Deutsche Bahn’s Europabahn Study
Deutsche Bahn released a study three days ago proposing to build a Europe-wide network of high-speed trains. There aren’t too many details – the fully study PDF is corrupted (update: this direct link works) – but we can already learn a lot from the proposed map, which is available. I’m glad that proposals like this are out, but this one reminds me of the recent proposal for a massive expansion of the Berlin U-Bahn, which leaves a lot to be desired, comprising both necessary priorities and questionable lines; this time, there are some priorities that should be included but aren’t.
The map is clearly intended as a Europe-wide network. For reasons I don’t quite get, Britain and its under-construction High Speed 2 system is not included – it’s not an EU or Schengen member but neither are Serbia and North Macedonia, and meanwhile, Northern Ireland is included.
In some places, the proposed lines are taken straight out of current proposals. This is the case in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France: on the French map, lines that are in active planning like Bordeaux-Dax and Toulouse-Montpellier/Perpignan are visible and so are lines that are stalled like Marseille-Nice or the Paris-Orléans-Lyon relief line.
There’s little to comment on in these places, save that some of the international connections are underbuilt under current plans. It’s frustrating that the current plans include a connection from Bordeaux to Basque Country and thence Madrid, and a more direct connection from Madrid to Pamplona, but not the short connection from Pamplona to the French border for faster Paris-Madrid service; French and Spanish trains are fast and these two cities, the two largest single-core regions in the EU, should be no more than 4.5 hours apart via the most direct routing. Italy is also, equally frustratingly, missing a fast connection from Milan into Switzerland, hooking into the new tunnels across the Alps with additional under-construction fast lines on the Swiss side; this way, the route from Zurich to Milan has an orphaned-looking fast section in the middle.
In Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, the map looks taken from existing proposals as well. Finland’s system is based on existing proposals. Their benefit-cost ratios were assessed to be underwater earlier this year (using atypically low estimates of the travel time elasticity – Helsinki-Tampere looks like they’re estimating -0.17, which is ridiculous; try -2), but this doesn’t mean they won’t happen. Sweden recently decided against a domestic high-speed rail system, but this again may be revived. Czechia is planning its own system, with international connections. But farther east, the lines get more fanciful – the Romanian and Hungarian networks look pretty overbuilt relative to the sizes of the cities in those countries, which aren’t growing.
And then there’s the German core. The domestic and international lines here mostly look like a very extensive proposal. Practically every city is on the map, to the point that there’s a 300 km/h line from Leipzig to Chemnitz. Some of those yellow lines on the map are already in planning, like Augsburg-Ulm, Hanover-Hamm, and Erfurt-Fulda.
But then there are the missing ones. Fulda-Hanau, currently on the planning board, is for some reason omitted. Berlin is getting two new high-speed rail lines to the south, one to Dresden and a separate one to Görlitz (district population 248,000), but nothing to Halle and Leipzig, even though that would also speed up the trains to Munich. This can’t be about the false belief that a four-hour trip time is good enough and there’s no point in speeding it up further, because then why would they include a spur to Chemnitz? It’s a three-hour trip today with a 40-minute transfer at Leipzig; the time saved from speeding up Leipzig-Chemnitz is less than what could be saved just by timing the connection better, let alone by doing that and also speeding up Berlin-Leipzig.
The international connections are pretty good. There’s finally a fast line to Zurich, plus two to Prague, plus an all-fast connection from Munich south across the Alps. Paris-Frankfurt is on the map, via Mannheim. The slow section to the Belgian border is fixed; the Netherlands gets four distinct connections, of which two I do not get (the three southern ones can be consolidated to one without taking a huge hit to trip times).
But then those international connections mostly just feed existing or planned lines. Thus, the fast line from Munich to the Austrian border is not accompanied by speeding up the Westbahn; Salzburg, per DB, should get fast trains to Munich and the rest of Germany, and Linz should get fast trains via two different lines, but then Vienna should stay connected by a medium-speed link.
And yet, at least in and around Germany, it looks like DB is proposing too much, not too little: cities like Szczecin, Bremerhaven, Kiel, Rostock, Chemnitz, and Görlitz are too small to be worth building a dedicated line to. Either send an ICE at lower speed from the nearest large node or run slow trains and try to time some connections. It’s proposing a 6,000 km network for Germany; I did a fair amount of crayoning in 2021, and got to somewhat more than 4,000, including international connections. The current network, including lines that shouldn’t be changed like Berlin-Hamburg or that are under construction like Karlsruhe-Basel, is around 1,700. So as with the Berlin U-Bahn map, it’s best to think of the current proposal as about half good lines, and half things that most likely shouldn’t see the light of day (Chemnitz, again).
I suspect the reason small cities like Kiel are included is that high-speed rail plans in Germany face constant criticism by technical railfans who think that small cities generate more traffic than they actually do. Part of it is that railfans and Green voters take the train at far higher modal split than does the general public, and thus use the train to get to places where everyone else not only drives but will keep driving even with better frequencies and connections. The same group also doesn’t mind sitting two hours longer on a train than at TGV speeds. Thus, rail advocacy in Germany kneecaps itself by insisting on the least cost-effective treatments. DB may be responding to such advocacy by proposing high-speed lines even to cities that are far too small to justify such connections, to preempt any criticism that cities like Görlitz are left out.
And this is sad, because most of the cross-border connections on the map out of or near Germany are really solid, and unfortunately underrated in current planning. I hope DB takes them seriously enough to commit to partnering with the other-country railway (SNCF, ÖBB, etc.) and building them, rather than shoving them below the priority level of a high-speed line from Berlin to Rostock.
Pedestrian Observations 
The study URL is here: https://www.deutschebahn.com/resource/blob/10878412/fadda7e9a3233aa044fa73fada00bf18/Studie_Metropolitan-Network-_A-Strong-European-railway-data.pdf
Thanks. Still a bad study – it’s like the fluff from America 2050 and megaregions. The part where Spain is projected to double p-km – which it is already doing to a large extent through lower prices – is especially bad. Do they not think Paris-Madrid is going to get a lot of riders?
Probably part of the reason is that it is currently impossible to book a single Paris-Madrid ticket so they don’t know how many people do the whole journey.
The other part is that the traffic volumes on the existing Perpignan-Barcelona line are undoubtably poor given the terrible service levels.
Every time I suggest running even a basic Fort William or Thurso quality service you get scared about support it – even though you are undoubtably less conservative and much more internationalist than people working in the rail industry.
As per https://ressources.data.sncf.com/explore/dataset/frequentation-gares/table/?sort=-totalvoyageurs2017&disjunctive.nom_gare&disjunctive.code_postal&q=Lille.
Lille got 7.8 million riders a year in 2019 at Lille Europe, so given the Paris Lille trains go into Flanders the total high speed passenger numbers must be close to 15 million riders a year in 2019, of which perhaps as much as 1.5 million of those are British people changing from the Eurostar to other trains at Lille.
So small places with good service can have very high ridership. And Lille is nice, but isn’t exactly a tourist centre.
The reason why UK’s HS2 isn’t on the map? The EU, like most, doesn’t have much confidence it will ever get built and has lost interest. Instead it is looking east. See the connections to Lviv thru Poland and the spurs in the south-east from Bucharest to the Ukraine border plus Chisinau in Moldova, just a hop-skip to Kyiv and Odessa, respectively.
They haven’t even included the British lines that are already over 190km/h. That includes London-Bristol, Birmingham-Leeds-York, London-Glasgow, London-Edinburgh and parts of the London-Sheffield line.
And certainly the Old Oak Common-Birmingham leg of HS2 will be built – even if it stops there – because that is under construction.
Yeah, I think they just left off all UK lines, but included EU lines that extend beyond the EU. This can also be seen in Eastern Europe.
Either they didn’t engage the UK, or they did and the UK in its post-Brexit strop did not respond.
The UK wouldn’t want to engage. As long as England is treated as a colony by the UK system its going to reject contact on the basis of equality. Foreigners have to be suborned to compensate for abuse at home hence Eurostar security theatre.
Of course its stupid given the UK is now an EU client state with semi-partitioned territory as the map’s Ireland wide line shows. Abuse begat abuse. But hey Serbia, Belarus, Russia, and Turkey are in their own self-destructive boats as the map shows.
More concretely its about infrastructure. Ireland has a common rail standard. The UK has loading guage troubles and is deliberately building HS2 to not be easily connected to HS1.
Ukraine, Moldova’s show aversion to think about how to deal with the gauge issue, they don’t have Rail Baltica plans.
To be honest for people who live in London or who are familiar with it the route along the Euston road is basically decent enough.
@ Mathew Hutton
I think Phoenix Place is / will be the encouraged route.
“decent enough”? The cost explosions is such that if we had Spanish construction costs we could have had a a station between St Pancras and Euston that connects directly to HS1’s track (not the platforms) while tunneling to Old Oak Common. German costs we could have had some sort of people mover between the 3 stations. We’re not even building an all weather pathway between them.
The Euston Cross proposal has been roundly dismissed as unworkable.
It is in unworkable in “Great Britain”. Because the relevant institutions are terrible.
Its also completely workable in a world where Nagoya and Ueno stations exist. But experts of the British rail industry continually tell me Japanese operations are impossible before telling me some racist bullshit about the Japanese and then calling me a Neoliberal Nazi (Gareth Dennis syndrome) for daring to question an industry that has managed to fuck-up what is the easiest country in the world for passenger rail.
The thing is the main thing you want to avoid is for trips beyond Paris to have to change trains in both London and Paris. Given Paris has less conveniently located terminals you may as well change in London.
