I saw an opportunity to share this: Where are America’s trains? by the very excellent edutainment channel Climate Town
Highly recommend, hilarious channel.
Not so fast! My trains are very late (I’m in EU)
Thank you for traveling with deutsche Bahn?
also the american ones are not HSR and are very limited to a few regions. being extremely car centric, public transportation is often neglected.
fake. i live in a big european city. i routinely miss my train but it doesn’t matter because the next one goes in 5 minutes anyways.
In my experience the MARC is pretty reliable. And mostly empty.
Not that I disagree in general, but funny to me to choose that one specifically.
Yeah, MARC! I Recognize That Train!
You obviously never been to France.
Or Italy.
Or Germany
Or Hungary
Or America, and used the trains. The only use case is 5 different locations and you have to even live in a metropolitan area to maybe have access
Actual American transit users:
Me! I also use the bus, and a bicycle, in addition to the train. Not all at once. I mix it up depending on a variety of factors.
On the one hand I’m happy lemmy is gaining traction in the wider culture on the other hand it sucks to see Deutsche Bahn posting their propaganda here.
No, that the train being only seconds late is a Japanese thing. In Europe we have anything between “No Train Today” to “Train passed through the station without stopping”
I lived somewhere with good busses. When the bus drove by without stopping (after dark, an hour before service was supposed to end) I felt like choosing violence
I was early to the train station with my coworker. We met a lot of people still waiting for the train before ours on the same platform. Suddenly, that other train was dropped from the display and replaced by our train. Seconds later, their train simply rushed through on a different track.
I’ve heard of those trains. Or rather I saw one in a movie about a train that had to “speed” around a city keeping its “speed” over 50 and if its “speed” dropped, it would explode. I think it was called… “The Train That Couldn’t Slow Down.”
Yeah those are common in Europe. Most people just wave at Sandra when they pass by.
No, the train just skipped a station, and our train, going in the same direction, was coming in almost on time a few minutes later.
It was a bit crowded, though, and of course they lost their seat reservations.
Or Swiss, but certainly nowhere else in Europe.
Ooh look at that shiny metal track. I wonder if it is ever used. Fable has it that great carriages arrive, and distant rattling and horns can sometimes be heard, but no one knows for sure…
I was that European transit user years ago. I did buy a BMW because I hated the train system, but crashed it and then bought a Saab. I sold it 3 years ago and bought an electric bike. Only take the train like twice a year or so. When I go to Berlin for a weekend trip or something. But then I’m using DB which is way worse than the trains in my country, so I won’t use trains for a while after that.
Liberals privatised it away
Slovakians: “Our train was less than 2 hours late AND didn’t crash, awesome!”
Slovakia, are you okay?
Idk it seems like they could use some training. Things are going off the rails over there.
That’s kinda horrifying. Signal system problems? Other equipment problems? Staff problems?
I like trains and all I want more. But I’m 100% will never not own a car. Far too fun.
I used to think that way. I live in rural Japan now so basically have to have one to do anything useful (especially buying farm stuff). But I lived without one for like 6 years, had I not moved so rural and begun to farm, I probably would still not have one.
I’d like to hear more about this Japanese rural farm
I mostly grow hot peppers since they were hard to find fresh when I came here. I have a full English website and support for people who want/need it. Of course, the year I bought the place and started farming, another site revamped and added English support which kinda destroyed the advantage I thought I would have, heh.
Interesting. For me, driving is only ever fun on a wide open, flat, straight road, with beautiful scenery, and where you can get away with speeding because there’s no one else around. Anything short of that and driving ranges from “unpleasant” to “hell on earth”.
Hey, for some of us, knowing exactly what speed to maintain on a congested roadway in order to never touch the brakes and break the “waves” of stop-and-go for everyone behind us is also “having fun”. Doubly so when the Karen behind you completely loses their shit and starts raging, even though your driving style is actually helping them out. Let’s just hope they’re not strapped…
Breaking the waves is how I get 45-50 mpg on commutes in my 2012 Civic. And that’s with the air conditioning turned on. If I maintain a fairly steady 50-60 miles an hour, I will easily go 400+ miles on a tank.
Y’all have such wild imaginations.
