High-Speed Rail is not for Tourists
Foreigners to a country often get a warped idea of what its infrastructure is like. Most infrastructure is used for day-to-day domestic travel, for commuting to work or school, for visits to family and friends, for social gatherings, for business travel within the national internal market. Foreign travelers make use of this infrastructure when they visit, but they use it differently, and can make erroneous assumptions about how locals use it and what it means for transportation in general. This has two policy implications: one concerns American misconceptions about European rail travel; the other concerns pan-European misconceptions about European rail travel, which is almost entirely domestic, based on domestic networks, and planned and debated in the local language and not in English.
The Europe of the tourists
To estimate how foreign tourists may view Europe, we need some information on tourist travel within the bloc. The best I have is lists of the most visited cities in the world, and unfortunately, the only lists I have that go beyond the global top 10 are from before corona. But 2019 should not be too different to first order from the present. Here are international arrivals, from the global top 50:
| City | Millions of arrivals (2019) |
| London | 19.55 |
| Paris | 19.08 |
| Istanbul | 14.71 |
| Rome | 10.31 |
| Prague | 9.15 |
| Amsterdam | 8.83 |
| Barcelona | 7.01 |
| Vienna | 6.63 |
| Milan | 6.6 |
| Athens | 6.3 |
| Berlin | 6.19 |
| Moscow | 5.96 |
| Venice | 5.59 |
| Madrid | 5.59 |
| Dublin | 5.46 |
Notably, there’s almost no intersection with any of the busiest intercity rail links in Europe. The top two are the trunk from Paris on the LGV Sud-Est to the bifurcation between Dijon and Lyon, and the Frankfurt-Mannheim trunk line. Paris is a huge international tourist draw, but nothing on the LGV Sud-Est and its extensions is; the top department outside Ile-de-France in tourism overnight stays is Alpes-Maritimes, a 5.5-6 hour trip from Paris by TGV. Germany has little tourism for its size, especially not in Mannheim – foreigners come to Berlin or Munich, or maybe Frankfurt for business trips. Only two city pairs in Europe with solid high-speed rail links appear in the table above, Milan-Rome and Madrid-Barcelona.
The upshot is that the American tourist who comes here and marvels at the fact that even in Germany the trains are faster and more reliable than in the United States isn’t really experiencing the system as most users do. If they take the TGV, it’s much likelier that they’re taking Eurostar and dealing with its premium prices and probably also with its security theater if they’re going to London rather than Brussels or Amsterdam. They have nothing to do in Lyon or Bordeaux or Strasbourg or Lille, so it’s unlikely they see the workhorse domestic lines. It’s even more unlikely they take the train to the smaller cities with direct TGVs, such as Saint-Etienne, Chambéry, and others that beef up the ridership of the LGV Sud-Est without serving Lyon itself; there were considerable errors made by American analysts in the Obama era about high-speed rail coming from looking only at the million-plus metro areas and not at these secondary ones.
By the same token, the American tourist in question is much likelier to be riding Spanish trains with their brand and price differentiation by speed than to be riding the workhorse regional and intercity trains anywhere in Northern Europe. ICEs charitably average 160 km/h on a handful of lines when they’re on time, which isn’t often, and on key corridors like Berlin-Cologne or Berlin-Frankfurt are closer to 120 km/h. The reason Germany is close to even with France on ridership per capita and well ahead of Italy and Spain is that these trains have decent connections with one another and with slower regional trains, so that people can connect to those secondary cities better. Trips from Berlin to Augsburg with a connection in Munich are not hard to plan, or trips to city cores in the Rhine-Ruhr and other polycentric regions. These are largely invisible to the foreign tourist, who doesn’t have anything to do in a city like Münster.
This also applies to the European tourist, not just the American or Asian or Middle Eastern one. A German who visits France is interested in trains from Germany to Paris, and those are not that good, but will probably not be taking TGVs between Paris and Rennes or Lille. From that, they’ll conclude the TGVs aren’t that useful in general.
The Europe of the typical intercity rail traveler
In contrast with the tourists’ picture of the countries of Europe, the typical intercity rail traveler uses the system in a way that the table above doesn’t really capture. All of the following characteristics are likely:
- They are traveling domestically since cross-border rail within Europe is practically never good.
