-cost railway companies in Europe is just beginning: FlixTrain[1] (Germany), OUIGO[2] (France), RegioJet[3], and LeoExpress[4] (both Central Europe) are now all offering long-distance train tickets from 10€. [1] https://www.flixtrain.com/ https://www.flixtrain.com/ [2] https://en.oui.sncf/en/ouigo/fares https://en.oui.sncf/en/ouigo/fares [3] https://www.regiojet.com/services/services-on-board-of-trains/ https://www.regiojet.com/services/services-on-board-of-train... [4] https://www.leoexpress.com/en/services/our-fleet https://www.leoexpress.com/en/services/our-fleet
rdsubhas 7y ago
It's not just the cost. Coming from India, I'm used to sleeping my way in any 6+ hour journey. In fact, for business travel, we prefer overnight trains or sleeper buses (yes, sleeper buses) because you don't need to book an unnecessary stay. I'm not going to compare INR vs EUR, but this mode of travel is pretty affordable and common to the mass market here. European trains are way more expensive AND I have to sit my way through long hours with not even pushback. Ouch my back hurts even thinking about it. Sleeper berths are extremely rare and even more expensive. I just don't get how my fellow european humans consider this mode of travel plausible.
LatteLazy 7y ago
I used to work in rail engineering. Our projects were all reliant on explicit government subsidiary. We as a company basically watched the national transport budget for the next 12 months to predict whether we'd make a profit in the coming year. There are a few factors to rail that make it unsuitable for long distance. First, there is 10s of 1000s of miles of track, all of which has to be laid, maintained, controlled and signalled. It has to be inspected and repaired and monitored and upgraded. Plus, you can't go directly anywhere. You can't take a train to Barcelona from London. You have to go via Dover for the tunnel, then lille because its a city and there's not track not via lille. The air maintains itself and you can fly basically direct to wherever. Plus a shit tonne of political interference (here in the UK we have stations basically next to each other no one will close and HS2 take a huge diversion to avoid politically sensitive areas, and that's just in one nation, try getting them to agree on train safety standards). For an airport, you basically just need a mile of tarmac and a tin shed. I don't think you even have to have radar anymore, just transponder tracking... Plus, as you point out, the plan can carry 7 loads of people in the same time that the train can carry 1. So all things being equal (which they're not) you'd pay only 1/7th... Plus, the costs for the Barcelona London route are basically fixed. The fact no one wants to make that journey in the winter just means the assets are unused. If no one wants to fly London to Barcelona in November, you can just switch the route and take people to their ski holidays instead. So planes are more versitile and has much higher utilisation rates than most trains. Trains make sense but only over shorter distances. Anything over about 200 miles and planes win.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  200 miles is way too short for the break-even point. If you take into account the time overhead for airplanes, the break-even point is about 4 hours. For modern high-speed rail (speeds of over 200 mph), that's about 800 miles (NYC to Chicago, or Paris to Vienna). Most European high-speed rail lines outside France and Spain don't operate at that speed yet, but it's not uncommon for newly-built high-speed lines (which is why it's common in China).
  - LatteLazy 7y ago
    4 hours at 200mph is 800 miles. But no train does that over distance. Even the Japanese, with dedicated infrastructure for bullet trains and minimal political issues stop every few hundred km because they're at a city people want to get on or off at...
mister_hn 7y ago
And what about the price of time? Going from e.g. Denmark to Spain or Italy isn't cheap in terms of time..
nothrabannosir 7y ago
I see a lot of good explanations for the status quo, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned the more fundamental problem that you simply can't overtake a train. Airplanes can fly relatively independently of each other, compared to trains who have to share tracks and more limited train stations. This means you just can't compete on the level that budget airlines can. Spirit, RyanAir, etc: they helped bring down prices across the industry. Flying used to be $300, but after relentless competition, even the more expensive airlines are now far cheaper than they used to be. The inching down of leg room, saving pennies on drinks and food, paying for extra luggage; that kind of brutal cost saving just doesn't happen without merciless competition. And it's comparatively impossible to start a RyanRail: you can't just dump your trains in between the other ones. It's an inherently hard field to compete in. Even in the UK and NL, where different private companies compete, they do so by winning bids for sections of tracks, and exclusive access to those tracks. That's not the same as airlines. If only one airline could fly LDN->BCN, it wouldn't be $25. (case in point: KLM & SLM had a monopoly on flights Netherlands <-> Suriname for a while. The day they lost it, prices dropped >50%). Most of the other things (salary expenses, track upkeep, etc) would follow if they could compete harder. We could have said the same about flying two decades ago; nobody would have predicted a $25 LDN->BCN, yet here we are. (this is just my theory, and it's hard to conclusively disprove, therefore quite a weak one..)
brnt 7y ago
Last I looked into this: maintenance of rail >> maintenance of runways. There's a lot of manpower in rail maintenance, which is costly in Europe. But subsidies also play a role. France subsidizes rail as much as air travel is subsidized, and there rail is much more affordable.
tim333 7y ago
And that's in spite of most railway lines being subsidised and most airlines not. I guess if you think of the stuff involved going London - Barcelona, for flying it's a plane with maybe 10 crew, and some tarmac at either end for runways, for train it's 100s of miles of track, goodness knows how many staff along it, plus the train of course. The UKs new HS2 line is looking at costing £750m per mile while airspace is free.