I’m describing a regular occurrence, but go off. “Fun” is what you make of it, was the point.
This is so me, find the right gear and feather the clutch, never touch the brakes.
I love driving cars as much as I love wrenching on them. That is to say it’s among my favorite things when I want to, and I want to stick a red hot poker in my eyes when I have to.
clearly never been in a German train
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.
I know a few people working there. Biggest train nerds I’ve ever met.
Poland here. We hear You. Not so long ago we used to have delays measured in hours.
fuck DB man
No, fuck corrupt politicians - our rail network used to be great before it got privatized.
Public services need to be publicly owned.
Politicians are corrupt, but business people are corruption embodied.
DB is publically owned. Just in a very stupid way. They made it a stock company cause they planed to privatise it, and then didn’t cause of the 2008 financial crisis. So it’s a stock company with a board and a CEO, that is supposed to make a profit, but all the stock is owned by the state.
In my eyes, they should reform it into something more sensible that is still publically owned, but the current government is more likely to go through with privatisation than do that.
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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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
The only neighbouring country with certainly better train travelling imo is Switzerland.
French tgv is fucking expensive and trains are a lot less comfortable.
Dutch has great trains but it’s basically all intercity/regional/local. It’s more like a very large S-Bahn Network, Not comparable to ice experience.
Belgian trains are just shit often and just as much delayed, also no real long distance trains.
Luxembourg is free but the trains are also very unreliable…
Is it really that great in Poland, Czechia, Austria? I don’t know.
It could be better, but DB Long Distance travel is really not that bad. It’s mainly the infrastructure that’s lagging behind
It depends how you define “better”, but in terms of punctuality Germany consistently ranks near the bottom. Bottom 3 of the EU for high speed or international trains, bottom 6 for local trains.
So yes all neighbouring countries may have their own issues with trains, but regarding punctuality they’re consistently better.
Austria is doing lretty well, spain is killing it with HSR, Italy also has great high speed services, but on a smaller network.
Overall, the big problem is reliability, the DB is basically never punctual, and almost all the others are better than them at that aspect.
Yeah… Japan might get you used to that kind of precision, but I can’t think of a European country with that punctual trains 😅
UK train travel is abysmal, it’s often trained just get straight up canceled or delayed, I was stuck for 2 hours on a 30 minute journey last week it’s incredibly stupid
This is wildly overstated. In the period Jan-Mar, 86% of station stops were made within 3min of the timetable, with a cancellation rate of only 3.2% of services.
However, extensive hot weather is playing havoc with everything, rail no exception. Heat affecting equipment, medical emergencies, buckling track, even the ground drying out so much the trackbed is becoming unstable in some places.
British rail travel is quite punctual as a whole, despite being complex and near-saturation and prone to knock-on delays.
Chinese train infrastructure is next level. Forget about Japan with their high speed railway and punctuality. For example just Hangzhou East railway station runs 800 trains a day, mostly high-speed trains.
Chinese rail has currently completed testing the CR450 which will be the latest fuxing version to run at operational speed of 400 km/h and will start carrying passengers by the end of year. The next project in development is a maglev running at 600 km/h but is only in prototype for now.
Didn’t japan have like the first maglev train like 10 years ago?
Shanghai also has a Maglev since 2001: 25 years ago, from the airport with a topspeed of 430 km/h.
But this new Maglev will be a proper commercial maglev to replace the older generation high-speed trains.
Damn, that’s so cool. Meanwhile, in the US of A, we’re cutting back on Metrolink train lines to save money
Japan has been building a long distance one for a while now. It got held up in one prefecture because of environmental and political reasons though. Currently running maglevs anywhere are all kinda gimmicky (really no point in going super fast when the distance is very short anyway, waste of money).
In China they will run it between Shanghai and Beijing initially, which is about 1200 kilometer. Currently it is either a 2.5 hour flight plus getting to and from the airport or a 4.5 hour high-speed train which starts and stops in the heart of both cities.
With the maglev the duration will drop to 2 hours. That is not trivial as you suggest. It is a genuine transport solution to counter the more polluting flights. In China people prefer the train over plane wherever possible. It is more comfortable, quiet and enjoyable.
