And if your response is “ah but rail firms will add more capacity”, I’d point you to Thalys that hasn’t upped capacity in 2 decades despite rising demand and sky high prices. And SNCF that runs just 2 TGVs to Barcelona a day. Both easy to solve, both not done.
@jon maybe we need a rolling stock purchase program subsidy on the EU level to BUY LOTS OF ROLLING STOCK so we can run more trains…
Or maybe switch to Taktfahrplan.
Or…
With what would you start?
@jmovs Taktfahrplan is hard. So I’d not start there 😊
I’d start with two rolling stock initiatives. First, an interoperability fund - where any rail firm (private or state owned) can get the difference in cost between a 1 country and a multi country train purchase financed.
Second I’d create a EU funded pool of long distance day and night train carriages that can run on any standard gauge track. And lease those low cost to operators.
@jon This! Yet I remain marginally hopeful that public pressure can occasionally work: the budget for traditional low income (?) tourism SNCF night trains to the south of France got reinstated over uproar. Last year we even enjoyed new cars with comfy beds.
@jakob That was a job retention effort for a SNCF works in Perigeux to renovate those vehicles. But yes, public pressure made it happen - and that’s welcome.
@jon appart from cross-border rail, do you know how other countries finance their infrastructure ?
French HSL are pretty well used close to max capacity, track fares are of the most expensive in Europe, yet apparently the network operator struggles, and SNCF barely breaks even on those lines.
Could EU-laws allow to finance tracks solely by the state (charging train operators only for saturation at specific times)
@tristramg Italy pretty much did just that. So yes that’s possible.
But I’d argue France’s HSLs are inefficiently used. You’ve got a morning and afternoon peak with saturation, but big gaps rest of the day. Also don’t underestimate station access charges too - that strongly mitigate against running only half full trains.
@tristramg and more generally - I’d imagine SNCF Réseau makes a borderline profit out of the LGVs. But it will make a massive loss on Lignes Classiques - that have few TERs and little freight. So the LGV charges will cross subsidise that dead weight.
@ColmDonoghue@jon “appart from cross-border” ;) When Clément Beaune talks about train prices, it’s mostly about domestic flights.
But the questions still holds for the Perthus. If the track charges just for the tunnel where 200€ instead of 2200, maybe SNCF would push the trains to Perpignan a bit further. But who would pay then?
@tristramg@ColmDonoghue well except SNCF can’t now, as it sent half its Spain compatible Euroduplex to Spain for OUIGO and stripped out the French signalling. So given SNCF has literally 6 suitable TGVs, I’m not sure they can do more than 3 a day. Ok, better than 2, but still… And even at that cost they could run 4 or 5 profitably in summer.
@jarek why is Paris-BCN so damned expensive? A tiny fraction is 10% tax on the 10% of the route-km in Spain. An even tinier fraction is tax on the electricity the train uses.
What’s the problem?
2 trains a day, keeping capacity low, and meaning SNCF can set whatever price it wants and the train will still be full. And that doesn’t even get a mention
@jon I still don't understand why these rail cos are so short sighted. Why they run such a limited service. Esp on the Thalys routes. Those are clearly running at capacity, and have been for a while. But not even a modest change of a couple of extra trains a day. Or running double formations. Nothing. It makes no sense to me.
@PGLux@jon we're gonna have to do something. We have no choice. We have to move passengers from cars to trains. That's gonna require construction. Should have started this 20 years ago. But as we didn't. Now is the best time we have to start.
Well, Jon, Thalys however increased capacity on Paris - Amsterdam and Brussels - Amsterdam as Fyra ended up in a fiasco, and most of those service increases are still in place now.
MLV - Brussels services (since 2022)
extension of some Cologne services to Essen / Dortmund.
Travelled to South of France in May. Started in Aachen, took ICE to Brussels, then caught direct TGV to Montpellier. Great train, changing in Brussels very convenient. But only runs once a day.
Montpellier Sud de France is a weird super modern station that only comes to life 2-3 times a day when the main trains arrive or leave. If you want to change to other trains (TER etc) to continue travel, you need to change to the main train station. There is no direct bus, taxi takes 30 minutes.
@OskarImKeller Right. A tram line is planned to Montpellier sdF but hasn't been built yet. But stations like that are typical in France - assumption is everyone taking the train ALSO has a car (or access to one).
Thanks, that's what we might do next time. Change in Nîmes-Pont du Gard and continue to Narbonne and rent a car from there. Unfortunately our destination Minerve is almost inaccessible by public transport.
All the big car rental companies are present at SdF. However, if you pick up a car there and want to return it to another station, they charge substantial extra fees (IIRC it was around 50 €). The station is surrounded by huge parking lots - sealed asphalt with little shade.
There is the occasional navette shuttle that gets you to the closest tram stop. The journey involves walking (with luggage) across some big square and takes at least an hour I calculated. We went for the taxi.
In Scandinavia (at least when I was still travelling there regularly) a bus service would be running between the two stations that would coincide with the arrival and departure of the main TGV services at SdF. It would cost a reasonable amoun of money, and be a reliable way of getting there and back, with space for people's luggage. Does France have laws against that?
@jon How does Renfe's new BCN-Lyon service factor into all of this? Obviously not much right now (are they still only at 1 train per day?), but Renfe, despite their bad record on the subject MAD-BCN, is expressing interest in adding frequencies BCN-Lyon, and eventually extending their trains Part Dieu-GdL. Which is significantly more interest than SNCF has offered lately.
