cross-posted from: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/727
crossposted: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/665
Oh boy...
I just took the train from Switzerland to Italy. Can confirm, people do it.
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Wait till this guy finds out you can take a train from France to England.
It's going to blow his mind
"Trains don't float, IDIOT"
- Greg, probably
Greg is a fucking moron, plain and simple.
he's on twatter, so that's a given.
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.
And don't forget, airports all have to be on the edge of town anyway. So even if you're not in a small town, you're taking a train or a bus or a cab to the airport.
Meanwhile, big train and bus terminals can exist in the dead center of town. I can walk to the Empire State Building from Union Station in New York. But even one time, Gilbert Godfried suggests a picking up a connecting flight at the Twin Towers and everyone yells at him.
Once, I arrived in Chicago by train, and had time to wander around before my bus departed for home. I walked around for a bit outside of Union Station, scanning the horizon and trying to locate the Sears Tower. (Yeah, I know it technically has a new name.) I couldn't find it. Then, I realized that I had to look up.
That is, the train station is literally 1 block from the tallest building in the city. I so wish that the Borealis train came through here; it'd be just as fast, cheaper, and so much more relaxing to head down to The Loop for the weekend. As it is, I almost never visit Chicago because getting there is such an enormous pain in the ass. (Contrary to the popular imagination, it is a nice place. I've only been murdered there, like, three times, tops.)
Well ackchuwally you didn't consider me living in the Bay Area who can only get to SFO by car before my 17 hour flight to India. How do you think a train will help me there soygirl?
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.
I'm from Australia and wouldn't have been able to confidently say there wasn't a tunnel between Ireland and England. There are long tunnels in a few places and one there wouldn't be too surprising to me
I actually think that's a fair question, the distance between Ireland and Scotland is less than the English channel and that can be crossed by rail. If I were to travel to Japan or some other place that I don't know, then I'd assume that some of the islands are connected by rail and some aren't, so in a conversation it would be natural for me to ask the same question: can I go there by rail?
You live in a world with the chunnel. The odds that a similar passage between islands formerly of the same empire is not so remote.
Maybe. On one hand, I'm inclined to agree, but I also don't know how many of these sorts of tunnels exist. There's one connecting mainland Japan with Hokkaido too.
Edit: The Wikipedia page lists oodles of underwater tunnels, but most are well below 15 km long, with the channel tunnel at 50.4 km.
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If it wasn't for NI being somehow behind the times compared to both England and Ireland, there would be a chunnel between them.
I doubt it. The enormous cost of the chunnel made economic, as well as symbolic and political sense. Between ireland and UK it wouldn't.
Come to think about it, maybe now it should be closed
In their defense, I have no idea what the capital of Kentucky or Virginia is :/
PS: I don't know it for most states 🙃 actually, I didn't know California's, New York's or Illinois'...this is starting to look like a conspiracy to make your largest city not the capital, lol
As an American, neither do i. I was taught them but unlike STEM courses i would never use that knowledge in my adult life.
Meanwhile i knew there wasn't a tunnel between IE/UK.
Some of us are more worldly i guess...
Kentucky is Frankfort. Yes its spelled differently from Germany's one.
California is Sacramento, New York is Albany, and every once in a while the capital is the biggest or most important city like seriously, Philadelphia was nearly the nation's capital but fumbled even being the state capital.
Oh and ohio is fun here because Columbus has slowly grown to be the biggest city in ohio. Cleveland and Cincinnati are more historically significant while Columbus was just a big city focused on the university and business. But as the great lakes manufacturing and ohio River manufacturing fell by the wayside and Columbus kept growing it beat them out.
and yes it's spelled differently from Germanys one
That's because it's not named after the German one. It's named after "Frank's Ford" which is part of a creek in the area.
Some people say it's because there is a surprisingly large German population in the area, but it was already called Frankfort by the late 1700s when the large influx of German immigrants really started.
Who really knows haha
That's really interesting. That said, it's an unimaginably meh city. Like gorgeous to get to but it's there alright. Certainly is a city I've been to many times.
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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.
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.
I took an Amtrak from Quebec to Washington DC. The entire process was amazing. Hung out at the train station. Walked around on the train. Sat in massive ass seats. The bathroom was the size of a new York apartment. No TSA, metal detectors, overpriced food and drinks, getting blown up with ads.