- They are traveling based on domestic business, leisure, and social networks: if French, they can be going between Paris and anywhere else in France, and very occasionally even between two places outside Ile-de-France; if German, they are likely going between two major cities or maybe between a major and a midsize city.
- They are a regular traveler, which implies good knowledge of the system and its quirks, experience with large complex stations allowing getting between the train and the street within minutes, and probably also some kind of discounted fare card such as the BahnCard 25 in Germany or the half-fare card of Switzerland.
- They have the disposable income to drive, and choose to take the train because of a combination of speed, fares, and convenience rather than because they truly can’t afford a car or because they are ideologically opposed to travel modes with high greenhouse gas emissions.
The upshot is that finicky systems like the TGV and ICE are useful to their current travelers, even if foreigners and people who move in pan-European networks find them unreliable for various reasons. Any kind of EU-wide policy on rail has to acknowledge that SNCF and DB may have problems but are the main providers of solid intercity rail within Europe and are not the enemy, they just focus on city pairs that reflect their domestic travel needs.
And any attempt to learn from Europe and adapt our intercity rail successes has to look beyond what a tourist visiting for a few days would notice. It’s not just the wow effect of speed; Eurostar has that too and its ridership is an embarrassment, with fewer London-Paris trips per day than Paris-Lyon even though metro London is around six times the size of metro Lyon. It’s other details of the network, including how far it reaches into the longer tail of secondary markets.
The secondary markets require especial concern, first because they form a large fraction (likely a majority) of European high-speed rail travel, second because they’re invisible to tourists, and third because they require careful optimization.
One issue is that secondary markets are great for cars, decent for trains, and awful for planes. The TGV owns them at distances where cars take too many hours longer than the train, which helps extend the trains well past the three- to four-hour limit that rail executives quote as the upper bound for competitive train trip time. At shorter range, high-speed rail competes with cars more than with planes, and so the secondary markets lose value.
Another issue is that it’s easy to overdo secondary markets at the expense of compromising speed on the primary ones. This is usually not because of tourists, who almost never ride them, but rather because of domestic travelers who are atypically familiar with and dependent on the system and will use it not just on city pairs like Berlin-Augsburg or Berlin-Münster but also things like Wismar-Jena, on which most people will just drive. In the United States, groups of users of Amtrak trains outside the Northeast Corridor like the Rail Passengers’ Association (RPA, distinct from the New York-area planning organization) routinely make this mistake and overrate the viability of slow night trains. I bring this up here because it is possible to overcorrect from the principle of “don’t rely on tourist reports too much, and do pay attention to the secondary markets” and instead pay too much attention to the secondary markets.
Pedestrian Observations 
I do seem to have notice that over the years that a lot of people who talk about how great HSR was on their vacation to Europe are often referring to a trip to and with Italy.
My experience (entirely subjective) after riding FS Frecciarossa as well as NTV services is that they come closest to the “feel” of Shinkansen services in terms of comfort and speed compared to TGV and ICE. Spain’s HSR I haven’t tried yet.
I’d imagine this is even more true for Japanese shinkansen lines, is it not? The same market segments you identified for Europe must be both similar and amplified greatly in numbers. Just a quick comparison – LGV Sud-Est at 52M/yr compared to Tokaido at 150-175M/yr.
I wonder what fraction of shinkansen passengers are commuters. Imagine taking a bullet train to work every day…
JR ridership documents break out what proportion of ridership and revenue is on commuter passes. For example, JR Central’s 2025 factsheet says commuter passes are 8% of ridership and 2% of p-km (PDF-p. 26).
What about less frequent commuter trips? Because if you went once a week (or perhaps 2-3 times a week) you wouldn’t have a pass but would be a commuter IMO.
A monthly costs about as much as 30 one-ways, so you need to take about 3.5 roundtrips a week for it to be advantageous, and there’s no hybrid work in Japan (or if there is, it’s post-2021).
The thing is going into London it’s cheaper to have a season ticket if you go in 10 days a month from my stop.
