Love it when people argue that it takes 45 minutes to fly from Y to X. 45 minutes is roughly the time your plane is airborne. The whole process takes 3-5 hours door to door.

You can go from Paris to Stuttgart in less 3h 30min by train. No customs, no TSA, downtown to downtown.

Thats like 700km so in a proper high speed train it would be 3h or less from station to station. Thats probably faster than flying if you include all the boarding and travel to the airport.

In the US people will argue it's quicker to fly or drive than take the train then show up 2 hours early to be sure to make it through check-in and TSA security to be sure to make their flight on time. Then waste another hour waiting for luggage

45 minutes to fly, but god help you if you check luggage, might as well be all day at that point.

Even for very long distances (where flying is almost mandatory unless you are ready to spend weeks traveling) trains make things easier.

For example I'm living in a small village in the south east of France and I will be traveling to the carribean in summer for family, I will be walking to the train station is my village to take the train, 2 changes later I will be in London from where I'll take the plane to cross the Atlantic.

Same thing on the way back but with a night train.

The high speed Paris to Berlin train just started in December:

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2024/12/13/high-speed-train-from-paris-to-berlin-to-launch-this-winter-with-daily-connections-from-59

There are about 25 trains per day on the route, but I guess according to this American they're all empty?

I've been in Germany two years and gone to France three times by train.

I honestly don't think people appreciate public transit enough. Trains are the fucking bomb and if people could make trains and trams and buses a priority I think the world would be a remarkably more fun and enjoyable experience.

Vote for the political parties, even at and especially the local level, that want to put more money into public infrastructure focused around public transit. Cars and planes have their places, but they should never be the priority when city planning and a strong country is one connected by high speed rail and convenient, reliable public transit.

So... Fucking... American...

I've only ever travelled to Germany from France via train. I wouldn't bother flying,that's waaay to much of an effort

I had a US colleague stay with me in Ireland for a week and he was asking if it was possible to catch a train to England. It's amazing the geographic ignorance of some people and Americans seem to be especially afflicted. Maybe it's because the USA is so big, large cities so far apart, and public transport so terrible it doesn't occur to them that Europe is not the same.

One of the factors is that the US is surprisingly huge. It takes EU tourists by surprise that a quick jaunt from NYC to visit their friend in Chicago is several days by road (unless you drive like an American roadtripper for fourteen hours a day) moreover, there's just huge tracks of land featuring not-too-exciting vistas (unless you plan your road trip to feature pretty routes, in which case multiply the distance by 1.3), so for the short while that airlines were regulated and we weren't worried (yet) about the air-travel carbon footprint (Huge. Enormous. Colossal.) it made sense to fly everywhere in the US.

Now that it's insanely expensive and inconvenient to fly, and we shouldn't be doing it, it's time for the US to build HSR for realsies, if the automotive / fossil fuel industrial complex will let us.

Well, consider that most Americans couldn't show you France or Germany on a map.

I used to take the train from Wales to Scotland. I'd get on at my local station and change once about half way through the trip. On arrival I could walk to my flat. The whole process took about eight hours.

Once I flew. First I had to get a bus to the airport, arrive early for security theatre, eventually fly, land, take a shuttle bus to a train station, then take a train to Cardiff Central, then take another train to my actual destination. The process took about six hours and was utterly exhausting.

Just took the train from Frankfurt to Strasbourg.

https://int.bahn.de/en/offers/saver-fare-flexible-fare/saver-fare-europe-france

Nobody flies a train from Germany to France.

I have my beef with the DB, but their ICE trains paired with SNCF are nothing to complain about

I’d love to hop on a train for a trip like that. So much more relaxing.

Wait till this guy finds out you can take a train from France to England.

It's going to blow his mind

Let's just pretend the environmental impact is a negligible factor to save like 35 minutes on a 5-6 hour trip. Toronto - NYC, one way or another (have this guy ever been to an airport?).

Many short distance flights are business related but as someone who was working in an international corporation I can tell you there's plenty of business monkeys who fly simply for the prestige of it. They fly to attend meetings that could've been an email or a call just so they can pretend they're hot shit.

Massively disappointing.

I mean, it depends a bit. Toulouse to Rostock would be an annoying train ride. But Düsseldorf or Frankfurt to Paris would be kind of stupid to fly.

Greg is a fucking moron, plain and simple.

Having done both the flying and the high speed in a few routes in Europe, the overhead of flying is so much that for anything within about 1000km distance a high speed train is faster, especially because both the origin and the destination train stations are pretty much in the city center and have direct connections to the subway network so you almost always save time and hassle in just getting to the station from your actual origin and from the destination station to your actual destination on the other side, compared to an airport. This is especially so for budget airlines as they tend to use even more peripheric airports.

Further, within the Schengen space in the EU there is no kind of passport or security control, so in most of Europe you literally just walk into a train that happens to go to another country in just the same way as you walk into a train that happens to go to the next city over.

Even for larger distances when the whole trip door-to-door takes an extra hour or two due to doing it by train rather than flying, it's often worth it because the train is way more comfortable, with plenty of room and you can just get up whenever and go for a walk to the restaurant carriage and get yourself a drink or a light meal.

But yeah, beyond a certain point the train is not worth it anymore. For example Lisbon - Paris by high speed train would be around 6h on a straight line (if you could, which you can't because of the Golf Of Biscay) at 250 km/h whilst the flight is 3h, but of course, trains in Portugal being shit outside short commuter lines around the 2 major cities and the North-South axis, there isn't actually a high speed train to Paris or even to anywhere in Spain or even inside the country (fast trains at best, not high speed ones), so you have to take the train and a bus to the nearest point in Spain with a high speed train connection to Madrid and from there to Paris, so you're lucky if you do the whole trip in 17h.

The world will progress out of sheer spite for Americans and I wouldn't have it any other way