ojagodzinski 7y ago

Jet fuel is tax free, energy and diesel for trains is not. https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/ https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/

yostrovs 7y ago
Wrong explanation. Jets still use more energy dollars per person flying and you're not taking account of subsidies for trains, though there are others for planes as well.
kds3 7y ago
Aren't EU trains electrified yet?
- martinrlzd 7y ago
  Yes, most of them are electrified.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive They’re more expensive because they’re better.

postingawayonhn 7y ago
No, they're more expensive because they have higher infrastructure costs. Building and maintaining hundreds of kilometers of track costs a lot.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Prices are set by what the market supports due to the value the product provides, not what the product costs to deliver.
  - postingawayonhn 7y ago
    Yes and no. The market has to at a minimum cover the cost of operation otherwise businesses will stop operating.
    - WilliamEdward 7y ago
      Not true, many industries don't return profit and are yet subsidised by the government out of necessity anyway, eg: farming.

Hamuko 7y ago

Well firstly, you don't need to do any work on the terrain that the plane operates on. Meanwhile a train will require contiguous tracks. That might not be a huge hurdle if you need to get between two places with flat land between them, but add water, mountains, forests and whatnot, and that makes it much harder to get a train from one place to another. An airplane just needs two airstrips.

fiblye 7y ago
But once a track is built, it doesn’t take much maintenance to keep it running for decades or even a century. There are places in this world that can’t even manage to repair streets, but have trains operating daily with little trouble. It seems like costs would come down at some point in first world nations, or it’d be worthwhile to subsidize the creation of railways more significantly. I know governments do try to to some extent, but riding trains is expensive almost everywhere. It doesn’t make sense to be cheaper than even roads, which need constant maintenance, intense infrastructure, and cleanup.
- thu2111 7y ago
  It takes quite a lot of maintenance unfortunately. Rails need constant work to keep them in good condition. So does the ballast. Signalling involves miles of cables, lights, radio towers and motors that also degrade. The stations need staff, gates, ticket kiosks, displays. A frequent need is to add capacity. Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty. It's essentially just about scaling air traffic control systems. Adding capacity in a rail line can involve major earthworks, rebuilding bridges, totally replacing the signalling and so on. Roads are easier to maintain and pay for themselves without subsidies just via fuel tax. There's no station infrastructure. No stations means no expensive employees. People drive cars themselves and cars can be driven safely even on quite degraded roads. Signalling is entirely local and so doesn't require much cabling, on high speed routes (motorways) there's usually little or no signalling required. Laying tarmac is much cheaper than laying rails. Finally of the few people needed to maintain and run the roads, many are private sector and un-unionized e.g. gas station employees. The government employees only do repairs and so don't have much strike power. Contrast to the railways which in Europe are frequently shut down for weeks at a time by strikes of drivers or crew. The capital investment in trains is worth it for only one reason - it's the highest capacity form of transport in seats per hour. It's got nothing to do with greenness which is at any rate a very ambiguous case to make when you consider all the factors. Trains can be less green than planes in many ordinary situations.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago

I flew from Amsterdam to Dublin for €19. I then took the train from Dublin to Cork for ... €60. The distance from Amsterdam to Dublin is about 750km, three times as long as Dublin-Cork (you can also take the bus for €15 or some such, but last time I did that I got rather carsick, so I figured I'd take the train, not knowing how expensive it was!)

