Europe’s “stone age” system of booking train tickets makes it needlessly difficult for travellers to avoid polluting flights, a report has found.
Booking equivalent train tickets is “difficult or impossible” on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, analysis from the Transport & Environment (T&E) thinktank shows.
Popular flight paths such as Lisbon-Madrid or Barcelona-Milan could not be booked from any rail operator’s website, the report found,
Lisbon Madrid by train is an idiot idea.
I think – haven’t checked – it’s because the Spanish network is a different gauge to the Portuguese one…..it takes under 6 hours to drive the same route.
I guess it depends on how complex the journey is whether it is in the computer or not.
I travelled all around Europe quite happily from Munich or Vienna provided that my destination was on a mainline. Crossing three countries was rarely a problem. Italy was pretty comprehensive too, come to think of it.
The Dutch ticket controllers can get a bit arsey sometimes and refuse to recognise Belgian sourced tickets.
“In the world we live in you can get pretty much most things, for better or worse, with one click,” she said. “When you can’t do that to travel by rail – despite people’s best intentions – we are not going to see the full potential being utilised.”
Because the governments run the railways.
National Express had e-booking back in the PC era. Book your ticket, print it out and show it to the driver. Because Greed Pig Capitalists both made booking more convenient and cheaper. More convenient means more people book, so more profit. Fewer ticket agents means lower costs, so more profit. The CEO improves the profits, gets a bonus and can spend his weekends snorting cocaine off models.
Airline bookings works because airlines want to sell tickets. They have APIs for booking agencies. And their systems can work out a route that might have some British Airways and a bit of Alaska Air. They didn’t need EU law about it.
Are the plebs making the wrong choices again? Many such cases.
The main problem with that route (and often a problem with trains) is the frequency of each train. The total rail time is about 9 hours, but you have nearly a 7 hour wait at Vigo Guixar for the train to Madrid.
It’s why “right size” transport is important. How many people want to do a journey every 15 minutes. If it’s a handful, taxi. If it’s 20+ coach. If it’s 200+ train. If you use the right form of transport, it can run frequently and cut connection times. There’s a direct Lisbon to Madrid coach about every 15 minutes that takes about 8 hours. If demand was higher, that would be 10 minutes.
And frequency matters, because of the connection problem. If you’re going from Santarem to Madrid, you only have a short wait at Lisbon for a Madrid coach. A car of course means a zero wait time. You get to an intersection and change road. But there are trade offs, like coaches are cheaper than owning and driving a car (depending on circumstances).
This is also one of the reasons that Concorde didn’t work as well as the planners thought. Because yeah, super fast to JFK. But if you wanted to go to Chicago, you then had to wait around for your connecting flight. A direct London to Chicago flight on a less sexy plane could do it quicker.
Or an hour and a bit on a plane.
By plane, yeeess….. butttt…. That’s flight time…
Airports are notoriously far removed from where you actually need to be, and involve getting there, checking in, checking out, and *then* getting anywhere remotely useful to you.
Funny how people *never* take that time into account in their “travel time”….
The coach operators cottoned on to this, and have their stops at major local public transport hubs and city *centers*.
Which vastly reduces the wait/transfer times to get where you *need* to be.
My experience is mostly Germany currently, but it’s *far* easier and cheaper, and most of all *FASTER* to take FlixBus and local trains to get pretty much anywhere you want than either fly or take an international train.
For the re-enactment festivals that I do, a plane wouldn’t work anyway…. Nor would an international train..
When you’re hauling between 50 to 80 kilo’s of kit, flying is right out, and the international trains *are not* set up for large luggage anymore, and haven’t for decades.
And that’s not even getting into the bit that I’m transporting *weapons* when I’m travelling to/from an event..
The paperwork for flying alone……
There’s a range where other options are cheaper because of fannying around, but fannying around is a static. Same amount of it if you’re flying to Rome or Paris. But the flight bit of Rome is faster than train. So London to Paris, Brussels etc is faster by train, but once you get to Lyon or Zurich, air goes past it.
The other option is to go as you sleep. London to Amsterdam is 11 hours on Flixbus, but it arrives at 8am.
But how many people want to travel from Madrid to Lisbon? Do the Spanish even know it exists? Unlike most other countries’ maps, which usually show what’s the other side of national frontiers, Spanish maps just show a blank to the west
The problem with nearly all public transport lobbyists is that they have no idea about what people want. They just want more trams and trains everywhere. You have to get down to who goes to a place and why do they go there, what needs do they have.
Like this East West Rail project is just retarded. Oxford and Cambridge are both tiny. Oxford has almost sod all commerce. It’s students and tourism. And what commerce it does have is out at Headington and Cowley. So the 90 minute train becomes 120 minutes once you add in a bus. At which point, driving is quicker, more convenient and probably more reliable. Most of the “science jobs” people talk about are in the shire, around Abingdon and Harwell. And if you want to get there you take a train to Didcot Parkway. The whole reason that area got the science jobs is that it’s near a station and you can build there like you can’t with Oxford’s dreaming spires and Greenbelt.
