I recently took a train from Seattle to Portland with my family. One difference compared to flying that it took me a while to realize was how amazingly quiet it is.
On a plane, the engines are right there out on the wing screaming and conducting that sound directly into the airframe next to you. With a train, the engine is way up front, hundreds of yards a way, separated by several linkages.
The end result is that a train car is as quiet as a coffee shop. I love it.
Love that route. Also, on a train the ride is so much smoother - no starts or stop or dealing with traffic.
The pricing is nuts, though. A one way train ticket for that route is $36. The same trip via car takes about the same amount of time and $20 in gas. The train is a nice luxury for one person, but for the whole family it becomes very expensive.
I guess I wouldn’t have thought that expensive for intercity travel. Certainly doesn’t strike me as such relative to shorter haul European trains I’ve taken.
And in the US, I’m a decent fraction of that ($13) just to take the commuter rail into the city one way.
The problem is that the train has to compete with 3 hours by car... And then the ability to actually use a car at your destination. The transit systems in either Seattle, or Portland, are nowhere near as good as they are in New York.
Much of my car's wear and tear is from age, so I can discount some amount of that that. Free parking is plentiful in 95% of both cities.
Driving 1 person is already close to the price of a train ticket. Driving 2 people is ~50% discounted. Driving 2 people, and then not having to rent a car/taxi, is something like a ~75% discount.
With a real carbon tax, these numbers would look a lot closer to eachother.
With a real carbon tax these numbers would actually be further apart. I was surprised to learn that in the real world trains are not more efficient than a the average car when measured in passenger mile per gallon equivalent. And trains are much less efficient when compared to a high MPG cars like a Prius. In fact I'd be willing to bet that there are only a few of city/regional public transportations systems in the world that are more energy efficient than just taking your Prius.
They report some 80 passenger-km per liter of Diesel equivalent energy, compared to 13 passenger-km in a modern hybrid. Both values include the energy production, utilization and energy expenditure for infrastructure.
This assumes a modern network with electric trains though. I'm not sure if the article you cited still uses diesel-powered trains to arrive at such extremely different figures.
But that's just looking at fuel efficiency. What about the carbon cost of manufacture? How long does a train car stay in service vs a prius? What is the cost to manufacture a train car vs individual prii for n passengers?
Depends where you want to go in the city and what you want to do. Portland has some hellish traffic at times, and free parking isn't as plentiful as you describe. The inner suburbs all have metered parking on 2+ lane streets, and extremely competitive side street parking. Plus, the west side suburbs have zoned parking to keep out non-locals: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/39277
Taking a bike is a much easier thing to do if you want easy access to the inner burbs and urban core of Portland.
An anytime return London Edinburgh £323, off peak £238, super off peak £147. Anytime first class return is £504.
Regardless of what you think of these fares (it is cheaper if you book in advance), considering HMRC allows you to write off 45p/mile and it is slightly over 800 miles, only the anytime return is really more expensive if travelling for work vs a car. Plus you'll have £30-40/day parking in central london on top, so apart from the first class return the train (even at its most eye wateringly expensive) is cheaper than a car.
The "subsidy" is not straight-up tax dollars being given to Exxon & co, but computed against "prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution".
The total includes direct subsidies, such as tax incentives that reward fossil fuel investment, exploration, and extraction in addition to indirect ones you describe.
In the US, like many countries, these are very substantial:
There’s very little federal tax, its mostly state tax (which varies).
I add the cost of “development” financing/spying/regime change as part of the cost of oil, and the U.S. pays for all of that, which is a de facto subsidy.
Most of the costs of a car are fixed once you own it. Wear and tears per mile is actually small. Insurance is the same for a car driven 7000 miles a year as one driven 30,000. there is a small discount for less than 7000 miles/year, but it is still fixed. Likewise the car payment doesn't change at all.
The IRS has to come up with a fair number that translates all those fixed costs into per/mile. It is a good financial number, but worthless for this discussion.
Buying new tires are a thing. Even if you buy cheap tires and get good life out of them (and that combo is...rare, you get what you pay for), that's, say, $400 ever 40,000 miles, that's a cent a mile right there..and tires are usually more expensive than that and don't last that long.
The most obvious cost of wear and tear though is that eventually the car needs to be replaced. More miles = sooner replacement.
Any modern car that is well maintained will last far longer than you will own it. People give up on their cars because their self image needs an excuse to get a new one. A lot of the maintenance cost is time based as well: UV and ozone are destroying rubber parts even while the car is sitting.
It depends on the car, but typically you are looking at $.20/mile for fuel, and $.05 for all other maintenance (including tires).
The average new car payment is something like $550/month. The average used car is somewhat less of course. Most people are making payments. Insurance is $500/year if you have a perfect driving record, many people pay more. These costs have nothing to do with how far you drive.
A few years ago I calculated my actual per/mile cost for my car, it was $.15/month, even though I bought it new (I track every fill up, though at 46mpg my fuel costs are less than average). The car had 200,000 miles on it to spread all the fixed costs across, and had been paid off for a few years.
The point is the marginal cost to drive a car you already own is low.
Considering I was driving 30k/yr at one point while commuting, I can imagine quite a lot of miles, actually.
PS: Your insurance costs are fantasy land. The average US driver pays almost $1500/hr. I haven't had so much as a speeding ticket in a decade and live in a safe small town and am still over $1k/yr.
Lower mileage insurance can help reduce that cost by the way, if you tell your insurer your only adding 2k miles a year to the car rather than 10k miles, they will drop your rates commensurately.
Sub in an eBike for the commuting & errands, its quite doable to go car light or car free (esp. if Car2go, Lime pod or another service is available in your city).
We've hit peak car in North America. This new generation will see car ownership go down.
