11 ms·

Trains are pretty awesome, especially in small Europe. Flying always comes with security hassle. A train is just: get in/get out. If Europe would just spent mo

by k__ 3y ago

Trains are pretty awesome, especially in small Europe. Flying always comes with security hassle. A train is just: get in/get out. If Europe would just spent more money on infrastructure. We have trains in Germany that can do 350km/h but I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be. Then we have the Germany Ticket. A 50€/month subscription to all regional trains (not the fast ones). Which removes the hassle of dealing with local subway and bus companies. But the trains are often late, which sucks, especially if you want to ride in the evening. If Europe could get on Japan's level, that would be a dream.

eigenket 3y ago
In my opinion the main "low hanging fruit" Europe has with trains are international birders, especially if they're trying to compete with flying. Trains in Poland work great, trains in Germany work pretty well but every train I've taken between Poland and Germany has been delayed. The standard thing is that while you're in Poland they claim the delay is because of previous delays in Germany and while you're in Germany they blame delays from Poland. If you're trying to do something more advanced like get across Germany to Belgium or France & eventually the UK the it gets quite annoying.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >Germany and while you're in Germany they blame delays from Poland. Both can be true at the same time. Developing enough capacity to avoid non-blocking train systems and bunching is a difficult issue.
- ddek 3y ago
  German trains wishing to enter Switzerland need to wait at the border so the DB’s, err, _erratic_ scheduling doesn’t perturb the much more rigorous Swiss system. My experience of German trains is one train arriving on time, to find my connection is delayed, but actually leaving earlier because the same train 1h before was 54 minutes late and I could get that instead.
  - foofie 3y ago
    > German trains wishing to enter Switzerland need to wait at the border so the DB’s, err, _erratic_ scheduling doesn’t perturb the much more rigorous Swiss system. I'm rather skeptic of this take. Railway operators provide services by reserving track sections and train stations in specific time windows which take into account travel speed and scheduling. Rail track capacity is typically reserved for periods of over a year. If german trains run on time in Germany and swiss trains run on time in Switzerland, then it sounds like germany's trains being delayed when entering swiss lines is an impedance problem caused by the way the swiss infrastructure manager is handling german trains.
    - maxwell22 3y ago
      70% of German trains that arrive at their destination are “delayed” (30 min or more). A train that never arrives is not counted as delayed. About 30% of German trains do not arrive at their destination. In Switzerland, the stats are single low percentage digits. After multiple ultimatums, Switzerland stopped allowing German trains into Switzerland. The most popular connection between Switzerland and Germany (Zurich-Munich) has been kept but is now operated by Switzerland even though most of the ride is in Germany. This is shameful and a lose-lose for all parties, but necessary.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - lolc 3y ago
        I doubt your stats, where'd you get them from? And there are multiple connections per day from Germany to central Switzerland. Take the Hamburg-Interlaken ICE for example.
- enaaem 3y ago
  Just built a separate international network, with its own separate system and tracks. The way Japan handles complexity is through redundancy. Japan runs both really old trains, hyper modern high speed rail and everything in between. Each system runs on separate tracks, are from different companies, and are not interconnected. This can be a lesson on how to run complex systems in general.
  - DrNosferatu 3y ago
    Enaaem: It already works that way. The Iberic Peninsula has a different rail gauge from Central Europe, but - in parallel to Iberian Gauge - is building and expanding its TGV network, which is in the Central European gauge. So, a secondary network.
    - porompompero 3y ago
      Thus was seen by many as a waste when built, but really it works better than in Germany in terms of quality of experience.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    Why not build parallel tracks, but with the same gauge? > This can be a lesson on how to run complex systems in general. This sounds like cargo culting. Japan has great train system, it has to be because of separate gauges!
    - throwup238 3y ago
      > Why not build parallel tracks, but with the same gauge? Jevon's paradox [1] probably. The most profitable part of the rail system will grow to crowd out and interfere with the rest. By keeping it different gauges, they all operate independent of each other's incentives. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
      - The_Colonel 3y ago
- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  In December I could not even buy tickets online to a train from Berlin to Warsaw because DB website is terrible. Had to cancel my trip — this is really a shame, that EU cannot fix cross-border connectivity.
  - bondant 3y ago
    Couldn't you book with another ticket seller? Like trainline.eu?
    - ivan_gammel 3y ago
      I tried Omio and one more, but this specific direction was not available there via train. DB website was simply showing an error at the last step. A month later, by the moment error was gone all tickets appeared sold.
      - eigenket 3y ago
        If you run into the problem again try the website of the Polish trains pkp.pl. You'll probably have to Google translate some stuff but it works well.
        octacat 3y ago
        There is an english version. But pkp site loves to give you errors and timeouts too.
  - snthd 3y ago
    You can buy from Polish Railways too. https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/berlin-to-warsaw-by-train.htm#How_to_buy_tickets https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/berlin-to-warsaw-by... The EU seemed (2021) to be working on it https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_21_6701 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
    - octacat 3y ago
- donalhunt 3y ago
  Did Prague to Brussels in one day (~ 12 hours) in 2010 and everything just worked. One connection in Frankfurt airport (it has a train station) and it was cheaper than flying. Will need to check how I bought the ticket but do know it was bought as a single ticket. Good thing I left early in the morning because the later trains to Germany all got stuck in heavy snow downfalls. \o/
MrDresden 3y ago
No need to get to Japans level. Just matching the Netherlands in punctuality and connections would be more than enough (using the word 'just' here does not do their rail network the justice it deserves).
- com 3y ago
  Argh. I moved away but am back in NL regularly and the train service has degraded beyond all recognition for me done in comparison to 2021 or so. Short trains, cancellation of 75% of scheduled services for random reasons, regular failures on key links (Amsterdam CS/Zuid-Schiphol, HSL-Zuid, Delft-Rotterdam etc etc) leading to widespread network disruptions. NS wasn’t perfect before, but it sure seems that they and their evil twin, ProRail, aren’t even trying any more.
  - static_motion 3y ago