I really don’t think a once a day direct service from Manchester-Bordeaux really buys you much over a 20 minute service from Manchester to London and a 2 hourly direct service from London to Bordeaux.
Manchester-Bordeaux would be silly. Manchester to Paris/Randstad/Rhineland/Lyon on the other hand.
Transfer penalties aren’t just the time you take to change, there psychological burden from having to navigate through a busy station and absorb timetable risk.
That’s why critics of the Chuo Shinkasen point to the 5-10 minute transfers planned at Nagoya and Shin-Osaka station given how deep the lines are going to have to be. Trains relative advantage over aerospace is ease of use.
Constructing a giant cavern in an area of complex subterranean structures is a non-starter – platforms + throat you are talking a 800m*200m box. The markets and operating requirements either side are totally different (25m end door stock on HS2, 20m 1/3 2/3 stock on HS1 domestic; 2x200m trains on HS2, fixed 400m trains through the Chunnel), they are completely unsuited to through running. Euston Cross is dead horse. No point flogging it.
Direct trains running everywhere = ease of use is a misnomer. Ease of use is consistent legible timetables. 3tph Manchester – London meeting 2tph London – Paris is good. Loads of 2- or 3-hourly direct services with confusing service patterns is bad.
My list of destinations that I think deserve service every 2 hours:
* Amsterdam
* Köln/Frankfurt
* Strasbourg/Munich
* Zurich
* Geneva
* Turin/Milan/Florence/Rome
* Marseille/Nice
* Lyon/Nimes/Montpellier/slow to Barcelona
* Barcelona/Madrid express
* Bordeaux/Toulouse
* Paris (hourly)
So a good spread of destinations around Europe within a days train ride from London – and that covers the 6tph that apparently you can fit through the tunnel.
You’re always going to struggle unless you can massively increase the service level to also serve destinations in the UK directly – especially when that list would at least need to include:
* Bristol/Bath/Reading
* Milton Keynes/Coventry/Birmingham/Wolverhampton
* Manchester
* Liverpool
* Leeds
* Newcastle/Darlington/York/Peterborough
* Cardiff/Newport?
* Bedford/Sheffield/Derby?
* Ipswich/Norwich?
* Brighton?
Matthew Hutton:
Nah, and not just for Londonphobes like me. The thing is that they aren’t even planning an airport-style travellator between the two. No, you’ll either have to walk it (and one wonders at how easy that will be, this is London after all) or, as seriously suggested by the pollies, take a cab!
I have not seen a convincing explanation as to why a tunnel connection between HS2 to HS1 just north of Euston-St Pancras is “infeasible”. It is about 300m. I did read some twittering about disturbing the Camden Markets but don’t understand how a tunnel does that; even if it is required for access during construction it seems a minor thing. (And if Nathan road in Hong Kong was kept open to traffic during construction of the cut-and-cover MTR … ) Instead an ≈8km separate tunnel all the way to Old Oak Common (OOC) in west London is the only ‘feasible’ solution. I suspect it is our old friend security theatre that is responsible; a thru-train would require Customs & Immigration at all northern terminals of HS2 a continental train picks up/puts down pax. To the Brit mind OOC thus makes sense, sort of equivalent to forcing all pax off trains at Lille, marching them thru British C&I then back on to (the same train), adding at least an hour to the journey.
Concerning the Paris thing. I’ve said it many times, who would not want to transit in Paris? Even for just a few hours. Seriously. It’s not London(stan) or any other big city you may be perfectly happy to bypass (those who sneer at this are not on these TGVs to begin with). Further, there already is the alternative of InterConnexion-Est at CDG & Disneyland; if there was significant demand to bypass Paris there would be many more trains using that route; significantly those trains only operate for specific short seasons during summer (for Avignon) and winter (for the Alps ski season) and actually I understand Eurostar has cancelled a lot of them (presumably due to covid). That bypass option remains eg. for HS2 trains carrying Brits to their favoured Costa Brava etc destinations, or Barcelona & Madrid in future. One can also imagine night trains from north of England/Scotland heading to those destinations (or further east in the EU) for which a stop and C&I interlude would be … ridiculous.
Plus, there are 4 other HSR terminals/routes out of Paris beyond Gare du Nord, so to really solve this issue for Paris would be a truly humungous underground Hauptbahnhof for Paris, requiring maybe 50km of deep tunnel and station of Chatelet proportions, of which Alon has fantasised previously. Great fantasy but we all know it ain’t happening. Compared to a 300m single tunnel linking HS2 to HS1.
Happy to agree to disagree on the rest but I wont accept that Eurostar running a sleeper train with no beds in the winter and running a summer train you had to get to St Pancras for 6:30am to catch counts as trying.
I was actually thinking about travellers from oop north taking even longer journeys to Spain. Overnight would be perfect for Barcelona and Madrid, maybe even to Seville (or Milan, Rome etc). No one is going to do that with some 90 minute forced march thru C&I in the middle of the night. And I say that as someone who has done it endlessly–on the night train+ferry before Eurostar. And Paris-Madrid night train where one became vaguely aware of some kind of train change (for the train not the pax) in Irun or somewhere in the deep of the night. Anyway, that is all now infeasible fantasy.
For Avignon you took the 7.15 am train at St Pancras and arrived in Avignon at 2pm just in time for lunch in the grand Place. (It’s a bit of a cheat due to the time diff. but who cares.) Incidentally it arrives at Avignon Centre rather than Avignon TGV, so it was just deux pas, a wonderful stroll. And this train (used to) travels thru France in daylight, Burgundy, Saone and Rhone valleys into Provence. By the end of lunch you’re dreaming of how to relocate to France … but that’s another infeasible fantasy for Brits these days (actually maybe not much change except in mindset and paperwork).
I think any Euston – St Pancras physical connection will be contingent upon what they decide to do with Crossrail 2’s Euston / St Pancras station. There’s a chance the Crossrail 2 station could be up-specc’d to include a link outside of its own paid area, but you are likely to still be talking about a big escalator down and a big escalator up. Or Crossrail 2 gates be programmed to let ticketed passengers through.
@michaelj if the overnight train left London at ~11pm to midnight that would still leave plenty of time for people from the north of England to get a late night express train after work and still catch such a train. I mean you can easily leave Manchester at 7:55pm, get to London for 10:14pm and then get a sleeper at 11-12 midnight from St Pancras.
Now back for sure is trickier. But I don’t think a sleeper that arrives in Lille at 7am, then you do the passport check and then get to London for 7:30am (thanks to the timezones) is that terrible – you’d still be in Manchester/Leeds for 10am.
@Matthew Hutton
No wonder you Brits have such a mess of a transport system today.
One doesn’t want an overnight journey interrupted by an off-train passport check. It’s not like a plane change on an international trip where they take care of the luggage etc. No, you have to schlep off the train with all your stuff, queue for 90 mins and schlep back. Probably between separate train stations! (Well, no, because the OOC to Euston part “won’t be completed before 2041 at the earliest” … as today another HS2 CEO departs, with his £700k salary, second-highest paid public servant …)
But that’s ok. If/when the UK begs to be readmitted to the club it will have to join Schengen and the Euro, so no probs. Until then you’re not even on the map.
@michaelj, don’t forget the channel tunnel! While theres capacity I think they should try running some good service. However once thats at capacity you want to run trains full through it.
And theres a political cost to removing the X Ray machines and passport checks – which I doubt any UK government will want to pay.
Having to go to speak to older moderate voters and justifying why you’ve moved the border to Greece when we are an island is going to be super hard. Far harder than us having a smaller rebate.
Matthew Hutton:
I don’t disagree. The Brits (well, mostly English) have found it impossible to correctly calculate the true Cost-Benefit of belonging to the EU and Schengen. That’s why I made the comment. And I think it’s true that those (and joining the Eurozone) will be preconditions on rejoining. Yeah, it’s going to be a long wait filled with a lot of pain (ie. cost).
@Matthew Hutton As an alternative, what if Eurostar ran 2 tph to Brussels, with timed connections from there to Germany and the Netherlands? You could achieve 2 tph to the major northern European destinations that way.
Well, they’ve eliminated (or made automatic) two of the four steps in boarding a Eurostar in London, though faintly ridiculously only for business class! (Is that really enough to speed the whole trainful of pax? Seems very British … for a French company.)
Even worse, the standard on the map for “Today’s fast stretches” is “Today’s cruising speeds” of >140kph not 190kph. By that standard all of the East Coast Main Line, Midlands Main Line, West Coast Main Line, and Great Western Main Line would qualify, plus other connections here and there. They all certainly have better infrastructure than Cherbourg-Caen, which is shown on the map despite having a fastest average journey time of just 91kph. British trains on those routes will average over 91 MILES per hour, not kilometers, up to 98mph/158kph for the fastest London-Edinburgh service.
Slowish regional lines like Cardiff-Manchester or Banbury-London do 90km/h average all day every day.
Cherbourg-Caen is 140 km and the timetable says the trip takes 71 minutes. That would make it 118 km/h. How did your calculation result to 91 km/h?
A ticketing website that said the trip was 105km and 69 min fastest trip. This is clearly wrong, as a check on a maps site says the distance is 124km road.
Note that 118kph is still below the 140kph threshold on the proposal diagram.
Why should DB care about rail intrastructure in provincial isolated backwater Britain?
Why should anybody who doesn’t live there? (Aside from providing cautionary examples of what not to do, that is.)
well, all its main railway lines are well over the contemptible 140km/h standard. I really think a lot of commenters should go back to the top and read carefully; DB’s map puts anything that makes 140km/h/70mph equal to 300km/h TGVs. The motivation is pretty clear; DB missed the bus on high speed, has none, nothing, zip, zilch, zero, is pitifully staggering after the competent Italians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen. sad!