Less car ownership on the horizon;
1)Cities are congested
2)The congestion in the suburbs is even worse than driving in downtown
3)For years the solution was to build more highways, but land for doing so is running out
4)Car ownership is no longer cool
5)Ride sharing and renting is become easier (GPS, Internet, Smartphones)
6)Cars have become safer, but the joy or riding in them has been killed. It's like being trapped in an egg carton.
I agree once someone doesn't own the car the numbers change. However if you already have a car the additional marginal cost to drive it on a trip is very low.
Which is pretty normal most places in the US and at least Western Europe unless maybe parking is especially expensive at the destination. Even so, if two of us go from the Boston area to NYC it’s almost certainly cheaper to drive although I almost always take the train because it’s a lot more pleasant. With a family the train would be a relatively expensive alternative.
No, this is awesome. All of that time is yours without having to worry about the road.
I wish we'd install more rail corridors. Especially outfitted with business and luxury amenities. I'd travel by train everywhere I could to avoid planes and long distance driving.
Distance Seattle Portland is about 280 km. That's similar to the Distance of Munich to Würzburg in Germany. The Deutsche Bahn takes 75 Euros, about 85 USD from you in economy class.
The problem with the US is not that rail travel is expensive (it is not), but that gas is waaaaayyyyy too cheap. (In Germany you pay around 6.20 USD/gallon)
Worth noting that trains with a locomotive up front are quite rare these days (although most common in the US - Amtrak Acela notwithstanding).
Most of the rest of the world has gone down the "multiple unit" route, where there are smaller motors in each car, under your feet, and there are no dedicated locomotives.
Yes but the TGV is all based on 70s technology. The more modern trains (such as Siemens Velaro, Alstom AGV, Bomardier ETR 1000) are all multiple-units.
One notable exception is the Bombardier/Talgo 350 (known in Spain as "the Duck" for obvious reasons).
The TGV Duplex was developed in the 90s, and continues to be developed, the new version (avelia horizon) coming out in a couple of years. There's a reason it uses a locomotive ("powercar") concept, it relates to it being a double-decker (which all the other trains you mentioned aren't.
I believe the Acela replacement (avelia liberty) uses powercars as well.
The UK sleeper trains were refurbished recently. They go out of London up to Scotland and down to the South West of England.
They are not multiple units or likely to be if they were refurbished tomorrow. The reason being that the stock is not in 24/7 use. It does the one long night journey then gets parked all day.
The train out of London gets split to serve different bits of Scotland, so you do get some shunting around going on when they do things to the train.
It doesn't go that quickly as a train because there is no need. Being in Euston at 5 a.m. is no fun, might as well be there at 6 a.m. with some sleep had.
So the loco that pulls the train can be any old freight thing. Although now it is likely to be a Class 73 diesel electric that can use electrified track as well as diesel. Note that there i no electric track all the way out to Scotland.
And it’s still not annoying, at all. It’s very quiet, and I personally find the sound of electric motors much more tolerable than anything involving combustion.
Train travel can be absolutely luxurious in a way that a plane or self-driving car could never be. You don't even need to book a $3,000 historical reenactment to get a taste. On a whim, I once booked a 1st class AVE train in Spain for an extra $10 and ended up with bottomless wine/champagne and a several course dinner for 3 hours. Would I ride a chicken bus for 7 hours through Honduras? Sure, but there are points for style too.
The information displays built into the viewing window frames are very nice, but you already know those will be the first things to get thrown out for cost and/or complexity.
Österreichische Bundesbahnen (ÖBB) took over all remaining sleepers run by Deutsche Bahn (DB) some years ago. One downside of this was the dropping of the Amsterdam–Munich sleeper — ÖBB's nexus lies in Vienna. The Netherlands currently has no sleeper trains, which is rather unfortunate, because the sleeper train appears to gaining in popularity after a period of decline.
Increasingly, people want to avoid flying if reasonably possible. A sleeper train is ideal, because you spend most of the trip asleep, and end up in Munich, Paris, Vienna, etc. early in the morning, in the middle of the city.
Sure, it's not as comfortable as a hotel, but it beats the torture of flying (I'm 200cm tall), and train stations are just a lot more pleasant to be in than airports.
> Also, anyone else get annoyed with tons of shops at airports?
I love it. Frankfurt duty free is pretty much my favorite shopping mall. The shops also give you something to do when you're waiting for connections. Duty Free in Dubai is also a lot of fun. Those shops also bring in revenue which goes to running the airport (your airline ticket is indirectly subsidized by those shops.)
Then problem of price still remains before wide popularity for sleepers or even just long daytrips. I'd love to use trains more often, but I'm not willing to pay through the nose. A trip in Central Europe I recently booked would've been over twice the price with a train, with maybe a couple of hours longer travel time when accounting for airport trips and waiting. Second class, just a daytime journey without sleeping.
Timewise this would've been fine, but price is not competitive. I'm not sure if the problem is too cheap flights, or too expensive trains.
This is really the only solution, asking people to cut down on their travel within Europe, switch to the (sometimes more expensive) train is just not going to work without a proper incentive.
I'm always comparing the travel times between train and plane. I even account for the time going to the airport, airport transfer etc and if it's roughly the same (which it sometimes is) I'll get on a train but if Ryanair can offer 9 Euro flights (Berlin -> Brussels) this is not going to be a real competition.
I think Switzerland is doing it well. Train travel is far more popular compared to countries with equally good (but not as punctual) trains in France and Germany.
> The EU should force a carbon tax on plane fuel for intra-EU flights and subsidize rail with the money.
You are aware that most of Europe produces electricity by burning fossil fuel right? So by all logic we should apply a strict carbon tax on rail as well.
Speaking of logic: Trains are way more energy efficient than planes. So even with the same "strict carbon tax", it would be cheaper to go by train and better for the environment alas.
An actual carbon tax on carbon would tax both trains and planes fairly. Planes use much more co2 per capita and so the result would be comparatively cheaper trains nonetheless.
