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I live in Europe and I also ask "why can't we have that". High speed rail >240km/h is still very uncommon[0], especially cross border (tho notable exceptions e

I live in Europe and I also ask "why can't we have that". High speed rail >240km/h is still very uncommon[0], especially cross border (tho notable exceptions exist, e.g. Paris-Milan with both TGV and Frecciarossa just reopened). There are EU plans for a wider network but it's progressing very slowly. The presence of fast trains between two cities, on the scale of <600km, is transformative, as it becomes more convenient to take a train than to fly, while also having less negative externalities. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe

mytailorisrich 2y ago
As distance grows cost really becomes prohibitive and flying also becomes faster.
- 7bit 2y ago
  Not really. Flying is fast, but when you measure door to door, in distances of under 1000k, a high speed rail network would not be slower.
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    Hence "as distance grows"...
    - gmueckl 2y ago
      But a 1000km radius around any major center in Europe covers a lot of potential destinations. I assume that a lot of people, especially in the US underestimate the density of Europe.
      - mytailorisrich 2y ago
        1000km is a stretch to set the threshold at which trains win on time. It is also costly, not least when you hit a mountain range... at some point you need to balance billions of euros vs saving an hour (or even less).
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Is that always true? In France HSR stations are often like airports, way out of town and you have to get a taxi in/out of wherever you're going. And the rail network seems more exposed to mechanical breakdown in general. I don't have hard data but it feels to me like trains fail or get cancelled much more often than flights do, and when a flight does get cancelled it's usually due to some major failure that'd take out trains too (e.g. power failure).
- d--b 2y ago
  It's an investment though. Every part of France that's next to the high-speed train really blossomed.
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    In France pretty much anywhere near a high-speed train station becomes within convenient reach of Paris and so attracts a boom in second homes and hybrid/remote workers.
- enaaem 2y ago
  Different optimal solutions for different scenarios.
- riffraff 2y ago
  sure, that's why I mentioned "<600km", which is a distance covering many connections in Europe. E.g. Paris-Milan, Amsterdam-Berlin, Budapest-Vienna, London-Brussels, Geneve-Genoa etc These would be * many hours by car * <3 hours by fast train * <1 hour in flight by plane The flight time is offset by security controls and getting to/from the airport, so a fast train is a good alternative (not perfect, just good).
  - herbst 2y ago
    There is also always the comfort factor. Increasing travel time by 25% or even more can be a non issue if I have high speed internet and proper food and drink service available.
the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
> I live in Europe and I also ask "why can't we have that". Which country are you in? Because the answer for "we" greatly depends on local environments and politics. For Austria the answer for instance is "the alps" and urban sprawl. Trains stop everywhere and people want to keep this, there is just not enough distance to have high speed rails be effective and there is not enough space for dedicated lines. The answer is a very different one than for instance why Germany has so little.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  That's a good point. The two endpoint of the main Danish railway line are both airports. Flight time between the two is around 30 minutes, maybe a little less, price, as little as €25. Take the train between the two, travel time is 6 hours, and it costs €70, if you're lucky you can buy something overpriced to eat, but don't count on it, so pack a lunch and drinks. So why would you ever take the train? The problem is that Denmark is shaped like a big L and there's no way to connect the ends without building an insanely long bridge.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  >For Austria the answer for instance is "the alps" and urban sprawl. There are no Alps between Vienna and Graz, the second largest city yet it takes 2.5 hours to get to Vienna from Graz, while the same ~200km journey is faster by car on the highway and that's accounting for traffic and you sticking to the 100-130kmph highway speed limit which plenty of drivers do not to shorten their journey. My ex-CEO would floor it to get home much quicker than the train and have his secretary pay the speed-cam fines on his company's dime. When you monitor the trains' speed on the internal screens, you can see the average speed on the straights is somewhere around 100kmph, slower than cars on the adjacent highway. What's the excuse there for such slow ass trains? And Austrian train tickets aren't cheap either.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Not an Austrian, but your talking about "excuses for such slow ass trains" seems to be missing the fact that the Austrians are building two large rail tunnels: The Semmering base tunnel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel which will shorten travel between Vienna and Graz, and the Koralmbahn tunnel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel Also, no Alps between Vienna and Graz? Have you looked out of the window? If you haven't, here is the map. The heights of the peaks are in meters, so 3x for feet: https://mapy.cz/s/bokococuza https://mapy.cz/s/bokococuza That is a bona fide mountainous terrain.
