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Comment by kefabean | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that many tourists will still arrive and depart by air.

Whilst there are some new cross continent routes coming online, overnight rail routes have been in decline since the 1990s.

It takes quite a bit of persistence to make this work especially if travelling with a young family. For example travelling from London to Rome (although surprisingly can be done in a day) takes 16 hrs and involves 3 changes including slogging across Paris.

https://www.seat61.com is a good resource for planning trips involving European train travel.

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For trips of that distance train will never make sense, flying is too much faster. Trains work great for shorter trips and Europe would be served well to focus on those trips. (In particular Europe has a problem with trips that should be in train range but because they cross a border they don't work well)

There is one exception, trains as a land cruise can go that far, but riding the train is the point, not where you are going.

Replacing only the short flights ( let's say those under 600 mile/1000km) won't sufficiently reduce pollution though.

It is very significant if you reduce car travel. Flights are not much pollution overall.

“ For trips of that distance train will never make sense, flying is too much faster."

I think you are making a common mistake of being too focused on speed - what really matters in convenience. I would like to go London -> Prague but there are like 4 changes. That’s too complicated.

If I could rent a coupe with friends and play poker, that’s a different experience than jumping between trains and platforms for an entire day with heavy bags.

There are advantages to trains - you can bring large and heavy luggage, lithium ion batteries, food service, etc.

At longer distances speed matters. Sure you can take a 'land cruise' vacation, which is fun in itself. However many vacations are to something and the journey is just a means to that end. You only live so long, travel time is wasted.

From my own experience, trains only make sense if you're traveling less than around 1000 km. Beyond that, it's a long, boring journey, and often more expensive than a plane to the same destination.

It also depends if train travels 100 km/h or 300 km/h on average. With high-quality high speed network across Europe demand for air travel could be greatly reduced. Europe is small.

On cost -it is internationally agreed that aircraft fuel is tax free, but train fuel is not. We subsidise air travel.

Now I don’t mind sitting on my butt for 3x longer than on a plane, but I don’t want to pay 3x for the privilege.

This will be the case until trains are cheaper than airfare. AMS to FCO is around $100 by air. The train from Frankfurt to Basel alone is that price and about a quarter of the journey.

I would LOVE to take a train but even IF it would cost the same I would still buy an airplane ticket because for the router I usually take I only have to fly for less than 2h instead of 14h-21h for the train route.

And taking the train for that does THINGS to your body. It would have to be way cheaper to convince me.

Like the airplane ticket costs usually 70-120€

> The train from Frankfurt to Basel alone is that price

No? Maybe if you’re trying to book tomorrow, or at a very specific time, but looking on RailEurope for an arbitrary date (September 1), I see plenty of tickets for under $50.

On the other hand, trying to go the whole way from Amsterdam to Rome does get a lot more impractical, because of all the transfers making the trip take around 24 hours, but you can get tickets for only around $150. I do agree that if you live in Amsterdam, it’s probably worth it to just fly to Rome because of a lack of good direct routes.

Other routes that are about the same distance are a lot more feasible though. Paris to Rome can be done with only one stop, for example.

Trains should be show up and go. Always plenty of roomroom for whoever wants to get on always one low price.

The ecconomics of trains are not like airplanes, airplanes need to be full, trains do not

Paris to Rome can be done with only one stop, for example

Utrecht->Milano (transfer in Zurich) can also be done with one stop, and Amsterdam<->Utrecht are only 30 minutes apart and have at least 6 trains per hour. Quite a lot of international trains in NL terminate at Utrecht rather than Amsterdam, I'd imagine because of rail congestion on the leg to Amsterdam. Only Amsterdam<->Berlin and Amsterdam<->Paris are direct links from the capital FAFAIK.

It's not a problem that tourists arrive and depart by air as it still is very helpful if they can move within Italy by train.

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