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Comment by ramboldio | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to see how disconnected the national railway systems are in eastern europe. Basically, 5h always fills the national borders but no further in Hungary, Romania, Poland etc

E.g., train connections from Czech Republic to southern Germany are missing all together.

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> train connections from Czech Republic to southern Germany are missing all together.

This is a huge problem IMHO. You always have to use the route via Dresden/Prague - it was different in the past - Would be really great if there would be some Eurocity Nürnberg-Pilsen or Munich-Budweis.

While I agree that rail infrastructure should be improved significantly in Eastern Europe, if you look a bit closer you'll see that there are many other countries where the 5 hrs don't take you much outside of national borders, e.g. Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, most of Scandinavia etc.

It's also important to note that Ukraine and Moldova run on a different gauge, so the border crossing takes some time.

The U.K. has nonsense passport and security checks which mean trains only go from london and adds a 60-90 minute connection. Without those you could easily route Manchester, Bristol, Leeds, Birmingham etc via Stratford and the tunnel and into much of north west europe in 5 hours.

The Czech borders are fairly mountainous. If you start in Prague, there's a tentacle that just barely reaches Regensburg in Germany. It crosses the border in the gap between two mountain ranges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham-Furth_Depression

Building other routes would likely be possible, but only with a lot of tunneling.

The Czech-Polish border is similar, I think.

We all have neglected the networks while claiming to have “the biggest rail network”. Well, now it’s the slowest, and probably the most underfunded. The missing connection to South Germany don’t make sense though. Just take a train to Berlin and take DB anywhere.

> The missing connection to South Germany don’t make sense though. Just take a train to Berlin and take OBB anywhere.

It's the difference between 6-8h and 2-3h to reach a city in Czech Republic. However the tracks connecting Germany/Czech Republic in the south are not in good shape if I remember that correctly.

Sure, but the problem is on the Czech part. Once you're in Germany, it's pretty fast.

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