Posted by Peter Ceresole on November 29, 2005 at 13:15:16 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Planning Rail Routes posted by Laurence Monkhouse on November 29, 2005 at 09:21:39:
I think that there is a lot of exaggeration about rail reliability in the past and unreliability now.
I'm sure you're right. And the sun always shone then, too- remember?
But I'm not so much comparing with the past as talking about the realities of now. And yes, I have to say that the reliability of South West Trains (who cover the London Commuterland where I live) is suprisingly high. And that every time I say this, something goes horribly wrong. But mostly, the other systems I use are the French and the Swiss. And what they say about Swiss trains is generally true; on time to the nearest ten seconds. Comfortable. Clean. Very friendly staff. About as expensive as British trains (very). The 'interesting' case is French railways. Thanks to a principled subsidy they are jolly cheap. But glitch-free, not quite... Travelling back from Nice to Geneva last winter, the first leg was by TGV, and they are jolly quick, when they turn up. But our TGV, which went via Dijon, was behind a giant, endless crocodile of a TGV that went direct to Lyon and Paris and was 3/4 of an hour late. An inherent problem of trains is that overtaking is not a practical proposition. We had a fast, comfortable ride to Dijon which took exactly the time it took. We had a connection there to the last train of the day that sloped off through the Jura to Geneva. We were all afraid of missing it as we arrived half an hour after its scheduled departure time. As we all pounded across the station, up and down the ramps, we saw our train, a brand new diesel double deck shiny, with the doors thrown open and the train staff waving and calling out 'Don't worry, we're going to wait for you!' And they did. It was a lovely ride through the midnight snow; there was a five minute stop scheduled at most of the stations but at that time of night there was nobody waiting and most stops were 20 or 30 seconds. One passenger was taking yet another connection which took him to the French side of the lake and he was worried about missing that; I heard him ask one of the train staff about it and the chap laughed and said 'Well, I'm driving that one and I don't think it'll leave without me.'
As it was, thanks to their hustling through the stops, by Geneva we were almost on time.
On the whole, I really enjoy travelling on French railways because they seem to enjoy running them. And believe in them.