HS2 is under construction. Yes it could still be cancelled but it’s not a paper project any more.
More likely it’s absent because it won’t run any through services into the EU. HS1 does, a Dublin to Belfast line would, but HS2 is just in Britain.
Not just UK. Turkey and Russia also have high-speed rail lines that aren’t on the map.
It shows UK is now as peripheral, as non-European as Turkey and Russia. Isn’t it what the Brits want? Isn’t it what the Brits deserve?
I’m Jewish, not Christian. In Judaism, people say there’s no heaven or hell – just one afterlife where all you do is study the Torah, and then whether it’s heaven or hell depends on whether you’re a devout Jew.
By analogy, what the Brits deserve is full integration into the Union, Schengen, and the euro, and abolition of the House of Lords. Throw in an EU Army replacing the British Army and Royal Navy and Air Force; British sailors will crew carriers with names like the Poland and the Italy.
In my opinion the concept has a gap in Eastern Germany. I would rather build a v 300 line from Leipzig and Dresden to Linz and Munich via Hof and Regensburg and only v 200 lines in Czech Republic (which like CH is too small for real high speed) in order to keep Dresden-Vienna shorter via German language space. Otherwise there could be conflicts with conservative Czech people who dont want to be surrounded again by Germany and Austria. Saxony is a stronghold of AfD, the question of inclusion and exclusion of that party is unresolved and this might explain the strategic gaps here. But high speed rail it could liberate that area of Germany. For westernization strategy, it is much more important to build high speed rail from Dresden to Nürnberg than to Prague (Erzgebirgstunnel) and Visegrad. For socially justice it would also make more sense to build Leipzig – Chemnitz – Prague axis as there is no line yet, different to Elbe valley line from Dredsen to Prague.
“It’s frustrating that the current plans include a connection from Bordeaux to Basque Country and thence Madrid, and a more direct connection from Madrid to Pamplona, but not the short connection from Pamplona to the French border for faster Paris-Madrid service”
The project from the Spanish ministry includes connecting Pamplona with the Basque Country, but still the intention is to connect Paris – Bourdeaux – Madrid going through Valladolid and Burgos, so no need for Pamplona:
Click to access 230306_ppt_corredor_atlantico.pdf
(sorry that I didn’t find it in english)
Yeah, but it’s faster via Pamplona and the extra connection would be short.
How much faster?
The collinearity relationship is clearly Paris – Bordeaux – Dax – Basque Country – Valladolid – Madrid. That corridor will be built anyway (there’s a domestic business case). An Irun – Pamplona route would be additional, not substitutional. It would require 60km of base tunnel but only deliver a 20km shorter route. The journey time difference would be immaterial; you are simply moving trains from one line to another (there’s no additional capacity) – this is not enough marginal benefit to justify the marginal cost. Paris – Madrid would be well into the wrong side of 4 hours anyway – rail would still get a respectable market share but probably not overwhelmingly so. I suspect the market size will be 1tph rather than 2tph – that’s not enough traffic to justify its own 60km base tunnel.
I am doing a holiday by plane to France in October and the door-door travel time will be at least 10 hours – and that assumes we can get our bags and pick up a hire car in 25 minutes which is probably a fairy tale.
The reason it is so long is because we wanted to fly cheaply and didn’t want to stay over at the airport as that is expensive. That really limits your options as there aren’t that many midday flights that aren’t really expensive.
Even for business if you send someone on an 7.5 hour train ride from London to Barcelona – well at least they can do a full days work on the train vs very little of any value during the half day a flight takes.
Business will not send people on a 7.5 hour train if there are faster options. You can fly that trip in less time – that is time your employees can spend with family, or in the office. Unless the cost difference is substantial (unlikely, airplanes are cheap at that distance). Companies generally just pay for whatever their employees book – there may be rules, but no company will force their people to take the train when a much faster plane exists.
Okay, there are exceptions, but most companies understand that employees value time at home, and so will book them on a faster trip if the cost isn’t unreasonable.
@Henry Miller
Matthew Hutton is correct on this. But the differences are even more profound than either of you suggest. The line about spending more time with family, and especially in the office is very close to 100% b.s. The preparation for a business trip is often pretty frantic the day and night before. By contrast to the crazy disruptive private car/taxi to get to airports then endless queueing for ticketing, security and boarding etc (sometimes squeezing in some overpriced horrible airport food) high-speed train travel is a dream. You can read any number of testimonials–and I personally know it to be true–that the train with those blissful, calm hours is one of the most productive environments one can find. Especially compared to the office where all the usual crap gets in the way. On the train you have no interruptions by others, by other obligations or meetings, phone calls, emails* etc and put some genuine ‘quality time’ into your final polishing & editing of your presentation or strategy, speech etc. knowing you have the time and calm to do it properly. As the PR line goes, “priceless”. It’s the only mode of travel by which you arrive more relaxed than you began the journey.
BTW, some people will travel the day before so as to have that same calm time in a hotel room, either the night before or the morning before their meeting etc. But, again read the testimonials, it is nowhere near as good as being on that longish HSR train journey (hotels are filled with distractions from other people, landlines, mini-bars, actual bars & restos, on-demand tv and other unmentionables).
(*this remains true notwithstanding high mobile connectivity today; ie. it remains fully acceptable to push all that b.s. away during the journey in the same way one does it during an air journey.)
Of course I am not denying that many so-called business managers, especially American, think in the fantastically narrow terms that Henry Miller suggests. But they are wrong. James D. Watson, (Nobelist for the DNA double-helix) once claimed: “It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.” It is extraordinarily difficult to achieve that state today but curiously the high-speed train provides a temporary respite from the ‘over-employed’ status most professionals experience today. Having a comprehensive HSR network linking all the major centres within the EU would be a considerable productivity boosting thing.
Doing London-Barcelona in a day involves getting a taxi very early in the morning and getting back very late at night. So its expensive, its not particularly great for a family life, not particularly good for work productivity and is very draining.
Yeah technically you get an evening with your family on day 0 with flights but you need to go to bed early anyway and you will disturb them when you get up at 4am.
I’m someone who often travels long distance by train for business. I have told my superiors I am no longer giving up weekends, so now I plan on-site visits for Tuesday to Thursday. Gives me all Monday and Friday for travel (and be back before beer-o-clock on Friday).
And then I just take my time getting there. Taking a train to Vienna from Zurich, for example, and of course booking a business class seat.
I think Alon’s proposed route could make sense for capacity reasons in a future where the current route through the Basque coast becomes saturated from regional and freight traffic, which hopefully it will 10-15 years from now.
However it’s politically impossible in the current environment. Even if the suburban NIMBYs on the French side were crushed, it’s important to remember that the reason why Spain under both right- and left-wing governments is (asymptotically) funding the Basque Y is mostly as pork barrel to secure the votes of the MPs from the PNV-EAJ, i.e. the right-leaning Basque nationalists. And when (if) that’s finished, what they want next is an East-West link connecting Bilbao to Pamplona, not a North-South base tunnel of very little nation-building value. (The left-leaning nationalists oppose all of the above, on a pastoralist NIMBY basis now rationalised as Greens-style organization-instead-of-concrete contrarianism.)
The longer, more expensive Central Pyrenees Crossing is probably more feasible, actually, but of less value for Paris-Madrid passengers unless you also punch a 300 km/h line between Toulouse and Clermont-Ferrand…
Question from my ignorance on the total numbers.
For trips longer than 5 hours, could HSR in Europe try to compete with the plane through low prices even if the total door to door time is worse? Maybe with very long trains once a day or on specific days a week? I remember some articles from you in the past on how bad was market segmentation because actually the marginal train-km is quite cheap, the expensive thing is the infrastructure and it’s stupid to leave it unused.
Lately I was wondering that Spain gets a lot of flights from England, France, Netherlands… In many of them the high-speed train may take longer than the plane, but how big is the difference? (especially if they improve the commercial speed going through France). Low cost airlines were a game changer 20 years ago, but the price of flying is going up lately, and it should go up in the long term. Barcelona/Madrid – London/Paris/Amsterdam bring millions of passengers after all.
Probably Flixbus and European Sleeper know the market better than me, but I’m thinking of trying to attract a big chunk of the general vacation travellers, not just the adventurous backpackers. Or maybe the numbers don’t add up?
The least risky thing you can try is to run a train from Brussels and Lille to Milan and Barcelona that leaves Lille at 10am, 12 noon or 2pm to meet the Eurostar from London.
High-speed rail lines and trains are usually expensive and that doesn’t seem to fit well with ‘competing through low price’. And to beat Ryanair & Co. while taking days longer, you’d probably need to pay something to the passengers.
Very long? Longer than the platforms, so that they block the station throats?
Or very long runs? Very long train runs cause logistical problems, because you have to organize cleaning and maintenance far from home, and you might end up with losy turnaround times (the 55min-turnaround-with-an-hourly-interval problem).
How many planes are there undrway each day and how many trains would one need simply to have enough capacity to capture a big chunk of the general vacation travellers?
Alon what do you think the Chinese HSR example offers as an example for Europe, good and bad? I mean it has a network with both extremely strong lines (Heibei-Jiangnan-Pearl River) and utter dud ones (Tibet/Xinjiang)?
I think the politics and completely different governance/consultation requirements and timescales just don’t compare.
I don’t disagree there, its much easier given the high population density (even higher weighted population density) aligned on huge river valleys as wells a single national area. On the other hand it is proof of concept. Do you have any info on how Yunnan or Jilin/Heilongjiang services have fared given they are closest to the problems that Balkan and East-of-Warsaw Europe services face?
