Interesting article and he is probably partially correct and one reason why you see a shift to discount airline travel in Europe…
I wouldn’t give the article too much credence. The author (and probably the magazine) appear to believe that turning back the technological clock is a viable option to adjust the current socioeconomic situation.
Read letter #8 and the article author’s rather lame response.
+1
He grabs every correlation and decides it’s cause and effect.
He doesn’t compare absolute ridership between city pairs.
He stays away from comparisons in Germany and the original TGV route.
He stays away from subsidy per passenger mile.
He concludes that if they hadn’t built HSR lines, that there would be a more robust “low speed” network. What’s more likely is if they hadn’t built HSR, there would be more trips on highway and los-cost air and much fewer by rail.
He grabs at least 1 past marketing practice and blames its modern variant on the high speed rail. The old slow train Paris-Amsterdam
Who’s to say the railroad wouldn’t have switched to a market demand and booking time strategy if they still had the traditional train? Amtrak uses that strategy and doesn’t have anything the rest of the world considers high speed rail.
I think he makes a good point when he talks about losing overnight trains. Without them in order to get to an early morning appointment one must either take a train the day before and pay for a hotel, or if it’s available get a predawn train that arrives around the same time the old overnight train did, losing the opportunity for the relatively uninterrupted sleep the overnight train could have given.
Are they saying that Local Trains are being killed off? In the Northeast Corridor was built as a 4 track mainline which hauled Express/Local and Freight. As far as I see in Pictures of Europe the high speed line is single track with passing sidings. Freight is the one that is hurting here as Europe does not have a good freight train system that keeps big trucks aka Lorries off of the Narrow Roads their.
+1 Precisely. What he writes can be passed off as accurate to folks who are not experienced with trains beyond Spain to Paris to Brussels. To folks like yourself who ride German trains today, the article seems silly. Currently, the real competition for DB is discount buses.
Reminds me of Randal O’toole - only from the other side.
Germany is a about the size of Washington State and Oregon put together. They use dedicated routes for high speed rail. Speeds up to 110 are done on the same lines freight uses. While it is rare you will see a 4 track right of way in Germany you will see two parallel rail routes roughly 10-15 miles apart between the same two cities both double track. Thats basically how they do it over there in the less than 110 mph market. Multiple routes between cities but usually only one HSR route between cities.
Boy, that sounds like a lot of extra maintenance, especially since rail freight densities are supposed to be less than ours. How do they afford it?
The ‘best’ rail passenger market is 50-400 miles. Barcelona to Brussels is much farther than that. They’re surprised that people fly?
Some facts: Germany 137,847 sq mi pop. 81 mil.; WA 71,362 sq mi. 7.1 mil.; OR 98,381 sq mi. 3.9 mil.
If you want to see high traffic density, stand along the bank of the Rhine in the little town of Bacharach sometime and watch the almost continous flow of freight and passnger trains running on both banks. The DB has many multitrack stretches and HSR shares tracks in approaches to cities. DB operates over 40,000 passenger and freight trains daily. Other operators run additional trains, particularly suburban and regional services. The number of trains run in the US is not easily accessible information, but I doubt if it is close to 40K.
Just for grins - can anyone find and translate the derailment statistics for the various sections and services (including the private freight services)?
Might also be interesting to see the methodology they use to keep it low…
Finding would be more than I want to do; however,
if you find, I will translate.
OK my last stat was like 1985 when I was living over there but the annual subsidy back then to German rail was approx $7-8 Billion a year and back then they did not have East Germany merged in so consider West Germany about the size of Oregon alone. Last time I was there was back in 2000
As a train watcher on the Bremerhaven to Bremen line in the mid-1980’s DB ran approx 12-17 frieghts a day. Various cargo primarily from the port of Bremerhaven inland. Bremerhaven was about the size of Green Bay, WI.
A lot had changed since the mid-1980s on my 2000 visit. For one there was a lot more graffitti on the suburban trains and they were no longer spotless as they were in the 1980s. They started introducing private operators and making things more efficient since my visit in 2000. The line I used to ride into Bremen between Bremen and Bremerhaven for example used to be electric locomotive hauled silverliner commute coaches (Germans call them that because they are all silver). In 2000 it was a DMV type rail car.
Cool thing about the 1980s is the US Army still had troop trains running daily (Bremerhaven) or three times weekly (Berlin). One would traverse the length of the country from Frankfurt all the way to Bremerhaven. The other would traverse North to Hannover and then head East to West Berlin through East Germany. I got to ride the West Berlin train the highlight was the border crossing into East Germany, the train conductor made us all pull down our shades as we approached the border with orders not to lift them until we were in West Berlin. I peeked under mine. U.S. Army Officer on the Train had to get off at the border and Salute his S
Grey trenchcoats and peaked caps is more like the Wehrmacht or SS than the Gestapo.
Things change, of course, over time, there far more than here. My first visit was 1968. Starting in 1990, I’ve been there almost every year, with some lengthy 1-2 month visits and have traveled over most of the main routes.