Though I don't think most trains are electric, and I think they do have a fuel tax.
By usage, most trains used in Europe probably are electric. It makes sense to invest in electrification where usage is most intense.
For example, in Britain "In 2006, 40%—3,062 miles (4,928 km) of the British rail network was electrified, and 60% of all rail journeys were by electric traction (both by locomotives and multiple units)".
I don’t think it’s an issue given how little CO2 is emitted by trains per passenger/km, and hopefully the electricity used already has CO2 taxes on it. Plane fuel doesn’t.
The saddest part of this statement is that the European rail system is MASSIVELY subsidized even at the price points that the person you responded to described as "paying out the nose", which of course is a somewhat subjective position for a European to say, because their already lower salaries are massively taxed and to pay for the subsidized rail systems the gleeful Americans can gush about being so cheap when they return to the USA and demand socialism.
I'll take Austin's local light rail train as an example to illustrate what I mean. I once looked into the finances and financing sources to get the system stood up, and I worked out that it would be around a $30-$35 trip from one end in the middle of the city to the outskirts of Austin's Leander township if the actual cost of the system were paid for by the rider.
It is immensely deceptive and rather dumb that these realities are simply ignored, especially by seemingly otherwise rather intelligent people that congregate here.
At the very least, there should not only be the direct cost per ticket if it were not heavily subsidized by taxes of Europeans, which non-Europeans should have to pay, and the price that is subsidized that Europeans pay. It is really rather immensely immoral to ride on the train at a cost that is heavily subsidized by wildly immoral tax levels (e.g., 100% on gasoline, 20% on sales of goods, ~35% of income that is also 70% of what it is in places like the USA).
This is crazy misleading. According to OECD taxing wages 2019, only single tax payers on significantly above median salary pay more than 35% tax and social security contributions combined in Austria. This places Austria far in excess of the OECD average.
Rather than being some low tax paradise, the US is around the OECD average in most categories.
As for things like vat, they look far worse than they are when you realise a lot of goods are zero rated, and most people spend only a s portion of their income on good due VAT. Last I checked in the UK it adds ca 3 percentage points to my tax overall tax burden. I don't pay much more tax here than I would in any number of US states at my income level.
When factoring in health insurance, it gets even closer. Having spent time both places, I'd pick European tax levels over 'US conditions' (a term frequently used to scare voters in many European countries) any day.
As for being immoral: we've voted for these tax levels. Surveys in the UK often show us prepared to accept increases as long as they go to the right things, like the NHS.
Feel free to enjoy our trains - I've never met a European that is as concerned with subsidising foreigners travelling on them as you are on our behalf.
Air travel is massively subsidized too (airport construction, airline and manufacturer bailouts); as is highway travel (automaker bailouts, free trade supply chain, environmental externalities, health costs associated with driving and sprawl, plus gas taxes which cover only a small proportion of actual construction and maintenance costs).
It's difficult to do a true apples to apples comparison, especially when highways are also justified in part as a national security asset. But it's a little much to clutch pearls about subsidies for rail ("immoral", really?) without acknowledging how subsidized the alternatives are as well.
That really depends on your perspective. A "conventional" subsidy can be understood as a reverse tax— instead of paying money into the general pot for the privilege of engaging in some harmful/productive/profitable activity, you are paid money out of the general pot as a benefit for engaging in some activity seen by the government as desirable or beneficial.
Cutting taxes in any form is a subsidy relative to what went before, whether or not the end state is above, at, or below the zero point.
More concretely, if an automaker previously bought widgets from a local supplier for $10, but now buys them from overseas for $8 because of free trade, that's effectively a $2-per-widget subsidy. You can argue that it's a market efficiency and that most of the benefits are passed to the end consumer anyway so whatever, but when you get far enough down that path, then there are no widgets being made locally any more, which is the real cost of having subsidized the import of them by cutting taxes to zero.
Indeed it's subsidised, IIRC "about half" is a decent ballpark figure. This is worth bearing in mind when people complain about Ryanair getting not-full-price landing spots, not paying road tax, or whatever.
Tourists pay 25% VAT on everything, so it's not like they pay no taxes. I think literally having to prove residence (or citizenship? or tax-residence?) sounds like the sort of bureaucratic hell I'd rather not encounter at the ticket machine. But note that some countries find a way, e.g. Switzerland has 50% discount cards which are far too expensive to make sense for tourists, but make it cheaper for locals.
City transport is a different game, and harder to calculate down to individual levels -- you need all those 10%-full 11pm trams so that people can get home, on some days.
I'm curious what massive subsidies you're talking about, do you have numbers or examples of what upsets you in particular?
I really don't think European public transport is the major force driving young Americans to the left. I hear a lot of young Americans who (quite rightly IMO) look at socialised healthcare in the EU and wonder why on earth they can't have it back home ... but that's a separate issue altogether
I think there's probably some crossover point that makes it more expensive to house people for longer amounts of time with more space required on a train, compared to burn a bunch of hydrocarbons to boost them to 800kph and get rid of them as soon as possible. Not sure whether physics make cheaper pricing possible as long as externalities aren't fully factored into the price of fossil fuels (i.e. flying gets more expensive and trains stay the same).
Considering the melting arctic sea ice, the answer is easy.
(Of course flights are not the only reason and I'm not saying that an individual shouldn't choose what is right for him/her, it's a policy/tax matter).
I take plenty of trains in Europe, and booking well in advance, I never pay the "full" fare.
It is usually quite easy to take advantage of early booking offers.
Sleeper trains make so much sense for travel over land. They are often competitively priced with air travel, they pollute a lot less and the time saved can be huge when you consider that you spend time travelling when you would otherwise be asleep (although this is sometimes true for air travel, many/most people find it difficult to get quality sleep in economy class).
