Lemmilicious

I’ll express my last bit of disagreement with your reasoning and then I’ll probably leave this argumentation, but I will read if you choose to respond. This is not what cost means, you are basically saying that your gut tells you it should be cheaper without any supportive arguments. If e.g. the train requires more energy to run faster, that alone could make it more costly, even if it has a higher capacity. Since neither one of us seems to have idea of the actual costs of running trains, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere with this!

Is it really? Because that claim goes against my intuition so if it’s true I would be happy to get more details! But what you say doesn’t quite make sense to me, sorry if I seem pedantic: transporting people faster is not the same as transporting more people. You transport more people per unit time, but not necessarily in total. I also don’t see how faster trains need less staff. When you say it’s cheaper, do you also take into account investment cost, or do you neglect those and just mean operating costs?

I don’t disagree with you, I didn’t mean to say that there’s no way of HSR being good, just that maybe we’re not doing it quite right! Maybe just fixing pricing would be possible, I don’t know what. I also don’t know if they actually got rid of the old tracks or just of the train route. I just want both HSR and the old trains back haha!

That’s really a great article, thanks for the link!

Still, there’s plenty of criticism in the article I linked that is not touched on, I hardly think it becomes irrelevant by reading Jon Worth’s writing! Even with his proposals I’m really not sure if we would get back the cheap and still relatively fast connections that have been removed. To me there’s not a clear benefit to getting rid of the old “low-speed” rail even if we fix SNCF.

So the article is very long so let me TL;DR a little. It mentions that when high speed rail is build, existing low-speed rails are often removed. Those removes routes are a little slower but often MUCH cheaper. I would say, like the author, that more expensive trains that are a little faster doesn’t rhyme well with “let people go fast”. He also has examples of night trains being removed in favour of a high speed rail, which hardly is a time-save if you count sleeping at night! Great examples in the article.

High speed rail doesn’t have to hurt low-speed rail, it just has the way we’ve been doing it in Europe.

Haha I’m scared of sounding like I don’t like high speed rail, which I do! I love trains in general, I’m interrailing right now! Buuut I felt this was a relevant place to link this fascinating article (slightly click-baity headline) about how high speed rail in Europe is actually not constructed in a very good way, because it ends up eliminating many of the positive sides with the European railway network: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-are-killing-the-european-railway-network/

Edit: fixed typo

Haha maybe it’s just me, but I feel like the good guys have a really cool look in this picture, different shapes and sizes, unexpected designs and cool details on their clothing! The bad guys are not bad, but it’s mostly the same armour as always