There’s an awful lot of cases where that would make sense but it wouldn’t in Japan. For example if you stayed over with family or your girlfriend a couple of nights a week. Or if you work in Nagoya/Kansai and Tokyo.
Thanks for the link!
Can I just say, I absolutely love the format of this fact sheet. You don’t need to dig for any of the data, it’s all right there, no narrative obscurations or spin, presented in context and often with a time history…just fantastic. There is not a wasted square inch in this publication. I’m going to look at the ones for some of the other JRs just to read up and compare. Not on topic but I’m also quite curious about how much the JRs earn from ancillary services like feeder transit and food and lodging, I’ve read in the past that that is a big part of their customer value proposition which is wholly enabled and facilitated by the core of fast, frequent, and reliable rail transport services.
JR East earns little from ancillary services and the other JRs even less. The private railways earn a lot more from ancillary services including department stores and malls at their primary stations and housing development in the suburbs along the lines they serve.
Ah ok, that makes sense. Extracting value from trip chaining. Thank you for the information!
And from development-transport synergy – the trains raise the value of the real estate, the real estate fills the trains. Japanese corporations haven’t undergone the 1980s-and-onward American trend of divesting from ancillary businesses to focus on the core product.
Wow. I decided to look up one of the private railroads, Odakyu, out of curiosity. In FY2024, they reported JPY 422k revenue: 175k from transportation, 96k from real estate, and 169k from “life services” as they call it, which includes retail, hotels, and restaurants. All three business lines were profitable. Negative cash but still, what a great business model.
There are some inaccuracies here:
Odakyu numbers are in JPY billions, not thousands.
JR Central is indeed mostly an integrated railroad company. It serves an area whose GDP lies between the UK and Germany. Only 3% of its revenues come from real estate. The Tokaido Shinkansen is a small part of its network but represents about 93% of its transportation revenue. The company seems to be betting its future on the large Chuo Shinkansen investment.
On the contrary, JR East has extensive real estate assets. Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Yokohama, Kita-Senju, Tokyo, Shinagawa, Takadanobaba, Akihabara, Omiya are stations where it brings more than 400 000 daily passengers. Only 47% of its Fiscal Year 2025 income came from transportation.
@dralaindumas
Yes of course, thank you for the correction on the Odakyu figures. 422k yen is a monthly rent…
Not quite to American levels. But the the Keiretsu and conglomerate nature of Japanese business has very much decayed since the 1990’s. To some extent the railways are the exception, but that’s because the core product the railway and its stations rewards integration in a way that it wouldn’t for Toshiba or Sony.
That said there is evidence of some downsizing/rationalising trends. The most notable being Tokyu, selling its rolling stock manufacturer to JR East (J-Trec), and its Tokyu-hands department store brand. Or the way Hanshin is being absorbed into Hankyu. JR West has also started buying stock into Kinki-Sharyou which is part of Kintetsu’s empire. But even Tokyu’s rationalisations are actually doubling down on intergrated TOD services in Southern Tokyo/NE Kanagawa.
And JR’s non-rail income has generally risen over time, and in the case of JR Kyushu is almost co-equal (JR Kyushu makes money on its rail ops only because of the Shinkansen). And as dralaindumas points JR Central is very much the exception in how its barely diversified at all. And frankly its “Bell Mall” brand is the worst of the JRs.
For my money I think the government in Japan really needs to think seriously about rationalising the sector (which they are not doing given how Osaka and Tokyo metro have been privatised). Consolidating rail fleets and workforces alone would do a lot of good.
Some years ago when JR Pass was a better deal and excluded Nozomi trains, foreign tourists were steered to a cheaper and worse service than domestic travelers. Nowadays with JR Pass much less of a steal and not coming with the Nozomi restriction, the typical intercity rail experience in Japan for inbound tourists is similar to that of locals.
The modal trip for both tourists and locals is almost certain Tokyo-Osaka, and the average trip is much shorter. Shinkansen commutes are a tiny fraction of overall ridership, but the trips they take overlap with popular day trip destinations (though typically opposite-direction).
While locals might be more aware of cheaper options, almost everyone uses fully flexible tickets often bought right before boarding. In the golden era of JR Pass, inbound tourists almost always paid way less than locals in exchange for some restrictions. However, after the JR Pass price increase and scope expansion, most inbound tourists pay the same prices as locals using the same systems (maybe more likely to use the vending machines than smartphones, but the lines of ven).
