7 ms·

Imagine you enter the train in New York at 8 pm, eat a nice meal, read or play a game, go to sleep and wake up at 8 am in San Francisco. No queuing in airports,

Imagine you enter the train in New York at 8 pm, eat a nice meal, read or play a game, go to sleep and wake up at 8 am in San Francisco. No queuing in airports, no security checks, just the pure pleasure of traveling. Wouldn't it be nice? Well, it's not gonna happen in the USA. It is one of the important differences between the two continents: in Europe, public transport is important, and improving its infrasctructure is one of the metrics of success. In the USA, owning a car is important, and there is no (feasible) way to change it.

GDC7 5y ago
> No queuing in airports, no security checks, just the pure pleasure of traveling. Wouldn't it be nice? All those things are self imposed, and they are strangely only enforced on airplanes. Like the 300+ lives aboard a train are worth nothing
- maeln 5y ago
  There was the same discussion a few days ago on another post. It's not a fair comparison. You can hardly hijack a train. Even if you manage to get control of the train, you cannot land it in a tower full of people. The worst you can do is make it de-rail which, while it will probably kill a lot of people, is unlikely to kill all of its passenger. And if you carry a bomb you will blow at most one compartment. Also, with train, even if someone manage to get to the driver compartment, you can still control a lot of the train from the outside. You can change its direction at exchange point, you can cut its supply in electricity (if it is an electric train) therefore stopping it (although in quite a dangerous way...). And you are still on the ground were it is very easy for police / military to catch up and intervene. You can't do that with a plane several kilometers high in the sky. Planes are much more sensible to all of those potential threat. That is why we ended up with such drastic security. Although I have to say, in a lot of places, security is way more relaxed. If you travel from the E.U to the E.U you have way less check and queue time.
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    The thing is that if someone wants to use a bomb to derail a train it may be easier to place the bomb on or near the tracks, which obviously bypasses any security onboard. This was attempted on the TGV during the terrorist wave of the mid-90s in France but, fortunately, it did not detonate. That being said, I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs.
    - pjerem 5y ago
      > I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs. Nope.
      - mrgordon 5y ago
        Spain has security checks at their major stations for high speed trains including to go to France, but France does not
        pjerem 5y ago
        There are so many widely open train stations in France that securing only some of them would be a huge waste of time and energy while securing them all would be nearly impossible. And I really don’t want to live in a country where boarding a train is as painful as boarding a plane. Millions of people are using train to commute, adding security checks would totally kill the train.
        mrgordon 5y ago
        For what’s it’s worth it’s more of a bag scan rather than a full security check like at the airport. Certainly the full security check is not something I want to deal with but it wasn’t too bad. They only do it at the main stations in Spain and only if you’re riding the high speed trains, so I imagine if France did it then it would only be at TGV stops which are not so numerous
    - Sevaris 5y ago
- occz 5y ago
  > Like the 300+ lives aboard a train are worth nothing This is a really strange take - security on airplanes was introduced due to hijackings, in which case the airplane can be used as a very lethal weapon to attack most anything, really. You are much more limited in what damage you can cause by hijacking a train, since trains are limited by where the tracks go. Worst you can do is probably derail the train by going to fast in a curve and potentially hurt people living near the curve, or worse, slam into a station and cause damage in and around it. Still, a fraction of what a hijacked airplane can do in terms of damage.
  - GDC7 5y ago
