Slovakians: “Our train was less than 2 hours late AND didn’t crash, awesome!”
I saw an opportunity to share this: Where are America’s trains? by the very excellent edutainment channel Climate Town
Someome has never been in Italy
TrenItalia is the same as DB. The meme is wrong
Or London, England
Not so fast! My trains are very late (I’m in EU)
Thank you for traveling with deutsche Bahn?
Americans IRL: (Standing in the TSA queue at the airport) “Train? What’s that?”
I’ve had to take a train from Boston to NYC and back a few times. Round trip, it costs anywhere from $200 to $500 depending on whether you want to leave / arrive at a reasonable time or not, and it takes about 5 hours each way, which is slightly longer than driving takes. Incidentally I can fly from BOS to JFK round trip for about $200, assuming reasonably early booking, and the flight is about 1 hour. So this doesn’t surprise me at all.
I’m not disagreeing with you but I think we all need to start including airport hassle time into our statements of flight times. In my limited experience train stations involve less of that bullshit, although obviously you can only go when the train is ready, as opposed to starting your car and hitting the highway. Neither Logan (Boston) nor LaGuardia (New York) is swift or easy, especially if you have any baggage, and there is also the travel time to actually get into the city, which can easily add another hour in traffic. Train stations tend to be in the heart of downtown.
(Tbf, I in Los Angeles live much closer to LAX than to Union Station so ymmv)
Train stations definitely have less bullshit, but it’s a 5h trip vs a 1h trip in this case. I could have spent 3 hours in the airport before the flight each way and added 30 minutes to get from the train station to the airport and back, and still saved time by flying.
Well I certainly acknowledge our train system sucks. Try comparing LA-to-NYC times. Or LA to Pittsburgh. Or DC. Just adding to the difficulty, there seem to be 2 completely separate systems (still both Amtrak) that you have to change over in Chicago. And the 3 hour layover isn’t considered reliable enough to book as one trip, you have to plan to spend the night there.
Chinatown bus ftw
flight time is actually closer to 80-90 minutes between the two cities. plus taxi time of 10-20+ minutes at each end… plus dealing with getting to and from the airport, maybe parking, and random tsa shenanigans inside.
compare that to the actual 3.5 hour acela route that starts at ~ $74, that directly connects midtown manhattan to south station or back bay.
That price is certainly not representative of what was actually available when I was booking. There were $99 tickets but only if you wanted to leave at 5AM or arrive after 4PM. If you want to leave between 8-10AM and arrive at a reasonable time, there were no coach options and business class was $200+.
I went and checked JetBlue before posting that and they had $101 flights that were listed at 1h 14m, so that’s what I was basing those numbers on.
Can’t find the Boston->NYC confirmation, but here’s one from around the same time from Penn Station in Providence. This was the cheapest seat available on this train; the cheaper ones were only available if you left before 6AM or after 11AM. This train got in at about 1:30 PM, so 3h 45m from RI.
Let’s also compare that time to the round trip of Boston (back bay) to Worcester (union station) and back using the regualr commuter rail. The amount of time it takes to get from Boston to Worcester via CR, is a plane to New York and back.
Driving vs CR is a crazy difference that no one likes to admit or acknowledge.
It takes literally ¼ the amount to drive to Worcester from greater Boston than it does to take a CR from back bay. But not one will ever say it, they’ll all say we need higher speed trains.
Had a similar comment in mind. The cost for a coach seat on a train to the nearest destination city that there’s actually a route to costs about 3x as much as a round trip flight (budget airline) and takes over 24 hours. I would prefer rail were it practical, but it’s not.
No secret that our rail systems suck though. I have taken trains in Europe and Japan, and those experiences were great!
Only reasonably priced amtrack route I’ve seen is Trenton to New York. Takes about an hour and goes from $15 to $60 depending on time.
I’m sure it can get higher at particularly peak dates
Same story with trains through Sweden. Takes too long and is somehow more expensive.
Damn in Germany that would be about 100€ if you book early, 200€ if you want to leave tomorrow at prime time
D-Ticket and ride 3 trains and take 2 times as long to get there, but it’s cheap
We don’t have high speed rail, either, so that trip would only take you (by my understanding) about 1.5-2 hours.
It can and often is worse for the environment in the US too. Pretty much anywhere outside the NE corridor.
Similar to IRL Canadians. If you’re anywhere between Montréal and Windsor then I don’t understand why you’d suffer an airport when the train is just a vastly nicer experience
Well it depends on needs too. I tried to explain this before is that if you’re 4 hours away in travel for something that could be done in 1 hour worth of travel, something that’s as important as your mom dying; Are you gonna take the 4hour train or the 1hour plane?
clearly never been in a German train
fuck DB man
As an American living in Germany ❤️ DB
I know it used to be better, and compared to neighboring nations its bad, but I’ve never had access to a better transit system.
Plus I do feel like DB is not given enough credit for its volume of trains. No other country in Europe is running so many trains so frequently. You have several hourly train routes that would be a bus ride every 3 hours in other European nations
Public services need to be publicly owned.
Politicians are corrupt, but business people are corruption embodied.
It is publicly owned, it was just defunded by conservatives
It’s more complicated than that. The DB as an umbrella organization (consisting of over 100 companies) is publicly owned, but:
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The infrastructure is completely separated from operations, with a lot of regulations to make sure that the infrastructure company doesn’t cooperate with any operations company for fear they might discriminate against other companies, effectively throwing sand into the gears of railroad operations because many communication paths that are standard in other railroads are banned.
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The companies that carry out operations are expected to be completely self-sufficient, with no direct support from the government, but only through contracts auctioned off to the lowest bidder for local services (definitely no connection with competing companies who bid really low regularly going bankrupt /s). Long distance services are expected to finance themselves but are expected to cross subsidize services to cities that aren’t quite as lucrative (because they are, after all, owned by the government) and at the same time compete with companies that aren’t government owned that just offer rides on the most lucrative routes.
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The budget that is available for infrastructure is decided by the government every year, meaning absolutely no financial stability. This means that construction companies don’t end up growing because it could be too risky, and when suddenly there’s a lot of work to be done the few construction companies that are able to do the work demand insane prices and conditions, and the infrastructure company is essentially forced to swallow if they want anything done at all.
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No, fuck corrupt politicians - our rail network used to be great before it got privatized.
Poland here. We hear You. Not so long ago we used to have delays measured in hours.
I’ve been in a German train. Was a while ago, though.
It seemed like the people running both the machines and system actually knew what they were doing and cared about doing it well.
As a latin american this was unfathomable to me and it broke my brain.
the workers may care, the people who decide about the infrastructure however dont.
Yeah… Japan might get you used to that kind of precision, but I can’t think of a European country with that punctual trains 😅
That Transrapid is located in china though, not europe. Germany developed it but never followed through and even China only uses it for one line. Would have been better to show a TGV or a Siemens Verlaro to represent EU
This is why I moved to Massachusetts after growing up in the south: the trains here might be old, late, and apparently catch on fire once in a while from what ive heard, but we have trains.
My town doesn’t even have a bus let alone a train.
Houston Texas. Population 2.3m. Number of inter city trains a day: 2. One in each direction.
The service only operates 3 days per week. That’s 6 trains per week, total. 3 in each direction.
South American transit user: “there’s a train?”
And I didn’t see anyone pissing or masturbating!
Well then what was the point of even using the train?
Where else will I get my free needles?
I can guess which seats are soaked with pee, too!
Curiously, I’ve never seen a seat on public transit soaked with pee. If the seats that you sit in are routinely pee-soaked, one might start to draw some conclusions about the source of the urine…