    That's interesting to read. I recently visited the Netherlands on vacation and one of the things I was most impressed by was the train service. I came away from an excellent opinion of NS, but I'd probably chalk that down to my extensive experience with Portugal's own national train service which is an absolute clown show on rails.
kibwen 3y ago
> especially in small Europe What's small about the scale of Europe in this context? Even taking the extremely conservative measurement of Madrid to Berlin, that's 1200 miles/2000 km, which is comparable to the entire length of the Japanese isles, or the distance from Beijing to the South China Sea, or the distance from Boston to Minneapolis and/or Miami. Speaking as an American, I'd be over the moon if our passenger rail was half as nice as Europe's, and we can't even use the scale of the country as an excuse.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Europe mostly speaks a different language in every country, so the actual scale of Europe isn't the whole continent (or whole EU), but a single country. Sure you can travel to other countries, but there is a language barrier (though English is common enough to get by most places). Note that GP was talking about Germany with seeming no awareness that the situation is different in Switzerland, France, England and Spain. (of the 5 countries I named there are significant differences that are unique to each - Swiss trains run ontime, French trains are fast...) God help you if you are trying to cross a border by train in Europe - it is possible, but often much harder than it should be.
  - erk__ 3y ago
    There is daily trains between all the countries you named (at least those that share a border) most of them are no different than any other border crossing with exception of the trains going to and from England as you have to go through security for that one. I don't remember ever having a bad experience crossing a border when I was on InterRail some years back.
    - Freak_NL 3y ago
      Really. Crossing borders within the Schengen-zone is trivial and goes unnoticed for most travellers. You can even cross multiple borders in your sleep on the night trains.
      - 3y ago
n4r9 3y ago
> the trains are often late, which sucks Traveling on Deutsche Bahn in the hopes of making a late Eurostar connection was nailbiting for this reason. I hear that Switzerland is strict about cancelling late trains so as not to interfere with the overall schedule, and as a consequence most DB trains from Germany don't make it past the border.
JJMcJ 3y ago
> small Europe Europe isn't microscopic. Paris to Amsterdam is about 300 miles, which is the same as Chicago to Cleveland. This is for intercity travel, and of course in the Western USA, except for the Pacific Coast, it is really not very dense.
- 62951413 3y ago
  SF to LA and SF to Crescent City are both over 350 miles and you never leave CA.
  - JJMcJ 3y ago
    On the other hand: Santa Barbara to San Diego Bay Area to Sacramento Sacramento to Bakersfield and on to LA Portland to Seattle - or paralleling I-5 through Oregon. All reasonably dense.
layer8 3y ago
Japan has it easier in terms of network topology. Compare https://keikaku-japan.com/sites/default/files/uploads/map-jr-train-network-japan-2019.jpg https://keikaku-japan.com/sites/default/files/uploads/map-jr... with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Bahnstrecken_Deutschland_Karte.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Bahnstre..., and the fact that the latter isn’t an island.
- enaaem 3y ago
  Distances on a square are shorter on average for the same area of land.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Network topology is independent of euclidian distance.
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      That doesn't make any sense. Network topology is designed in such a way as to make connecting routes as short as possible so it's 100% related to Euclidian distance. You know, we even build super expensive tunnels and stuff to make sure that the routes are as short as possible
asdff 3y ago
Do they have a similar program to TSA precheck in europe? That has really changed flying for a lot of airports in the US, to the point where it kind of is now a quick thing you can just get in/get out, only real issue being the artificial barriers airlines put on your like having to check in to the flight a certain time before boarding and having to board a certain time before doors are closed.
- harha 3y ago
  Except for Germany and the UK where trains are also quite bad, security usually doesn’t take too long. Boarding is typically 15 mins before the flight, but then again airports are usually more comfortable to navigate than train stations since you get rid of your large luggage in the first step
rchaves 3y ago
Nope, the trains are not often late, this is just in Germany
- jhoechtl 3y ago
  Is there a pattern in Germany engineering? Airport Berlin, Stuttgart 21, constantly late running trains? Is Germany over-engineered and over-regulated, what's the issue?
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    Not really. It's just heavily used and so the faults are very obvious, and we Germans are extremely quick to complain. Objectively there's not much of a difference and for almost all European countries it's complaint at a high level[1] Of course Stuttgart 21 is objectively a mess but Germany is big, there's more than just a handful of engineering projects at any given time. We brought a pretty substantial amount of LNG capacity online in just two years but that never gets any press compared to the latest airport chaos. [1]https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fcal1z0hga1j61.png%3Fwidth%3D1459%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df1d490a0d73c462078b2a91ffb1bc0f24a55c5c8 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    Trains being late is simply an overrated problem. This is not something that DB should optimize for. It would be easy to make sure every train is punctual by running one Munich-Berlin-Hamburg train a day. Trains are late because they run a demanding schedule, trying to serve every big city (this is not like France where everything is supposed to go through Paris, this is a country that unified late with many powerful regions who all want direct connections between them).
    - ivan_gammel 3y ago
      Schedule isn’t the root cause. DB has serious problems with staffing, because their workforce is going to retire soon in large numbers and finding replacement is hard. They have problems with infrastructure: it is telling that a heavy rain, moderate snowfall or burning grass can knock out a major route. Both are management problems.
cassepipe 3y ago
Aren't plane just as often late ? My hypothesis is that planes are just as often late but people complain less because : 1. They have already taken the whole day because getting to the airport, booking, security... so they don't care as much about a two hours delay. 2. They have some respect for the fact that we are allow to fly and see that as big technical challenge depending on weather and good security practices. On the other hand a train *seems* trivial when in reality it's not. Psychologically for most people it's just putting some cars on rails and it will basically drive itslef to its destination.
- dewey 3y ago
  Not if you are comparing to Deutsche Bahn. Where in the last months only 52% of long distance trains were on time: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-november-train-punctuality-worst-in-years-bild/a-67618089 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-november-train-punctuality-wor...