    This cognitive dissonance is everywhere. Apparently even on HN. There are 100-200 people on a train, some have 300. No security at all. You only need an ill intentioned guy with a gun and it's over for all those on board. They'd move across compartments and off everybody. Multiply that by the amount of trains which travel everyday and you'd get a pretty chilling scenario.
    - himinlomax 5y ago
      You can crash a whole plane by poking a small hole with a tiny bomb. Put a bomb in a TGV, and you'll kill people nearby, but not in the other wagons. So it's not a particularly attractive target compared to say, a shopping mall. Terrorists planned to derail one in the 1990s by destroying rails, they were thwarted beforehand. But even if they succeeded, TGV is designed specifically to resist derailment and not fold on itself like a regular train, so it's unlikely most passengers would have been killed.
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        Your best option is likely controlled demolition of a bridge. And that needs decent number of explosive and knowledge. Plus timing. Ofc, the financial damage is quite substantial, but loss of life is in the few hundred range.
        5y ago
- robrenaud 5y ago
  In the US, it takes 1.5 days for a 9/11s worth of people to die from covid. The TSA does not seem very effective [1], and terrorism via plane hasn't killed very many people since 9/11. Cockpits are re-inforced, passengers will fight back. It's hard to highjack a plane. Abolishing the TSA in airports and slightly increasing vaccination requirements would be a net win/win for life and liberty. https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-operation-us-airports/story?id=51022188 https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...
Aloha 5y ago
The distances and population densities involved are also vastly different.
burntoutfire 5y ago
There's hardly a connection in Europe which does 4600 km in 12 hours (maybe China has those?), let alone a sleeping one. I doubt if European countries would ever build a super-fast 4600 km line which goes mostly through farmland, deserts and desolate mountains. China has one (to Tibet), but that's mostly for political reasons.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  In China, Beijing to Kashgar is about 3,500km but there isn't any high speed train on that line (yet?) One important aspect is that China needs capacity: It has a very large population and also has two peak periods during which literally hundreds of millions of people want to travel during the same week. I think they've concluded that planes alone are never going to handle that demand and that trains offer a much larger capacity.
gherkinnn 5y ago
I like trains but a connection from NY to LA makes little sense. There's nothing in between to make the infrastructure worth it. But hight speed rail down either coast, why not? You'd share the same infrastructure as slower commuter trains, have large towns from N to S to stop by, and surely there's a market for people who want to travel in comfort from Seattle to SF.
- lambdasquirrel 5y ago
  It would require a cohesive central government and good planning, neither of which we have. On the East Coast you’d need to exercise eminent domain to make it work. As it so happens, a high speed line would run through a lot of seriously wealthy neighborhoods. These are the wealthiest and most politically-connected areas of the country. On the West Coast, you have A LOT of big mountains and rugged terrain, the likes of which you don’t see in the Northern European plain, and also, some other seriously wealthy (and NIMBY) neighborhoods. There are a lot of people who resisted building the BART through the peninsula and Marin. Caltrain’s already got people suiciding on it all the time, and they needed to build the high speed line through it. The commuter infrastructure isn’t really there.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  Nothing in between! Well, you may get your NY to LA route because the midwest area is quietly building out their passenger rail capacity for their own needs and desires. Everything they are doing is discrete, incremental projects that have an attainable budget and timeline. They are using normal rolling stock so speeds are limited to 110mph, but they are laying the groundwork to allow for faster speeds later on.
- Lammy 5y ago