If driving Cambridge-Oxford takes a reliable 2 hours then the roads must be much better than when I had to make the journey several times a year.
Be that as it may, the new railway line is a daft idea. Who the hell wants a transport mode vulnerable to the bloody rail unions?
The only merit I can see is that a railway line that isn’t a London line has its attractions – but that’s not enough to outweigh the defects.
Looking on Google Maps, it’s predicting 2’10 via the A14, 2’05 via the M25 right now. But I guess earlier mornings may be slower. But the way around that is to go the night before. How many people want to do this trip? Is it more economic to build a train for them, or for them to pay £60 for a Premier Inn, and be there fresh in the morning for their talk?
“The only merit I can see is that a railway line that isn’t a London line has its attractions – but that’s not enough to outweigh the defects.”
You do get people riding the Settle to Carlisle railway for the view, but well, for how much of the year? How much will they cough up? Trains cost an absolute shitload of money to run. That’s not just about useless government, but that everything is custom, track has to be kept in tiptop condition, drivers are not interchangable. Coaches are production line, tolerant of conditions and any bloke with a PSV can get in one. They’re easier to change routes as demands change. National Express run coaches to Silverstone to the Grand Prix. 3 days of the year. The following month they can add more coaches for people wanting to get on a flight to Magaluf. In winter, they can run lots of people to Bath for the Xmas market.
There’s Manchester, Birmingham too. I guess Scotland too. But outside of those 3 destinations it’s barely worth it. So, London to Bristol, Bristol to Birmingham make sense. Bristol to Salisbury? Waste of money.
My regular travel is 102 miles door to door. It’s just on that cusp between driving and train, but: THERE IS NO TRAIN. So, I drive. Going by train involves a 30-minute bus jouney to the train station, a 4-hour circuitous journey to a bus stop for a 30 minute wait for a 1-hour bus journey, and it all has to fit in a contrained part of the day to all match up. I can do a full day’s “stuff”, jump in the car at 9pm, get home at 11am, go straight to bed, and be available for “stuff” immediately the next morning.
The train+bus journey is almost the same in monetary costs, but takes about four or five times as much time, and an entire day of not being able to do anything else.
With buses and coaches you can run them at much lower levels. So you can have more direct journeys. Swindon to Cirencester takes as long by train as by bus, because you have to go to Kemble, then wait for a bus to Cirencester.
And that still doesn’t fit journeys to really small places. You can’t realistically run a frequent bus up to the Roman villa at Chedworth very often.
The problem with nearly all public transport lobbyists is that they have no idea about what people want.
Quite. I do know a lot of Spanish, here. I don’t know any who’ve been to Portugal or speak Portuguese despite it being literally just down the road. I can’t remember the last time I saw a P registration plate here. And if I saw one, odds on the driver would be Brit. You’d have to ask Tim about E plates in Port, but I haven’t seen many. And again, if you did, they probably wouldn’t be Spanish.
It is quite weird. I’ve lived on frontiers. Up on the Belgian/French one the two countries blend. Go into the supermarket car park in Bailleul & half the cars will have red & white plates It’s the opposite in Iepres (Ypres). French side of the border a lot of French speak Flamand (Flemish). Same’s true on the Fr/De frontier.
So who’s bitchin’ about Lisbon/Madrid rail connections. Ajit Niranjan. Figures. Sounds very Spanish/Port dunnit?.
“It is quite weird. I’ve lived on frontiers. Up on the Belgian/French one the two countries blend. Go into the supermarket car park in Bailleul & half the cars will have red & white plates It’s the opposite in Iepres (Ypres). French side of the border a lot of French speak Flamand (Flemish). Same’s true on the Fr/De frontier.”
The one I know well is Luxembourg which is full of French people driving over for cheap fags and petrol.
If you go to Trier-Euren which is the Luxembourg side of the Moselle at Trier the main drags has some huge filling stations that are usually full of Germans topping up.
East-West isn’t particularly about the ends, but all the intermediate journeys. Both Oxford and Cambridge are being throttled by their green belts, so there’s lots of travel from the surrounding areas.
I know people that have commuted from Bedford and MK to Oxford, that could be a train instead.
On the Cambridge side, there’s lots of houses being built at Tempsford and Cambourne.
The Science Arc stuff is nonsense, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be well used if they ever get it opened.
“I know people that have commuted from Bedford and MK to Oxford, that could be a train instead.”
Which part of Oxford was that? If it was the centre, Didcot is 17 minutes away by train from Oxford by train. Season ticket price is £152/month. House prices are £362,000 average. Barely more than Bedford.