Greyhound is unfortunately the next best thing if you don't live in a major city.
I feel so much frustration that driving and flying are the primary ways it travel in the US.
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This comment reminds me a meme about someone's European family visiting them in Vancouver, BC. The family decided that they wanted to go to Toronto for the weekend.
It's 45 hour drive between Vancouver and Toronto if you want to stay in one country. 41 hours if you drive through the States. It's almost 4 days by train.
The US isn't as huge as you seem to believe (or Europe not as small). Europe is not as square, so its land area is much smaller, but the distances are comparable.
A trip from Hamburg to Vienna is not that much shorter than a trip from NYC to Chicago, but it's easily done by train in Europe: Board the NJ491 at 8pm in Hamburg central station (in the city centre, no need to be there more than a few minutes before boarding), have a good nights sleep, get your breakfast served at your bed (in the comfort category), take a shower and arrive well rested in Vienna (city center, no need to wait for your luggage) at 10am the next day.
Admittedly, a lot of people do fly from Hamburg to Vienna as well, as it can be cheaper than the train due to tax exemptions for the airlines (not everything is perfect in Europe), or they just don't like sleeping in a train, but these trains are usually well utilised.
EDIT: The link to truesize doesn't seem to work correctly, here's what I meant to show: 
You're right about all that, but it's worth noting that U.S. population centers tend to be coastal. New York to Chicago is one of the closer city pairs between the 10 largest cities in the U.S. Here's the driving distance from New York to each of the other 9:
Los Angeles: 2800 miles (4500 km)
Chicago: 800 miles (1300 km)
Dallas: 1600 miles (2500 km)
Houston: 1600 miles (2600 km)
Miami: 1300 miles (2100 km)
Washington: 230 miles (370 km)
Atlanta: 900 miles (1400 km)
Philadelphia: 100 miles (160 km)
Phoenix: 2400 miles (3900 km)
Dallas and Houston are close to each other. New York, Philadelphia, and DC are close (and are already connected by the most popular passenger rail line in the US). But the others are all pretty spread out.
So the type of travel people might imagjne doing in the U.S. tends to be weighted towards pretty far distances.
That's a good point, the population in Europe is much more evenly spread. But that still doesn't explain why a train journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles has to be 12 hours long.
Also, I guess you guys do not regularly travel from New York to Los Angeles for a weekend trip, just as we Europeans don't usually do that with Stockholm and Barcelona (which is a distance the average European would also travel by plane).
We do however travel from Frankfurt to Strasbourg for a day trip, and of course we do that by train.
why a train journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles has to be 12 hours long
That's its own saga, with a bunch of factors specific to California politics (and national politics with funding and permitting California projects). The California High Speed Rail project intends to connect SF to LA in less than 3 hours (and the original 2008 plan aimed for a 2020 operational start date), but we'll see if that ever comes to fruition.
Also, I guess you guys do not regularly travel from New York to Los Angeles for a weekend trip, just as we Europeans don't usually do that with Stockholm and Barcelona (which is a distance the average European would also travel by plane).
One wrinkle in comparing things is that the US's cultural affinity is less tied to geographical proximity than in Europe. Obviously European villages and cities and major population centers were established long before rail, much less before automobile highways and commercial air travel (or even before global television broadcasts), so each local region will have its own culture and language.
In the U.S., with the population centers built up much more recently, cultural affinity between cities or regions is distinct from geographical proximity. So for many, a weekend getaway or a one-week vacation will tend to look to other similarly sized cities. One joke in the TV show 30 Rock was the idea that someone from New York would want to move to, or even visit, Cleveland. This is especially true for those who aren't straight white Christians, where much of the geographical footprint of the United States represents urban islands where you might feel like you belong, and where you'd want to hop from island to island rather than explore the vast areas geographically nearby.
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Several days for an 800 mile trip? Are the roads that bad? That is roughly the distance of Hamburg to Venice and that's a 12 hour trip.
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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.
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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.
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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
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You can go from Paris to Stuttgart in less 3h 30min by train. No customs, no TSA, downtown to downtown.
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