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    This includes 6-15 minutes lateness which would be absolutely inconsequential in air travel. We aren't comparing apples.
    - Sakos 3y ago
      You also aren't switching planes as frequently as you do trains, much less with 5-15 minutes of time to switch trains in many cases. 6-15 minutes of delay absolutely matters if it means you will likely miss connecting trains, which can easily lead to hour or hours long delays in reaching your destination.
cassepipe 3y ago
Personally my main gripe is not so much the speed as going to higher speed is probably less efficient hence more expensive. My main gripe is the price (I am poor by european standards). For example going from Paris to Napoli only by train is currently above 300 euros whereas you can find a flight for 40 euros. I am ready to pay around 100 euros for that. Recently there was sleeper car train from Paris to Milano which was affordable but the company did not last alas. I am personally ready to pay more in order to avoid a flight, I don't even care about the time it takes, I like being on trains. Sleeper cars are even better. The only thing is the price.
- egman_ekki 3y ago
  So much this. We’re so spolied by low cost airlines in Europe. I can either - go for a train trip to the 2nd largest city in Denmark (Copenhagen to Aarhus) for 230 eur (2 adults + a kid) and it takes almost 3 hours. - take a Ryanair flight to Alicante for 240 eur (2 adults + a kid), flight takes 3.5 hours The weather will be much better, the food and accommodation cheaper by a long shot (not to mention Spanish cuisine). It’s not even comparable how much more value you get when flying.
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    Is probably an unfair comparison. (And if you think that living in Alicante is cheap, you should see the boring inner smaller cities, easily reachable by train) My impression is that Air travel to touristic destinations is just too cheap, for a reason. Selling airplane sits for pennies is probably just part of a bigger business. Tourists typically will spend money on services and hotels that could be owned by a sibling company, etc... In Spain is often discussed how UK tourists can came to Spain for ridiculous prices, while we can't do the same in the opposite direction (or when flying inside the country). Tour-operators altering the market could be the reason for that "magic" IMAO. Trains are nice in any case (but nobody is armed here, so just copy the system could be more defiant in other places)
- philjohn 3y ago
  It's worse in the UK. Paris to Napoli is a long distance. London to Birmingham walk up fair can be £150.
morsch 3y ago
> I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be. Then you are riding odd routes because the ICE hits 250 all the time. Piss poor infrastructures governance notwithstanding.
harha 3y ago
In theory end to end shouldn’t make a big difference for short routes, but if you want to get somewhere reliably just don’t take Deutsche Bahn
tpm 3y ago
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.
LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
You also have Thalys in .de which is not just get in. The same goes for Eurostar. Maybe more, but I don't know about them. That aside, some could do 350kph in theory, but there are no tracks anywhere which are certified for more than 330kph in regular daily operations. With the additional constraint of limiting that to 280 kph max after several fuck ups, which I don't know about if that limit was lifted, or not. And if you think you could board the Japanese fast ones at Deutschlandticket prices? Dream on! :-) Anyways, it was fun to use one of the very first ICEs on the runway right side of the Rhine from Cologne to Bankfurt and back at 331kph, sometimes parallel to the A3 at a distance of only few 100meters, and watching the lichthupenden and warnblinkenden Nieten in Nadelstreifen trying to overtake the Normalos, while they seemingly stood still. Some sort of parallax-effect, I guess. At that times I've thought: "Wozu brauch ich noch mal 'nen scheiss Transrapid?"
- jhoechtl 3y ago
  > lichthupenden and warnblinkenden Nieten in Nadelstreifen trying to overtake the Normalos, Thank you, made my day. Austrian btw.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
    Ja das war halt so. Fette Karren, Audi, Benz oder BMW, Sakko wackelnd am Bügel auf'm Rücksitz hängend. Kannte ich bisher nur als Clichè, aber das war da so zu beobachten. Und wirklich alle immer lichthupend und drängelnd, und nicht linksblinkend, sondern warnblinkend. Aber bei 330 war das als würde man an einem Diorama vorbeifahren. Unvergesslich :-)
patmorgan23 3y ago
Europe is not small. And lots of European countries are investing/have invested heavily in their rail networks, especially compared to the United States. Spain and France have extensive high speed rail and regular rail networks. There's an EU level initiative to connect all the national rail networks and facilitate the creation of robust pan-euorpean rail services.
Nextgrid 3y ago
> Flying always comes with security hassle Unfortunately that is not the case, the security theater seems to be slowly contaminating rail too. The Barcelona->Paris connection has some bullshit security on the Barcelona side (luggage x-ray & plastic trays for laptops), and I think the Eurostar had some of this on the London side too.
- jamil7 3y ago
  I changed in Barcelona on my way to Madrid and went through this too, it seems like it's specific to Spain/Barcelona, at least for now.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  I went through that Barcelona one, and it must have been the weakest security I’ve ever seen. Dude wasn’t even looking at the xray machine screen. ICAO or whomever audits airport security would shit their pants if the Barcelona rail station had the same scrutiny.
- donalhunt 3y ago
  Eurostar has had airport-style security for long time (maybe always?). Definitely 10+ years anyway.
  - frereubu 3y ago
    This is partly to do with the fact that the UK was never part of the Schengen group of countries (i.e. countries where you can travel from one to the other without a passport), even when it was part of the EU.
- kergonath 3y ago
  I cannot say for Spain, but for the Eurostar it has been like that for quite a long time and it is related to the Schengen area border. The checks are made on boarding, so in Paris, Lille, London, Brussels, and Amsterdam before they started refurbishing the station (I am not sure about seasonal destinations but I can’t see how they could avoid checks at some point). It is not an example of increasing security theatre.
WinstonSmith84 3y ago
Not sure whether you're sarcastic or doing some PRs but trains in Germany are from my experience definitely not awesome. Flying is usually much more reliable in Germany as long as it doesn't snow (but trains are stopped too when it snows anyway). Trains in Germany are: 1- constantly delayed (ironically I already missed my flight because of that) 2- very expensive (unless you've hours to waste on regional trains) 3- slow in average (yes it can clock at 300kmh+ for 20 minutes just to get stuck behind a freight train using the same network..)
- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  4. German train can use a completely different route to destination, dropping all passengers who were going to an intermediate station somewhere early on the route (you figure out yourselves how to get home at this late hour). I was on board of ICE from Rostock to Berlin which was suddenly routed via Greifswald with arrival in Berlin delayed by 2 hours. There was some fire on the tracks between Oranienburg and Berlin.
