Railway companies are national in nature and by history. The share of cross-border travelling is small; the income mainly comes from national rail.
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Obviously if they streamlined the process to take on airlines their revenue would increase. But perhaps the cost of streamlining would outweigh the revenue increase. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to create a disruptor in the train space due to rules, regulation and the capex nature of it. Whereas the airline space is easy to enter as a competitor even though it is capex heavy because the core asset (planes) are mobile. You can move them from very competitive market to another one that has less competition if the laws (and airport slots) allow for it.
Also, the EU mandates open track access, which means technically it's possible for private companies to compete (and they do, there are several private operators like Flixtrain, RegioJet, LeoExpress, even a high speed one in Italy, Italo).
It's also possible to have rolling stock that is fairly usable all over Europe (RIC carriages, usually 200km/h). There is even a bit of a market for used vehicles. As for locomotives, traditionally they only work in one country, or perhaps two. Now there are more and more locomotives that work in multiple countries, e.g. TRAXX and Vectron. It's possible to rent carriages and trains. It's also possible to rent traction.
In some sense it's getting close to possible to do a startup in European rail. I'm thinking about the problem a lot.
This would have been an ideal point to agree on at Glasgow but of course it didn't happen.
There's also very little capacity on the rail network and if they sell short trips as opposed to one long one they can sell the same seat multiple times over the same international trajectory. And in those short trips they don't have planes to compete with so they can ask higher prices.
> When travelling from Copenhagen to Warsaw or Lisbon to Marseille
People pick the train because those trips are far enough to make the train a hassle
But I can enter the origin train company sites (or the operator) and buy a ticket to another country "pretty easily" (for the last couple of times I did this). In fact buying online was easy enough.
There's also the fact (also mentioned in the article) that buying split tickets (which is what those kind of agencies will sell you if the respective operators don't offer through-tickets) won't give you the full protection of the passengers rights in case of delays, missed connections, etc.
They happily let you select a train ride from Madrid to Wladivostok, including all intermediary stations ... but you can't buy the ticket. Same for Berlin to Rome.
(for DB specifically it seems that international-bahn.de can determine the price for some trips)
Most of the interior lines got shut down when they privatized CP and handed the state railway to one company and not more. The first thing they did was close many train lines. The lamentable decline of the Portuguese railway systems has happened on many levels, including local trains and trams like Coimbra shut down all east side lines and that entire mountain gateway area sits in decline with rotting properties and population flight and business closures etc…
> Deutsche Bahn had (and still has I think) a "Europe Special" where you could buy a ticket from any town in Germany to any town in Europe for 39 EUR flat. Our idea was to travel through Croatia for a few weeks, starting from Zagreb. Sure enough, bahn.de (the journey planer of Deutsche Bahn) offered us a ticket for a train ride of around 16 hours from our home town to Zagreb, through Austria and Slovenia. We would have had to change trains 2 times.
> Then things escalated.
> We discovered that we could book the same trip, for the same price, but with a different route, making a 500 km detour inside Germany over my parent's town. Then we discovered that bahn.de allowed us to specify a minimum time to change trains. We set it to 24 hours at my parent's town, letting us stay at my parents for a night. Then we found out that we could set an additional via option in such a way that we had to change trains in Ljubljana. We set the minimum time to change trains there to 24 hours. Then we found out that the ticket price was the same if we travelled not only to Zagreb, but to Split (at the coast), which required a change of trains in Zagreb. But we wanted to stay a few days in Zagreb, and the maximum minimum time to change trains on bahn.de was 24 hours. But thenw e discovered that (at least 5 years ago) all foreign tickets were valid for 30 days in Croatia. Effectively, this meant that we could stay in Zagreb for 30 days, and our ticket to Split was still valid.
> We got the ticket. After a week of visiting my parents (1 night stay), Ljubljana (1 night stay), and Zagreb (5 nights stay), we arrived in Split without problems. It was a 1,500 km, 7 day train trip for 39 EUR.