radicalbyte 7y ago
You can go from one side of The Netherlands from the other for about €20 on the train and you can have unlimited train travel for €350 a month (and considerably less for a given route).
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  Yes, but we're kind of unique in our standardized national public transport system. Undoubtedly our small size as a country helps there.
  - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
    Well, Ireland is just 6.5 million people, not exactly a large country, and I think Germany's DB is more or less similar to the Dutch NS? I lived in the UK for a while, and things are really complex there with a patchwork of private companies. Either way, I stopped complaining about the Dutch trains very shortly after moving there :-)
    - vanderZwan 7y ago
      We have one transport card that works for all public transport providers. You cannot book trains in advance - all distances have a fixed price (not counting international trains). In many other countries there are regional commuter trains like that, but with national trains the prices vary on how early you book, like with planes.
    - radicalbyte 7y ago
      The thing is the UK trains used to be much better. Then the Tories privatized them and we ended up with this mess of private companies owning different regions of the country. Apparently that leads to competition because if taking a train from the City to Luton is too expensive they can just take a train from Leeds to Glasgow.

notahacker 7y ago

Airlines do one hop, and revenue optimise by having the aircraft near-full on that hop, which entails an aggressive pricing model especially since there's usually direct competitors showing up in the same flight search. They also make a lot of ancillary revenue from charging you another $30 for your luggage. Long distance trains usually have several intermediate stages they can sell tickets on, often with no public transport competition, and there's really no incentive for them to price-cut on a London-Barcelona route involving several other companies and very little customer interest.

hackeraccount 7y ago
This is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I'm not sure what the fix is - having multiple companies sharing the same track seem dubious but maybe that's answer. Either that or let a bunch of companies put down redundant lines.
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  EU intervention. It worked for getting rid of roaming prices for mobile phone carriers in Europe, and that also requires cooperation between different carriers. Why wouldn't something like that be possible for rail?
  - thu2111 7y ago
    EU intervention solves nothing. Forcing roaming prices down just pushed up other tariffs, which didn't matter to the Commission because their ideological goal is to unify Europe into a single country, not get people the best mobile deals. It was only possible at all because the phone industry already built all the infrastructure for roaming on it's own. The problem is lack of demand. The article posits there is huge untapped demand for night trains but there isn't. Rail companies can and do run services on each others tracks but rail lines are frequently at capacity, timetabling wise, so it's not always easy to just drop in and run extra trains in the same way many airports have free slots for extra planes. And of course airlines are still mostly national too. Indeed it's best kept away from the EU. It has a habit of suspending transport and trading rights as part of unrelated political disputes with its neighbors in order to pressure them to obey Brussels. If you want train connections to be mysteriously severed because of some dispute with the UK or Switzerland over fishing or trade unions then asking the EU to organise it is the right way to go. If you'd like train timetables to be set taking into account what the railways can do, leave it to the private sector and get governments out of the way.

sfifs 7y ago

Coming from Asia, I have always been shocked at how expensive trains are in Europe vs. here and how flights are cheaper. I would suspect someone is profiteering in the value chain... probably the construction and maintenance industries which tend to be the usual means of political graft... And that cost gets charged to passengers. It's a lose lose situation... Bad for environment, bad for people, bad for economic efficiency. The whole point of a rail network in a nation's economy is to be an economic force multiplier, not to be a profiteering entity

JeanMarcS 7y ago

I’ll add to all the other comments good explainations that as trains use tracks, it all depends on where are all the other trains and when. So fast trains (at least in France that you should have cross to go to Barcelona) must have very specific time tables and get along with local trains, when airplanes don’t and can go straight. It adds constraint. (Ok, I know planes have routes too, but it’s much easyier to do timetables)

MaulingMonkey 7y ago

> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. I recently watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA which covered much of the cost breakdowns - especially for American passenger rail. TL;DR: * Labor is expensive. That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train. The faster speed of an equivalent plane ride means you're not paying pilots for as long, or allows them to make more trips. * Rail is expensive. You have to buy the land between point A and point B. You have to build the rails, bridges, crossing guards, with lots of labor to build and maintain it all, with plenty of regulatory burdens to work through (ecological, safety, eminent domain, ...). The sky between airports, on the other hand, is free. I've seen some suggestions that the sweet spot for trains is in medium length routes ("too far to drive, too near to fly"), with short haul routes being dominated by road vehicles (cars, taxis, buses) and long haul routes being dominated by airplanes (fast, don't need to buy/lease/maintain rails across thousands of miles)