bradley13 3y ago
German rail infrastructure is...in need of help. Here, in Switzerland, many trains come from Germany. Well, they did. They are so often late that some routes now stop at the border, so that the Swiss schedule isn't impacted by German problems. Germany is also years behind on putting cargo onto trains for transit through the Alps. Even Italy was faster.
- bigfudge 3y ago
  This is true, but I have watched with amusement as a Swiss station master paced, tutted and finally started swearing under his breath as a train from Milan got later and later. It amazed me at the time he cared so much - it seemed personal. But I guess that’s why Swiss rail is so great - that and the funding.
  - ecnahc515 3y ago
    Yeah that's a very Swiss thing. People get upset when trains are more than 1-2 minutes late. It's so reliable even a delay of < 5 minutes is important to people. Not to mention, transfers sometimes are < 5 minutes long, so a train being 1-2 minutes late means you might miss a timed transfer.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Yes, paying for things is a hassle, but it's also a great way of incentivizing companies to provide services that people actually need, and incentivizing people to use only those services that they actually need. And yes, figuring out what exactly you have to pay for on public transit is an especially big hassle, but that's a problem that's solved technologically in many countries, where you just have to swipe a card at the entry and exit.
yann63 3y ago
> A train is just: get in/get out. This is changing, at least in France. Enshittification of train travel has begun by SNCF/ouigo. I traveled last month, now (at least for some trains) you must have a ticket at your name to travel, you must register big suitcases. It is becoming less and less get in / get out, unfortunately :-(
- orwin 3y ago
  Yeah, low cost TGVs are a hassle.
Wytwwww 3y ago
> If Europe could get on Japan's level, that would be a dream. To be fair Germany could at least reach France's or Italy's level first.
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > To be fair Germany could at least reach France's or Italy's level first. I'm not sure Germany should be looking to Italy for advice on getting the trains to run on time.
  - mcv 3y ago
    Is Italy worse than Germany? That's hard to believe.
    - ithkuil 3y ago
      The service level in Italy was unbelievably bad for a time, then got much better, with occasional dramatic drops in quality. The problem is that (like in many areas) our collective subjective memory of things lags behind reality, sometimes by decades. Things get enshrined deep in culture (not only films, but day to day jokes and mechanical repetition of cultural self-flagellation). I'm living in Italy for almost 20y now, coming from Switzerland. I came here in part because I wanted the experience of a more chaotic place, coming from the extreme order in Switzerland I found confining and suffocating. Central Italy in the 2000s was a good mixture of chaos and infrastructure that worked ok in order to have a civilized life. Roads had potholes but they did exist, it's wasn't Madagascar level bad. Yet italians complained and complained and kept saying that they were backward country and looked up at Germany or the Netherlands or whatnot. Over the years everything got incrementally improved. Roundabouts got built, green grass inside roundabouts got actually cut, parking spaces started to be delimited and you no longer had to park your car in the mud alongside a road (but now you had to pay for parking in more places) ... And also trains got better! Objectively better. And more expensive. They were incredibly dirt cheap 20 years ago, now they are not too expensive but it's an entirely different ballpark. 20 years ago my average experience from Pisa to Florence was to suffocate for 50 minutes because somebody let a puddle of vomit uncleaned in the train and there was no physical space to go to escape that because the train was so packed. Now trains are much cleaner, more frequent, bigger, faster, ... Occasionally you get stuck in a tunnel for a couple of hours because something breaks but hey it only happen to me once in the last 10 years and it happened 10 times the decade before, so improvement!! Yet, locals still think nothing improved. Yesterday I had a conversation with Italians who thought they were the country with the worst infrastructure. The thing is, most people here live in an imaginary world. Even when they do travel abroad, they don't update their beliefs about that stuff. It's a bit like identity politics. They watch TV journalism shows that show how well executed (cherry picked) public systems in other countries work, and bask in self-flagellation. While the other identity group declares how Italians are the best in the world and that nothing approaches their virtues etc. these two camps (I struggle identifying them as left and right anymore) affect each other and make their position even stronger.
wongarsu 3y ago
> small Europe Europe the continent is 7% larger than the US. It's not that small. The population is just comparatively evenly spread out
vizzah 3y ago
"A train is just: get in/get out" - alas, not really. High-speed AVE trains in Spain are subject to security checks with you/your luggage going through the scanners. Fortunately, no need to take out laptops, throw water away, put liquids in a transparent bag and other nonsense.
lores 3y ago
Europe is always referred to as "small", but it's actually bigger than the US. It changes the perspective somewhat when you keep that in mind.
mathverse 3y ago
This is not true. I fly freely Vienna<->Germany and it has always been better,faster and cheaper than trains. There is absolutely 0 issue with security.
foofie 3y ago
> Trains are pretty awesome, especially in small Europe. Trains aren't really about the region's size. They are about the region's population density and the volume of travel demand between somewhat close urban centers (max 600/800km). > Flying always comes with security hassle. Nowadays trains also come with security hassles. For example, Spain's RENFE enforces security checks, complete with baggage scanning and metal detectors, to board high-speed lines. The key difference is where train stations are located vs where airports are located. Due to historical reasons, nowadays most european cities have train stations essentially in their city centers, whereas airports tend to be >50km out of the city. This means that the door-to-door travel time for any flight must include a >50km trip to the outskirts of a city for then to way out the mandatory 60 to 90 minute boarding process.
awiesenhofer 3y ago
So every time you say Europe you just mean Germany, right? Cause European trains are for the most part just fine, its only german trains that very famously suck. So no need to extrapolate here.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  And its really ICE. German S-Bahn are freaking awesome.
  - awiesenhofer 3y ago
    Agreed!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
illiac786 3y ago
> We have trains in Germany that can do 350km/h but I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be. no, they never built high speed rails in germany simply. a decision that baffles me. whereas france has been at it for 30 years for example.