The London - Edinburgh sleeper train (Caledonian Express) has been running pretty much since 1873 and is an amazing way to get between the two cities. You arrive at the station in London between 10-12pm, depending on if you want to have a few snacks or glasses of wine, then wake up in Edinburgh around 8am the next day.
Worth pointing out that the sleepers don't terminate at Edinburgh - they continue further north to Fort William and Inverness - the former being the "Deerstalker":
The Highlander (to Aberdeen, Fort William, and Inverness) splits at Edinburgh Waverley (though that's not a passenger call); the Lowlander (to Edinburgh and Glasgow) splits at Carstairs Junction.
Beware: The Caledonian Sleeper is experiencing severe teething problems, including delayed boarding times (e.g. past midnight) and last-minute service cancellations. The trains were clearly rolled out with insufficient testing.
If you're travelling on it in the next few months, hope for the best – but plan for the worst.
The Caledonian Express is in the process of refreshing all their rolling stock as well. There have been some growing pains (the introduction has been delayed a few times, and isn't fleet-wide yet), but it seems like a significant upgrade.
Excited for our first overnight train ride in their new hotel-room style sleeper cars (with a private bath and shower) later this summer. Even for a family of 6, when you factor in the (saved) cost of overnight acommodations in either London or Edinburgh, it was one of the most affordable ways to travel between those two cities.
The Caledonian Express is definitely on my list of trains to travel by some day. Pretty soon (when the customs part is sorted out on the Amsterdam end) it will be possible to travel from Amsterdam to London directly on the Eurostar without transferring in Brussels, so that helps too for me as a Dutchman.
I've been on a fair amount of sleeper trains and the Caledonian has been the most comfortable so far.
For the opposite, the most uncomfortable one to sleep in was the Hong Kong to Shanghai one. I paid extra for the Deluxe option, can't even imagine how hard the bed would have been on the lower classes. Still, was a pretty cool journey.
I think that's just an (northeast) Asian bed thing. Preferences trend firm for mattresses and you can see this in traditional or luxury places that don't cater to Westerners. The most deluxe ryokans in Japan still have relatively thin mats on the floor, business hotels in China and Japan often have former mattresses, and so on.
I took a 44 hour train from Delhi to Bombay. The "bed" was a plastic-covered sheet of wood, like a cheap kitchen worktop. That was uncomfortable. I think it was standard class.
I took the train direct from London to Rotterdam a few days ago so I assume it goes straight to Amsterdam also. No customs required (unless brexit) and passport control was done at the point of departure.
> They are often competitively priced with air travel
I traveled in sleeper trains in China, and while the experience was interesting, I can't really say it was comfortable or even pleasant. People would keep moving around at night, making noise, and the train would stop now and then and create noise on its own. It's slow and it only works if you are not too far from where you want to go anyway, unless you are ready to waste a long time to get there.
Problem is they really don't quite make as much sense for city pairings that don't fall into the narrow window of roughly one night of travel time. This severely limits the amount of mainstream awareness sleeper trains can reach, so people who don't routinely travel such a route won't have them on their radar when they do.
Many sleeper trains stop at several places (just like a normal train does) until, say, 10pm. Then they travel for a long time overnight, and stop in several places in the morning.
You can see the Caledonian Sleeper timetable at [1], it's also reasonable to catch it at Watford. It then stops at both Edinburgh and Glasgow (they have split the train in two further south). You can see the Highland train stops at many towns and villages.
You do need to be a bit more alert if you're getting off the train before the terminus, but the attendant will almost always wake the passengers who are due to alight.
Well, pairings that fall below the window of 6 to 9 hours are short enough you don't need a sleeper train: sitting in a train for 3 to 5 hours is not that bad. Pairings that are above the window are turned into a 6 to 9 hour sleeper train ride plus a regular 3 to 5 hour ride that's not that bad.
I traveled from NY to LA via train with one planned stop-over. We had coach seats which were a little less expensive than air travel, so it's not really worth doing unless you're in it for the experience of it.
It was an enjoyable experience tough, and we'd probably do it again on another route. While it would have been nicer to have a sleeper, the coach seats were pretty comfortable.
As someone who's done lots of long-haul (Texas–Chicago and Texas–Maryland) rides, one (or a few) long-distance coach trip is perfectly doable, and even enjoyable if you like train rides; but I feel that it gets unbearable pretty quickly as a regular occurrence. Also a big factor: travelling with an intimate (someone you can literally lean on) makes sleeping much easier, even in coach.
> many/most people find it difficult to get quality sleep in economy class
I've only taken a sleeper train once (from Paris to Marseille), but i found it difficult to get quality sleep on that. There's noise, there's movement, and the mattress isn't terribly good. Train schedules don't necessarily fit well with your normal sleeping schedule. I'd much rather to the trip in a TGV and then spend the hours saved having a shower and a rest on arrival.
I've taken the Amtrak Autotrain from DC to Florida many times with a car and family. It is somewhat expensive (about $2,200 roundtrip for a family of four and car) and very unpleasant but I keep WISHING this time will be different...the US sleeping cars are ancient and covered in a film of grime. The tracks in the Carolinas are very rough and bumpy, sleep is difficult. Maybe someday we'll have sleeping cars like this but I think we'll have luxury self-driving sleeping buses displace America's terrible sleeping car rail option.
> They are often competitively priced with air travel
Not at all. London-Edinburgh is £65 on EasyJet and a 1 hour trip. A regular seat on the Caledonian Express is £45 for an 8 hour trip. The Caledonian Express en suite twin room is £280.00
> when you consider that you spend time travelling when you would otherwise be asleep
I could fly Easy Jet for 1 hour for £65, and have money left over for a very comfortable hotel and a nice meal.