chrisseaton 7y ago
> That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train. A driver, a ticket inspector, and someone to run the café? Three people? Shared amongst a few hundred passengers? Is that really a significant cost?
- MaulingMonkey 7y ago
  If they're each pulling down $100k/year (this is slightly bellow amtrack average!) or ~$50/hour in total comp, 3x50x10 = $1500 right there for none of the support staff - managers, staff back in the control rooms switching signals, staff on call for maintainence issues - and none of the associated costs of putting the staff up in hotel rooms on account of being 10 hours away from home when their shift is over, etc. Spread it out over 300 riders and that's perhaps only $5 for the trip and your 1:100 employee:rider staffing ratio. Not so bad! Of course, there are also 44 hour routes. Or less popular routes without 300 passengers that are run for political reasons, or because they feed passengers into the more popular routes. Or the popular routes when run off-peak, so passengers can still use the route even if they may occasionally need some flexibility in when they travel. The video suggests amtrack employs 1 person per 4 riders, not per 100! For a route half the distance (DC to New York - 3.5-5 hours) they attribute $25/ticket to labor costs. You've got stories like this where Japan is keeping open a train station for a single passenger - do you think that route has 300 people on it there? And this is in a country where trains are popular and some routes are packed to the brim in the middle of rush hour: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/01/japan-keeps-this-defunct-train-station-running-for-just-one-passenger/423273/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/01/japan-keeps-t...

Shivetya 7y ago

Because politics. Trains are very national in the EU and even after this many years that still gets in the way of effective train based transportation. Plus heavy rail is flat out expensive to put down and maintain and the cars are and engines themselves all contribute the initial cost of establishing a line as well as maintenance. Then the kicker compared to airline travel, you cannot simply reroute a train. It is stuck to its rail line, as in you cannot simply move a train to service a route that needs it now. You could tax the airline industry into the ground but it will not fix the reality that trains simply are not flexible, similar to how light rail in cities is not ideal for the majority of cities that employ it; for many city transportation systems light rail eats away a disproportionate amount of the budget impacting bus availability as well - it is a money pit A previous financial times article [0] explains some of the political problems but far too many still do not understand the logistical side of rail lines. [0]https://www.ft.com/content/e77dc48e-7894-11e8-8e67-1e1a0846c475 https://www.ft.com/content/e77dc48e-7894-11e8-8e67-1e1a0846c...

radicalbyte 7y ago
Privatized trains are worse, in the UK they've just given the go ahead for a $140 billion high speed rail project, HS2. A decade ago we build HS1, a 67 mile track between London and the Channel Tunnel, for a total of $7.6 billion ($112m / mile). HS2 is longer but its 330 miles of tracks will cost $400m / mile. The project costs make absolutely no sense: London is a special weird place in the UK where everything you build is twice as expensive as in the rest of the country. Considering most of HS1 was in London and most of HS2 is outside of London, this budget makes absolutely no sense. What makes the whole thing even more insane is that the endpoints are not connected to the rest of the infrastructure. You have a 30 minute trip between HS1 and HS2. So if you're travelling from Birmingham to Paris you'll have to switch trains in London. For the money they're spending on this it's crazy that you're not getting it.
- captainbland 7y ago
  My understanding is that basically HS2 is massively over-specced compared to HS1. It wants high throughput and extremely high speed (80-100mph faster than HS1). I guess you could probably shave a few tens of billions off just by slowing the line down a bit - using ballast rather than concrete slab and such. See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51415590 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51415590 The only other thing I'd add is that Euston is easily within walking distance of St Pancras. But given all this already extraordinary cost it seems like you might as well connect St Pancras and Euston HS lines and have the odd Eurostar service run from Birmingham.

krn 7y ago

> To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300. That's because you are comparing standard railway companies with low-cost airlines. I believe that it would also cost around $300 to fly from London to Barcelona and back with British Airways or Iberia. The era of low-cost railway companies in Europe is just beginning: FlixTrain[1] (Germany), OUIGO[2] (France), RegioJet[3], and LeoExpress[4] (both Central Europe) are now all offering long-distance train tickets from 10€. [1] https://www.flixtrain.com/ https://www.flixtrain.com/ [2] https://en.oui.sncf/en/ouigo/fares https://en.oui.sncf/en/ouigo/fares [3] https://www.regiojet.com/services/services-on-board-of-trains/ https://www.regiojet.com/services/services-on-board-of-train... [4] https://www.leoexpress.com/en/services/our-fleet https://www.leoexpress.com/en/services/our-fleet

rdsubhas 7y ago

It's not just the cost. Coming from India, I'm used to sleeping my way in any 6+ hour journey. In fact, for business travel, we prefer overnight trains or sleeper buses (yes, sleeper buses) because you don't need to book an unnecessary stay. I'm not going to compare INR vs EUR, but this mode of travel is pretty affordable and common to the mass market here. European trains are way more expensive AND I have to sit my way through long hours with not even pushback. Ouch my back hurts even thinking about it. Sleeper berths are extremely rare and even more expensive. I just don't get how my fellow european humans consider this mode of travel plausible.