by k__ 3y ago

eigenket 3y ago

In my opinion the main "low hanging fruit" Europe has with trains are international birders, especially if they're trying to compete with flying. Trains in Poland work great, trains in Germany work pretty well but every train I've taken between Poland and Germany has been delayed. The standard thing is that while you're in Poland they claim the delay is because of previous delays in Germany and while you're in Germany they blame delays from Poland. If you're trying to do something more advanced like get across Germany to Belgium or France & eventually the UK the it gets quite annoying.

pixl97 3y ago
>Germany and while you're in Germany they blame delays from Poland. Both can be true at the same time. Developing enough capacity to avoid non-blocking train systems and bunching is a difficult issue.
ddek 3y ago
German trains wishing to enter Switzerland need to wait at the border so the DB’s, err, _erratic_ scheduling doesn’t perturb the much more rigorous Swiss system. My experience of German trains is one train arriving on time, to find my connection is delayed, but actually leaving earlier because the same train 1h before was 54 minutes late and I could get that instead.
- foofie 3y ago
  > German trains wishing to enter Switzerland need to wait at the border so the DB’s, err, _erratic_ scheduling doesn’t perturb the much more rigorous Swiss system. I'm rather skeptic of this take. Railway operators provide services by reserving track sections and train stations in specific time windows which take into account travel speed and scheduling. Rail track capacity is typically reserved for periods of over a year. If german trains run on time in Germany and swiss trains run on time in Switzerland, then it sounds like germany's trains being delayed when entering swiss lines is an impedance problem caused by the way the swiss infrastructure manager is handling german trains.
  - maxwell22 3y ago
    70% of German trains that arrive at their destination are “delayed” (30 min or more). A train that never arrives is not counted as delayed. About 30% of German trains do not arrive at their destination. In Switzerland, the stats are single low percentage digits. After multiple ultimatums, Switzerland stopped allowing German trains into Switzerland. The most popular connection between Switzerland and Germany (Zurich-Munich) has been kept but is now operated by Switzerland even though most of the ride is in Germany. This is shameful and a lose-lose for all parties, but necessary.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - lolc 3y ago
      I doubt your stats, where'd you get them from? And there are multiple connections per day from Germany to central Switzerland. Take the Hamburg-Interlaken ICE for example.
enaaem 3y ago
Just built a separate international network, with its own separate system and tracks. The way Japan handles complexity is through redundancy. Japan runs both really old trains, hyper modern high speed rail and everything in between. Each system runs on separate tracks, are from different companies, and are not interconnected. This can be a lesson on how to run complex systems in general.
- DrNosferatu 3y ago
  Enaaem: It already works that way. The Iberic Peninsula has a different rail gauge from Central Europe, but - in parallel to Iberian Gauge - is building and expanding its TGV network, which is in the Central European gauge. So, a secondary network.
  - porompompero 3y ago
    Thus was seen by many as a waste when built, but really it works better than in Germany in terms of quality of experience.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Why not build parallel tracks, but with the same gauge? > This can be a lesson on how to run complex systems in general. This sounds like cargo culting. Japan has great train system, it has to be because of separate gauges!
  - throwup238 3y ago
    > Why not build parallel tracks, but with the same gauge? Jevon's paradox [1] probably. The most profitable part of the rail system will grow to crowd out and interfere with the rest. By keeping it different gauges, they all operate independent of each other's incentives. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    - The_Colonel 3y ago
ivan_gammel 3y ago
In December I could not even buy tickets online to a train from Berlin to Warsaw because DB website is terrible. Had to cancel my trip — this is really a shame, that EU cannot fix cross-border connectivity.
- bondant 3y ago
  Couldn't you book with another ticket seller? Like trainline.eu?
  - ivan_gammel 3y ago
    I tried Omio and one more, but this specific direction was not available there via train. DB website was simply showing an error at the last step. A month later, by the moment error was gone all tickets appeared sold.
    - eigenket 3y ago
      If you run into the problem again try the website of the Polish trains pkp.pl. You'll probably have to Google translate some stuff but it works well.
      - octacat 3y ago
        There is an english version. But pkp site loves to give you errors and timeouts too.
- snthd 3y ago
  You can buy from Polish Railways too. https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/berlin-to-warsaw-by-train.htm#How_to_buy_tickets https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/berlin-to-warsaw-by... The EU seemed (2021) to be working on it https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_21_6701 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
  - octacat 3y ago
donalhunt 3y ago
Did Prague to Brussels in one day (~ 12 hours) in 2010 and everything just worked. One connection in Frankfurt airport (it has a train station) and it was cheaper than flying. Will need to check how I bought the ticket but do know it was bought as a single ticket. Good thing I left early in the morning because the later trains to Germany all got stuck in heavy snow downfalls. \o/

MrDresden 3y ago

No need to get to Japans level. Just matching the Netherlands in punctuality and connections would be more than enough (using the word 'just' here does not do their rail network the justice it deserves).

com 3y ago
Argh. I moved away but am back in NL regularly and the train service has degraded beyond all recognition for me done in comparison to 2021 or so. Short trains, cancellation of 75% of scheduled services for random reasons, regular failures on key links (Amsterdam CS/Zuid-Schiphol, HSL-Zuid, Delft-Rotterdam etc etc) leading to widespread network disruptions. NS wasn’t perfect before, but it sure seems that they and their evil twin, ProRail, aren’t even trying any more.
- static_motion 3y ago
  That's interesting to read. I recently visited the Netherlands on vacation and one of the things I was most impressed by was the train service. I came away from an excellent opinion of NS, but I'd probably chalk that down to my extensive experience with Portugal's own national train service which is an absolute clown show on rails.

