As an aside, for people who are interested in international train travel - can I recommend https://www.seat61.com - it's a work of love and has helped me loads of times traveling in Europe. Most recently getting a train from the UK to Southern Italy
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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I never knew that I can get to Hamburg in about 10 hours. Visiting Berlin by train is on my wish list now I will add Hamburg too.
With the German train system even short trips can take you ten hours. It's great! 💖
Why is the German rail infrastructure so shit for such a rich country? Even the Netherlands has a better system. Is it because of the car industry lobbyists?
There is simple answer: there is too much to maintain.
As a Czech I can tell that we have the denses rail network in Europe because we were in centre of Austria-Hungary. Communists didn't want to tear it down and expanded public transport...
Now even with heavy subsidies it is just too much.
At least in Germany it's due to partial privatization. To a degree. We still think it should be profitable and don't treat it as the critical infrastructure it is.
Here it is also partially privatised, but only train providers. National rail maintainer is SŽDC. I think that it is similar in Germany.
In itself, I like to take the train to go on vacation. It has a lot of benefits. But one thing I avoid whenever possible is connecting trains. If you don't want to ruin your trip, don't change trains more than once and even then only with a lot of time buffer. If that is not possible, I prefer to make a stopover for 1-2 nights instead and continue the journey on a different day.
The good thing is that you sometimes end up in wonderful places that you don't even have on your radar. This tool had already helped me with that.
That's really cool! I can't seem to make it work properly though. Sometimes, there's a popup with links to the train connection, but I can't make the popup appear reliably.
~~Is it nation locked? Or perhaps only counts local trains? Looking at Turin and it doesn't seem to show the high speed links to France. The dotted line stops right at the border.~~
Nevermind, I'm dumb.
Is it a direct train though? Maybe you have to change at the border. It shows international connections from Berlin to Poland for example, so it's not nation locked.
Nevermind, I am an idiot. The tool works, I was looking at the wrong Turin station lmao.
I saw connections to other countries from Hamburg, Germany and Paris, France.