4 ms·

> You’re close to places like Switzerland, Austria, and Italy, which makes it easy to travel. One thing I really like about living in southwestern Germany is t

by lqet 1y ago

> You’re close to places like Switzerland, Austria, and Italy, which makes it easy to travel. One thing I really like about living in southwestern Germany is that I can hop onto a train at my local station at around 6am, and - after changing trains 1 time - get out in Milano Centrale at around 11am (until quite recently, there was even a direct train). From Milano Centrale, it's 2 hours to Venice or the Italian Riviera. Paris is a 3 hour TGV trip from here. London is 5 hours, plus 1 hour transfer and checking into the Eurostar train at Paris Gare du Nord. Milan, Paris, and London are all quicker to reach by train from here than Berlin.

est31 1y ago
It's hard to overstate how much southern Germany, Switzerland, France, and northern Italy are profiting from the new alpine tunnels being bored: Basis Brenner tunnel, Lyon-Turin tunnel, and the Gotthard base tunnel. Last one already opened 10 years ago, but it's still pretty recent when it comes to infrastructure projects of that size. As for inner-German train transport being slow... it's thanks to a bunch of reasons, like a) Germany having been divided in two until 30 years ago, so railways to Berlin have not been the top priority. in fact, one didn't really want to give russians, whose army mainly used railway to transport, the infrastructure to invade west Germany. b) the German car industry is running the country and ofc they want people to drive and not use DB, so investments went/are going into the Autobahnen instead of the railways. c) Germany both being multi-centered and shaped like a square. France has the Paris star, UK has London, and Italy is multi centered but it has this elongated shape, so south of the Po valley the high speed railroads (roughly) follow the coastlines.
- neuronic 1y ago
  Don't forget that German highspeed rail (ICE) is not running on a separate network of tracks like Shinkansen in Japan. This and your point (c) make it very hard to manage in comparison.
  - ta12653421 1y ago
    LOL its even worse, people from outside dont know: all trains in DE are also sharing same track capacity with commodity trains. there is a part of the track above Frankfurt, which has only two(!) tracks, but this cross is passed by 80% of the cargo transport between south and north :-D (plus regular passenger transport on top!) ("German engineering applied" ;-)
pjmlp 1y ago
You get the same feeling from here I am located, easy weekend trips between France, Belgium and Netherlands to chose from, a couple of hours away. Now if the getting all the train connections wasn't like going to the casino playing roulette.

by lqet 1y ago

est31 1y ago

It's hard to overstate how much southern Germany, Switzerland, France, and northern Italy are profiting from the new alpine tunnels being bored: Basis Brenner tunnel, Lyon-Turin tunnel, and the Gotthard base tunnel. Last one already opened 10 years ago, but it's still pretty recent when it comes to infrastructure projects of that size. As for inner-German train transport being slow... it's thanks to a bunch of reasons, like a) Germany having been divided in two until 30 years ago, so railways to Berlin have not been the top priority. in fact, one didn't really want to give russians, whose army mainly used railway to transport, the infrastructure to invade west Germany. b) the German car industry is running the country and ofc they want people to drive and not use DB, so investments went/are going into the Autobahnen instead of the railways. c) Germany both being multi-centered and shaped like a square. France has the Paris star, UK has London, and Italy is multi centered but it has this elongated shape, so south of the Po valley the high speed railroads (roughly) follow the coastlines.

neuronic 1y ago
Don't forget that German highspeed rail (ICE) is not running on a separate network of tracks like Shinkansen in Japan. This and your point (c) make it very hard to manage in comparison.
- ta12653421 1y ago
  LOL its even worse, people from outside dont know: all trains in DE are also sharing same track capacity with commodity trains. there is a part of the track above Frankfurt, which has only two(!) tracks, but this cross is passed by 80% of the cargo transport between south and north :-D (plus regular passenger transport on top!) ("German engineering applied" ;-)

pjmlp 1y ago

You get the same feeling from here I am located, easy weekend trips between France, Belgium and Netherlands to chose from, a couple of hours away. Now if the getting all the train connections wasn't like going to the casino playing roulette.