relistan 2y ago
In live in Ireland where there is hardly any rail, despite once having the densest network in Europe. Would love to see further state investment here as well. Ireland is small enough that it should be possible to be in Dublin from either Cork, Galway, or Limerick in an hour.
- pm215 2y ago
  Mmm, when I took a train based holiday in Ireland a few years back the rail map did strike me as rather withered. You wouldn't really want to try to go from Ballina to Sligo by train these days, although you technically could...
- rsynnott 2y ago
  There’s a plan to build a Cork-Dublin-Belfast high speed (300km/h standard) line, but it seems unlikely to happen. There’s a more feasible-looking plan to upgrade Dublin-Cork to 200km/h (high-ish speed?) via improvements to the existing line (which currently caps out at, at best, 160km/h or so, but much worse in many parts); that seems likely to happen now. This would bring it from 2h30m to maybe 1hr30, which would be a big improvement. There’s an argument that Ireland just isn’t physically big enough for ‘true’ (TGV/ICE-type) high speed, though I’m not totally convinced by it; with a 300km/h line it’d be less than an hour journey, making commuting borderline feasible.
- igleria 2y ago
  As someone looking to move to notDublinButClose, I hope you get that wish!
mrweasel 2y ago
Exactly, high speed rail is a nice option, but it's not really widely available. I needed to go to Warsaw, 1200km away, I wanted to go by train, but I don't have that kinda time. It's either 17 hours, half of which is going to be in a bus anyway. An alternative route had me take a ferry, extending the travel time to almost two days. Taking a plane was cheaper and took three hours and given that airport security, at least in one direction is basically non-existing you just show up 20 minutes before your plane leaves.
d--b 2y ago
France truly has awesome trains though. Main criticism is that it lacks routes that don't go through Paris (like Lyon-Bordeaux, or Marseille-Bordeaux). But I live close to Marseille and it takes me 7 hours to go see my father who lives in Cherbourg (with a 1-hour connection in Paris, and one of the train being local). Coompared to 1200km of driving and zero planes. And boy, don't get me started on the Eurostar. It's expensive sure, but 2 hours-ish to go from London to Paris is ludicrous.
- fgeiger 2y ago
  The centralization of train infrastructure in France is especially annoying for someone arriving from the North or East trying to travel towards the South. That Paris does not have a proper rail connection between its various high speed terminals baffles me.
smcl 2y ago
We don't have a network quite like the Shinkansen or the Chinese one, but you've linked an enormous article with dozens of high-speed lines and suggested that it's "very uncommon" for speeds beyond 240km/h (which seems pretty arbitrary speed). That's pretty misleading IMO, and anyone who would scan through it or who took a glance at https://openrailwaymap.org https://openrailwaymap.org with the "Max Speeds" style will see a lot of the major metros in the biggest countries are connected with high-speed rail. Rail is undoubtedly vital for the future and we should always be pushing for more, but I think it's ok to step back and appreciate that high-speed rail (and rail in general) in the EU is so much further ahead than the USA, even if it does still lag behind Japan and China.
plugger 2y ago
I took the TGV from Munich to Dijon with a train change in Strasbourg in December and we hit 315km/h on the Strasbourg to Dijon leg of the trip.
rlpb 2y ago
> The presence of fast trains between two cities, on the scale of <600km, is transformative, as it becomes more convenient to take a train than to fly I haven't found this to be true for London to Brussels. Eurostar terminals seem to operate like airports and require check-in two hours in advance, with airport style security. So I don't save time, and for me, my regional airport is much easier to reach than the Eurostar terminal. I can believe it works better for "normal" train travel within the Schengen area, but I wonder: what are the security requirements then, if any?
- fgeiger 2y ago
  There are next to no security checks on stations that I regularly use throughout Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria. I believe that French stations have a turnstile at the platform for TGV trains. Other than that, I know security checks only from Eurostar terminals at the Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris stations.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > but I wonder: what are the security requirements then, if any? None, mostly. You just get on the train.

mytailorisrich 2y ago

As distance grows cost really becomes prohibitive and flying also becomes faster.

