YUROP

I am fighting the train travel jihad, I take the train even if it's more expensive and takes way longer.

As a French living in Germany, I often take the train to visit some friends/family. I would say it's working well from Frankfurt to Lyon or Frankfurt to Paris and not too expensive if you have a Bahncard and you can plan your trip in advance. But IMO, it the least we should expect from 2 neighboring countries.

I'm very excited to see the resurgence of night trains though, I love this mean of transport in particular!

I'm currently waiting for a train to go two countries over for a weekend, so... yes?

It is just too expensive compare to plane and that's a shame. I've seen it is cheaper for scotisch and Londoners to meet in Spain than to take train.

I took a trip from the Netherlands to Romania, and amazingly only had a single transfer.

At least, that was the plan, but then a train went missing on the way there and we had an additional transfer. Pretty stressful. Way home was super smooth though.

The one thing I don't get the EU doesn't bring down the hammer on is getting directions and buying tickets. Feels like that should be a relatively easy fix, forcing all European rail companies to align from the top down. But I'm probably unaware of something that makes that harder than it seems.

No. For a destination where I am going this summer a train trip is 12h with a stopover and if I want a sleeper cabin, the whole trip is 300€. Plane takes 1.5h and costs 50€.

Also as I'm in the middle of one of those routes, if I were to return home by train, I'd need to get off at 3am.

Here's my solution: tax the living hell out of aviation please, use this money to subsidize trains. There will be more supply and more demand on the rails. We will suddenly have frequent and convenient connections. And we all will be co2-neutral.

To neighboring countries yes, if there is a good connection. If there is a night train even further. However, the price should not be much higher than a flight and I want to change train as little as possible. Buying tickets should not be too complicated either. Unfortunately, taking an airplane is often easier in my experience. We need a true high-speed railway network across Europe. Something like the Shinkanzen.

Please avoid trains in Greece. Last year about 60 people were killed (most I think were uni students), because we don't have almost any safety mechanisms.. There were two trains, one with passengers who took the last train and one on the opposite direction on the same track for ~10 ehole minutes before the collided..

The other train seems to had been carring illegal flammable oil or sonething that caused an explosion upon collision.

The goverment tried to cover up everything once it happened (they even poured cement on the collision point and removed debris "to clean the space", thus removing evidence), there were some (unifished) joke trials that lead almost nowhere (there might still be investigations) and most importantly, the people working on the trains say that there have been nearly zero improvements to the system. And they blamed it ~all on the single guy who managed the tracks/routes of the trains.

Another symptom of capitalism (the company which operates the trains is private for some years)..

Check this wikipedia article if you want to learn more https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempi_train_crash (or search somewhere else).

It's sad because trains ~should be the future means of transportation, along with trams (only the capital city has tram I think)..

PS. On the other hand, I dont know how much less safe our trains are compared to boeing planes, hmm.

From the Netherlands I take the train to:

• Paris (HSL)
• London (HSL)
• Belgium
• Austria (night)
• Germany (want to try night)
• Poland (via Vienna or Berlin, usually fly back)

Yes. Took the sleeper train from the Netherlands to Italy last autumn.

I am in love with train travel but in the last years my local system has lost a step or two, to put it mildly. I'm seriously considering going back to more air travel, and I hate what the whole flying experience has become.

It used to be that one could spend three hours dealing with the airport experience plus an hour or two flying - or enjoy four or five relaxing hours on the train to somewhere, no garbage security checks, lines, etc. But nowadays on the train you're almost guaranteed delays, cancellations, extra stopovers, etc., which means sometimes you're not even sure on longer trips if you'll make it home that day.

Obviously this cancels out any advantages of train travel aside from the environmental ones. And if you have someone like me, who like I said, absolutely loves traveling by train, considering going back to the airport - how are you going to convince the average person to ride instead of fly?

I'm sure it's all the result of cost-cutting efforts but train companies desperately need to underderstand that what makes people more likely to ride are the things they're choosing to sacrifice when they're trying to cut costs.

I firmly believe train travel needs to be heavily subsidised and not run like a business. Leaders need to understand that it's important infrastructure and enables business of all other sorts. Not unlike the highway system, which they do without batting an eye.

The railway system in Sweden is trash. We have to and should have spent a lot more into maintenance and new tracks.

I am from Norway so....no. Just to make the point even more clear. That pink line up north. It's mostly for shipping iron ore from Kiruna to the port in Narvik. It can take passengers but it's not its main purpose. And the rest of the Norwegian rail system stops in Bodø. So from Narvik to Bodø you need a six hour+ bus drive. (This is an map of the EU system I think so Norway and the UK are left out)

As I'm living in the north of Germany I could probably easily go to Denmark and Sweden, haven't tried that yet though. Been to Prague by train once, which was okay, as there was a direct connection by EC.

Actually I'm planning to go to Austria this summer, so I've recently looked it up. Plane tickets are more then twice as expensive compared to train for my route. The train takes 11-12 hours (depending on connection) though, which is absolute max for me. So yeah, wouldn't go further than that. (Still looked up a connection to Croatia, that would've been an absolute pain in the a** by train...)

Over many years I took my kids by train to see almost every country in europe (all except Moldova, Kosovo, and islands...). Mostly we used inter-rail tickets as kids up to 12 are free. Now they got older it's more difficult, but a few weeks ago took my family from Wallonie to Catalonia - for 29€ each person, all the way from belgian border to spanish border (with some hours in Paris). Can also get good prices from DB crossing three countries (e.g. Belgium - Italy, or Poland ). It helps to know the routes (use openrailwaymap) and experiment with the options (add 'via', change stopover time etc.). Indeed it’s frustrating that every country system is different.

From Germany, I have been:

• to Switzerland (3 or 4 times)
• to Sweden via Denmark (twice)
• to Italy via Austria (one direction) and Switzerland (other direction)
• to Corsica, technically a part of France (don't tell them) via Italy, also taking a ferry
• to the Czech Republic
• and some mixed hitchhiking & train to Belgium and France

And I will go to France (Bretagne) soon.

I hoped to take the sleeper some time, but all routes we looked for, they are so much more expensive than a day train + one night of hotel stay that we opted for the latter.

Out of the countries I have been to, France and Italy have the best connections between cities/regions, while Denmark has the worst.

I'm a finn. The choices are the connection to Russia, or that long detour up north to get to Sweden. So not really.