  > I like trains but a connection from NY to LA makes little sense To be fair, it was Chicago to LA ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Los_Angeles_(train) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Los_Angeles_(train)
teddyh 5y ago
Recently, Technology Connections on YouTube had an interesting theory¹: Long-range trains will never be popular in the USA, since people there have so little vacation time. It’s not reasonable to blow a few days (in total) on just train travel if your entire vacation is a single week. Other places don’t have this problem, so trains are more popular. 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDV1R1j1n5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDV1R1j1n5I
- moogly 5y ago
  But on the other hand, many Americans have no trouble traveling by car for 5-6 hours without a second thought whereas for a West European, that's quite unusual, so I'm not sure that tracks.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    That’s for shorter trips than a day-long train ride, though.
    - OldHand2018 5y ago
      The sleeper cars on Amtrak long-distance routes sell out almost immediately - many months in advance. There is a market, if only they could figure out how to serve it. PS - if they added the ability to take your car along with you it would open up an even larger market.
      - omerhj 5y ago
        They figured it out on the DC to Orlando route: https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train
- rsynnott 5y ago
  Honestly, very long-range trains (overnight) aren't particularly popular anywhere.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
jonp888 5y ago
I don't understand why Americans covet European long distance high speed rail. Even a lot of the more recent European high speed routes were built primarily for political reasons and carry little actual traffic. The high speed line between France and Spain has just 2 trains a day. In the US, the distances are so much greater and the population density so much lower that it just doesn't make sense apart from a few small regions. Covet the Urban Transport networks, the pedestrian-friendly cities, the mixed use suburban districts, yes; but long distance high speed rail is one thing that just doesn't translate.
- melling 5y ago
  No one said build a train from NYC to Los Angeles, or from North Dakota to South Dakota. The population density in several parts of the country is the same as Europe, Spain for example.
q-big 5y ago
> Imagine you enter the train in New York at 8 pm, eat a nice meal, read or play a game, go to sleep and wake up at 8 am in San Francisco. According to Google, the road distance between New York and San Francisco is 4670.6 km. The travel time means that the train will take 15 hours (12 hours + 3 hours difference between the time zones). This means that the average velocity of the train has to be 311 km/h. At least in Europe, there exist few train lines that even allow such speed (only in France and Spain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail#/media/File:High_Speed_Railroad_Map_of_Europe.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail#/media/File:Hi...
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I think you're overestimating rail travel in Europe. We're stuck with limited capacity, grossly different rail systems in each country.. I was on an international chartered train from the Netherlands to Germany recently and while the locomotive supported both systems, they had to change drivers at the border. As a result intra-EU train travel is far more expensive and more hassle than air travel. With air a low-fare airline culture has developed, with rail this can never happen without massive infrastructure investment. All the seats are already full so why reduce their cost? So rail in Europe is more of a national phenomenon. It's not like it's a serious alternative to flying. Most countries in Europe are too small to make national flights a thing so rail is mostly used within countries.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Rail travel in Europe is a national phenomena because it is heavily subsidized, and different nations are willing to spend more than others on their rail system, so don't expect a unified experience as you cross borders in terms of either quality, track maintenance, on-time performance, or comfort. Paricularly as you cross from West to East you will see a big difference.