I take sleeper trains occasionally between Germany and Austria. A plane ticket would be 30-50 EUR, a basic six-person sleeper cabin is 90 EUR, a private 2 person sleeper cabin is 160 EUR (x2, obviously). It's a great way to travel, but competitively priced it ain't.
One high-level design choice that they made is to entirely skip any kind of in-seat entertainment and screens and instead of plan around people showing up with their own tablets and phones (to which they provide power). This makes immense sense to me and I'm sure simplifies things on their side.
They made the seats more claustrophobic even though they didn't stick out massively. They were not free so the only thing you could use them for realistically was the map. So yes, you could see where the train was for 2-3 minutes then it would go into 'attract mode' to try and get you to pay.
I think that they were a solution looking for a problem. They could reboot the concept to use Apple Carplay/Android Auto. Train info is useful to have on hand and it should be possible to do upsells.
Agreed. Southwest Airlines does this in the US, with "free" wifi access to their entertainment app/portal. I much prefer it to the often terrible seat-back screens on some other carriers.
I have even seen on some airlines (Alaska) that are doing away with seat backs screens on newer flights you can pay to rent a tablet if you don't already have one, want an extra one, etc.
There's been talk for a while about autonomous cars driving people throughout the night across countries/states for meetings the next day. Sleeper trains already do this. Sleeper trains are making a comeback as we become more aware of the impact of flying to the environment.
As a regular train traveller here in Austria and I'm very curious how this turns out.
Currently the Intercity/RailJet trains are more like a downgrade to what was available before. They look nicer, but provide quite uncomfortable seating and offer no possibility to change the seating inclination; due to the air condition it's very noisy; there's no place to put your feet in an elevated position; there's no compartments, the whole car is one big room; and the only option for children is an open place with a TV, you have a lot of fun chasing your small children through the train.
> Currently the Intercity/RailJet trains are more like a downgrade to what was available before.
I strongly disagree with this. I really like the railjet. My issue is that it's still on an elevated platform which is super annoying if you have strollers. But in terms of comfort I think it's their best product yet. I definitely prefer that over the compartments that were there before.
Enclosing beds to make them a kind of cradle is bad. The good design would add space not stuff. There's a reason older trains didn't have that.
Typical design made on computer that nobody tried to use (or not enough users to say how bad it is).
I've also traveled in the newer trains in Europe that were significantly worse than the older, again for having less space everywhere. It's a bad trend.
It looks fine to me? What's wrong with it? Many people are worried about falling out of the upper bed in sleeper cars. There's often a rail there. The "half cradle" offers the same protection against falling, while making it easier to get in from the foot end. It provides protection against light, noise and drafts.
The foot end is a bit narrower than the overall bed, which is also a smart use of space and, again, makes getting into the bed easier.
This is also the first sleeper cabin I've seen where the window seems to be parallel beside the bed as opposed to orthogonal at one end.
Amtrak runs extensive sleeper service around the US. I’ve taken San Francisco to Chicago - it’s quite nice, if you’re willing to burn some vacation days.
Having travelled a couple of times on overnight trains from Austria to other European cities, these sleeping pods look marginally a larger improvement.
- Tempeature: Having slept in a cabin where the aircon blasts from the bottom into those sleeping there, they inevitably have to turn it off to sleep, leaving those on the top bunks at temperatures of over 40C in the summer.
- Noise/Privacy: In the 4-bunk cabins, I don't want to hear anyone either. Why wouldn't they include the soundproofing curtains in those too.
- Space: There's a tiny gap between the beds currently. Look closely and this is also the case. It's impossible having more than 1 person do anything inbetween the beds and stepping out of your own pretty much puts you about 1foot away from the other person's face/legs.
Maybe someone can tell me why they can't just make lightweight carriages, and put a lot of them on the back of a train car (more than now). By having more carriages you can make the accommodation more spacious and comfortable. This is what stops me considering it as a viable option for European travel currently. Even if they couldn't fit in the station, what's to stop them letting half the carriages off first, followed by the second half?
trains longer than the station would double the time at each stop. that's not acceptable. but also, most stations are not designed to have trains longer than the station. a station usually has more platforms than the two rails that feed it. an overlong train would frequently block other trains coming in at other platforms.
the only thing that would work is to have two trains on the same route in a short delay from each other. say half an hour.
however, for all of this the real problem is cost. i believe germany dropped all overnight trains because they weren't getting used enough compared to high-speed trains. it's interesting that austria bought them, but i guess with austrias lack of high-speed trains, overnight trains are still useful.
Two trains would suit me just fine. Or three. As long as they are serving customers I don't see the problem.
I'd guess people weren't using them because they are so cramped and uncomfortable. I would bet they could be economical and comfortable when the whole process is designed from scratch. I don't think this exercise feels like that.
You should think that the cost is basically per floor area. The cars are already as light as they are willing to go (for crash safety etc). The minimum acceptable space gets you to a price that a trainload of people per day can afford.
The beds with their own screens look nicer than the ones in trains I've taken (and at comparable density) and far far nicer than anything in the air I've ever had. (Also nicer than the airport lounges I've slept in between flights...) There are also private cabins which I'm sure cost double.
I would be very surprised if the carriages were any heavier than they had to be. Why would they waste energy costs (and engine size costs) on dragging around weight they didn't have to?
I'm sure that weight improvements could be made, but I'm also sure that it would cost money and rolling stock is expensive enough.
What a great design. I like the simplicity and the lightness of it all.
One thing I don't understand is the private berths.
> Private berths are fitted in both First and Standard Class carriages and can be booked for business passengers or families travelling together.
They are completely transparent, nice for the lightness. But bad for privacy. I can see many reasons why a business meeting would not want prying eyes.
For me it has been a common issue in the past to be traveling while working on private files. But having a person sitting next to you doesn't allow for enough privacy... So usually I just stopped working, while that could be a big plus of train travel.
