Food for thought on rail passenger service growth strategies

[jis]

A very interesting video discussing how European railways and regulators are starting to emulate what happened in the airline industry to grow the usage of passenger rail.



Maybe when we try to insist here that rail is not air, we are on the wrong track possibly. Cheaper travel is the key, not necessarily fancier service affordable only by smaller segments of travelers. Something to think about.

 

[GDRRiley]

An interesting thing it fails to note is how some sections of the network have lots of spare capacity while others struggle.
Italy, Span and France have lots of capacity on their high speed lines in many cases. Meanwhile gemany while they often have capacity on high speed lines they are so short and limited they run into the bottleneck of the conventional lines

 

[Metra Electric Rider]

I haven't watched the video yet (since when did that ever stop anybody from commenting) but while I think open access is useful, how would that work here with privately owned, freight dominated trackage?

A lot of the European low cost trains have gotten good/decent reviews, especially on service and price (I want to say Lumo on the ECML in the UK has been quite good - as have some of the continental routes).