Why are cross-country train tickets in EU still so complex?

Sometimes this complexity can lead to nice loopholes. Some time ago I wrote a comment [0] which explained how we once tricked ourselves into a 1,500 km, 7 day train trip for 39 EUR:<p>&gt; Deutsche Bahn had (and still has I think) a &quot;Europe Special&quot; where you could buy a ticket from any town in Germany to any town in Europe for 39 EUR flat. Our idea was to travel through Croatia for a few weeks, starting from Zagreb. Sure enough, bahn.de (the journey planer of Deutsche Bahn) offered us a ticket for a train ride of around 16 hours from our home town to Zagreb, through Austria and Slovenia. We would have had to change trains 2 times.<p>&gt; Then things escalated.<p>&gt; We discovered that we could book the same trip, for the same price, but with a different route, making a 500 km detour inside Germany over my parent&#x27;s town. Then we discovered that bahn.de allowed us to specify a minimum time to change trains. We set it to 24 hours at my parent&#x27;s town, letting us stay at my parents for a night. Then we found out that we could set an additional via option in such a way that we had to change trains in Ljubljana. We set the minimum time to change trains there to 24 hours. Then we found out that the ticket price was the same if we travelled not only to Zagreb, but to Split (at the coast), which required a change of trains in Zagreb. But we wanted to stay a few days in Zagreb, and the maximum minimum time to change trains on bahn.de was 24 hours. But thenw e discovered that (at least 5 years ago) all foreign tickets were valid for 30 days in Croatia. Effectively, this meant that we could stay in Zagreb for 30 days, and our ticket to Split <i>was still valid</i>.<p>&gt; We got the ticket. After a week of visiting my parents (1 night stay), Ljubljana (1 night stay), and Zagreb (5 nights stay), we arrived in Split without problems. It was a 1,500 km, 7 day train trip for 39 EUR.<p>&gt; The only minor problem we had was the German conductor in the first train after we visited my parents. He just stared at the monstrous ticket in disbelief and had to finally conclude that it was valid.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26982370" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26982370</a>

Apparently there is little current economic incentive (or regulatory push) to streamline the process and take on airlines in cross-border travel:<p>Railway companies are national in nature and by history. The share of cross-border travelling is small; the income mainly comes from national rail.<p>-<p>Obviously if they streamlined the process to take on airlines their revenue would increase. But perhaps the cost of streamlining would outweigh the revenue increase. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to create a disruptor in the train space due to rules, regulation and the capex nature of it. Whereas the airline space is easy to enter as a competitor even though it is capex heavy because the core asset (planes) are mobile. You can move them from very competitive market to another one that has less competition if the laws (and airport slots) allow for it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Contestable_market" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Contestable_market</a>

Cross-country used to be very convenient before kerosene production increased, got distributed and aeroplanes range increased so that taxation of the fuel became impossible.<p>You could book one nighttrain ticket from Stockholm to Paris straight and that had been possible since 1930 until ~1970!<p>Now when the Swedish governement tries to revive the service they say they encounter resistance from the Germans who apparently don&#x27;t want to let traffic just cross their territory for some reason? Political blame game?<p>&quot;In this case, one of the objections has been that the final destination of the traffic is not German. There are similar challenges with other countries. But if we are to have train traffic in the EU, we must accept and let traffic through, says Minister of Infrastructure Tomas Eneroth&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dn.se&#x2F;sverige&#x2F;tyskland-stoppade-svensk-nattag-till-bryssel-ministrar-skriver-till-eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dn.se&#x2F;sverige&#x2F;tyskland-stoppade-svensk-nattag-ti...</a><p>Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compagnie_Internationale_des_Wagons-Lits" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compagnie_Internationale_des_W...</a>

I travel between Italy, Austria, Germany and Switzerland somewhat regularly, not rarely passing through 3 of the 4 countries for a given trip. I use the Austrian national railway‘s (ÖBB) app to book my tickets, I get a single QR code on my phone that is valid for all legs of my journey, gets scanned by the personnel of whatever country‘s railway company, and I‘m good. Never had any problems whatsoever.

One thing I particularly enjoy traveling by public transport within European countries is the use of a &quot;travel card&quot; - Rejsekort in Denmark and OV Chipkaard in Netherlands. They work as a simple card that you can &quot;beep beep&quot; whenever you use public transport and it works out the payment from attached bank account&#x2F;card. It makes travel by public transport hassle-free. I only wish in this digital age, all EU countries co-operate and make these systems inter-operate so that for example, one can have a Danish Rejsekort, and travel to Netherlands by train, and go around the town in public transport using the same &quot;beep beep&quot;. Now, make that acceptable in long distance trains as well, and imagine how convenient that would be!!<p>EU can clearly make a nice case for this because it will improve efficiency and usage (thereby netting profit) for member countries. There needs to be leadership and will to make it happen!!!