I've certainly found that to be the case when traveling to NYC. From where I live, a plane ride takes about an hour, and Amtrak takes about 6.5 hours...except that really, the total trip time ends up being about five hours for the plane and seven hours for the train. Flying involves driving twenty minutes to the airport, arriving early due to uncertain security wait times, going through security, waiting to board, boarding, taxiing, flying, taxiing, disembarking from the plane, and then even after all that you have to walk a long way through the airport, take the AirTrain to a different station, then get on yet another train to make it into Manhattan.
The train, by contrast, involves leaving from downtown near where I live, sitting on the train, and arriving in Manhattan a few blocks from my office. It's so much simpler and more relaxing, and much easier to actually get work done during the trip, so oftentimes it's worth the extra couple of hours the trip takes. If we could invest in high-speed rail and make the whole train trip even, say, 30% faster, there would be no contest.
Looks very nice, but I don't like the table design. The extensions that pull out look like they don't provide a continuous level surface, which would just be a pain to use. Amtrak (at least the cars on the Acela Express) has a much better design where each side of the table flips up when you want to enter or exit the seat. It doesn't look quite as nice when folded up, but it is much more functional.
I wonder if digitally linked convoys of cars and vehicles could replicate the smoother and quieter experience of trains, even on busy highways? The idea would be to use several "buffer cars" in front of the convoy of passenger busses. The entire convoy would be inter-linked and centrally controlled, so the "buffer cars" could accordion closer together and farther apart, so the passenger busses could use lighter braking acceleration. Build the busses with lots of sound damping and actively damped suspensions, and the experience could come close to that of a train.
The buffer cars would take up some additional highway area, but the passenger density of the convoy as a whole could still exceed private passenger cars.
2x2 facing seats in standard class? What an horrible idea - I have never understood why this was a standard in about every wagon since most of the time when you get this seat you get to share it with strangers, and lack leg space to feel comfortable.
It's not, but my point still stands: by far and large there are way too many seats in that configuration compared to the planned utility for it. You end up with regular passengers having to fit such seats and having a miserable experience. It never happens on a flight.
I slept on a fair number of sleeper trains during multiple trips to China. It’s basically the most popular way to get around the country. A few years ago, Xuzhou-Xi’an, a 10 hour trip, was priced at 315¥ (around $50 USD) for each “soft bed” (four soft beds to a room), which was perfect for a travelling family.
Recently, the high-speed rail lines have started to shift things in favor of daytime trips between large cities (Beijing-Xuzhou used to be 7 hours by sleeper train, but it’s now 2.5 hours by bullet train). But, the train remains the best way to travel within the country. It’s smooth, quite cheap (esp. for an American traveler), and increasingly comfortable.
I did recently Chicago to Las Vegas with the Southwest Chief and, while it's not as shiny, it was still a lovely train (the cabins, the restaurant and the fantastic viewing lounge), with great service and quite comfy. It was a very enjoyable trip, would recommend it to anyone who loves train travel. Looking forward to taking the California Zephyr some day.
Those trains look nice, but at the same time pretty cramped and uncomfortable to me. I wonder if its just the photos, but the seats look to straight with not much legroom and the sleeper compartments seem really tiny.
And the photos attached are primarily first-class seats too. I found it odd having two seats next to each other without an armrest or gap in-between. I would not want a stranger next to me without that space/divider.
As a side note recently traveled from US to Austria. I was blown away by how clean, beautiful and affordable the country is. But we can’t have the things they have over there cuz “who is gonna pay for it”?
One of the things that doesn't appear to have any real innovation is luggage space and the speed of loading. Get on any long-distance train or Eurostar service and you can wait minutes for people to drag 4 suitcases, trying to find space. Even on the Eurostar where you would expect most people to have a lot of luggage, there is often not much room at all.
We used to have luggage vans back in the olden days!
Slightly off-topic, but couldn't help but notice on the Projects list a really cool version of the London tube. Unfortunately it seems it's from 2014 (there's even some quote from Boris as Mayor), so probably scrapped by now?
Makes me wonder if these Austrian train designs are already set in stone or just a proposal that might or might not happen.
> Makes me wonder if these Austrian train designs are already set in stone or just a proposal that might or might not happen.
I would assume they are pretty much set in stone. I was in a mock model they had standing around at Vienna central station. They got the budget and are currently ordering the trains.
That design is extremely close to the new design of train in use on the circle line. The seating arrangement is a little different and they use monochrome LED signboards rather than LCD (for sensible reasons), but the continuous unobstructed design is there, along with actual aircon.
It's an impressive sight to look from one end of the interior to the other when it's not full of people (and going straight).
Yeah, I've seen those, but they are slightly different and have been available for a few years already (I believe before 2014, the date of this project, but I could be wrong).
I'm glad to see on the other reply that the plan hasn't been scrapped. Some of the lines could really use new trains (with proper air ventilation/filtering, especially).
Finally I see someone realizing the "hovering" seats in a train. Anytime I sit in a train, I wonder why they have not done so for the last 30 years or so.
While they state its for luggage and design purposes, I just think: Its so much easier to clean. Even automatically ;)
> Anytime I sit in a train, I wonder why they have not done so for the last 30 years or so.
My guess: Ease of installation and for stability reasons. Bolting the seats to the outer frame probably requires much more consideration than simply bolting them to the floor.
Really enjoyed a recent European rail trip but quickly discovered mixing flight and rail is problematic if the links between airport and train station suck
The French tried: both Paris CDG and Lyon airports have TGV stations in them. There was a time the trains were even code-shared and you could book them as regular connections.
It was very convenient when it worked, for example from the US to other cities or ski resorts in France. But that was 10 years ago, and I haven't looked into it recently, so I'm not sure if they developed it or not.