To be more specific, Japan Rail Pass holders can now use the Nozomi services by paying a supplement of about 5000 jpy (for Tokyo to Shin Osaka/Kyoto), much like Eurailpass holders must pay a seat reservation charge to ride Eurostar.
Probably a fair few American tourists to Britain are riding the workhorse regional and intercity trains – if only to go to Oxford, Bicester Village, Cambridge, Bath or York.
In part because London and Paris are extremely similar. There are more trips to Manchester than between Manchester and Liverpool, or to Edinburgh than between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Does anyone (including Alon) have data on the breakdown of ridership between primary and secondary cities? E.g. if it’s Paris-Lyon, is it mainly Lyon residents travelling to Paris, Paris residents travelling to Lyon, or 50/50? This would be useful information to have.
Alon argued against it but fell into the trap of thinking like an American tourist on a first European tour with London and Paris as two must-see destinations. The London-Paris travel market is large but many less flashy ones are just as large.
Paris-Lyon is one of them. TGV’s pre-pandemic market share was at 65%. HSR traffic has since risen with Trenitalia’s arrival but Trenitalia’s losses may not be sustainable. At 64%, Tokyo-Osaka and Osaka-Hakata are other markets with high HSR share. As left and right side driving and high tolls make driving inconvenient, Eurostar’s share of the London-Paris market is probably around 75%. There is always room for improvement but calling it an embarrassment when it seems to be doing better than HSR services anywhere in the world is illogical.
It will be interesting to see how these numbers evolve. London St Pancras Highspeed wants to increase St Pancras capacity for international travel from 1800 to around 5000 per hour. Virgin and others want to get in. Paris-Lyon market is more mature with TGVs serving 3 destinations in Lyon (Part-Dieu, Perrache and Satolas), 6 in Ile de France (Gare de Lyon, Marne-la-Vallee, CDG, Massy, Versailles, Mantes) and a LGV closer to capacity. Shinkansen ridership is stagnating but JR Central expects a boost from the Chuo maglev.
But why is Paris Lyon just as large as Paris London? If we remove the border crossing penalty gravity shows Paris London to be something around 4x stronger than Paris Lyon or 6x stronger than present. So it’s not that Eurostar is doing something right, it’s that it’s doing something less wrong than flying/driving.
I suspect that tourist gravity is similar or ideally even higher than population based gravity.
They let the provincials visit the big city? Someone in London who want’s a big city experience doesn’t have to go to Paris to have one. Or vice versa.
And those wily wily people from Lyon , when they have business to conduct with the national government, do it in Paris. Or a national business.
I doubt that most people traveling Lyon Paris, or for that matter NYC DC or Shanghai Beijing, do so for business with the national government. But am open to a source.
Also London and Paris have really different cultural infrastructure, unless you think e.g. the Louvre and British Museum are identical.
I didn’t say the that it was a majority. I’m hazarding a guess that people in Lyon who have business to do with their national government aren’t stupid enough to attempt it in London. Works that way with national businesses too. People in Manchester, likewise, aren’t stupid enough to attempt it in Paris. I don’t know why railfans have difficulty grasping the concepts. Whether it’s national or provincial/state or local.
The Mona Lisa is usually at the Louvre. People in Paris who want to do something other than go to the Louvre have a wide variety of options without going to Lyon or London. People in London have many choices besides the British Museum. Including things like sporting events, concerts, plays.. People in Lyon have fewer choices. I suspect their choices are going to lean towards Parisian activities.
Despite the widespread knowledge that London is a shithole and a very expensive one, zillions of dumb tourists make the pilgrimage. Some even queue hours and pay £35 or whatever to gawk at the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, FFS! (Queuing to see the Mona Lisa is also quite dumb but not as …) By contrast these same factors mean lots more Londoners are likely to consider a weekend in Paris, unless of course their therapists warns against it on the basis that seeing a place where everything works, and the place is quite pleasant whatever the weather, will deepen their depression/SAD on return. (There is nothing quite as drear as London in cold, miserable, damp winter –and sometimes summer too!)