If China wants to do a vanity project it does a vanity project. It can call on the resources of the majority economically productive regions to build political lines to Xinjiang / Tibet, and to be fair the economics/politics of building your first modern strategic railway is a bit different to building HS2 when you already have a 200km/h railway. And then there’s no real media channel for the coastal provinces to grumble about its taxpayers’ money being squandered like Northern Europeans like to moan.
To be fair, the EU isn’t without its political projects. Some stretches of Spanish HSR have questionable economic value but they got built at a time EU money was aplenty. That said, most of these were short branches to otherwise well patronised trunk lines (like the Huesca spur) – I don’t think any of the trunk routes radiating out of Madrid and Barcelona are too contentious.
I suspect the Basque Country – Zaragoza – Valencia line, if ever built, will have similar economics to something like Budapest to Bucharest. I think such a corridor would have do well to have half the traffic intensity as Madrid – Barcelona, but still might be considered a sensible investment. I think a single Budapest – Bucharest line (rather than the two shown on the map) with a mix of upgrades and cut-offs targeting a 4-hour journey time might still represent a good investment.
Spain’s issue is that its construction costs are so low that it managed to build the longest high-speed rail network outside of China on a significantly smaller budget than that of the TGV or NBS networks (the latter two cost about the same). For the same reason, Madrid casually got itself a longer metro network than Paris – when you can build for 50M€/km, you can support ridiculous-looking lines like MetroSur.
How much of Spain’s slower construction cost can be explained by general lower price/wage levels though? I.e. are we comparing pure monetary figures or adjusted for PPP?
I always adjust for PPP, and the correlation between GDP per capita and construction cost per km is about 0.23 and all of it is due to the tendency of high-cost developing countries like India and Bangladesh to build elevated lines, and once you correct for that the correlation drops to about 0.
The main effect of Southern Europe’s somewhat lower GDP per capita is that Northern Europe refuses to learn from it, whereas the things Northern Europe does fine, like Takts, Italy is slowly adopting for its own regional lines due to cultural cringe.
As Alon explained many, many moons ago, “general lower price/wage levels” often translate into lower tax earnings and smaller government budgets, so that they spend the same percentage of their wealth on it.
I wish it were the same percentage of wealth. The issue is that developing countries have the same average costs as developed ones in PPP terms, so they’re a much higher share of their wealth – and most of them are building really inefficiently, for example using security theater and high fares as a means of keeping out poor people (e.g. India).
Hmmm. I guess Europe and China are similar in that there’s a core-periphery dynamic with a contiguous rich, dense core with profitable intercity trains (Western Europe, Eastern China), and a poorer periphery that for political reasons must be drawn in. On the other hand:
1. China has fewer, larger cities than Europe (and this goes back to preindustrial times).
2. European inequality is a lot lower than Chinese inequality – Czechia can self-support, Poland may be able to as well, and then it’s just some links to Ukraine and such that need a subsidy.
3. China barely has regional rail.
4. China doesn’t have the issue of cross-border rail problems.
I’d definitely agree 4. is probably the biggest obstacle. I’d also have 5. which is the strength of freight rail in China compared to Europe, which is downstream of 4. Opportunity costs are lower of line duplication compared to Eastern Europe.
2. ah so you’ve mostly discussed HSR viability in terms of the gravity based model. Do you cases where “sure you can subsidy if you want” like Ukraine?
China is just different. Apart from economical and political issues mentioned above, one fact usually neglected in such discussions is that China’s national rail operates both European style high speed trains and North American style bulk trains, the latter being much more profitable than the former. There’s a EU-wide research project called Shift2Rail. Yet China has actually been able to shift freight transportation from roads to rails in recent years via increasingly stringent environmental policies. Increasing freight volume creates both chronic congestions and much needed revenues to the national rail. Thus, HSR projects in China usually bring significant indirect benefits by replacing fast intercity trains with slower freight trains on legacy lines.
The Lanzhou-Xinjiang HSR is a good example of this. Travel demand along the silk road corridor is nowhere close to justify a HSR. However, removing fast intercity trains from the legacy Lanzhou-Xinjiang line has created much needed capacity for coal and grain trains. The section from Lanzhou to Zhangye, damaged in a 2022 earthquake, reopened earlier this month. Since then,10 long-distance intercity services have been redirected to the HSR, which, in turn, increased the number of freight trains running in and out of Xinjiang by 22. Freight revenue alone was able to cover costs of the HSR. It’s clearly sustainable as long as frieght demands remain steady.
“is just different” that’s true but also not true. The EU is an Empire of Nation states and US/China are nation-state empires*. The latter will always find it easier to integrate rail standards across its territory.
Freight needs long (1000km plus) corridors where its potential speed and labour cost advantage can tell against road and shipping. To match India/US/China of freight mode share the EU would need to get to the Urals and replace Russian guage. And yes full HSR relief lines getting the blockages in central Europe (i.e. Germany sorted). All difficult but doable.
*India is somewhere between those two, but more like the latter for rail purposes.
Europe needs to start using automatic couplers like the rest of the world. Break in gauge isn’t as much of a problem with containerized freight.
The part of Europe with break-of-gauge – the former USSR and its borders – is the part with the highest modal split.
Partly because they can run long trains with couplers the rest of the world has been using for a century. Regauging a few lines into Western Europe, for agricultural products from the steppes, if they even want to bother to do that, makes more sense than reguaging all of the former Soviet Union.
The continental-scale freight trips within Western Europe – trans-Alpine freight and the trains in Sweden and Finland – have modal splits approaching American levels. It really is a matter of the shape of the continent more than anything, and secondarily really poor international integration on the French side (I think also German?)
Nobody, except clueless railfans, would consider converting the former Soviet Union back to mid 19th Century technology.
North America decided on a coupling standard, an automatic one, 125 years ago. The Soviet Union decided on a very similar one 100 years ago. The Europeans haven’t and they are still coupling and uncoupling cars with labor intensive chains. Assuming the buffers are compatible. Which can’t haul the kinds of loads automatic couplers can.
As far as I know there are no common carrier freight railways using AUTOMATIC couplers. Please correct me if I am wrong!
They didn’t use electricity much on the railroads in the 1880s. Or air brakes.
Allow me to introduce the UIC central coupler. This for freight trains, Schaku for passenger trains.
Ahhh, so we have successfully refuted the claim that “The Europeans haven’t” “decided on a coupling standard, an automatic one”. Thankfully nobody mentioned any requirement of it acually being used.
Which Schaku exactly? So far, every model of multiple unit has its own bespoke dimensions for its kind of Scharfenberg coupler, and loco-hauled wagon trains (where it would matter) haven’t been seen equipped with Schakus in the wild.
according to the Wikipedia page it’s obsolete.
You’re not wrong. But you also should reconsider whether it’s profitable to feed trolls.
…the route from Zurich to Milan has an orphaned-looking fast section in the middle.
And hilariously, north of Zurich seems to show an HSR line up to Stuttgart — by way of Konstanz, no less! Considering how neglected the line on the German side of the border has been for decades (through Singen, not Konstanz, I might add) and, after essentially forgetting about the southern connection into the new underground station of Stuttgart 21 when the project was planned, the Intercity Zurich-Stuttgart is now scheduled to be severed from the station for a decade or more while a new tunnel gets built, this is pure fantasy.
It’s also hilarious that the creators of this plan “forgot” the obvious HSR connection in Bulgaria to meet Turkey’s line from Edime to Istanbul that’s currently under construction.
Very interesting study. In Germany it looks as though everything I would propose is there. I suspect the ‘design speed 300km/h’ for the yellow line should be taken with a huge pinch of salt. Knowing Germany (and other countries) when it comes to the actual day there will be a lot of 230-250km/h mixed traffic lines and existing lines upgraded to 200km/h, but in the right locations that is still fine.
A few interesting things worth mentioning specifically (I’m probably reading the map too literally, but then if they’ve drawn certain lines in very specific ways there is probably a reason):
– Nuremburg – Munich gets completed. Is there an Ingolstadt bypass, and does the line approach Munich from the east?
– Completing the Stutttgart – Munich line. Do I see an Ulm bypass? I think Augsburg should be bypassed as well. Stuttgart – Munich ought to become around one hour.
– There’s Frankfurt – Wurzburg – Nuremburg, which is good
– There’s Hamburg – Hanover – Duisburg. Would Hanover be bypassed?
– Wolfsburg – Hanover gets sped up (reasonable to assume it’d be a 300km/h line given the base is mostly 200km/h).
– There’s your prized Lorraine – Frankfurt line, so there you go.
Beyond that, yes, there’s a distinct smell of ‘shit let’s make sure no-one in the arse end of the country gets upset because they are missing out’ about it. Beyond the obvious political ones – these deserve special mention:
– Hanover – Leipzig via Magdeburg looks optimistic
– There’s a Hamm(?) – Frankfurt direct line. I can’t work out what it’s for other than duplicating lines that I don’t see as being at capacity
In terms of international connections:
– There’s Berlin – Poznan connecting with planned Poznan – Warsaw. I suspect a high degree of watering down of this route to upgrades and cut-offs.
– Interesting that Berlin – Wroclaw/Katowice/Krakow is envisaged as via Goerlitz rather than via Rzepin.
– Nuremberg – Wels via Passau also feels optimistic
– Munich – Wels via Salzburg and not via Salzburg is surely going to be rationalised?
