Sleeper trains are making a comeback in Europe, allowing existing infrastructure to be put to good use. So why hasn’t North America made any progress on slee...
Because they would be privatized and maintained by the cheapest ass companies and they would do a shit job of maintaining the cars and there’s no way in hell I’m sleeping in a public bed that is poorly maintained.
Interestingly, the video goes into exactly why there are so many quality sleeper train offerings in Europe compared to North America. In North America, most of the tracks are privately-owned freight rail, and the rest is a patchwork of local monopolies of passenger rail (e.g., Amtrak, Via Rail, regional/commuter rail, etc.), and none of them are being made to cooperate or allow interoperability.
Whereas in Europe, having so many countries in such close proximity, they were forced to make their systems interoperable and standardized and allowing open access (much like roads are open access to drivers or buses), so what you get is many state-run operators and private operators in a competitive market without local monopolies. The result is high competitiveness, high standardization, high interoperability, and thus high quality and availability of service for competitive prices.
Not really. The tracks can only take so many trains, so one more operator just pushes other trains off the track. Which might be fine if it meant that the trains that did run were hyper-competitive. But they’re not, because the train companies tend to get a near monopoly on a particular kind of service (fast trains vs stopping trains, for example). And if there are two companies running the same service, you’ll only have half as many trains to choose from for the return journey. It’s a ridiculous thing.
I mean… it’s literally not - we obviously have some fundamental misunderstanding between us and neither of is going to get our point across to the other, so I’ll simply agree “The railways are currently shittier than they should be” :)
Because they would be privatized and maintained by the cheapest ass companies and they would do a shit job of maintaining the cars and there’s no way in hell I’m sleeping in a public bed that is poorly maintained.
Interestingly, the video goes into exactly why there are so many quality sleeper train offerings in Europe compared to North America. In North America, most of the tracks are privately-owned freight rail, and the rest is a patchwork of local monopolies of passenger rail (e.g., Amtrak, Via Rail, regional/commuter rail, etc.), and none of them are being made to cooperate or allow interoperability.
Whereas in Europe, having so many countries in such close proximity, they were forced to make their systems interoperable and standardized and allowing open access (much like roads are open access to drivers or buses), so what you get is many state-run operators and private operators in a competitive market without local monopolies. The result is high competitiveness, high standardization, high interoperability, and thus high quality and availability of service for competitive prices.
Not really. The tracks can only take so many trains, so one more operator just pushes other trains off the track. Which might be fine if it meant that the trains that did run were hyper-competitive. But they’re not, because the train companies tend to get a near monopoly on a particular kind of service (fast trains vs stopping trains, for example). And if there are two companies running the same service, you’ll only have half as many trains to choose from for the return journey. It’s a ridiculous thing.
I should point out that I am speaking from the UK, which privatised its trains with indecent haste and far more destructive enthusiasm than many other EU countries. But EU-required rail privatisation is a fucking disaster. It makes no sense.
Public transport is best run as a monopoly and is too vital a part of economic infrastructure to leave in the hands of idle shareholders.
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UK railways are nationalised? Are you from 25 years in the past, or 5 years in the future?
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In the UK, as in the United Kingdom? Our railways were privatised in 1997. They’ve become so bad, there is talk of renationalising them.
Technically, some of our railways are owned by the governments of other countries (I think France and Germany amongst others) - but not our own.
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I mean… it’s literally not - we obviously have some fundamental misunderstanding between us and neither of is going to get our point across to the other, so I’ll simply agree “The railways are currently shittier than they should be” :)