> The only minor problem we had was the German conductor in the first train after we visited my parents. He just stared at the monstrous ticket in disbelief and had to finally conclude that it was valid.
Fun loophole with those minimum transfer times, was it patched since? It's not something I would use; I don't mind paying a fair price for what is a form of transport much more sustainable than air travel, although I do like to figure out economically frugal routes.
Having to have an argument with a conductor isn't my idea of leisurely travel either. I could manage in Germany, but I once had an Italian train conductor who didn't understand the (valid and very popular) Interrail tickets we had and just got annoyed. She gave up thankfully and move on in a huff.
I have to ask why it’s a loophole. OP consumed just as much train with long stops as someone that travelled directly.
It’s odd, in aviation, you’ll pay less with longer layovers and more for direct, even though direct is the least miles in the air.
I get it that suppliers like to charge more for more convenience but really, the cost of provision is the same (or less!).
but I'm sure internet forums can help too
You could book one nighttrain ticket from Stockholm to Paris straight and that had been possible since 1930 until ~1970!
Now when the Swedish governement tries to revive the service they say they encounter resistance from the Germans who apparently don't want to let traffic just cross their territory for some reason? Political blame game?
"In this case, one of the objections has been that the final destination of the traffic is not German. There are similar challenges with other countries. But if we are to have train traffic in the EU, we must accept and let traffic through, says Minister of Infrastructure Tomas Eneroth"
https://www.dn.se/sverige/tyskland-stoppade-svensk-nattag-ti...
Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnie_Internationale_des_W...
EU can clearly make a nice case for this because it will improve efficiency and usage (thereby netting profit) for member countries. There needs to be leadership and will to make it happen!!!
For international travel planning and booking ahead of time usually means you can get very large discounts as well that would not be possible with a check-in-whenever-you-travel type of card.
Back when we were still allowed to travel i spend a fair bit of time traveling between non-airport cities which meant that an 8-10 hour cross border train ride was often the only alternative to even more time spend waiting at airports, which still required muiti-hour train journeys to the final destination, and i really did enjoy that mode of transport, but it does take some mental adjustments as delays are pretty common on the railways so if you have a "must meet" every connection as scheduled schedule where you cannot just jump on the next train out things will get messy.
(provided by Deutsche Bahn but not limited to their own trains)
It is indispensible if you want to plan international travel by train. A true work of love.
https://jobs.lever.co/thetrainline/9743f1ec-253f-46ec-a144-1...
Hindsight /km payment for international travel would not readily take your mind off of distances beyond the travel time; you'd never know how much to pay. Every international card has recognition issues in some countries/places, or limited ticket stations serve special deals. Countries probably vary in their use of smartcard gates etc further complicating such deals.
I was wondering about train pricing and train pricing ideals. There's a large factor of involvement of the cost of finance, as they're expensive projects. The market-technical pricepoint relates to alternative modes of travel, but the nature of mobility does not. This relates to hyperloop etc.
It would be neat to have fast-train New York - London/Paris/Amsterdam - (... more stops, have skip-trains ...) Bejing - Seoul/Busan - Tokyo, maybe Australia would even pay to have one next to a brand new city in the northeast of the country.. But the scale implies enough industry to have issues being expressed in regular currencies - and it should have fargoing implications to live so proximate; in one of the world-cities.
But how many people would you expect to make the journey? And whatfor? Is the economy of it the leading choice, or is prestige a factor? What is the balance of advantages at different price-points, or at different expectations of traffic volume. It might be added value for tickets to be ~20 euro's (cheaper even per hour than 'typical' train fair, probably impossible without large volume and subsidy), instead of the 'serious hassle' <300 that a "regular international intercity" tends to go for. In fairness to potential comfort, fares could be 2000 euro's, but this would greatly reduce the potential volume and application range.
Another question could be, why are countries ran 'retroactively' nowadays? I'd rather the news stated there was debates about future trains, proactive regulation of automation and small electric vehicles, something to tie science like a horse for improvement, rather than to consider (promoting) improvements indirectly; through a market.