@SicTransitPHL at the moment Renfe + SNCF are separately running the same number of trains FR-ES they used to when collaborating. So so far 🤷♂️
Medium term Renfe does See opportunities in France though - and its Series 106 AVE ought to be approved for France. So medium term there’s a little hope.
@jon@SicTransitPHL Also nice that Marseille-Madrid is back, even if 1 train per day is way too little. And I've never seen such a bad ticket purchasing website as Renfe's, I had to book through Trainline.
@PGLux@jon@SicTransitPHL
Do you know whether that Talgo Avril S-106 parked in Chalon-sur-Saône really broke down, as a spokesperson of SNCF stated, as cited by the article below?
It seems weird that they would not take it back to Spain for repairs, after more than a month.
@PGLux@EnriqueAndres@SicTransitPHL If that's the cause then trying to run anything Talgo in France is going to be hell. What’s DB's and DSB's plan for this with their Talgo orders?
And I will try to make an hour stop in Chalon sur Saone on Sunday to go see if I can find this train, and photograph it.
The DB and DSB orders include maintenance facilities and equipment.
Whether the maintenance itself will be done by Talgo or the operators I don't know.
(In 🇪🇸 , Talgo has been doing it since Day 1, but since 2002, Renfe may be subcontractor for 50% of it)
Presumably, the former Talgo facility in Berlin-Warschauer Strasse will be re-used.
@PGLux@EnriqueAndres@SicTransitPHL Ooof, that Warschauer Strasse depot in Berlin is hard to access, and small. But I think there might be something near Leipzig as well where the old Talgo night trains were also maintained for a while.
@jon on some destination, it costs me less to drive than to take TGV (unless I book 10y in advance ;) Until this changes, I won’t believe their lies.
Once again, instead of fixing their own backyard, they tax someone else (the loopholes should be fixed though). They do that with movies too. France!
@jon
You are kind of spot on.
Trains have become luxury travel, at least in Spain. They are very very comfortable and you have plenty of space. ¿You want cheap? go by bus!
The problem in 🇪🇸 is that from the mid-70s, coach travel became faster than rail, which led Renfe to axe quite many mainline services, and close quite many line, including 3 transversal corridors iof nationwide interest.
One had to wait until 1993 to see the market share of mainline rail services pick up again...
@jon Also, it's beyond my comprehension why they are using a picture of a Swiss train in Switzerland if the article is not about trains in Switzerland...
@theseeduneed In a Telegram group of rail nerds we have a sort of ongoing “oh there's another wrongly chosen stock image" series going on. If you don't know what you're on about in your article, do you know enough about trains to choose the right picture? Doubt it.
@jon Yes, unfortunately those publishers don't care too much what their photo editors are doing. I mean, why would a photo editor need to be able to read if his job is about photos. And why would a journalist need to know about the railway system if he only writes about ticket prices...
As you said, everything fits together there. 🤷♂️
@jon In the meantime, there's a cheap overnight train from Paris to Perpignan which can be combined with a regional train ticket from there to Barcelona.
The broad problem isn't solved that way, but maybe it helps some people ITT.
@ljrk Or via Latour de Carol. But both of those have another problem: no through tickets, and some of the Cerbère-BCN, and ALL of the Latour-BCN trains do not show in international timetable planners…
@jon Are all trains full to capacity, including ones at less popular/favourable times of day?
To clarify: I'm in no way criticising your argument, just curious to find out, particularly as you've so much personal experience of European rail travel.
@adrianfry on the lines mentioned in the piece, yes, mostly. Any long distance France to a neighbour is full - and I mean trains full, not tracks at capacity. Tracks are nowhere near capacity.
@mule_du_pape off peak it’s nowhere near saturated. And SNCF’s use of rolling stock is v poor. If DB were planning paths it’d look a LOT different into Paris.
@pettter and sure, mobility for people on a limited budget matters. But rail’s modal share also matters. To get prices down you need capacity up as a matter of utmost importance at the start.
@jon As for "assuming the rail company will add more capacity", if it doesn't voluntarily it should be made to do so. By nationalising it, if necessary.
@jon OK, so that means there should be levers for political control, and less barriers to imposing democratic mandates than working through market mechanisms.
@jon Also, to be clear, the article states that the increased taxes on air traffic should be used to invest in the rail industry in order to lower prices, not that those price reductions should come about (only) through straight transfers to ticket prices.
@aurochs@pettter Depends on the country. Pretty much all long distance trains in France - that were the heart of our discussion - are compulsory reservation, so do sell out.
@jon@aurochs Also having gotten very delayed on an ICE somewhere in Germany (Erfurt?) because too many people were on it (thanks to previous delays and cancelled trains), you really can't cram however many people onto a train.
@jon@aurochs They got the police to throw off anyone with no valid seat reservations for that particular train. Never seen anything like it. I got to stay on more or less by sheer luck (I had a seat reservation for a cancelled train and had been specifically told to get on that train, but mostly the cops got told to get off the train just as they were asking for my ticket).
@pettter@aurochs It happens once in a while. But really, it's marginal. In France with a compulsory reservation system you just never see the potential customers, as they're put off already at the booking stage.
But imagine I must travel tomorrow - say to a funeral. I'd sooner be able to, and have to stand, than not travel at all. Germany would allow me the former, France would land me with the latter.
@aurochs@pettter Bit of both. They feed off each other. But more company policy really, as it's a way of maximising load on each train without needing to run extras at peak times - because you can go "sorry, all full”
Add comment