Neither Ulm nor Augsburg will be (nor should be) bypassed between Stuttgart and Munich — those are decent-sized cities that are well-served with high-speed connections. Hell, DB built a new station for its just-opened HSR line from Stuttgart to Ulm in a town with just over 2000 people (Merklingen) to serve those few thousand more in that sparsely populated region of the northern Swabian Jura.
Then they will be bypassed between Brussels and Munich by the Sprinter trains. 😀 Once high-speed rail reaches far enough, there will be enough trains to have multiple stopping patterns without hurting frequency too much. (But it requires Deutsche Bahn to learn doing it.)
And the more smallish towns (<1 mio. 🙂 ) you skip with bypasses, the more time you save in the long run, like Brussels – Munich one hour faster.
I’m pretty sure DB only built it because the state put pressure onto them and/or ordered regional trains to stop there. Notably, only RE trains stop there, no ICEs. (And it’s serving as a bus feeding and park&ride station for a wider catchment, not only the next door population. (bus network, newspaper article suitable for online translators).
Merklingen looks like a classic NIMBY sop, a bit like Haute-Picardie.
Rural stops can get good traffic with a decent service. Plus they help you with levelling up.
Tweedbank – a village of 2k in the Scottish Borders – a region of 115k – still managed 420k passengers a year pre-Covid. And the only place that line goes is Edinburgh.
Now they run two trains an hour on that line which helps. But still you can see whats possible.
The two stops on the LGV Sud Est in France both get pretty respectable traffic numbers too given the size of the places near them.
Stuttgart – Munich wants to be one hour and bypassing Ulm and Augsburg is the only realistic way of doing it. With better separation of national ICEs and regional expresses you can significantly increase the frequencies of services at Ulm and Augsburg to Dutch levels.
I think Baden=Wuerttenberg is unusual in that a lot of places don’t have a direct service to Stuttgart so ICEs need to serve Ulm to avoid too many interchanges. Part of the reason is electrification, and this is being rectified on the route to Memmingen. What you want to be able to do is to run regional expresses from Memmingen and Aulendorf all the way to Stuttgart, which would allow ICEs to skip Ulm.
Of course, Memmingen and Kempten are in Bavaria, which probably explains why things stop at Ulm …
If the network I’ve crayoned is built and the ridership behaves as my model predicts, then Cologne-Frankfurt can expect a traffic density on the order of 150 million passengers, necessitating relief lines. But Hamm-Frankfurt wouldn’t really do much – from Hanover, it’s always going to be faster to go via Fulda if Fulda-Hanau is sped up; Hamm itself is a small city that shouldn’t even be a knot given that Dortmund is right there and is at a better distance from Bielefeld. Most of the contribution to this projected density on the Cologne side is from the Netherlands, Belgium, and London, so a relief line would have to start from Brussels.
Cologne – Frankfurt is still only an 8tph route though e.g.
– 2tph Cologne – Frankfurt point-to-point (of which 1tph extend to/from Brussels)
– 2tph Duisburg – Frankfurt point-to-point (of which 1tph extend to/from Amsterdam)
– 2tph Cologne – Munich via Stuttgart
– 2tph Duisburg – Munich via Wurzburg
All services call at Frankfurt Flughafen to provide interchanges for additional journey opportunities.
Siegburg/Bonn, Montabaur and Limburg Sud do provide some timetabling challenges over what would otherwise be a uniform 300km/h railway, but planning for 8tph should still be an absolute doddle.
Agreed that from Hanover it’s always quicker to go via Fulda.
Why would you run services Brussels/Amsterdam-Frankfurt instead of Bru/Am-Munich? Granted Cologne-Frankfurt will be the heaviest trafficked section, and Low Countries to Munich is a longish link, but it is still only about 850km; for a 300kph line to average 210kph express and complete the journey in 4 hours is reasonable and should generate ridership justifying direct service. Compare to the NEC at 735 km; no one suggests running trains Boston-Phila, or that the NE Regional trains from Boston to Richmond/Lynchburg/etc. are poor routes.
Worse, your plan has only 2tph Frank-Stutt-Munich, even though depending on who you ask Stuttgart is the same size or slightly larger than Munich and greater Stuttgart possibly as large as Frankfurt. This should drive both more trains to Frank/Munich and also support extended service from Bruss/Am; the Low Countries to Stutt is about 600km, right in the heart of prime HSR distance (compare to Paris-Marseille at 660km or Tokyo-Osaka at 515km).
Also, why would you run a separate service pattern from Duisburg, it is almost a suburb of Cologne only 72km away. Better to start all intra-German service in Duis, with the branch being trains
Dortmund-Wuppertal-Cologne and on. Bringing service to both ends of the Ruhr is far more valuable, given that the Ruhr metro area is about the same size as Berlin or Frankfurt.
A far better service plan at 8th is:
2tph Brussels-Munich
2tph Amsterdam-Munich
2tph Dortmund-Munich
(all via Cologne-Frankfurt-Stuttgart; Dortmund to Cologne via Wuppertal)
2tph Duisburg-Munich
(via Frankfurt-Wurzburg).
no one suggests running trains Boston-Phila, or that the NE Regional trains from Boston to Richmond/Lynchburg/etc. are poor routes.
Some of the Virginia trains originate/terminate in Springfield. The demand is west and south of New York so there will always be things like the Keystones. They don’t terminate in Lynchburg anymore, they terminate in Roanoke. In 2120 it may make sense to skim off a trainload or two of New Englanders going to New York where they swap with Philadelphians.
Frankfurt Hbf isn’t on the way to Munich. Cologne/Duisburg trains to Munich turn right after Frankfurt Airport. Brussels to Southern Germany is realistically only a 1tph market. Between Frankfurt and Munich, Frankfurt is the obvious choice. In my utopian world the Brussels – Frankfurt service would come from London. From the hourly Brussels – Frankfurt train, there’s same-platform / cross-platform interchange at Frankfurt Airport for 4tph to Munich, which is good enough. Frankfurt – Munich via Stuttgart gets its own 2tph trains (I didn’t mention them because they were out of the scope of the Cologne – Frankfurt corridor discussion).
Cologne to Frankfurt/Munich trains can only be fed from the west. Running trains from Duisburg or Dortmund with a reversal at Cologne Hbf destroys capacity. Duisburg trains are really for the benefit of Dusseldorf which is economically just as strong/important at Cologne. Dortmund – South Germany would have to be via interchange at a Rhine station. Cologne – Wuppertal – Dortmund corridor would have a high frequency of trains from Cologne – Berlin and Cologne – Hamburg trains alone; running South Germany services beyond Cologne to Dortmund would just lead to excess capacity.
“Frankfurt Hbf isn’t on the way to Munich. Cologne/Duisburg trains to Munich turn right after Frankfurt Airport.”
Frankfurt Airport is all of 8.6km from Frankfurt Hbf, and there are tracks directly connecting the two. Frankfurt is definitely on the way to Munich, both geographically (given the terrain) and economically/socially (given Frankfurts size). Current track layout is not optimized for through running at Frankfurt, but it can be done, and in the context of a “Europa Bahn” should be a prime infrastructure focus. Even a sub-optimal reversing movement at Frankfurt shouldn’t be discounted given its size/importance.
Cologne-Frankfurt-Stuttgart-Munich is as linear a corridor as polycentric Germany has – with Cologne representing Rhine-Ruhr you have four of the five largest metros and a third of the German population (more if you include Rhine-Neckar). All about the same distance apart as Washington-Boston or Paris-Marseille (longest path of travel distance Dortmund-Munich, accounting for the non-flat terrain and zig-zagging along the rivers). Just link the four cities with a high quality HSR line so a train that serves one serves them all.
“Frankfurt – Munich via Stuttgart gets its own 2tph trains (I didn’t mention them because they were out of the scope of the Cologne – Frankfurt corridor discussion).”
This is absurd. Stuttgart is 375km from Cologne, no more than 450km from the rest of the Rhine-Ruhr, with hourly direct trains today, and in the future Europe-wide HSR plan you expect everyone traveling between them to transfer at Frankfurt?!?! I know that all good networks make use of and ensure high quality transfers (see Switzerland) but metros of 3-5M people get direct service. Poor-quality-American-rail Amtrak is still smart enough to run the Harrisburg trains through to New York instead of forcing a transfer at Philadelphia, but what you are proposing is like stopping the Washington DC trains in Philadelphia for a transfer to NYC.
Stuttgart is basically the same size as Munich (by some counts slightly larger!) and 200+km closer to Cologne, but you are planning direct trains Col-Mun while making Stutt transfer?! Crazy!
“Cologne to Frankfurt/Munich trains can only be fed from the west.” “Dortmund – South Germany would have to be via interchange at a Rhine station.”
What nonsense is this? You can get an ICE direct from Dortmund to Munich, today, and they all stop in Cologne.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Munich,+Germany/Dortmund,+Germany/@49.8001052,6.631022,7z/data=!4m15!4m14!1m5!1m1!1s0x479e75f9a38c5fd9:0x10cb84a7db1987d!2m2!1d11.5819805!2d48.1351253!1m5!1m1!1s0x47b91760bff07a11:0x427f28131548750!2m2!1d7.4652981!2d51.5135872!3e3!5i1?entry=ttu
“running South Germany services beyond Cologne to Dortmund would just lead to excess capacity.”
See above on RhineRuhr-Frank-Sutt-Munich as a single corridor. The Ruhr(represented by Dortmund) has as many people as Stuttgart or Munich with an economy the same size as Berlin’s. Direct service from there to the 18M people living Frank-Munich isn’t excess capacity it IS THE CAPACITY. The whole point of HSR is to connect large metro areas like this. Dusseldorf and Cologne each have slightly larger economies than the Ruhr and combine for more people, but that doesn’t make Dortmund/the Ruhr small.