7bit 2y ago
Not really. Flying is fast, but when you measure door to door, in distances of under 1000k, a high speed rail network would not be slower.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Hence "as distance grows"...
  - gmueckl 2y ago
    But a 1000km radius around any major center in Europe covers a lot of potential destinations. I assume that a lot of people, especially in the US underestimate the density of Europe.
    - mytailorisrich 2y ago
      1000km is a stretch to set the threshold at which trains win on time. It is also costly, not least when you hit a mountain range... at some point you need to balance billions of euros vs saving an hour (or even less).
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Is that always true? In France HSR stations are often like airports, way out of town and you have to get a taxi in/out of wherever you're going. And the rail network seems more exposed to mechanical breakdown in general. I don't have hard data but it feels to me like trains fail or get cancelled much more often than flights do, and when a flight does get cancelled it's usually due to some major failure that'd take out trains too (e.g. power failure).
d--b 2y ago
It's an investment though. Every part of France that's next to the high-speed train really blossomed.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  In France pretty much anywhere near a high-speed train station becomes within convenient reach of Paris and so attracts a boom in second homes and hybrid/remote workers.
enaaem 2y ago
Different optimal solutions for different scenarios.
riffraff 2y ago
sure, that's why I mentioned "<600km", which is a distance covering many connections in Europe. E.g. Paris-Milan, Amsterdam-Berlin, Budapest-Vienna, London-Brussels, Geneve-Genoa etc These would be * many hours by car * <3 hours by fast train * <1 hour in flight by plane The flight time is offset by security controls and getting to/from the airport, so a fast train is a good alternative (not perfect, just good).
- herbst 2y ago
  There is also always the comfort factor. Increasing travel time by 25% or even more can be a non issue if I have high speed internet and proper food and drink service available.

the_mitsuhiko 2y ago

> I live in Europe and I also ask "why can't we have that". Which country are you in? Because the answer for "we" greatly depends on local environments and politics. For Austria the answer for instance is "the alps" and urban sprawl. Trains stop everywhere and people want to keep this, there is just not enough distance to have high speed rails be effective and there is not enough space for dedicated lines. The answer is a very different one than for instance why Germany has so little.

mrweasel 2y ago
That's a good point. The two endpoint of the main Danish railway line are both airports. Flight time between the two is around 30 minutes, maybe a little less, price, as little as €25. Take the train between the two, travel time is 6 hours, and it costs €70, if you're lucky you can buy something overpriced to eat, but don't count on it, so pack a lunch and drinks. So why would you ever take the train? The problem is that Denmark is shaped like a big L and there's no way to connect the ends without building an insanely long bridge.
FirmwareBurner 2y ago
>For Austria the answer for instance is "the alps" and urban sprawl. There are no Alps between Vienna and Graz, the second largest city yet it takes 2.5 hours to get to Vienna from Graz, while the same ~200km journey is faster by car on the highway and that's accounting for traffic and you sticking to the 100-130kmph highway speed limit which plenty of drivers do not to shorten their journey. My ex-CEO would floor it to get home much quicker than the train and have his secretary pay the speed-cam fines on his company's dime. When you monitor the trains' speed on the internal screens, you can see the average speed on the straights is somewhere around 100kmph, slower than cars on the adjacent highway. What's the excuse there for such slow ass trains? And Austrian train tickets aren't cheap either.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Not an Austrian, but your talking about "excuses for such slow ass trains" seems to be missing the fact that the Austrians are building two large rail tunnels: The Semmering base tunnel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel which will shorten travel between Vienna and Graz, and the Koralmbahn tunnel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel Also, no Alps between Vienna and Graz? Have you looked out of the window? If you haven't, here is the map. The heights of the peaks are in meters, so 3x for feet: https://mapy.cz/s/bokococuza https://mapy.cz/s/bokococuza That is a bona fide mountainous terrain.