kibwen 3y ago

> especially in small Europe What's small about the scale of Europe in this context? Even taking the extremely conservative measurement of Madrid to Berlin, that's 1200 miles/2000 km, which is comparable to the entire length of the Japanese isles, or the distance from Beijing to the South China Sea, or the distance from Boston to Minneapolis and/or Miami. Speaking as an American, I'd be over the moon if our passenger rail was half as nice as Europe's, and we can't even use the scale of the country as an excuse.

bluGill 3y ago
Europe mostly speaks a different language in every country, so the actual scale of Europe isn't the whole continent (or whole EU), but a single country. Sure you can travel to other countries, but there is a language barrier (though English is common enough to get by most places). Note that GP was talking about Germany with seeming no awareness that the situation is different in Switzerland, France, England and Spain. (of the 5 countries I named there are significant differences that are unique to each - Swiss trains run ontime, French trains are fast...) God help you if you are trying to cross a border by train in Europe - it is possible, but often much harder than it should be.
- erk__ 3y ago
  There is daily trains between all the countries you named (at least those that share a border) most of them are no different than any other border crossing with exception of the trains going to and from England as you have to go through security for that one. I don't remember ever having a bad experience crossing a border when I was on InterRail some years back.
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    Really. Crossing borders within the Schengen-zone is trivial and goes unnoticed for most travellers. You can even cross multiple borders in your sleep on the night trains.
    - 3y ago

n4r9 3y ago

> the trains are often late, which sucks Traveling on Deutsche Bahn in the hopes of making a late Eurostar connection was nailbiting for this reason. I hear that Switzerland is strict about cancelling late trains so as not to interfere with the overall schedule, and as a consequence most DB trains from Germany don't make it past the border.

JJMcJ 3y ago

> small Europe Europe isn't microscopic. Paris to Amsterdam is about 300 miles, which is the same as Chicago to Cleveland. This is for intercity travel, and of course in the Western USA, except for the Pacific Coast, it is really not very dense.

62951413 3y ago
SF to LA and SF to Crescent City are both over 350 miles and you never leave CA.
- JJMcJ 3y ago
  On the other hand: Santa Barbara to San Diego Bay Area to Sacramento Sacramento to Bakersfield and on to LA Portland to Seattle - or paralleling I-5 through Oregon. All reasonably dense.

layer8 3y ago

Japan has it easier in terms of network topology. Compare https://keikaku-japan.com/sites/default/files/uploads/map-jr-train-network-japan-2019.jpg https://keikaku-japan.com/sites/default/files/uploads/map-jr... with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Bahnstrecken_Deutschland_Karte.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Bahnstre..., and the fact that the latter isn’t an island.

enaaem 3y ago
Distances on a square are shorter on average for the same area of land.
- layer8 3y ago
  Network topology is independent of euclidian distance.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. Network topology is designed in such a way as to make connecting routes as short as possible so it's 100% related to Euclidian distance. You know, we even build super expensive tunnels and stuff to make sure that the routes are as short as possible

asdff 3y ago

Do they have a similar program to TSA precheck in europe? That has really changed flying for a lot of airports in the US, to the point where it kind of is now a quick thing you can just get in/get out, only real issue being the artificial barriers airlines put on your like having to check in to the flight a certain time before boarding and having to board a certain time before doors are closed.

harha 3y ago
Except for Germany and the UK where trains are also quite bad, security usually doesn’t take too long. Boarding is typically 15 mins before the flight, but then again airports are usually more comfortable to navigate than train stations since you get rid of your large luggage in the first step

rchaves 3y ago

Nope, the trains are not often late, this is just in Germany

jhoechtl 3y ago
Is there a pattern in Germany engineering? Airport Berlin, Stuttgart 21, constantly late running trains? Is Germany over-engineered and over-regulated, what's the issue?
- Barrin92 3y ago
  Not really. It's just heavily used and so the faults are very obvious, and we Germans are extremely quick to complain. Objectively there's not much of a difference and for almost all European countries it's complaint at a high level[1] Of course Stuttgart 21 is objectively a mess but Germany is big, there's more than just a handful of engineering projects at any given time. We brought a pretty substantial amount of LNG capacity online in just two years but that never gets any press compared to the latest airport chaos. [1]https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fcal1z0hga1j61.png%3Fwidth%3D1459%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df1d490a0d73c462078b2a91ffb1bc0f24a55c5c8 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Trains being late is simply an overrated problem. This is not something that DB should optimize for. It would be easy to make sure every train is punctual by running one Munich-Berlin-Hamburg train a day. Trains are late because they run a demanding schedule, trying to serve every big city (this is not like France where everything is supposed to go through Paris, this is a country that unified late with many powerful regions who all want direct connections between them).
  - ivan_gammel 3y ago
    Schedule isn’t the root cause. DB has serious problems with staffing, because their workforce is going to retire soon in large numbers and finding replacement is hard. They have problems with infrastructure: it is telling that a heavy rain, moderate snowfall or burning grass can knock out a major route. Both are management problems.

cassepipe 3y ago

Aren't plane just as often late ? My hypothesis is that planes are just as often late but people complain less because : 1. They have already taken the whole day because getting to the airport, booking, security... so they don't care as much about a two hours delay. 2. They have some respect for the fact that we are allow to fly and see that as big technical challenge depending on weather and good security practices. On the other hand a train *seems* trivial when in reality it's not. Psychologically for most people it's just putting some cars on rails and it will basically drive itslef to its destination.

dewey 3y ago
Not if you are comparing to Deutsche Bahn. Where in the last months only 52% of long distance trains were on time: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-november-train-punctuality-worst-in-years-bild/a-67618089 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-november-train-punctuality-wor...
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  This includes 6-15 minutes lateness which would be absolutely inconsequential in air travel. We aren't comparing apples.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    You also aren't switching planes as frequently as you do trains, much less with 5-15 minutes of time to switch trains in many cases. 6-15 minutes of delay absolutely matters if it means you will likely miss connecting trains, which can easily lead to hour or hours long delays in reaching your destination.

