@albertcardona So true! And even within the UK it's so expensive to travel from place to place that people are no doubt using cars or planes instead. Have a look at the cost of a return ticket from Bristol to London for example.

@albertcardona
🤞 my student's journey next month to Rotterdam is smooth

@albertcardona So true! And on top of that, it's often super hard to figure out where/how to buy the relevant tickets. You don't want to know how much time I spent on that. I actually wrote a blog with tips about this: https://mariekevanvugt.blogspot.com/2023/08/how-to-travel-by-train-in-europe.html

@albertcardona
We tried to go by train (and ferry, of course) from the Netherlands to El Jadida in Morocco. It proved impossible. The total cost of trains, busses, taxis, and necessary overnight hotel stays could have bought us a flight ticket around the world. Aside from that, trying to find out what might be possible and to make all the bookings was a full-time job for days. We failed.

@albertcardona TRAINS!!!

@albertcardona I think two easy things that could help:
- Make it as easy to buy train tickets as it is to buy plane tickets
- stop subsidizing air travel and externalising costs: that means global CO2 taxes.

The result of the second point will be, that travelling will be much more expensive , so people should stop whining about the high cost of going on vacations.

@albertcardona lets be real, all short haul flights should be banned

@albertcardona The unsaid part of this is that the cheap airlines are private (and hence efficient), while most train companies are either public or semi-public, and hence both expensive and inefficient. If you take a look at Polish train prices, which aren't that bad compared to other places, going by car instead becomes more affordable at 3 to 4 people, assuming normal tickets. This makes no sense, there's no way a car is more efficient than a train.

@albertcardona I know this all too well. My wife and I just went from London to Florence on the trains.

it cost an absolute fortune (compounded by the necessity to stay overnight in Zurich.. not a cheap city !) but overall it was a much more pleasant experience.

#trains #EuroRail #Interrail

@albertcardona are you following @jon on his investigative trans-border train journeys as he details the huge gap between European politicians rhetoric about trains and the facts on the ground?

@albertcardona the speed also heavily depends on the country. Romania has terrible rail infrastructure and the average train speed is 17 km/h 💀

There are places I wanna go by train to but when my options are 4 hours by car or 8 hours by train (and the train only leaves at 3 AM)...

@albertcardona Yeah, I've been trying to improve my train usage but it's difficult. It's partly that it means slightly longer trips and rail does often take an extra day of padding if you're going a fair chunk across the continent, but also for me going between e.g. Austria and the UK just isn't very affordable. From Vienna I managed to do a recent conference in Konstanz by rail, but I ended up having to opt for planes for trips to Varna and Ravenna both of which should be in rail range really.

@albertcardona Given that taking off uses so much of the energy, there should be minimum flight distances to justify it.

@albertcardona From what I've read, the problem is that European railway systems were basically independently developed by a bunch of countries without consideration for each other. So you have incompatible track width, incompatible electrification, incompatible signaling, etc.
It *could* be fixed but very slowly because most countries simply don't have the money to overhaul the entire rail system.

@albertcardona I have a positive exception to this.

I recently booked a trip from Rotterdam to Berlin with https://www.europeansleeper.eu/

Direct night train from Rotterdam on Monday evening arriving the next morning and a direct one back on Tuesday evening.

I have yet to take the train but booking it was done in 15 minutes and it was only 69 euros one way. 🥳

@albertcardona and just all of a sudden, ICE to Basel will be discontinued by DB... that was the perfect sleeptrain to Italy...

@albertcardona You are correct. To a large extent this is a question of ticketing: we need an effective system so that if train A is late, then the train company reschedules ticket for train B, as airlines do.

@albertcardona it costs me less to fly London–Innsbruck than to train London–Glasgow. It's a disgrace.

@albertcardona We (2 adults and 3 kids) are French from #Britanny but live in #Oslo Norway. This summer, for the first time, we will travel by train only. This involves day trains, a sleeper train, and several nights at hotels.

But yes, all you write: expensive, little guarantee at connections, no unified ticketing...

@albertcardona I would love to travel by high-speed rails but at the moment the trips take very long and require multiple connections which have a high likelihood of not working out so the whole process is quite painful for most destinations.

@albertcardona
How does the #EuropeanUnion not have a national train system?

@albertcardona 100% agree. We need a concerted, coordinated effort to streamline long distance train travel in Europe and cost in carbon for both trains and flights so prices are fully reflective of the real cost.

@albertcardona Another thing I realised, when considering travelling from Switzerland to London by train last summer, is that if you have a lot to carry (e.g. with small kids, which means also extra luggage,) it’s not very nice having to switch trains a lot.

@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz the situation is even worse in Australia to the point it's almost comical, there has been such a push to get high speed rail covering what is the 5th busiest air corridor in the world, none of which have gone anywhere

@albertcardona That's where you can take the train at all! I live in Lisbon and for years there have been no more trains to Spain. Flying to Madrid or Barcelona is absurd. But all local politicos argue over is new airports and airline subsidies.

@albertcardona currently traveling from Nantes, France towards Norway. I love my trip, I'm having a lot of fun, but it could have been waaaay easier.
First (and biggest) issue is France not having external night train connection.

@albertcardona On distance over 200 km the cheapest and most convenient way to travel is to travel with car.

@albertcardona yes, I agree. Moreover, in Italy train system became terrible, not only for delays, but also for interconnections and obviously prices. The high speed trains are only a small part of the possible routes and on the “normal” (“regional”) routes travelling is a nightmare. Sometimes we -6 people family- wondered how to get to Munich or Geneve by train but we gave up shortly after. 🤯😰