LatteLazy 7y ago

I used to work in rail engineering. Our projects were all reliant on explicit government subsidiary. We as a company basically watched the national transport budget for the next 12 months to predict whether we'd make a profit in the coming year. There are a few factors to rail that make it unsuitable for long distance. First, there is 10s of 1000s of miles of track, all of which has to be laid, maintained, controlled and signalled. It has to be inspected and repaired and monitored and upgraded. Plus, you can't go directly anywhere. You can't take a train to Barcelona from London. You have to go via Dover for the tunnel, then lille because its a city and there's not track not via lille. The air maintains itself and you can fly basically direct to wherever. Plus a shit tonne of political interference (here in the UK we have stations basically next to each other no one will close and HS2 take a huge diversion to avoid politically sensitive areas, and that's just in one nation, try getting them to agree on train safety standards). For an airport, you basically just need a mile of tarmac and a tin shed. I don't think you even have to have radar anymore, just transponder tracking... Plus, as you point out, the plan can carry 7 loads of people in the same time that the train can carry 1. So all things being equal (which they're not) you'd pay only 1/7th... Plus, the costs for the Barcelona London route are basically fixed. The fact no one wants to make that journey in the winter just means the assets are unused. If no one wants to fly London to Barcelona in November, you can just switch the route and take people to their ski holidays instead. So planes are more versitile and has much higher utilisation rates than most trains. Trains make sense but only over shorter distances. Anything over about 200 miles and planes win.

DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
200 miles is way too short for the break-even point. If you take into account the time overhead for airplanes, the break-even point is about 4 hours. For modern high-speed rail (speeds of over 200 mph), that's about 800 miles (NYC to Chicago, or Paris to Vienna). Most European high-speed rail lines outside France and Spain don't operate at that speed yet, but it's not uncommon for newly-built high-speed lines (which is why it's common in China).
- LatteLazy 7y ago
  4 hours at 200mph is 800 miles. But no train does that over distance. Even the Japanese, with dedicated infrastructure for bullet trains and minimal political issues stop every few hundred km because they're at a city people want to get on or off at...

mister_hn 7y ago

And what about the price of time? Going from e.g. Denmark to Spain or Italy isn't cheap in terms of time..

nothrabannosir 7y ago

I see a lot of good explanations for the status quo, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned the more fundamental problem that you simply can't overtake a train. Airplanes can fly relatively independently of each other, compared to trains who have to share tracks and more limited train stations. This means you just can't compete on the level that budget airlines can. Spirit, RyanAir, etc: they helped bring down prices across the industry. Flying used to be $300, but after relentless competition, even the more expensive airlines are now far cheaper than they used to be. The inching down of leg room, saving pennies on drinks and food, paying for extra luggage; that kind of brutal cost saving just doesn't happen without merciless competition. And it's comparatively impossible to start a RyanRail: you can't just dump your trains in between the other ones. It's an inherently hard field to compete in. Even in the UK and NL, where different private companies compete, they do so by winning bids for sections of tracks, and exclusive access to those tracks. That's not the same as airlines. If only one airline could fly LDN->BCN, it wouldn't be $25. (case in point: KLM & SLM had a monopoly on flights Netherlands <-> Suriname for a while. The day they lost it, prices dropped >50%). Most of the other things (salary expenses, track upkeep, etc) would follow if they could compete harder. We could have said the same about flying two decades ago; nobody would have predicted a $25 LDN->BCN, yet here we are. (this is just my theory, and it's hard to conclusively disprove, therefore quite a weak one..)

brnt 7y ago

Last I looked into this: maintenance of rail >> maintenance of runways. There's a lot of manpower in rail maintenance, which is costly in Europe. But subsidies also play a role. France subsidizes rail as much as air travel is subsidized, and there rail is much more affordable.

tim333 7y ago

And that's in spite of most railway lines being subsidised and most airlines not. I guess if you think of the stuff involved going London - Barcelona, for flying it's a plane with maybe 10 crew, and some tarmac at either end for runways, for train it's 100s of miles of track, goodness knows how many staff along it, plus the train of course. The UKs new HS2 line is looking at costing £750m per mile while airspace is free.