cassepipe 3y ago

Personally my main gripe is not so much the speed as going to higher speed is probably less efficient hence more expensive. My main gripe is the price (I am poor by european standards). For example going from Paris to Napoli only by train is currently above 300 euros whereas you can find a flight for 40 euros. I am ready to pay around 100 euros for that. Recently there was sleeper car train from Paris to Milano which was affordable but the company did not last alas. I am personally ready to pay more in order to avoid a flight, I don't even care about the time it takes, I like being on trains. Sleeper cars are even better. The only thing is the price.

egman_ekki 3y ago
So much this. We’re so spolied by low cost airlines in Europe. I can either - go for a train trip to the 2nd largest city in Denmark (Copenhagen to Aarhus) for 230 eur (2 adults + a kid) and it takes almost 3 hours. - take a Ryanair flight to Alicante for 240 eur (2 adults + a kid), flight takes 3.5 hours The weather will be much better, the food and accommodation cheaper by a long shot (not to mention Spanish cuisine). It’s not even comparable how much more value you get when flying.
- pvaldes 3y ago
  Is probably an unfair comparison. (And if you think that living in Alicante is cheap, you should see the boring inner smaller cities, easily reachable by train) My impression is that Air travel to touristic destinations is just too cheap, for a reason. Selling airplane sits for pennies is probably just part of a bigger business. Tourists typically will spend money on services and hotels that could be owned by a sibling company, etc... In Spain is often discussed how UK tourists can came to Spain for ridiculous prices, while we can't do the same in the opposite direction (or when flying inside the country). Tour-operators altering the market could be the reason for that "magic" IMAO. Trains are nice in any case (but nobody is armed here, so just copy the system could be more defiant in other places)
philjohn 3y ago
It's worse in the UK. Paris to Napoli is a long distance. London to Birmingham walk up fair can be £150.

morsch 3y ago

> I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be. Then you are riding odd routes because the ICE hits 250 all the time. Piss poor infrastructures governance notwithstanding.

harha 3y ago

In theory end to end shouldn’t make a big difference for short routes, but if you want to get somewhere reliably just don’t take Deutsche Bahn

tpm 3y ago

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.

LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago

You also have Thalys in .de which is not just get in. The same goes for Eurostar. Maybe more, but I don't know about them. That aside, some could do 350kph in theory, but there are no tracks anywhere which are certified for more than 330kph in regular daily operations. With the additional constraint of limiting that to 280 kph max after several fuck ups, which I don't know about if that limit was lifted, or not. And if you think you could board the Japanese fast ones at Deutschlandticket prices? Dream on! :-) Anyways, it was fun to use one of the very first ICEs on the runway right side of the Rhine from Cologne to Bankfurt and back at 331kph, sometimes parallel to the A3 at a distance of only few 100meters, and watching the lichthupenden and warnblinkenden Nieten in Nadelstreifen trying to overtake the Normalos, while they seemingly stood still. Some sort of parallax-effect, I guess. At that times I've thought: "Wozu brauch ich noch mal 'nen scheiss Transrapid?"

jhoechtl 3y ago
> lichthupenden and warnblinkenden Nieten in Nadelstreifen trying to overtake the Normalos, Thank you, made my day. Austrian btw.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
  Ja das war halt so. Fette Karren, Audi, Benz oder BMW, Sakko wackelnd am Bügel auf'm Rücksitz hängend. Kannte ich bisher nur als Clichè, aber das war da so zu beobachten. Und wirklich alle immer lichthupend und drängelnd, und nicht linksblinkend, sondern warnblinkend. Aber bei 330 war das als würde man an einem Diorama vorbeifahren. Unvergesslich :-)

patmorgan23 3y ago

Europe is not small. And lots of European countries are investing/have invested heavily in their rail networks, especially compared to the United States. Spain and France have extensive high speed rail and regular rail networks. There's an EU level initiative to connect all the national rail networks and facilitate the creation of robust pan-euorpean rail services.

Nextgrid 3y ago

> Flying always comes with security hassle Unfortunately that is not the case, the security theater seems to be slowly contaminating rail too. The Barcelona->Paris connection has some bullshit security on the Barcelona side (luggage x-ray & plastic trays for laptops), and I think the Eurostar had some of this on the London side too.

jamil7 3y ago
I changed in Barcelona on my way to Madrid and went through this too, it seems like it's specific to Spain/Barcelona, at least for now.
Scoundreller 3y ago
I went through that Barcelona one, and it must have been the weakest security I’ve ever seen. Dude wasn’t even looking at the xray machine screen. ICAO or whomever audits airport security would shit their pants if the Barcelona rail station had the same scrutiny.
donalhunt 3y ago
Eurostar has had airport-style security for long time (maybe always?). Definitely 10+ years anyway.
- frereubu 3y ago
  This is partly to do with the fact that the UK was never part of the Schengen group of countries (i.e. countries where you can travel from one to the other without a passport), even when it was part of the EU.
kergonath 3y ago
I cannot say for Spain, but for the Eurostar it has been like that for quite a long time and it is related to the Schengen area border. The checks are made on boarding, so in Paris, Lille, London, Brussels, and Amsterdam before they started refurbishing the station (I am not sure about seasonal destinations but I can’t see how they could avoid checks at some point). It is not an example of increasing security theatre.

