Time to move rail travel into 21st Century....

mart2929Sun 17/08/08 14:50

Aaaaaaaaaaagh! That's it. I'm travelling by air until the European railway industry grows up and becomes remotely useable.

I've just wasted 3 hours of my life trying to figure a way to get from London to Zurich without murdering the planet by carbon emissions.

In the end, flying is the only viable way of doing it. Do I feel guilty? Hell no: I've tried, I've given the railways the very best chances of rigorous timetabling to prove that they are worthy of my time, but alas they have failed on the two most important counts.

Using easyJet, if I leave my home at 14:35 on Friday 28-Nov-08, I can be in Zurich Hauptbahnhof meeting point by 20:20 the same day. My return journey would start at 19:30 and end at 23:30 on Sunday 30-Nov-08.

Using the railway, it is uncertain whether the trains will run at all. I would need to wait for a few more weeks before the railway timetables are available to enable internet bookings for 28/30-Nov.

Were I to leave my home at 10:50 on Friday 7-Nov-08, I would arrive at the same Zurich Hauptbahnhof meeting point 23:10. The return journey would require me to leave at 14:02 to arrive home at 23:35.

Train journeys should take longer than planes, that much is obvious (trains are slower vehicles). But the 2-hour waiting for connections is the logistical problem that eliminates trains as a time-effective means of travel.

But the real killer about this story is that most railway bookings seem to accept only 90 days notice, whereas an airline accepts up to 180 days or 356 days.

Clever airlines. Stupid railways. Taxpayer-funded, state-controlled railways, too, for that matter. Ah, that's makes them stupid and arrogant railways, then. Free public money means that they can afford not to care about their passengers and changing travel patterns within or beyond their country's borders. The evil "champions nationales" aren't yet dead.

And there's more. The railway journey cost considerably more than the flight. Today's all-in price for the return flight was £90. Today's all-in price for the return trains doesn't yet exist, but looks to be £145 minimum.

So the train would cost me 38% more money and 24% more time.

Doesn't look like a very good deal, does it?

And it's absurd. Why the greater time-cost? Airport security is a sinister, time-wasting, probably counter-productive, misguided, mainly theatrical, arguably sexist, visibly racist, dehumanising and profiteering process. Security has become a fraud that creates an artificial monopoly airside and thus creates a vested interest on the airport's part to waste more passenger time in opulent, expensive consumerist lounges. Railways have none of that. And still airlines are QUICKER AND CHEAPER than railways!!!

And there's more. Railways are substantially subsidised and controlled by governments. Airlines are substantially not. Railways have fixed routes; airlines do not. Set aside the ignorant stupidity of economic illiterates whittering on about how aviation fuel is exempt from taxes, and the comparison is crystal clear. Subsidised and socialised railways deliver a crap service and rip the taxpaying and fare-paying customer off.

(As if an additional tax on somebody else would make railway management wake up to 21st century! How childish!)

And yet, we vainly hope that railways will save us from carbon emissions and global warming.

How naïve.

If only we didn't give free money to railways simply to exist. The railways would need then to wake up and compete with airlines properly, if they want to survive at all. To match the same single-payment, point-to-point service that European short-haul air passengers rightly expect, railways would need to offer transparent, cross-network, cross-border, joined-up pricing and timetabling. And, because of European competition law, the railways would need to do all of this without appearing to look like a cartel. That is the level playing field that railways need to work on. So they should stop pissing their taxpayers' money down the drain and start doing their job properly. Governments should back off, instead of running their expensive toy train sets like voting fodder.

The European railway industry has a long way to go before it becomes a credible alternative to the airline industry. Let's hope that our fellow voters in European are able to exterminate the diabolical vested interest that greedily cling onto the status quo, for there seems no other catalyst for such long overdue reform.