Obviously Cologne – Munich trains would call at Stuttgart. I’m not going to unbuild Stuttgart 21 am I.
What Germany needs is frequency. The only way to increase throughput at places like Frankfurt and Cologne is to streamline train movements and eliminate reversing moves. It would be possible to run from Frankfurt 8tph to the West and South, and 12tph towards Fulda and Wurzburg but only provided the two sides work independently and each side has simple consistent turnaround moves that can be organised as parallel moves.
When you point-to-point markets sustain 2tph frequencies, minimising journey time is more valuable than additional frequency. There’s no point increasing Cologne – Munich frequency from 2tph to 4tph when you are increasing the journey time by at least 20 minutes. You are not increasing capacity – you are just mixing everyone in the same set of trains and causing unnecessary churn.
From what I can see Germany is so wounded from the ongoing Stuttgart 21 trauma and such an endeavour will not be repeated again. Frankfurt-Mannheim is planned to lead out of the western side of Frankfurt Hbf and no version of any theoretical Frankfurt 21 would match the journey time of ‘turn right after Flughafen’. Frankfurt 21 is completely unnecessary – far from a prime infrastructure focus it would represent a colossal distraction that could sink the whole concept of Europa Bahn completely.
Whose best at frequency? Us and the Swiss right?
Well theres a heck of a lot of regional/long distance UK journeys that have 2tph frequency. But very little with more than that. More is basically just London-Manchester and London-Birmingham before Avanti became awful.
Now sure Reading-London has more as does Manchester-Leeds. But thats a combination of routes.
The king of frequency is the Dutch. They keep their network simple and make it easy for passengers to change trains. When you want to operate a high frequency network reliably you need to forego some of those operationally awkward direct journeys.
Here’s ProRail’s 2030 proposal:
Click to access Het-Aanbod-van-ProRail-2030.pdf
Granted the 2030 date might slip, certain things might be pared back; this is also an infraco’s proposal and NS may have different ideas. However, all the noises I’ve heard indicate the Dutch rail industry gradually moving towards that map quite faithfully, like simplifying services that go to Amsterdam Centraal vs Zuid etc.
The Dutch consider it acceptable that only Amsterdam trains go to Arnhem and Germany, and if you live in The Hague or Rotterdam you change at Utrecht. I’m just applying the same principle for Rhine-Ruhr.
If frequency is king the best way to achieve it is to make all trains of a given class (express, limited, etc.) make all of the same stops. Your plan has frequency from Frankfurt-Munich not serving Cologne and frequency Cologne-Munich not serving Frankfurt. Better than all trains serve all major destinations so that one doesn’t have to wait for a train to Frankfurt instead of Cologne, or get on in Stuttgart knowing you will have to transfer. If every express train leaving Munich serves Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Cologne and another stop in the Rhine/Ruhr then that is the highest frequency you can have – to every destination.
If Germany built 300-350kph lines between the major cities along this route the extra few minutes for the reverse will not matter, it should be entirely feasible to do Cologne-Munich in three hours which would dominate travel on the corridor.
You seem to be making the same mistake the British are with HS2. They are planning to have 17tph passing Birmingham Interchange, but instead of Birmingham getting 17 tph to London it will only get 3 tph from city center and at best 6 tph including Birmingham Interchange. London-Manchester will be 3tph but Birmingham to Manchester only 2 tph and only by running additional service at greater cost instead of using capacity on those London bound trains. And so on. Running greater service hours for less frequency for riders.
“The Dutch consider it acceptable that only Amsterdam trains go to Arnhem and Germany, and if you live in The Hague or Rotterdam you change at Utrecht.”
Yet the rail plan you link to plans for 4tph from The Hague to Arnhem, maybe the Dutch realize that while their current network isn’t bad, it also isn’t best. More to the point, there is direct service now from the Hague and Rotterdam to Amsterdam, instead of expecting people to change in Utrecht. The links between major German cities are as important as connections within the Randstad and warrant direct service, as direct service is warranted from the Hague to Amsterdam. The transfers are for lesser links, like the Hague to cities in Germany. I’m fine with riders from Stuttgart having to change in Mannheim to go to Paris on a future Paris-Frankfurt train via Strasbourg, but having to change to get to Cologne because a train heading northwest because it stops in Frankfurt instead of continuing on is crazy.
The thing about all trains having the same stopping pattern is that it requires all the stops to be equally big. Medium sized stops that want to get an hourly express service but not a half hourly one ruin it.
If the train is making a lot of stops it’s not an express any more.
On the one hand Paris-Barcelona would be about 30 minutes quicker on a typical run if the Nimes-Montpellier high speed line was used in all cases and end to end journeys would also be about 35 minutes quicker if the stopping pattern was Paris-Valence TGV-Perpignan-Barcelona.
Of course if this was done the other destinations would need serving with another TGV service – perhaps Lyon – Nimes – Montpellier St Roch – other intermediate stops – Barcelona.
On the other hand if adding two extra hourly stops to a train that runs every half an hour costs you only 5 minutes it feels like a small price to pay to give two places extra service to the large cities anchoring the train at each end.
Overall its difficult and probably depends on the exact circumstances.
On long-distance high-speed services frequency is only king up to 2tph, beyond that journey time is kinger.
HS2 has got its service pattern right. I want a 3tph direct Manchester – London service, I don’t want a 6tph service that takes 20 minutes longer via Birmingham. London – Birmingham and London – Manchester are both 3x400m per hour markets and Birmingham – Manchester is a 2x200m market. This means (ignoring other service groups) there are 2400m of trains per hour south of Birmingham and 1600m of trains per hour between Birmingham and Manchester. this is a lot more resource efficient than running the whole 2400m of trains between London and Manchester.
The Den Haag – Utrecht via Amsterdam Zuid service takes 30 minutes longer than the straight route – that blue service is planned in that form as an operational marriage of convenience only – it’s not intended for passengers to make that through journey. Rhine-Ruhr needs a structure and hierarchy just like the Randstad. Notice international trains from the Randstad have one pattern only in each direct:
– To the south, trains service Amsterdam and Rotterdam; Den Haag and Utrecht passengers change at Rotterdam
– To the east, trains service Amsterdam and Utrecht; Rotterdam and Den Haag passengers change.
Amsterdam is the primary settlement – whichever secondary settlement is served is purely based on geographical convenience. Apply the same logic to Rhine-Ruhr – the Rhine side is the primary side; how the Ruhr side is served should depend on operational reality. Having a complicated service structure with en-route reversals won’t let you achieve a base 2tph frequency.
@MatthewHutton
“The thing about all trains having the same stopping pattern is that it requires all the stops to be equally big.”
No, I said all trains of the same speed class (Express/Nozomi, Regional/Kodama) make the same stops. It is perfectly fine to have trains that only stop at the major cities (Cologne, Munich, etc.) and others that stop at smaller cities (depending on route, Ulm, Bonn, etc.). It is also fine in unbalanced routes to short turn services so the busier/denser area has more service, for instance only 4 tph to Brussels/Amsterdam but 8 tph south of Cologne. However, for consistency and frequency stops should be identical within classes (if the fast train goes Munich-Stuttgart non-stop, and the semi-fast goes Munich-Augsburg-Ulm-Sutt, then every train stopping in Augsburg stops in Ulm. This helps passengers (more choices when to board, easy to know if the train you are getting on will take you where you want to be) and operations (easier to plan for overtakes, etc.) But you can certainly give some stops 8tph, others 4tph and still others 2 or 1tph.
The issue with Weifang Jang’s plan is that The Ruhr, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Munich are all ‘equally big’ as you put it (not literally equal, but they are all the centers of major metros of 5-6M and economies of 150-200B euro). Thus they should all be getting the same amount of service to and from each other; i.e. the same stopping pattern for trains serving them.
It is false economy to say think that a Town A with 300,000 should get 3 tph and Town B with 400,000 gets 4 tph. This kind of optimization works when sizing pipelines or scheduling iron ore trains, but people are not bulk goods. The 4 tph are passing through Town A anyway, so there is next to no cost to have it stop, even if it isn’t “needed” for the passenger load. It is much more convenient for people to know the train comes at :11, :26, 41, :56 than :11, :26, :56 (“I arrived at :29 and now I have to wait 27 min?!”) The speed increase from the skipped stop isn’t helpful, since 3/4 of the passengers in B will be taking trains that make the stop in A. The slight speed increase can actually be hurtful for train ops – if trains from A arrive in C at :20, :35, :50, :05 then you can slot an arrival at C for :17, :32, :47, :02; but if they arrive at :20, :35, :48, :05 (because the third train skipped A) then you can no longer use the :47 slot at C.
@Weifeng Jiang
A summary:
You: “Frequency is king”
Me: “OK, this operating principle will maximize frequency of Stuttgart-Frankfurt or Birmingham-Manchester.”
You: “NO! I don’t want to maximize frequency by leveraging the advantage of rail, I want to run a Flight Level 0 airline with duplicative point-to-point service!”
HS2 has it wrong. Read what I wrote to Matthew Hutton above regarding false efficiency in railway operations. There are 2400m of trains S of Birmingham and 1600 N of it, but there are 6tph to the S and 5tph to the N. Running those two 200m trains costs basically the same as running two 400m trains (each has one driver, for instance). If you did 6tph to Bir with 4tph continuing to Manchester with through running then:
Frequency from Bir-Man doubles from 2tph to 4 tph.