WinstonSmith84 3y ago

Not sure whether you're sarcastic or doing some PRs but trains in Germany are from my experience definitely not awesome. Flying is usually much more reliable in Germany as long as it doesn't snow (but trains are stopped too when it snows anyway). Trains in Germany are: 1- constantly delayed (ironically I already missed my flight because of that) 2- very expensive (unless you've hours to waste on regional trains) 3- slow in average (yes it can clock at 300kmh+ for 20 minutes just to get stuck behind a freight train using the same network..)

ivan_gammel 3y ago
4. German train can use a completely different route to destination, dropping all passengers who were going to an intermediate station somewhere early on the route (you figure out yourselves how to get home at this late hour). I was on board of ICE from Rostock to Berlin which was suddenly routed via Greifswald with arrival in Berlin delayed by 2 hours. There was some fire on the tracks between Oranienburg and Berlin.

bradley13 3y ago

German rail infrastructure is...in need of help. Here, in Switzerland, many trains come from Germany. Well, they did. They are so often late that some routes now stop at the border, so that the Swiss schedule isn't impacted by German problems. Germany is also years behind on putting cargo onto trains for transit through the Alps. Even Italy was faster.

bigfudge 3y ago
This is true, but I have watched with amusement as a Swiss station master paced, tutted and finally started swearing under his breath as a train from Milan got later and later. It amazed me at the time he cared so much - it seemed personal. But I guess that’s why Swiss rail is so great - that and the funding.
- ecnahc515 3y ago
  Yeah that's a very Swiss thing. People get upset when trains are more than 1-2 minutes late. It's so reliable even a delay of < 5 minutes is important to people. Not to mention, transfers sometimes are < 5 minutes long, so a train being 1-2 minutes late means you might miss a timed transfer.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Yes, paying for things is a hassle, but it's also a great way of incentivizing companies to provide services that people actually need, and incentivizing people to use only those services that they actually need. And yes, figuring out what exactly you have to pay for on public transit is an especially big hassle, but that's a problem that's solved technologically in many countries, where you just have to swipe a card at the entry and exit.

yann63 3y ago

> A train is just: get in/get out. This is changing, at least in France. Enshittification of train travel has begun by SNCF/ouigo. I traveled last month, now (at least for some trains) you must have a ticket at your name to travel, you must register big suitcases. It is becoming less and less get in / get out, unfortunately :-(

orwin 3y ago
Yeah, low cost TGVs are a hassle.

Wytwwww 3y ago

> If Europe could get on Japan's level, that would be a dream. To be fair Germany could at least reach France's or Italy's level first.

chimeracoder 3y ago
> To be fair Germany could at least reach France's or Italy's level first. I'm not sure Germany should be looking to Italy for advice on getting the trains to run on time.
- mcv 3y ago
  Is Italy worse than Germany? That's hard to believe.
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    The service level in Italy was unbelievably bad for a time, then got much better, with occasional dramatic drops in quality. The problem is that (like in many areas) our collective subjective memory of things lags behind reality, sometimes by decades. Things get enshrined deep in culture (not only films, but day to day jokes and mechanical repetition of cultural self-flagellation). I'm living in Italy for almost 20y now, coming from Switzerland. I came here in part because I wanted the experience of a more chaotic place, coming from the extreme order in Switzerland I found confining and suffocating. Central Italy in the 2000s was a good mixture of chaos and infrastructure that worked ok in order to have a civilized life. Roads had potholes but they did exist, it's wasn't Madagascar level bad. Yet italians complained and complained and kept saying that they were backward country and looked up at Germany or the Netherlands or whatnot. Over the years everything got incrementally improved. Roundabouts got built, green grass inside roundabouts got actually cut, parking spaces started to be delimited and you no longer had to park your car in the mud alongside a road (but now you had to pay for parking in more places) ... And also trains got better! Objectively better. And more expensive. They were incredibly dirt cheap 20 years ago, now they are not too expensive but it's an entirely different ballpark. 20 years ago my average experience from Pisa to Florence was to suffocate for 50 minutes because somebody let a puddle of vomit uncleaned in the train and there was no physical space to go to escape that because the train was so packed. Now trains are much cleaner, more frequent, bigger, faster, ... Occasionally you get stuck in a tunnel for a couple of hours because something breaks but hey it only happen to me once in the last 10 years and it happened 10 times the decade before, so improvement!! Yet, locals still think nothing improved. Yesterday I had a conversation with Italians who thought they were the country with the worst infrastructure. The thing is, most people here live in an imaginary world. Even when they do travel abroad, they don't update their beliefs about that stuff. It's a bit like identity politics. They watch TV journalism shows that show how well executed (cherry picked) public systems in other countries work, and bask in self-flagellation. While the other identity group declares how Italians are the best in the world and that nothing approaches their virtues etc. these two camps (I struggle identifying them as left and right anymore) affect each other and make their position even stronger.

wongarsu 3y ago

> small Europe Europe the continent is 7% larger than the US. It's not that small. The population is just comparatively evenly spread out

vizzah 3y ago

"A train is just: get in/get out" - alas, not really. High-speed AVE trains in Spain are subject to security checks with you/your luggage going through the scanners. Fortunately, no need to take out laptops, throw water away, put liquids in a transparent bag and other nonsense.

lores 3y ago

Europe is always referred to as "small", but it's actually bigger than the US. It changes the perspective somewhat when you keep that in mind.

mathverse 3y ago

This is not true. I fly freely Vienna<->Germany and it has always been better,faster and cheaper than trains. There is absolutely 0 issue with security.

foofie 3y ago

> Trains are pretty awesome, especially in small Europe. Trains aren't really about the region's size. They are about the region's population density and the volume of travel demand between somewhat close urban centers (max 600/800km). > Flying always comes with security hassle. Nowadays trains also come with security hassles. For example, Spain's RENFE enforces security checks, complete with baggage scanning and metal detectors, to board high-speed lines. The key difference is where train stations are located vs where airports are located. Due to historical reasons, nowadays most european cities have train stations essentially in their city centers, whereas airports tend to be >50km out of the city. This means that the door-to-door travel time for any flight must include a >50km trip to the outskirts of a city for then to way out the mandatory 60 to 90 minute boarding process.

awiesenhofer 3y ago

So every time you say Europe you just mean Germany, right? Cause European trains are for the most part just fine, its only german trains that very famously suck. So no need to extrapolate here.

panick21_ 3y ago
And its really ICE. German S-Bahn are freaking awesome.
- awiesenhofer 3y ago
  Agreed!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

illiac786 3y ago

> We have trains in Germany that can do 350km/h but I've yet to ride one that goes faster than 200, probably because the rails aren't what they're used to be. no, they never built high speed rails in germany simply. a decision that baffles me. whereas france has been at it for 30 years for example.