Rail Chatter

 CNN Travel had a curious piece yesterday....talking over Europe and the idea of high-speed rail replacing in-Europe airline travel (far into the future).

The hype?  Well....a fair number of bureaucrats desire that air travel (at least within EU region) would just go away in twenty-odd years, and you'd only need planes for 'far' region travel.  To replace this segment of society....would be this element of high-speed rail.

I paused over the story.

There are several problems to this level of thinking.  First, if you go and evaluate what exists today....it's an odd patchwork of networks that go between 250 and 300 kph.  

In Germany, there are eleven 'paths'.  The least one?  Wendlingen-Stuttgart (it won't be up and running until 2025)....at 25 km. The longest path?  Wurzburg-Hannover, at 327 km.  The one nearest me....Frankfurt to Koln....180 km.  

You have the same make-up in France....sixteen routes, and some going up to 320 kph.

So you come to the EU chatter....that you'd have to allocate funding (via tax revenue) and 'gift' certain countries to build up the 'paths'.  

For example....the Greeks have one single line (the whole path will be active in 2022).  

Ireland?  Zero.

Croatia?  They have a plan, but it may be a dozen years before anything comes out of this.

So yeah....a lot of this funding would skip Germany, France, and the Netherlands...going to the lesser countries to build up this network.

Getting the public to accept mandates and shutdowns of in-country flights....then moving to Europe-wide shutdown.  

A time-line?  No....no dares to suggest this, and I doubt that you could move beyond in-country flights even by 2035.  

If you asked regular working-class Germans?  The majority I think....if you mandated in-Europe flights were halted, and high-speed rail was the solution?  I'd say more than half would not trust the rail plan to work, and they'd be driving to their vacation spot in their own car.  

I'd even vouch....the idea of trusting some modern railway car to be 'cool' in mid-summer is out of touch with reality.  

So I come to the final part of this pondering.  Would the airport crowd and airlines just roll over and accept this?  I doubt that.  Also....if you are a representative of the EU sitting in Brussels and had to discuss returning to your home-town this weekend....spending 12 hours on high-speed/regular-speed rail to reach home, or spending 4 hours with air-travel and a cab....we know how they'd react to the mandate.