Frequency Bir-London doubles from 3tph to 6tph
Operating cost drops 9% (roughly, because 4tph N of Bir instead of 5tph, there are now 10tph instead of 11)
If you can give passengers more options at a lower operating cost, that is a good thing.
What’s more, currently there is no service Bir-Liverpool, and service Bir to Glasgow & Edinburgh is 0.5tph each. But there are already 2tph London-Liverpool/Glasgow/Edinburgh (2tph, your magic number!); if those trains all stopped in Birmingham you would get better service while still dropping the Birmingham to Scotland expense.
What’s more, since trains can only be 200m or 400m long and run in integral tph, they are not being evenly filled. It’s not as if York gets exactly twice the passengers of Sheffield and exactly 4 times as many as Chesterfield. Instead there will be unused capacity on some of these trains, far better that they stop in Birmingham where that capacity and space from passengers getting off can be filled with Bir-Lon riders. Far from being “churn” this is how effective rail lines work. At that point you probably don’t need 17tph out of London with a mix of 400m and 200m trains. Instead 12-14tph suffices, which on top of cutting the Bir-Man/Glasgow/Leeds/etc. trains means real savings. Do the extra frequency and connections mean more riders? Great, then run 17 or 18 tph out of London; getting more riders for the same operating cost is also more efficient.
Through running wouldn’t add 20min. Birmingham new Street already through runs, and the HSR tracks are literally adjacent to the WCML tracks N and S of the city, this is entirely a routing decision. Plus about a third of trains are to stop at Birmingham Interchange, so there often isn’t even a penalty for the stop itself.
You misinterpret my Dutch observation. I was pointing out that the Dutch do not forgo direct journeys. If they did to go Rotterdam-Amsterdam you would take a green train to Utrecht and then a blue to Amsterdam. Instead there is the red line connecting Amsterdam-Hague-Rotterdam. The major cities get direct service, just as the major German Cities (K, F, S, M) should. Note also planned service Am-Utrecht splits with some to Arnhem and some to Eindhoven – instead of expecting Eindhoven riders to change in Utrecht because their train stops there. Same logic for trains from Dusseldorf and Duisburg continuing S from Cologne.
@Onux, if all trains in the same speed class should have the same stops where should the 3 hourly London-Manchester express trains stop?
Also its well worth noting that the railway basically doesn’t have variable costs. During Covid when passenger numbers and train numbers were down significantly the railway continued to cost just as much to run. That means any move that boosts revenue is good and any move that cuts revenue is bad.
@Matthew Hutton
If you are setting a speed class framework, London-Manchester express trains don’t exist per se. There is instead an express service class that stops at the largest/most important stops. Manchester and Birmingham are #2 and #3 largest UK metros and about the same size so they should have the same level of service. Liverpool and Glasgow/Edinburgh are also major cities, close in size to Bir/Man or the next tier down so they should have the same stops but perhaps lower frequency. A base service plan would be:
2 tph Glasgow/Edinburgh-Carlisle-Manchester-Birmingham-Old Oak Common-London (trains split at Carlisle)
2 tph Liverpool-Manchester-Birmingham-OOC-London
4 tph Manchester-Birmingham-OOC-London
Every Birmingham / Manchester train might stop at Birmingham / Manchester airport as well. Maybe 2 tph of the M-B-L service is limited not express with stops at Macclesfield, Stoke, Stafford, etc. Scotland services might stops at Preston, etc.
Manchester and Liverpool both get 8 tph to London ***and to each other***. Manchester gets service to Scotland and Birmingham’s frequency to the Scottish cities quadruples. Liverpool gets service to Birmingham. If you are interested in more revenue the riders from all those connections will provide it.
But budgets are not just revenue but expenses. Infrastructure/track costs are fixed, but each train you run or don’t run is a variable cost. The current plan is for 11 tph leaving London for these cities, my plan is for 8 tph. Factoring length of train and distance travelled this plan uses around 70% of the train miles and 85% of the car miles with about 90% of the rolling stock, so lower operations and maintenance and procurement costs.
@Onux if you wanted to make the London trains to Liverpool go via Manchester you would need to do Crewe-Stockport-Manchester Piccadilly-Liverpool Lime Street in less than the 38 minutes that the current direct services take – I think you’d find that pretty difficult to achieve to be honest.
The same is true with the London-Scottish trains. The record on the East Coast Mainline from 1991 is London-Edinburgh in 3h29 hours. That is quicker than the time HS2 plans to hit even with the link line north of Crewe that will never be built.
If you upgrade the East Coast Mainline to 225km/h where you can and perhaps built a passenger dedicated line from Darlington to Durham and bypassing Welwyn north I’d have thought you could do Edinburgh-Newcastle-Darlington-York-London in 3h40 or so – which is pretty good and actually slightly faster than HS2 might manage even with the Golbourne Link.
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@Onux
When did I ever say frequency is king at all costs?
In the specific example of Cologne – Munich, the journey time penalty of going through Frankfurt Hbf WILL be 20 minutes. The journey time penalty outweighs the frequency gain leading to an overall *worse* generalised journey time.
You don’t even understand your own point on the Dutch network. Yes, INTERNAL to the Randstad there are direct trains among all major cities. Journeys to OUTSIDE of the Randstad are provided by very streamlined and structured services with a single spine collecting passengers many of whom need to change at Rotterdam or Utrecht. Where did I advocate removing direct journey opportunities INTERNAL to the Rhine-Ruhr? Not everywhere within Rhine-Ruhr should expect direct journeys to places OUTSIDE of Rhine-Ruhr. Having a place hierarchy within Rhine-Ruhr is important – just as there is within the Randstad.
On HS2 – the journey time penalty of going through central Birmingham and Manchester WILL be 20 minutes. You clearly don’t understand the urban constraints and orientation of available land parcels that limit the curve radii of approach tracks. I’m not debating that point with you. Building through alignments instead of bypass + spur WILL cost you extra billions (£3bn a conservative estimate) in each case.
‘Running those two 200m trains costs basically the same as running two 400m trains’
This is plain wrong. The majority of train operating costs vary by number of vehicles not number of trains. The difference in crew costs between 1tph 400m and 2tph 200m is negligible. The loss in revenue of London – Manchester passengers getting an overall slower journey time is much bigger. The lifetime benefits and revenue of Birmingham – Manchester getting and extra 4tph is just a rounding error of the capex increase from building a through alignment.
Birmingham is a much weaker market than London. Birmingham to Carlisle at 1tph is perfectly adequate (at Carlisle you can change for a service to the other Scottish city) for that market size. Protecting London – Scotland 3h40m journey time is much more valuable than giving Birmingham – Scotland additional frequency. It’s not the job of stronger markets to subsidise weaker markets.
The whole point of HS2 is to provide capacity. HS2 Ltd didn’t propose 17tph just for shits and giggles. That was proposed because it was the REQUIRED capacity. Your tph reduction opportunities simply do not exist.
I’m sure HS2 had a point to provide something to somebody.
It just didn’t turn out to be “rail service” to “Britain”, surprisingly enough.
Shits? None given.
Giggles? All the way to the bank.
Enjoy the pyrocene!
@Weifeng Jiang
“When did I ever say frequency is king at all costs?”
‘What Germany needs is frequency.’ ‘The king of frequency is the Dutch.’ and ‘When you want to operate a high frequency network reliably you need to forego some of those operationally awkward direct journeys’ are all things that you said.
I note that “operate a high frequency network reliably you need to forego some of those operationally awkward direct journeys” would seem to directly support through-running all trips at Birmingham and Manchester for high frequency instead of building extra track to achieve direct journeys.
In fact he time penalty of going through from Manchester through Birmingham would only be 20 min on the HS2 route because is has “operationally awkward direct journeys”. Leaving Manchester Airport the HS2 heads slightly NW – but Birmingham and London are *SE*. Why go the wrong way? To let Scotland trains bypass Manchester in the future the line heads to Millington for a Y-junction with the WCML in Warrington. Only then does the HS2 line head south to Crewe only to head east after leaving the WCML, before doubling back and heading due west again to reach Curzon. Why the zig-zag? So Manchester and Leeds trains can bypass Birmingham.
But the WCML already connects to the through-routed tracks at Manchester Piccadilly via Bolton (same through-route tracks also connect directly to Liverpool, look at that!) If you used that and then headed south from Manchester Airport you could link up with the ~19km of almost dead straight track from Chelford to Crewe (straight = cheap to build high speed track next to the existing ROW). If you stay on the WCML south of Crewe, you reach Birmingham New St via Wolverhampton, in a route that is ~14mi *shorter* than HS2. Even with the slower approach from the north, at current Man-Wolverhampton speeds you can meet the HS2 time for Bir-Man.
Same story from the south, if HS2 follows the WCML to Birmingham airport station (the existing one, without a new people mover to the terminals) and then the legacy route in, the route would be 3 mi shorter and 2 min *faster* than what HS2 is planning. If you put money from those no-longer-needed tracks into improving the legacy route M54-New St-Bir Airport you can make all of these trips shorter still (the lines only average 48-53mph currently, so small improvements would pay big gains). You could end up with a penalty through Birmingham of only 10-12 min (it starts at just 15, with current slow approaches).
But look how much you gain from those 10-15 min! You can dispense with almost 50 km of new build high speed track, two Y-junctions, a junction to the WCML, and both Birmingham Interchange and Curzon St stations – a savings of over $10B at HS2’s inflated cost. You get all the benefits of Liverpool-Bir and Man-Bir connectivity, you get a simpler operating plan (all trains London-Bir-Man) you get operational savings from not running extra trains from Birmingham alongside trains already running from London.
