• Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    5 days ago

    Yeah why doesn’t Europe have trains?

    Europe definitely doesn’t have trains already.

    • whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      Still too much plane for local journeys

      And is France train are not cheaper than planes or buses… Which is stupid, they should start to properly taxe Airlines

      • Tenkard@lemmy.ml
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        5 days ago

        They’re building high speed rails connecting major European cities as we speak, we’ll be good

      • Opisek@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Do you happen to use Dvorak?

        Sorry for the random question out of this air, but the in/is typo is something that happens a lot to me while being nearly impossible on “standard” keyboard layouts.

        • whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works
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          23 hours ago

          No, and I have no idea how I could do this, could be my brain rephrasing after I started writing

          And it would be BEPO(dvorak-fr) for me but on the phone I don’t really find any advantage

    • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      We do. Not as much as we used to because privatisation is a plague upon mankind, also we have very diverse geography which makes developing new lines prohibitively expensive, even more so when you’re a private company. Add to that a lack of political backing and yeah, it’s all rather turgid, even if there are some extremely recent talks concerning transeuropean night trains and such.

      Those are going to be for our nice flat and speedy routes no doubt, but hey, it’s an effort in the right direction.

      But yeah, things are not gonna get better fast as long as we are cursed with privatisation. What a shit show to see our glorious TGV reduced to a shell of its former self.

      Meanwhile I just got an article yesterday that Wuhan is now connected to the super high speed network and the first 450kph train now connects it to Shanghai. Last time I was there the train was already TGV levels of speed and much more modern, and only a year later they are leaving us on the fucking dust…

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        China sees investment in mass transit as a loss leader. It costs more to put in than it generates in fairs, but the boost to connected economic zones pays back the cost several times over.

        The US sees investment in mass transit as a detriment to the airline, automotive, and fossil fuel industries. It would shrink the economy in three places where the nation has tried to goose growth for the last 60 years.

        • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
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          5 days ago

          For real. If those idiot neighbours would stop fucking around, we get trains from Wuhan to Bordeaux in about a week. It’s a real game changer.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            What if we told them they could keep killing each other, just on the train, and then we’d make a murder mystery about it?

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          5 days ago

          I never really understand why historically trains were so rare in the US. They had loads of trains at one point left over from the industrial Revolution and then they seemed to decide to get rid of them all. Even Beaching didn’t shut down that many lines

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        If you’re on a long tube that travels quickly on the ground from one city to another, and everyone is talking in Spanish, you’re in a train.

        If you’re in a long tube that travels quickly on the air from one city to another, and everyone is talking English, you’re on a plane

    • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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      5 days ago

      My total journey from Berlin home this week was about 50 minutes late, and the connection after the ICE was not pretty.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        5 days ago

        Apparently Germany’s problem is that they run all the high-speed trains on the normal lines which means all of the normal trains have to work around them. Obviously you can’t have a normal train in front of a high-speed train so if the high-speed train is delayed by even a small amount it has a knock-on effect where a bunch of local service trains have to sit around waiting for the line to clear.

        Everyone else runs high-speed rail on their own tracks. So everyone gets to do what they want and not affect anybody else.

        The French do it better than the Germans, which is just not an acceptable state of affairs.

      • arrow74@lemm.ee
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        5 days ago

        50 minutes isn’t that bad tbh. I dont remember the last time I flew that there wasn’t a delay. Hell even the whole arriving 2 hours before ,finding parking, going through security is all so much more of a hassle.

        I’d much rather walk 5 minutes to the local subway head to the hauptbahnhof and wait 50 extra minutes for my train. I can at least go get a reasonably priced coffee while I wait.

        • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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          4 days ago

          It was bad enough. Schlimmer geht immer.

          Also, comparing flights and trains doesn’t really work, I think. The getting into the plane time alone makes it too different.