House prices are also far cheaper than Oxford (£582,000). If everyone is gagging to work in Oxford, why is there such a huge differential for a 17 minute journey? Why is the train fairly quiet when I’ve been on it in the morning?
Look at a map of Oxford, and around the station. To the west is Botley which is shops and houses. To the East is the centre of the city, which is some university buildings, used by students mostly living in the city, little of which has much density, various museums, tourist tat, dreaming spires, shopping.
The parts with high densities of workers are in Headington (hospital area), Cowley (Mini + Oxford Business Park) and Littemore (Oxford Science Park). I know there are problems with Headington and Cowley. Mini recruit for people in Swindon to go work there every day, because of how expensive it is. The hospital sector struggles to recruit people because you get the same pay in Oxford as Newport (no London weighting, but far more expensive housing). Swindon has loads of jobs in clinical research and manufacturing, because Oxford’s a joke.
The New Shiny High Speed Bollocks is going to go right past Headington, and then, people will have to take a 30 minute bus back. Milton Keynes to the John Radcliffe will be 75 minutes. Who wants to commute 75 minutes per day?
I don’t need to look at a map, I live here.
It was commuting to the city centre, which is where most of the University is. People don’t immediately move when they get a new job or have the location of their job as their primary reason for where they live.
The roads are choked with cars at commuter o’clock, there are plenty of people trying to get into the city.
The Science and Business parks will hopefully be sorted when they reopen the Cowley branch to passenger trains.
The car may be faster door to door in the best case, but many people are willing to trade a slower journey if it’s more reliable. You also can’t go for after-work drinks if you have to drive home.
“It was commuting to the city centre, which is where most of the University is. ”
How many people is that per day, on average (deduct all the holiday periods).
“People don’t immediately move when they get a new job or have the location of their job as their primary reason for where they live”.
Where you choose to live for where you choose to work is your problem. You want to live in Bedford and work at the Andrew Wiles building, getting there is your problem. I’d like a Maglev to get me to the Royal Opera House from the end of the road. Can I have that too?
“The roads are choked with cars at commuter o’clock, there are plenty of people trying to get into the city.”
Oxford is choked with cars, because Oxford has bad roads, because Oxford doesn’t want to knock down all the old shit like Carfax Tower and Christ Church that get in the way of a dual carriageway. That redundant aesthetics constrains the roads to single carriages. And I’m find with Oxford making that choice, but it has consequences, and that is, roads are going to be shit. And as the people of Oxford make that choice, they can suffer them.
“The Science and Business parks will hopefully be sorted when they reopen the Cowley branch to passenger trains.”
Oh good. So having put a stupid choo-choo in the wrong place, we’re going to spend even more money putting another stupid choo-choo in place.
This sounds like a great idea, but of course, once you get to Oxford station, you still have to wait for the Cowley choo-choo. How often is that going to run, and is it quicker than someone just driving?
“The car may be faster door to door in the best case, but many people are willing to trade a slower journey if it’s more reliable.”
What train is more reliable than a Toyota Corolla? Show me this unicorn.
“You also can’t go for after-work drinks if you have to drive home.”
You can get a taxi. If that’s Bedford, a taxi to Bedford. Don’t live so far away if you don’t like it.
Ferdinand and Isabella called…
Yeah. I had to explain to my Brasilian why Brasil exists. The Pope drawing a line on a map in Rome in about 1520. She’s a Primeira from Salvador. Brasil’s first city & capital when S. America was still an island. You would have thought the Spanish would have got over it by now.
I assume you are referring to The Treaty of Tordesillas which was 1494 – just two years after Columbus’ discovery of the Americas. That’s what inadvertently gave Portugal all of Brazil. They we not wasting time in those days! Though maybe there are other treaties to which you refer.
I believe there were several. The one I’ve referred to defines a north-south line. Obviously superseded or Amazonia & Acre would be Spanish & Uruguay & Paraguay Portuguese.
I’m going to France later in the year. Flying looks iffy now so I looked up the train. Book tickets to Paris on the Eurostar app, use the IDF Mobilité app to get across to Gare Montparnasse and the SNCF app to book the TGV. Ok so it’s 3 apps but it’s reasonably easy to do.
Off to the Loire? Charente? Bordeaux? I’ve done all 3 modes and generally like the overnight ferry and drive best. Arrive into St-Malo fresh as a daisy and then it’s about a 4 hour drive to La Rochelle. But west side of the UK works out like that.
(also allows you to stop off in Sancerre and Cognac)
We’ve done that with the kids back in the day but we’re older ( and a bit richer) so I’m no longer into long drives like that.
Fair enough.
The other option depending on where you are going is Eurostar to Lille, TGV from Lille to Bordeaux. Which stops at St-Pierre (basically Tours), Poitiers, Angouleme and Bordeaux. It might be cheaper or have better times, and it’s also an easier transfer.