GDC7 5y ago

> No queuing in airports, no security checks, just the pure pleasure of traveling. Wouldn't it be nice? All those things are self imposed, and they are strangely only enforced on airplanes. Like the 300+ lives aboard a train are worth nothing

maeln 5y ago
There was the same discussion a few days ago on another post. It's not a fair comparison. You can hardly hijack a train. Even if you manage to get control of the train, you cannot land it in a tower full of people. The worst you can do is make it de-rail which, while it will probably kill a lot of people, is unlikely to kill all of its passenger. And if you carry a bomb you will blow at most one compartment. Also, with train, even if someone manage to get to the driver compartment, you can still control a lot of the train from the outside. You can change its direction at exchange point, you can cut its supply in electricity (if it is an electric train) therefore stopping it (although in quite a dangerous way...). And you are still on the ground were it is very easy for police / military to catch up and intervene. You can't do that with a plane several kilometers high in the sky. Planes are much more sensible to all of those potential threat. That is why we ended up with such drastic security. Although I have to say, in a lot of places, security is way more relaxed. If you travel from the E.U to the E.U you have way less check and queue time.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  The thing is that if someone wants to use a bomb to derail a train it may be easier to place the bomb on or near the tracks, which obviously bypasses any security onboard. This was attempted on the TGV during the terrorist wave of the mid-90s in France but, fortunately, it did not detonate. That being said, I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    > I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs. Nope.
    - mrgordon 5y ago
      Spain has security checks at their major stations for high speed trains including to go to France, but France does not
      - pjerem 5y ago
        There are so many widely open train stations in France that securing only some of them would be a huge waste of time and energy while securing them all would be nearly impossible. And I really don’t want to live in a country where boarding a train is as painful as boarding a plane. Millions of people are using train to commute, adding security checks would totally kill the train.
        mrgordon 5y ago
        For what’s it’s worth it’s more of a bag scan rather than a full security check like at the airport. Certainly the full security check is not something I want to deal with but it wasn’t too bad. They only do it at the main stations in Spain and only if you’re riding the high speed trains, so I imagine if France did it then it would only be at TGV stops which are not so numerous
  - Sevaris 5y ago
occz 5y ago
> Like the 300+ lives aboard a train are worth nothing This is a really strange take - security on airplanes was introduced due to hijackings, in which case the airplane can be used as a very lethal weapon to attack most anything, really. You are much more limited in what damage you can cause by hijacking a train, since trains are limited by where the tracks go. Worst you can do is probably derail the train by going to fast in a curve and potentially hurt people living near the curve, or worse, slam into a station and cause damage in and around it. Still, a fraction of what a hijacked airplane can do in terms of damage.
- GDC7 5y ago
  This cognitive dissonance is everywhere. Apparently even on HN. There are 100-200 people on a train, some have 300. No security at all. You only need an ill intentioned guy with a gun and it's over for all those on board. They'd move across compartments and off everybody. Multiply that by the amount of trains which travel everyday and you'd get a pretty chilling scenario.
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    You can crash a whole plane by poking a small hole with a tiny bomb. Put a bomb in a TGV, and you'll kill people nearby, but not in the other wagons. So it's not a particularly attractive target compared to say, a shopping mall. Terrorists planned to derail one in the 1990s by destroying rails, they were thwarted beforehand. But even if they succeeded, TGV is designed specifically to resist derailment and not fold on itself like a regular train, so it's unlikely most passengers would have been killed.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Your best option is likely controlled demolition of a bridge. And that needs decent number of explosive and knowledge. Plus timing. Ofc, the financial damage is quite substantial, but loss of life is in the few hundred range.
      - 5y ago
robrenaud 5y ago
In the US, it takes 1.5 days for a 9/11s worth of people to die from covid. The TSA does not seem very effective [1], and terrorism via plane hasn't killed very many people since 9/11. Cockpits are re-inforced, passengers will fight back. It's hard to highjack a plane. Abolishing the TSA in airports and slightly increasing vaccination requirements would be a net win/win for life and liberty. https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-operation-us-airports/story?id=51022188 https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...

Aloha 5y ago

The distances and population densities involved are also vastly different.

burntoutfire 5y ago

There's hardly a connection in Europe which does 4600 km in 12 hours (maybe China has those?), let alone a sleeping one. I doubt if European countries would ever build a super-fast 4600 km line which goes mostly through farmland, deserts and desolate mountains. China has one (to Tibet), but that's mostly for political reasons.

mytailorisrich 5y ago
In China, Beijing to Kashgar is about 3,500km but there isn't any high speed train on that line (yet?) One important aspect is that China needs capacity: It has a very large population and also has two peak periods during which literally hundreds of millions of people want to travel during the same week. I think they've concluded that planes alone are never going to handle that demand and that trains offer a much larger capacity.

gherkinnn 5y ago

I like trains but a connection from NY to LA makes little sense. There's nothing in between to make the infrastructure worth it. But hight speed rail down either coast, why not? You'd share the same infrastructure as slower commuter trains, have large towns from N to S to stop by, and surely there's a market for people who want to travel in comfort from Seattle to SF.

