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I’m often surprised at the ticket prices on trains in Europe. As I’ve traveled around there, it’s not uncommon for me to see a route by train at approximately 1

I’m often surprised at the ticket prices on trains in Europe. As I’ve traveled around there, it’s not uncommon for me to see a route by train at approximately 100 EUR and the same route by air by for less than half that. Causing additional confusion is that when I take the train, there are often a significant number of empty seats. It seems that the cost of an additional passenger on a train is almost zero, so why do trains not attempt to reduce per-ticket prices to increase capacity and become more competitive against low cost airlines? In your example, the train from London to Paris in my experience has almost always been nearly triple the cost of a flight.

byroot 7y ago
> It seems that the cost of an additional passenger on a train is almost zero It is. But the cost of the first passenger is massive. Think of all these rails (and the terrain under it you have to pay a hefty price for), all the bridges etc. You mention the Paris-London train, just the tunnel did cost $21 billions, add the high speed rails before and after it and you are probably at close to $40 billions in infrastructure before the first train can do the trip. Trains are orders of magnitude greener than planes, but unless you massively tax planes, or massively subsidize trains, they'll always be more expensive than planes.