What do you lose from 10-15 min Lon-Man? Nothing. A Lon-Man trip of 85-90 minutes will be so competitive it will completely dominate the market. Getting to 76 min gets you very few additional riders.
“Building through alignments instead of bypass + spur WILL cost you extra billions (£3bn a conservative estimate) in each case.”
As I noted, the cost to build the through alignments is zero. Literally zero. The through tracks and approaches already exist and allow equal trips without increasing current speeds.
“The majority of train operating costs vary by number of vehicles not number of trains. The difference in crew costs between 1tph 400m and 2tph 200m is negligible.”
Maintenance costs vary by number of vehicles (8 cars going 100km is double the maintenance load of 4 cars) but for operating costs labor is king. A train of any length only needs a single driver and a single chief conductor. Running two trains of 200m instead of one of 400m doubles those two labor costs and labor is the highest portion of train operations. Since there are other employees on the train (buffet car attendants, assistant conductors) your total labor costs don’t double, but there is a savings.
Plus remember that by through routing you can cut about 15% of the total high speed track for London-Manchester. That is a huge savings in track maintenance.
“Birmingham to Carlisle at 1tph is perfectly adequate (at Carlisle you can change for a service to the other Scottish city) for that market size.”
This is nonsense. From Manchester today you can get 0.5 tph direct to Glasgow, connect multiple ways to 1tph to Glasgow on the WCML, get 1 tph direct to Edinburgh, connect to another 0.5 tph to Edinburgh via the WCML, and also get 0.5 tph to Edinburgh from Man Victoria station via York and the ECML. Birmingham has 1 tph to Glasgow either direct or with a cross-platform transfer on the WCML, and another 1.5 tph direct or single transfer to Edinburgh. I’ve omitted all the 6+ hr journey options with 2-3 transfers. But surely the market will shrink when you make the trip faster and the 0.5tph from Birmingham alone will satisfy it.
“The whole point of HS2 is to provide capacity.”
If the point is capacity then speed doesn’t matter, and all of your complaints about the losing a few minutes by stopping in Birmingham become moot.
“HS2 Ltd didn’t propose 17tph just for shits and giggles. That was proposed because it was the REQUIRED capacity. Your tph reduction opportunities simply do not exist.”
The 17tph includes 200m trains. Running 16tph at 400m (8tph to Man and beyond, 8 to Leeds) actually provides more capacity into London. But 14 tph (8 to man, 6 to Leeds) probably suffices because it is foolish to think the 17tph will be totally full. These services are constrained by train lengths of 200 or 400m (not 315m) and 1, 2 or 3 tph (not 2.78 tph). They are not optimized. The plan is for 1 tph at 200m to Stafford, Stoke and Macclesfield, which combine for 489k. Sheffield, at 1.2-1.9M is supposed to get 2tph at 200m. If the Sheffield trains are full, the Macclesfield one is not. Same for Birmingham getting 1/8 the service to Scotland with 1/5 the population. York gets 50% of service to Birmingham as Leeds and 60% of the service to London, despite having 6% the population. Those trains won’t be full. The way to get them as full as possible is to through route so empty space on a train to York can be used by someone going to Leeds, or so that a passenger getting off from Glasgow to Birmingham can be replaced by a Birmingham to London rider.
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This is a very interesting study and has really come out of the blue. Is this an over-enthusiastic DB doing an international study off its own back, or is this something commissioned by high up in EU? It’s not clear, though some of the policy wording in the introductory paragraphs hint at the latter.
Given the nature of the study – Europe wide and and consultative, there will inevitably be inconsistencies and inaccuracies. You are beholden to the quality of response from other national operators and infrastructure owners; some will have more mature project pipelines than others. I would give plenty of allowances in judging the quality of this report – overall it’s pretty good for what it is.
I find the mode share projections interesting. In the 500-1000km range the mode shift is shown to mainly come from road rather than air – I’m surprised that many people drive that long distance and the projected low propensity to switch from air to rail.
Some of the policy bumf really is interesting:
“Building an additional 21,000 km of rail infrastructure over the next 27 years is an ambitious target. However, considering that approximately 20,000 km of motorway was built in the EU27 between 2000 and 2020, it is clear that infrastructure of comparable size and complexity can be built in an even shorter time.”
Is there a recognition that 2010-2020 has been an HSR ‘dry spell’ period in Central Europe (and Eastern Europe development has been too motorway focused), the railway money tap must be opened? So far there’s been very little indication from member states or at the EU level that we’ll suddenly roll in ‘good times’.
I don’t think there’s such recognition? The issue is, every year that Germany grows faster than France and Southern Europe, elite interest in high-speed rail diminishes: why imitate stagnant countries? The Americans try to reinvent the wheel with Hyperloop and what not; Germans and other Northern Europeans instead tell themselves that speed isn’t important and why not just build less to avoid NIMBY contention (same reason Germany underbuilds subways).
Silicon Valley wunderkind drawing something on a cocktail napkin is not “Americans reinventing the wheel”. And showing how clueless they are. Mostly about what a cruel cruel mistress Physics is. Or being ahistorical. The proposals for vac-trains goes back decades.
It’s curious. One would think a study of this nature would have some political impetus behind it. Unless this is an attempt by frustrated DB and other national railway technocrats to force politicians’ hands?
I suspect so? There’s a lot of confusion about what Green Deal spending should be – borrowing not just the name but also the concept from the US, the EU named a budget figure without having much of a clue of what to do with it. DB management supports high-speed rail, it’s just that the German advocacy community is against. It’s the same thing that I blogged about a few months ago about the BVG crayon – BVG management wants more U-Bahn service (and so does CDU, as long as there’s enough parking), it’s the Berlin advocacy community that thinks subways are immoral.
Silicon Valley wunderkind drawing something on a cocktail napkin is not “Americans reinventing the wheel”. And showing how clueless they are. Mostly about what a cruel cruel mistress Physics is. Or being ahistorical. The proposals for vac-trains goes back decades.
DB would rather build direct links between Berlin-Rostock and Frankfurt-Dortmund, than to build between Erfurt-Fulda which would shave an hour off Berlin-Frankfurt.
Why? Why? Why?
Same reason Brexit happened. Governments want to do levelling up.
It’s quite remarkable how ‘blue’ Spain, France and Italy are on the map. Spain has a smattering of purple and yellow in equal measures, nothing coming as a surprise. The amount of purple in France is a bit paltry, though the two projects on-going (Lyon – Milan, Bordeaux – Toulouse) are hefty construction undertakings. France doesn’t have a lot of yellow (arguably doesn’t need a lot of yellow), and yet they are all small sections that would make a huge difference (remaining stretches of Rhin-Rhone, Montpelier – Perpignon, Bordeaux – Irun) – you just want to scream ‘get on with it!’ Italy – again, no surprises there.
Go to the Balkans it looks a lot more like ‘let’s get the crayons out’ – most lines I’m seeing for the first time (disclaimer – I’ve not looked very much into that part of the world). Feel like an amateur efforts from new accession EU countries wanting to get their hands on EU cash. What stands out (though not necessarily surprising) is Germany – looks much more like amateur efforts from the east than the mature ‘no surprise’ ones from the Mediterranean countries.
It shouldn’t be so surprising. Europe’s population and economic centres are heavily weighted to western Europe. A product of ecology and geography (western Europe has been dominant since the High Middle ages) and history (Industrial Reveolution starts in NW Europe the 20th century destroys Eastern Europe’s capacity to match western Europe). Also because France/Italy/Spain are the star performers 1945-2000 they have the advantages of catch-up growth to leapfrog technology. Germany and the UK are stuck with very built legacy infrastructure.
Southern Balkan’s suffered from lacking large fiscally capable-commercially integrated states during the 19th-20th centuries unlike Eastern Europe. And the most economically successful Greece is very maritime oriented.
Obviously Eastern Europe’s sparse geography and recent political history haven’t been conducive to long-term metropolitan / international infrastructure investments – that isn’t surprising.
I think France and Spain benefit from their settlement patterns of small number of big cities and empty countryside – few medium-sized places in semi-rural areas so low NIMBY risks. Germany’s settlement pattern of lots of medium sized places in semi-rural areas create the perfect double whammy of NIMBYism and ‘fear of getting bypassed’. Also Germany’s Green lobby has BANANA tendencies which Spain and France don’t seem to suffer from. Germany is still a frustrating case though – they clearly had a good run of building decent high speed lines but then they just stopped.
Italy is a bit surprising – Italy’s national politics isn’t known for being stable, and Italy’s settlement pattern does have some German characteristics and yet they’ve just been steadily getting on with it.
Alon’s had quite detailed post on why Italy is better than Germany at HSR.
1. Linear geography gives a very strong line.
2. Greater willingness to learn (i.e. from France that full length HSR lines are better for these distances and market depths).
3. Construction has greater delegation to professional bureaucrats with necessary administrative independence with less adversarial avenues to gum up the process.
Linearity is a bigger issue than concentration in big cities. Spanish weighted population density is higher than France or Germany, but its polycentric in a way France is not (Metro Madrid has less than 14% of national population while Metro Paris is over 20%).
Does Ireland really need a new build Cork-Dublin-Belfast line (that seems to be the idea from the map).
I mean Ireland’s no.1 rail policy requirement is electrification so that they have a rail system worthy of the name.
And assuming you did all that and Ireland decides on proper “decolonisation” and builds some damn houses. Then maybe some new straight segments Newry-Lisburn or Tipperary-Cork.
There has been proposal to link Oslo and Stockholm with high speed rail. Officially, the current government in Sweden still supports such a line. Interesting it’s left out from the map.