Anyway if anyone is looking for any excuse to do a quick zip over to Paris then today is that day! What, Adirondacker, you didn’t know it is Beaujolais Day? Instead of paying outrageously in some London over-rated restaurant for Beaujolais Nouveau flown over by helicopter (shoulda taken Eurostar) for about the same cost, but vastly nicer experience they could glide into Paris and have a meal in almost any restaurant, brasserie etc and have as many glasses of BN as they wish. (Yes, of course BN is over-rated which is beside the point!)
These days I suspect that Lyon, NYC, and other such second cities have the vast majority of government functions available locally or online. I could see national businesses being a important differentiator, but I really do wonder at the scale of that market. Personally, I suspect that if travel were easier between Paris and London that naturally business travel would follow.
Michael, I believe Paris has quite similar weather to London’s actually. But I do agree that food culture is an important differentiator. Paris will have superior national food, but London will probably have superior Indian food for instance.
By some statistics that can appear to be the case but from living there it just doesn’t turn out like that. Sometimes I think it must be Parisian group-think in believing they are a Mediterranean city (all that outdoor restaurant seating etc) but no, it is more likely the nature of the weather. For example London has less rain than most big cities in Australia but for any Australian in London it seems unbelievable. The reason is simple: Australian cities get their rain in mostly heavy but shorter bursts (and often overnight so even less noticeable) while London is often constant low drizzle which is far less pleasant and difficult to avoid. I haven’t looked at insolation but it is hard to believe Paris doesn’t have considerably more sun, and when it matters, than London (hence the outdoor dining). However as I conditioned my statement with “[Paris] is quite pleasant whatever the weather” and it’s true even if I am not entirely sure why. I can walk around Paris all day in the rain but if I do that in London I get overcome with exhaustion (of the spirit). If it is mostly a state-of-mind then that is still something real and I believe most Brits would agree with it.
I would agree that London has its musical and other stage shows but is something I don’t factor in since I have never been attracted by them, plus the astronomical costs make them prohibitive for most people. Oh, and I hate English pubs (yeah, as an Australian I was a big disappointment to my Brit colleagues). Everything in London is more expensive, often a lot more expensive, but poorer quality/experience. I think different opinions are arrived at because some people in London, perhaps the glitterati and media who report on it, and perhaps many tourists who are resigned to a hugely expensive one-time splurge (and the ones reporting in English are naturally Anglophone), aren’t much impacted by the cost, and don’t use the transit etc.
Media is glowing about the world cuisines in London but those type of restaurants are also exorbitant while Paris has both, ie. it has very expensive restos plus most world cuisine (including Indian) but a huge amount of affordable French cuisine including a lot of provincial variety (ie. within Paris). And actually I’d also claim the ethnic cuisines (Chinese, Vietnamese other Asian including Indian; North African, middle-eastern, Japanese) are more authentic and better in Paris. There is a large difference in these types of experience and some of us much prefer the latter to the former, even if we could afford otherwise; there is simply no comparison unless for some perverse reason you like soggy fishnchips (which is better almost anywhere else in the world!) or dodgy vindaloo etc. And incidentally it is a major reason to visit Lyon which is better than Paris on that issue.
Because this is a transport blog: LU is at least twice as expensive as Paris Metro/RER and worse service and rather more tedious getting around the city–partly due to the fact the Metro was built to service intramuros Paris, so an historical “accident” but nevertheless real and a very real effect. I love the Paris Metro and it makes me hate the LU when forced to use it. And then there is getting into and out of London! We know about the absurdity of Eurostar. Heathrow Express sometimes costs more than the flight! And long train journeys cost double or triple or more than flying, and involves spending hours on websites to navigate complicated fare structures. If you want discussion on trains there is a thousand comment thread on an article in yesterday’s Grau (yes, of course). But ok, CrossRail was finally opened and is kinda doing the job but on these very pages I predicted it would be quickly overwhelmed by popularity (who in their right mind would use the LU if you could use an RER-A equivalent) and sure enough it was soon overcrowded. They had so obviously underestimated early uptake. Planning is a dirty word to the English, partly because it usually implies spending some public money … on the public. Just this week the House of Lords voted down a worker’s rights bill. Says it all, including the very existence in the 21st century of such a House.