Personally, I’d go to Bordeaux or Bergerac by plane. Bergerac is great. The whole terminal is about as big as a hypermarche. I’ve been off the plane and in a car in 20 minutes.
The OuiGo (chap TGV) option from Montparnasse to Bordeaux is €25 each way*, if the timing works out.
* It’s variable pricing, but that’s what we paid. Consider upgrading to the ‘plus’ option, which gets you an assigned seat and more than hand luggage for €37.
Blimey that’s cheap.
It’s France, so a little bizarre. EU demands that rail is open to competition, so they’ve created two SNCF subsidiaries running essentially identical TGVs (one’s painted blue, like Lumo on the ECML) with one at ‘full price’ and one ‘low cost’. TBF other nations are getting in on the act, the Eyeties run Frecciarossas between Paris and Marseille.
Last year I used Lumo back from Newcastle, IIRC that was £40 (with a railcard).
Iffy how? Surely you could fly wherever it is you are going in the time it takes to get to Paris?
Yes, if they are still flying to Bordeaux or Bergerac then. Unless the French do a RMT/ASLEF, the train is lower risk and I don’t really mind the extra journey time. We’ll see the countryside from ground level rather than 35000ft.
My bro has just had a BA flight to Vienna cancelled. No explanation, but he’s thinking concerns about fuel availability.
difficult for travellers to avoid polluting flights
Are they going to publish which are the polluting ones?
a report has found
Oh, a report you say?
16 hours? I booked a flight to Beijing that took that long.
Is there really a “think tank” piddling away on this type of crap?
Doubtless, they’ve got a government grant to do so.
I bet there’s a dozen.
I think it’s because the Spanish network is a different gauge to the Portuguese one
[anorak mode on]
Almost. Iberian broad gauge is ~5’6″ compared to standard 4’8½”. Portuguese and Spanish gauges differ* by a few mm, but not enough to prevent trains running through with no need to slow to change gauge. New (high-speed) lines in both countries are being built to standard gauge. Trains running through to France need a gauge change, which with modern rolling stock can be conducted on the move (up to 50kph).
* The story is that the 19th century Spanish chose a gauge of six Castilian feet (about 11″), while their Portuguese oppos chose five Portuguese feet (about 13″).
[anorak mode off]
These people always fail to understand that people don’t do things because of *one* consideration. No one’s gonna take a train for 16 hours if they don’t have to. So it would have the be significantly cheaper than driving or flying.
Back in the mid 1990’s I used to take a bus from San Diego back home to Tucson on the weekends. A 13 hour bus ride. Its a 3 hour drive. But I took it because I did not have a car and it was cheap.
Then I looked at airline prices. 1 hour, twice the cost of the bus ticket. So I started flying their because I could afford the time/money trade-off.
Some people prefer air travel, some prefer not. We have choices – isn’t it great! For anyone actually wanting to travel from Madrid to Lisbon by rail, here’s how you can do it, explained by The Man in Seat61
https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/madrid-to-lisbon-by-train.htm
tl;dr – page with details on trains, timetables, prices and upgrades over the next few years which will reduce the total travel time.
“Incredibly, there is now no direct train between Madrid & Lisbon, two adjacent EU capitals. The Trenhotel Lusitania sleeper train was temporarily suspended in March 2020 during the pandemic and Renfe (Spanish Railways) used this as an excuse to discontinue it permanently.”
That is a good use of a crisis. People will kick up a stink about cuts to dumb things, but once gone, won’t really care.
Sleeper trains are stupid. We only had them in the past because aircraft hadn’t evolved or were too expensive. The problem with them is that not only are you running a train that can’t carry a lot of people as you need bedroom space but also, you have hotel costs. The only argument is environmental, but you can insist on Lisbon to Madrid running on SAF and it would be cheaper and more convenient.
As BiS asks, how many people want to do this? Prices of flights are not that huge, and they go every 30 minutes. So, about 400 people an hour. Which is less than half a train per hour. If there’s flights going off every 10 minutes to meet demand, it might be worth blowing money on a faster train.
And you have to get into who is going where and why. The whole “but you don’t have to muck about going to the airport” thing works if you assume people go from city centre to city centre. I think this was the flaw with Eurostar and HS1 numbers, that everyone assumed huge numbers because the Heathrow to CDG traffic would switch, But of course, not everyone using that flight was in the centre of London and they weren’t all going to the centre of Paris. If you live in Reading and are going to see a client near Paris, you are going from home, and Heathrow is no more hassle than St Pancras. And your client might be in La Defense, but they might also be a Champagne house in the sticks, at which point, picking up a car and driving from CDG is faster than getting from Gare du Nord .
Sleeper trains are for tourists. The Caledonian sleeper isn’t used by businessmen, unless you count Highlands & Islands MPs who (a) don’t have to pay, and (b) use it because their constituents like it.