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
Clearly you don’t know the Deutsche Bahn
Luckily the metro in Germany is not operated by Deutsche Bahn
Where I live, the U-Bahn is by far the most dependable transit. I love it! Nowadays I mostly use the bicycle, plenty of bicycle lanes to go around. It’s nice to have options.
It really depends on the part of the US. Amtrak is very reliable in the north east. Lot of the commuter train services are quite good as well. Subways and metros are pretty good in most of the north east as well.
Amtrak is much more limited in its coverage on the west coast, but still ok from what I’ve heard. BART in the SF area has good ridership although it needs some more investment, LA is doing some big expansions right now as well.
Chicago has a good but a bit old transit system as well. The Amtrak from NYC/DC to Chicago is a long but pleasant ride, about 18 hours; but this is to be expected given that the distance is 1146 Km (714 miles) which is about the same as Brussels to Warsaw, and most of the routes for that appear to be about 18 hours as well.
I’ve heard some rumblings about projects in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s not really something to write home about as it stands. Needs more investment and not to have the projects price gouged by contractors.
Some mid sized cities and towns all over the country will have decent bus services, some even a light rail or two, but it’s a coin toss.
The South West, Mountain west, South East and Midwest (outside of Chicago and the twin citiest) absolutely atrocious, like, you are basically screwed if you don’t own a car. Like there are a few example of decent local transit systems in particularly big cities but their ridership and coverage are pathetic given the size of the cities and there aren’t any plans for serious expansions on the scale that needs to be happening. Regional rail is just… hope you like a 2 week train ride where you’re spending half the time waiting for 40 mile long trains full of gravel to pass.
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.
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.”
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.
Yeah those are common in Europe. Most people just wave at Sandra when they pass by.
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…
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
also the american ones are not HSR and are very limited to a few regions. being extremely car centric, public transportation is often neglected.
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.
This happens in Europe too.
A few years back I had to go to my company’s northernmost office. It took about 20 hours of travel, 19 hours of which was on trains, and I didn’t even reach my destination. The train couldn’t get far enough because of the snow, and was replaced with a bus. Only I couldn’t go on it, and so my company shelled out about another $170 for a taxi from one town to the other.
All in all, trip there and back costed ~$500, not counting the taxi.
Meanwhile, looking now, I could take a flight instead. I’d have to take a train or a bus to the airport, that’ll take about two hours of course, but it’ll cost me about $30. The flight will take 1½ hours, and will cost $150 including the trip back. So, about $210 for the entire trip.
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
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.
I have one hour flights (three hours including time traveling to and from airport) that are 24 hour train trips. Twenty six including time traveling to and from the station. Monetary costs are equivalent. Like, some areas aren’t conducive to rail.
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.
Trains had their chance after 9/11 and blew it. If they were as cheap as the airlines it would’ve become the way to travel (especially considering no TSA).
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.
Damn in Germany that would be about 100€ if you book early, 200€ if you want to leave tomorrow at prime time
We don’t have high speed rail, either, so that trip would only take you (by my understanding) about 1.5-2 hours.
Well we barely have high speed rail in germany too, just a few sections that are shared with slower trains.
D-Ticket and ride 3 trains and take 2 times as long to get there, but it’s cheap
It really depends on where your starting and ending destinations are. Also, if you book Acela far enough in advance, which you’re assuming for the flight, it’ll usually be cheaper than flying, especially factoring in the cost of getting to the airport.
A reporter tried this back in 2021 and there was only a five minute difference between train and flying. Trains are also less affected by weather.
Every situation is unique, but I’ve found the train to be the better option on several occasions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/timing-myself-taking-the-train-and-flying-between-ny-boston-2021-3
Chinatown bus ftw
Same story with trains through Sweden. Takes too long and is somehow more expensive.
It can and often is worse for the environment in the US too. Pretty much anywhere outside the NE corridor.
Flying pre-9/11 was a whole different ballgame. Flying domestically in Japan is pretty close, especially at the smaller regional ones. My closest airport doesn’t even fly to Tokyo because everyone just takes the shinkansen (bullet train)
A train is a kind of “land plane”. Instead of wings, it uses a track on the ground, otherwise it’s basically the same thing
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?
Japan…
clearly never been in a German train
fuck DB man
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.
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.
Yeah… Japan might get you used to that kind of precision, but I can’t think of a European country with that punctual trains 😅
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.
I know a few people working there. Biggest train nerds I’ve ever met.
the workers may care, the people who decide about the infrastructure however dont.
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.
So you didn’t visit e.g Poland lol
Slovakians: “Our train was less than 2 hours late AND didn’t crash, awesome!”
Edit: Some context
Trains are frequently late.
As for crashes, some timeline and pictures:2025-10-13 - Jablonov nad Turňou
2025-11-09 - Pezinok
2025-12-09 - between Liptovský Mikuláš and Liptovský Hrádok
Just a few meters from crash
2026-06-05 Krpeľany
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 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. Taking the train to the station where the ICE stops: 2 minutes delay. FFS… ICE: 3 hours late, doesn’t stop here anymore, need to take another train to a other station to get it. FUUUUUUUCK DB! YOU’RE NOT EVEN IN GERMANY YET AND ALREADY FUCK EVERYTHING UP! Wo ist der Deutsche pünktlichkeit eh?
Liberals privatised it away
They have a big house and 2 cars, why TF would they care about reliable trains. All the stock they own is in BMW and Mercedes.