They had functions available locally forever. That doesn’t change there are some things that can only be done in the capital. Someone in Springfield Massachusetts who wants to smooze with a legislator or protest outside the state’s highest court wants to do it in Boston even though the train service to Hartford is better. Driving to Pittsfield is even less effective. I don’t know why railfans find these concepts difficult.
As you put it, Eurostar is “doing something less wrong than flying/driving” between Paris and London. Eurostar has around 85 to 90% of this Air/HSR market, the kind of numbers observed world-wide when HSR offers a reasonably fast trip. Eurostar benefits from the fact that the driving alternative is unpleasant and costly on this market. Without the hassles of the “wrong side of the road” driving experience, of going through the tunnel, and of paying the Congestion and/or Low Emission Zone charges, more people would drive the 440 km.
Once we agree that Eurostar is nothing special, neither an embarrassment nor a world beating operation, we can wonder why the Paris-London market isn’t 4 or 6 times larger than the Paris-Lyon one? I think there are multiple reasons.
The first one is not specific. As stated above by Alon, European rail travel is almost entirely domestic and based on domestic networks. Although the Schengen Agreement eazed the pain of going through most borders, there is still a border penalty when it comes to ridership. Whether this penalty is caused by language, culture, old networks, or residual administrative barriers in education, insurance, licenses, train ticket purchase, etc is a complex topic.
The second reason is that the UK is not in the Schengen Zone. The hassle of going through the border is real. Functionally, the 2h20 trip is turns into a 3 hour one. The TGV stops in multiple stations in and around Paris and Lyon, but not in Ashford or Stratford International because setting up border controls is costly.
The third one is cost. With relatively cheap domestic TGV tickets, many professionals can maintain an activity in Paris while raising a family in a provincial town or vice versa. This induced ridership is larger than the tourism one on domestic markets and is smaller on Eurostar’s territory. The people who, depending on the evolution of tax laws, move their domiciles and affairs between London, Paris, Brussels and Jersey don’t mind high ticket prices but they are a smaller cohort.
There’s also the fact that London and Paris are equivalents. Both have world class museums, restaurants etc
Yes, unfortunately the border penalty is real and rational. But 2h20 to 3h should make us go from 6x larger to about 3.5x larger, so I wonder about how additional penalties break down. Certainly a French isn’t going to London for healthcare and vice versa, but I would guess that education is a big enough differentiator that it would make sense for a French to go to UCL or a Brit to go to the Sorbonne for instance (absent border complications).
As for professionals, I think Eurostar tickets are not so expensive for businesses that a genuine business need for a weekly/monthly commute would be stopped by the cost. Compare Japan. However, it does definitely dampen tourism.
But speaking of tourism, I think the gravity is really quite strong. Recently I was on a Prague to Regensburg train and the tourism market was clearly there despite the slowness of the train, relative lack of departures, etc. Paris and London should have quite high tourist gravity and Eurostar needs to lean into that.
Matthew, certainly London and Paris each have no lack of amenities; but there is no West End equivalent in Paris, there restaurant scenes are both world class but very different, etc.
The whole reason the British long distance ridership is better than the French is because of higher traffic between regional stops. It adds up when the service is respectable. Cross country trains are busy
The Swiss Travel Pass is designed for tourists, but tourism is relatively important in Switzerland and you won’t see much high speed with that card.
Generally, there is some tension between the needs of regular travelers and tourists: tourists often have a lot of luggage, and if there is one thing worse than cross-bordel rail, it’s cross border luggage – I really wish there would a service similar to Kuro Neko in Europe. Also you can sell slower but scenic routes to tourists, you can see it with the Gotthard, where the touristic trains take the historic tunnel, while the high-speed train take the base tunnel.
I would expect a fair amount of high speed rail users to have luggage. This depends on the length of the trip too though – if grandma is only an hour away (total trip time including “last mile transportation) you will “go for Saturday” all the time and return home the same day. However a 4 hour trip means the return trip will be the next day, or more likely because of the time you will only go for “long weekends” when you spend several days to justify all that travel time. Once the trip becomes overnight you need to bring a change of clothing.