Slightly related : I have discovered an hour ago this interactive map of Europe which lets you know, given your starting train station, all the destinations you can reach directly without changing trains.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;direkt.bahn.guru&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;direkt.bahn.guru&#x2F;</a><p>(provided by Deutsche Bahn but not limited to their own trains)

I didn&#x27;t find riding the train around Europe to be complex, if anything it was a bit more straightforward than air travel in the US domestically because I didn&#x27;t have to go through absurd security theater as part of the process. I have done many many cross-country train trips in Europe without issue.

You think that&#x27;s bad? Spanish train operator Renfe&#x27;s website [0] (which has been &quot;redesigned&quot; time and time again to much fanfare over the years) is incapable of offering tickets for any journey between two stations if there&#x27;s no direct train between them, unless a specific option changing trains has been manually defined on their system. Neither will it display commuter train services, even though stations served by commuter trains do appear in the drop-down.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.renfe.com&#x2F;es&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.renfe.com&#x2F;es&#x2F;en</a>

Really?<p>&gt; When travelling from Copenhagen to Warsaw or Lisbon to Marseille<p>People pick the train because those trips are far enough to make the train a hassle<p>But I can enter the origin train company sites (or the operator) and buy a ticket to another country &quot;pretty easily&quot; (for the last couple of times I did this). In fact buying online was easy enough.

Just in case people haven&#x27;t come across the excellent <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seat61.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seat61.com</a><p>It is indispensible if you want to plan international travel by train. A true work of love.

The trick to get an flexible affordable ticket between European cities is to know that interrail tickets(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interrail.eu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interrail.eu</a>) is no longer limited to youngsters on a multiweek backpacking journey.<p>Back when we were still allowed to travel i spend a fair bit of time traveling between non-airport cities which meant that an 8-10 hour cross border train ride was often the only alternative to even more time spend waiting at airports, which still required muiti-hour train journeys to the final destination, and i really did enjoy that mode of transport, but it does take some mental adjustments as delays are pretty common on the railways so if you have a &quot;must meet&quot; every connection as scheduled schedule where you cannot just jump on the next train out things will get messy.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interrail.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interrail.eu&#x2F;</a> is providing good bundles to travel across Europe. Plus, there is a black friday promo ongoing.

If you are interrested by this problem Trainline is hiring and my team is working on connecting the Train carrier API to a single backend like what you have in the airline world.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.lever.co&#x2F;thetrainline&#x2F;9743f1ec-253f-46ec-a144-189158af3639" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.lever.co&#x2F;thetrainline&#x2F;9743f1ec-253f-46ec-a144-1...</a>

And somehow I&#x27;m able to buy a return ticket from Paris to Prague on my national railways&#x27; website without a single issue.

There are some very useful hyperlinks in this article to website that negate some of the hassle of booking cross-border tickers

Wow, I assumed that the EU was created to simplify things like this. Still better than Amtrak I suppose.

Try booking a train ticket from Brussels to Riga. Still quite a bit of work to do...

Most of the time, you buy fewer than one ticket per leg. Often the interfaces or forms are more fancy or extensive; perhaps implying security.<p>Hindsight &#x2F;km payment for international travel would not readily take your mind off of distances beyond the travel time; you&#x27;d never know how much to pay. Every international card has recognition issues in some countries&#x2F;places, or limited ticket stations serve special deals. Countries probably vary in their use of smartcard gates etc further complicating such deals.<p>I was wondering about train pricing and train pricing ideals. There&#x27;s a large factor of involvement of the cost of finance, as they&#x27;re expensive projects. The market-technical pricepoint relates to alternative modes of travel, but the nature of mobility does not. This relates to hyperloop etc.<p>It would be neat to have fast-train New York - London&#x2F;Paris&#x2F;Amsterdam - (... more stops, have skip-trains ...) Bejing - Seoul&#x2F;Busan - Tokyo, maybe Australia would even pay to have one next to a brand new city in the northeast of the country.. But the scale implies enough industry to have issues being expressed in regular currencies - and it should have fargoing implications to live so proximate; in one of the world-cities.<p>But how many people would you expect to make the journey? And whatfor? Is the economy of it the leading choice, or is prestige a factor? What is the balance of advantages at different price-points, or at different expectations of traffic volume. It might be added value for tickets to be ~20 euro&#x27;s (cheaper even per hour than &#x27;typical&#x27; train fair, probably impossible without large volume and subsidy), instead of the &#x27;serious hassle&#x27; &lt;300 that a &quot;regular international intercity&quot; tends to go for. In fairness to potential comfort, fares could be 2000 euro&#x27;s, but this would greatly reduce the potential volume and application range.<p>Another question could be, why are countries ran &#x27;retroactively&#x27; nowadays? I&#x27;d rather the news stated there was debates about future trains, proactive regulation of automation and small electric vehicles, something to tie science like a horse for improvement, rather than to consider (promoting) improvements indirectly; through a market.