relistan 2y ago

In live in Ireland where there is hardly any rail, despite once having the densest network in Europe. Would love to see further state investment here as well. Ireland is small enough that it should be possible to be in Dublin from either Cork, Galway, or Limerick in an hour.

pm215 2y ago
Mmm, when I took a train based holiday in Ireland a few years back the rail map did strike me as rather withered. You wouldn't really want to try to go from Ballina to Sligo by train these days, although you technically could...
rsynnott 2y ago
There’s a plan to build a Cork-Dublin-Belfast high speed (300km/h standard) line, but it seems unlikely to happen. There’s a more feasible-looking plan to upgrade Dublin-Cork to 200km/h (high-ish speed?) via improvements to the existing line (which currently caps out at, at best, 160km/h or so, but much worse in many parts); that seems likely to happen now. This would bring it from 2h30m to maybe 1hr30, which would be a big improvement. There’s an argument that Ireland just isn’t physically big enough for ‘true’ (TGV/ICE-type) high speed, though I’m not totally convinced by it; with a 300km/h line it’d be less than an hour journey, making commuting borderline feasible.
igleria 2y ago
As someone looking to move to notDublinButClose, I hope you get that wish!

mrweasel 2y ago

Exactly, high speed rail is a nice option, but it's not really widely available. I needed to go to Warsaw, 1200km away, I wanted to go by train, but I don't have that kinda time. It's either 17 hours, half of which is going to be in a bus anyway. An alternative route had me take a ferry, extending the travel time to almost two days. Taking a plane was cheaper and took three hours and given that airport security, at least in one direction is basically non-existing you just show up 20 minutes before your plane leaves.

d--b 2y ago

France truly has awesome trains though. Main criticism is that it lacks routes that don't go through Paris (like Lyon-Bordeaux, or Marseille-Bordeaux). But I live close to Marseille and it takes me 7 hours to go see my father who lives in Cherbourg (with a 1-hour connection in Paris, and one of the train being local). Coompared to 1200km of driving and zero planes. And boy, don't get me started on the Eurostar. It's expensive sure, but 2 hours-ish to go from London to Paris is ludicrous.

fgeiger 2y ago
The centralization of train infrastructure in France is especially annoying for someone arriving from the North or East trying to travel towards the South. That Paris does not have a proper rail connection between its various high speed terminals baffles me.

smcl 2y ago

We don't have a network quite like the Shinkansen or the Chinese one, but you've linked an enormous article with dozens of high-speed lines and suggested that it's "very uncommon" for speeds beyond 240km/h (which seems pretty arbitrary speed). That's pretty misleading IMO, and anyone who would scan through it or who took a glance at https://openrailwaymap.org https://openrailwaymap.org with the "Max Speeds" style will see a lot of the major metros in the biggest countries are connected with high-speed rail. Rail is undoubtedly vital for the future and we should always be pushing for more, but I think it's ok to step back and appreciate that high-speed rail (and rail in general) in the EU is so much further ahead than the USA, even if it does still lag behind Japan and China.

plugger 2y ago

I took the TGV from Munich to Dijon with a train change in Strasbourg in December and we hit 315km/h on the Strasbourg to Dijon leg of the trip.

rlpb 2y ago

> The presence of fast trains between two cities, on the scale of <600km, is transformative, as it becomes more convenient to take a train than to fly I haven't found this to be true for London to Brussels. Eurostar terminals seem to operate like airports and require check-in two hours in advance, with airport style security. So I don't save time, and for me, my regional airport is much easier to reach than the Eurostar terminal. I can believe it works better for "normal" train travel within the Schengen area, but I wonder: what are the security requirements then, if any?

fgeiger 2y ago
There are next to no security checks on stations that I regularly use throughout Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria. I believe that French stations have a turnstile at the platform for TGV trains. Other than that, I know security checks only from Eurostar terminals at the Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris stations.
rsynnott 2y ago
> but I wonder: what are the security requirements then, if any? None, mostly. You just get on the train.