Most EU countries are small enough that most trips would be reasonable to take as day trips. It makes for a long day to spend 4 hours on trains (both days), but you save hotel, schlepping bags, and such. (same with Japan – small country) If the EU gets serious about cross border HSR then expect to see a lot more people with bags just because some trips become useful that are not really possible today. Then again the EU suffers from a multitude of languages and so it will be a long battle to make long distance trains useful just because you can’t talk to anyone. (English is common in the EU, but when you leave the tourist bubble you find a lot of people who don’t speak it even if they passed the classes in school)
I don’t think it’s really about language. Brussels is Francophone, but Paris-Brussels traffic on Eurostar is a lot lower than Paris-Lyon traffic on domestic TGVs. This isn’t even a capacity issue the way it is on Eurostar to the UK – there’s no security or border theater and one gets on a train to Brussels at Gare du Nord as if one got on a domestic TGV to Lille. Rather, it’s all reducible to exorbitant prices designed exclusively around business travelers.
Some of that is because as the capital of the EU Brussels has a lot of business travel and some of that is because Brussels is quite boring. What are the highlights other than the bar with all the beers and the weeing statues?
All of the provincial destinations I mentioned in the UK are more interesting except Bicester Village, but even there Waddeston and Blenheim are both close and good.
So 11m London to Brussels/Amsterdam/Paris means 8.5m Paris-Brussels-Germany/Amsterdam?
Sorry for the long question: Do France and Germany run those “workhorse trains” as public services or commercial services? Can a regional government say “I’m paying from my pocket the track access charges to put my public service trains on this high speed line”?
The question comes because the Spanish transports minister (I know you aren’t his best fan), said in the last weeks something in the line of “the high speed lines are a commercial service, not a public service, and the European Union demands that they have to be profitable.” and “The current liberalization in Spain is not a true liberalization because the competing companies are all national public companies, and all they are doing is eating the benefits from the best lines that could pay for the other loss making lines”. All this came in the context of questioning from a province in Castilla where they were protesting new timetables where more trains were skipping a barely-used stop in there, and about the situation around Barcelona where there are “minimal public services” on high speed lines that aren’t liberalized yet (Girona, Lleida, Valencia), but on some time ranges the trains on those services are always running full and nobody gives more service. It feels like the minister says we’re the pet student of the EU’s liberalization project, even though it’s some kind of martyrdom.
Font: https://www.congreso.es/public_oficiales/L15/CONG/DS/CO/DSCD-15-CO-387.PDF (page 32) “Les recuerdo que la alta velocidad es un servicio comercial, y cuando nos quejamos de los precios y decimos «es que de un lado a otro…», es que es un servicio comercial. No es un servicio público ni de interés público, por mucho que algunos lo pretendan. No, la alta velocidad es servicio comercial y se rige por las reglas del mercado. Porque, además, tiene que dar beneficios porque así nos lo exige la propia Unión Europea. “Second font: https://www.europapress.es/economia/transportes-00343/noticia-oscar-puente-admite-unico-positivo-competencia-trenes-precio-frecuencias-20250910181649.html
Those trains are run both publicly and commercially – the TGV system is expected to make a profit and then use the profit to subsidize the slower intercities, and DB Fernverkehr is expected to make a profit as well (and did until 2023 IIRC). There’s very little private competition, some from actually private companies like Flixtrain, some from public ones like Trenitalia running on the LGV Sud-Est to Italy. The D-Takt is designed around public integration of infrastructure and the timetable, and even though the full implementation is being delayed for decades, core elements are already being implemented.
French regional governments can pay to put regional trains on high-speed lines, yes. Hauts de France does so; it’s called TER-GV. I’m not sure if in Germany it is disallowed or allowed but not done due to lack of need; the connections between fast and slow trains are good enough that there’s no need for (say) Bavaria to run its own trains between Munich and Nuremberg with branching out to other cities – passengers can book an itinerary with connections and the trains will usually wait for a delayed train.
The Germans do run regional services on their fast lines, that’s what serves the smaller stops that were required to build the fast lines in the first place.