In the US I would take a sleeper train from Seattle to Chicago instead of a plane provided the sleeper train runs 180 mph on average. That would put me in Chicago in about 10-12 hours, meaning I could get to Union Station in Seattle, get on the train, sleep a full night, wake up, eat breakfast, and disembark in Chicago.
The red-eye to Chicago, which is a comparable trip, really sucks because you only get about 3 hours of sleep in the most uncomfortable position imaginable. This means that you arrive in the city groggy and discombobulated.
I would even pay airfare-level prices for that kind of service. And extra if there's a way to segregate families with small children from my cabin so I don't have to try to remain asleep while a toddler is screaming for 3 hours in the same cabin.
"airfare-level prices"? In Germany and Austria my experience was that flying was generally cheaper than the train, and sleeper trains more expensive still.
I'm on a (day) train between Berlin and Vienna this very minute and it costed me €99 (one way!) where as a flight would have been about €50.
You can get cheaper tickets if booking well in advance (months) but the same applies to budget airlines.
In Germany, jet fuel is untaxed, whereas train companies have to pay tax on electricity, in particular renewable energy. Also, VAT is handled differently: if you buy a flight from Germany to another country, only a portion of what you paid for your plane ticket is taxed at German VAT rate, but for train tickets, 100% of the ticket price is taxed with the German VAT rate. These are several factors that make it quite a bit harder for the railway to compete with short-distance flights.
>In addition jet fuel in Europe is tax-free which enables these ultra low prices.
This kind of Orwellian double speak is amazing. Lack of tax leaves too low prices for the consumer!
If you really feel that this tax is important, you can always tax yourself! Anyone you can persuade can join you, voluntarily. Just estimate the tax you owe (through this as of now not yet enacted tax) and send a cheque to the national treasury, with "Gift" as memo. They will take it!
Air travel is comparable in fuel usage to trains [1]. Which surprised me a bit, as I expected much better mileage for the air travel, thanks to the exceptionally low drag of the rarified air up there as compared to wheels on rails.
However the railway ought to be more expensive overall due to the other costs: requires build-out and maintenance of extensive ground based network, including some prime real estate; requires much longer occupancy of vehicles; requires much more man-hours for each vehicle crew. Sadly in most settings (like continental Europe) the fixed costs of rail are barely visible to our considerations due to the governmental funding. Meanwhile airplanes only require build-out of the end-points, and the crew required is minimal.
The only meaningful way of fixing the problems with rail is 1) high speed (Mach 0.5 ... 1); 2) de-coupling from wheels-on-rails as the source of noise, drag and speed limitation; 3) de-coupling from expensive on-the-ground infrastructure as cause of high costs and NIMBYism; 4) high automation, little to no amenities; 5) smaller vehicles, more frequent departures. All in all, going in the airplane-like direction. Hyperloop may just be the thing, if it ever becomes large scale commercial.
That's a misleading statement. From your linked article:
"Trains in countries like Japan are predominantly electric and transport a much larger number of people per cabin than trains in the US. While it’s difficult to broadly compare trains between regions it’s safe to say that trains in European and Asian countries are far more fuel efficient than those in the US, making them a leading option for travel.
In most cases outside of the US, trains are probably at least as efficient as buses and are much more efficient than cars and planes."
Physics gets removed from the conversation when we start to view trains as endlessly more efficient than airplanes. They aren’t, and in the US part of that equation is the requirement to make passenger trains able to survive a full collision with a freight train, adding a great deal of weight and removing much of the physical advantage of low rolling resistance. Other examples are the overly prescriptive regulations for trains, which is a situation that the aeronautical industry has recently been able to make major gains on. Trains are great, but they’re not necessarily better for the environment or the users than airplanes because of their physics.
Physics is on the airplane's side [0]. The drag of rolling over rails, and of going through the dense air at ground level pressure is naturally much worse than that of flying up high for any non-trivial speeds.
Right now the trains may be ahead in some regions thanks to their slow speeds, and thanks to the electrification - with the assumption electricity is generated from sources other than fossil fuel.
But if you tried to set up railway at travel time comparable to airways, you'd quickly find yourself doing away with rolling in favor of maglev or maybe air cushion, and also trying to lower the air drag as much as possible. Both are non-trivial engineering challenges - cue the Hyperloop languishing in protracted development. Both have been solved by air travel decades ago.
Meanwhile electrification of the air travel is already underway. Quiet SSTs[1] are up next. And yes, SSTs are rather fuel efficient, thanks to the even higher operating altitude, and also the natural efficiency of the jets at high speeds.
I will miss the railways. It used to be a great adventure back when I was a kid.
[0] well if you disregard travel time, then the sailing ships would be the kings
A 3 passenger car at 25 MPG significantly beat airlines in fuel efficiency per passenger mile assuming reasonably direct routes.
Busses and trains both crush aircraft from a physics standpoint assuming similar occupancy. Though of course with very low occupancy per cabin things can shift.
Taking the night train between London and Edinburgh used to me and my partners absolute favourite way of making that journey. If you get yourself into a deep enough sleep (admittedly I didn't always manage) it can feel like magic to wake up at your destination having wasted no useful time; having not been irradiated or felt up; and not being subject to enforced retail operations.
Yeah generally I used to find a sleeping pill mandatory for sleepers, the downside being that one tends to leave at least one possession behind in the cabin the morning after.
In the US I would take a sleeper train from Seattle to Chicago instead of a plane provided the sleeper train runs 180 mph on average.
Not really doable for a lot of Austria and generally the Alpine regions.
There are not many high speed tracks in Austria and Switzerland, the reason being that the countries are relatively small and that building high speed tracks through the alps is insanely expensive.
Switzerland built two base tunnels through the alps: The Lötschberg[1] - and Gotthard[2] base tunnels, which are geared to a top speed of 250 km/h (ca. 155 miles/h) and a normal travel speed of 200 km/h (125).