lambdasquirrel 5y ago
It would require a cohesive central government and good planning, neither of which we have. On the East Coast you’d need to exercise eminent domain to make it work. As it so happens, a high speed line would run through a lot of seriously wealthy neighborhoods. These are the wealthiest and most politically-connected areas of the country. On the West Coast, you have A LOT of big mountains and rugged terrain, the likes of which you don’t see in the Northern European plain, and also, some other seriously wealthy (and NIMBY) neighborhoods. There are a lot of people who resisted building the BART through the peninsula and Marin. Caltrain’s already got people suiciding on it all the time, and they needed to build the high speed line through it. The commuter infrastructure isn’t really there.
OldHand2018 5y ago
Nothing in between! Well, you may get your NY to LA route because the midwest area is quietly building out their passenger rail capacity for their own needs and desires. Everything they are doing is discrete, incremental projects that have an attainable budget and timeline. They are using normal rolling stock so speeds are limited to 110mph, but they are laying the groundwork to allow for faster speeds later on.
Lammy 5y ago
> I like trains but a connection from NY to LA makes little sense To be fair, it was Chicago to LA ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Los_Angeles_(train) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Los_Angeles_(train)

teddyh 5y ago

Recently, Technology Connections on YouTube had an interesting theory¹: Long-range trains will never be popular in the USA, since people there have so little vacation time. It’s not reasonable to blow a few days (in total) on just train travel if your entire vacation is a single week. Other places don’t have this problem, so trains are more popular. 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDV1R1j1n5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDV1R1j1n5I

moogly 5y ago
But on the other hand, many Americans have no trouble traveling by car for 5-6 hours without a second thought whereas for a West European, that's quite unusual, so I'm not sure that tracks.
- teddyh 5y ago
  That’s for shorter trips than a day-long train ride, though.
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    The sleeper cars on Amtrak long-distance routes sell out almost immediately - many months in advance. There is a market, if only they could figure out how to serve it. PS - if they added the ability to take your car along with you it would open up an even larger market.
    - omerhj 5y ago
      They figured it out on the DC to Orlando route: https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train
rsynnott 5y ago
Honestly, very long-range trains (overnight) aren't particularly popular anywhere.
GekkePrutser 5y ago

jonp888 5y ago

I don't understand why Americans covet European long distance high speed rail. Even a lot of the more recent European high speed routes were built primarily for political reasons and carry little actual traffic. The high speed line between France and Spain has just 2 trains a day. In the US, the distances are so much greater and the population density so much lower that it just doesn't make sense apart from a few small regions. Covet the Urban Transport networks, the pedestrian-friendly cities, the mixed use suburban districts, yes; but long distance high speed rail is one thing that just doesn't translate.

melling 5y ago
No one said build a train from NYC to Los Angeles, or from North Dakota to South Dakota. The population density in several parts of the country is the same as Europe, Spain for example.

q-big 5y ago

> Imagine you enter the train in New York at 8 pm, eat a nice meal, read or play a game, go to sleep and wake up at 8 am in San Francisco. According to Google, the road distance between New York and San Francisco is 4670.6 km. The travel time means that the train will take 15 hours (12 hours + 3 hours difference between the time zones). This means that the average velocity of the train has to be 311 km/h. At least in Europe, there exist few train lines that even allow such speed (only in France and Spain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail#/media/File:High_Speed_Railroad_Map_of_Europe.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail#/media/File:Hi...

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I think you're overestimating rail travel in Europe. We're stuck with limited capacity, grossly different rail systems in each country.. I was on an international chartered train from the Netherlands to Germany recently and while the locomotive supported both systems, they had to change drivers at the border. As a result intra-EU train travel is far more expensive and more hassle than air travel. With air a low-fare airline culture has developed, with rail this can never happen without massive infrastructure investment. All the seats are already full so why reduce their cost? So rail in Europe is more of a national phenomenon. It's not like it's a serious alternative to flying. Most countries in Europe are too small to make national flights a thing so rail is mostly used within countries.

rsj_hn 5y ago
Rail travel in Europe is a national phenomena because it is heavily subsidized, and different nations are willing to spend more than others on their rail system, so don't expect a unified experience as you cross borders in terms of either quality, track maintenance, on-time performance, or comfort. Paricularly as you cross from West to East you will see a big difference.