That's why it takes roughly 10 hours to get from Zurich to Vienna, but only 4 to get from Zurich to Paris (after Mulhouse the whole track is high speed capable and trains run with up to 320 kmh (200 m) on that track.
Edited to add: Of course night trains make a lot of sense on that route.
The railway from Beijing via Xining to Lhasa in Tibet passes over the Tanggula Pass at 5,072 m (16,640 feet) above sea level (apparently the world's highest point on a railway) before dropping you at Lhasa at 3,490 m (11,975 feet) [1].
It takes two days at around 100 to 120 km/h over 675 bridges, though some recommend [2] that you spend a day or so in Xining on the way to acclimatise to the altitude.
Every train carries a doctor and oxygen to increase the concentration of oxygen in the carriages from 21% to 25% (but no pressurisation), plus a separate oxygen supply for each passenger.
I'm not a fan of China, but its rail network is something to behold.
> Not really doable for a lot of Austria and generally the Alpine regions.
On the other hand that distance is a lot smaller than Chicago-Seattle (4x) so the lack of high speed in the alpine region isn't as noticable for a night train because the distances are much shorter.
The thing about sleeper trains is that you need the distance to be 8-15 hours. If it's less than 8h you'd get uncomfortable departure or arrival times. 10h for Zurich-Vienna is perfect for a sleeper.
In Austria if you're traveling between big cities you're probably traveling to a neighboring country (very common to travel to Germany, Czech, Hungary, etc by rail).
Unfortunately Germany is the only neighbor with an extensive high-speed rail network that Austria has.
This is a good 3-4 days of constant train travel to get to the destination. The thing I'm complaining about is that the plane is almost too fast for what I want to use it for, while the train is incredibly slow.
It would be cool if there were a way for me to leave Seattle on Sunday night and arrive in Chicago on Monday morning having gotten a full night of sleep.
Not bemoaning at all, it's a matter of size, geography and topology why HSR does not make much sense in a country like Switzerland.
The country is roughly 300km long and ~200km high, add to that a lot of cities, which need to be serviced with relatively small distances.
HSR only makes sense, when a train can travel big distances between nodes.
Instead a different approach was chosen:
The trains are dispatched by clock face scheduling[1], which makes much more sense. Trains leave nodes by the (usually) half hour and deliver passengers to connecting nodes within the time required to connect to transfer. This guarantees scheduled connections, even when there's no direct train.
For example: If you want to get from Zurich to Lugano there are trains leaving at 5:10pm, 6:10pm, 7:10pm, etc.
The first and the last are direct trains, with the 6:10 you need to get out at Arth Goldau to connect with another train, which leaves 4 minutes later.
For a small country like Switzerland this concept makes far more sense than HSR.
It's probably one of the most efficient train networks with the exception of Japan. So bemoaning generally happens on a very high level, if at all.
Knowing the fate of the California HSR project, what makes you think this is realistic in any way, shape or form?
I mean, I would pay airline-level prices for an autonomous electric air drone taxi from my house in Seattle to my destination in Chicago, and as crazy as that sounds, it still might be more realistic than what you're asking for.
For those that don't know the route, this route is currently >40 hours, with something like 45 stops along the way. (almost every congressional district, imagine that)
I guess you are right. But those 7 stops in ND, and 12 in MT, are there really enough people there to justify those stations? Maybe have an 'express' and a regular train?
Probably. If you look at the sensitivity of passenger traffic to travel time, the graph is roughly a logistic curve with the inflection point around the 3 hour mark. On a 40-hour trip, the number of people you'd add to the train by cutting out 4 hours of stops is probably on the order of 10-100 people per trip. If those stations collectively serve more than that number of people, then you're losing people by cutting those stops.
It's a question of demand really and maybe driven by a chicken and egg problem. Trains are slow and expensive so people prefer to fly leading to a lack of demand to support both a slow every stop train and an express point to point train. Also I imagine prices would increase on an express train compared to current trains because it will be picking up less passengers from those intermediate stations. It's tough to setup a lot of different trains because tracks are afaik one per direction in most locations and lines so you're very harshly limited on the scheduling side of things.
I don't know about this route in particular, but Amtrak generally runs on freight lines. It's quite possible that the time lost to stopping to pick up a couple passengers is dwarfed by the time spent sitting on a siding waiting for freight trains to pass (I've spent many hours of my life here).
I believe the OP's point is a 3-hour red-eye isn't a great travel option. But, it's a fairly common flight when traveling West-to-East in the US. He'd prefer a 10 hour trip (via train, or blimp, or anything else) if the pricing was in the same ballpark.
The 10 hour over-night doesn't "waste" any time - you're eating and sleeping those hours regardless.
Why are they 'surely' at least 2m? The beds on the Caledonian aren't that long. A standard (not King) bed is only 190 cm in most countries. You're not going to get a King-length bed on a train - that's not a reasonable expectation.
British trains are narrower than most in Continental Europe, the structure gauge (the width the train can be without crashing into tunnel walls, platforms and so on) is smaller.
For example, a fairly recent British coach is 2.73m wide, but a German ICE is 2.85m wide, and a Danish/Swedish passenger coach is 2.97m wide.
Im 180 and never felt a difference in length from my home bed to the sleeper train beds. They may be shorter but not so much that it bothered me. That’s why I assumed they were the same as home beds (standard length in Europe is 200).
I’m looking at that first class seat and it’s angle. It’s most likely doesn’t have recline nor enough space for ones things, making it hell for taller frogs.
Well, I'm 180 cm and I'm capable of getting a good night sleep in almost every sleeper train configuration (regular seats, basic couchette and more fancy sleepers)
On a plane, the engines are right there out on the wing screaming and conducting that sound directly into the airframe next to you. With a train, the engine is way up front, hundreds of yards a way, separated by several linkages.
The end result is that a train car is as quiet as a coffee shop. I love it.