Things they do on European railways which would be good in the UK

starrymarkb said:

Yet baggage on the Shuttles isn't scanned.

Click to expand...

That's the point I was making.

Every vehicle going onto the Shuttle does get screened to some extent - you just can't see the measures. True, they don't make you take the bags out and put them through an X Ray machine though.

Bald Rick said:

I'm afraid you can't have both...

Click to expand...

Why not?

talltim said:

Why not?

Click to expand...

If you lower both then how do you pay for everything?

ainsworth74 said:

If you lower both then how do you pay for everything?

Click to expand...

By cutting the train service. If you lower your income, you must lower the costs as well. That can only be done by scrapping trains other cost cutting measures. Which I would be against. I'd rather have more subsidy, to lower the fares. Either that or Britain has to invest in more asphalt.

If you remove the profit element, you have some more money to play with. This could reduce subsidies and fares. Admittedly the amount of profit 'saved' wouldn't reduce either or both by a huge amount (you especially probably wouldn't notice saving on individual tickets) but that doesn't mean that the statement is not true.
Also don't forget that the form of privatisation we have costs a lot more than just operators profits. Where do you think the money for preparing bids, transferring staff, making new websites, etc comes from?

WhiteJoker said:

I'd rather have more subsidy, to lower the fares. Either that or Britain has to invest in more asphalt.

Click to expand...

This.

Publicly-funded public transport and provision for utility cycling are good things, and a worthy use of the taxpayer's funds because the total cost of car usage is a far greater burden on the taxpayer.

Clip said:

you know as well as I do that enthusiasts want to know bloody everything even internal stuff.

I know for a fact that your average passenger just wants to know the destinations and calling pattern so they know where they're going

Click to expand...

I'll have to disagree with you on the train numbers. I have spent the last hour helping 2 mates who don't have a clue about public transport get the train from Brussels to Bruges. Left to their own devices they would have looked for a train going to Bruges and got there an hour later. In fact the main concern of the friend I was contacting was that the train would be going somewhere else and he wouldn't know which train to catch. Some people are that useless. He only found out, from me, last night that he wasn't flying to Brussels he was flying to Brussels South as Ryanair call it.

fowler9 said:

ILeft to their own devices they would have looked for a train going to Bruges and got there an hour later

Click to expand...

My mate did that. He got the stopper from Gent to Brussels Airport which went on the slow line via Aalst and stopped everywhere. Missed the plane and spent £160 to end up in Leeds/Bradford not Manchester.

Apologies if some of these have been already mentioned:

Belgium's Go Pass, giving a flat fare of €6 for anywhere in the entire country for under 26 year olds, saved me a huge amount of money last year.

Germany's region day tickets, go anywhere around an entire region of Germany including all bus, train, tram and metro routes. These happen up to a point in certain places here but the areas covered in Germany are absolutely massive - a North Rhine ticket will give you the entire networks of Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bonn and more for €28, inc. travel to and from airports.

Berlin's high-speed 'Airport Express' line from Schoenfeld airport being simply included as part of the main network and with absolutely no difference in price, you just buy a standard ticket and speed your way through to the city centre. Credit to for Madrid for including their airport station as part of their day pass, no silly extra fare.

Spain's 'CombinadoCercanias' tickets - a long distance train from one city to another (say, Barcelona to Madrid) will include a free ticket to continue your journey anywhere in your arrival city, accessible by entering in a five-letter code into any ticket machine. Imagine if they did this on the London Underground! Also in Spain the ability to buy a ticket for any train several months in advance from a ticket machine, find the cheapest advance fares, see what seats are available and choose your seat. And the first class 'preferente' lounges that are even accessible if you buy an (extremely) cheap first class advance ticket online, with complimentary food and drink...in general Spain impressed me all round, I travelled all the way from Barcelona to Lisbon in Portugal by train a few months back and it barely cost me anything given the distance covered.

Switzerland's SuperSaver tickets, similar to our Advance fares but give you 50% off the walk-up price if you book them even a couple hours before travel - which you can do at any major station.

Cheaper tickets on weekends. You get Super Off-Peak tickets here but in certain countries it's much more simple and widespread.

And then there's timed tickets which the UK seems to be one of the very few countries in Europe not to do - the biggest advantage being that you can use the same ticket for a short metro trip and then on a bus (or several buses/metro trips) afterwards, which would save me a ton of money in London. Given our delays though I can see why it wouldn't work over here.

One thing I'm glad we don't have - the hugely oversized long-distance tickets as seen in France and Spain but only seen here on the Eurostar. Ours are much more compact!

Billy Hicks said:

One thing I'm glad we don't have - the hugely oversized long-distance tickets as seen in France and Spain but only seen here on the Eurostar. Ours are much more compact!

Click to expand...

They are just derivations of IBM 80-track punched cards. UK inter-city tickets were like that in the '70s and '80s. Airline tickets were also that way but some of them are slightly smaller now.

As the title of the thread alludes to us as not being European how about the things that are better here than on the continent?
Platform heights for one. How often (okay not everywhere in Europe) do you need to step up or climb on to your train even at major terminals in European capitals ?

AM9 said:

They are just derivations of IBM 80-track punched cards. UK inter-city tickets were like that in the '70s and '80s. Airline tickets were also that way but some of them are slightly smaller now.

Click to expand...

The advantage of ATB tickets (the large ones) is that you've plenty of space for detailing things like restrictions.

Neil

Clip said:

This obsession for service numbers is really only an enthusiasts wet dream. Your normal pax doesn't care about them and wouldn't use them either. They look at the screen to see the destination and calling points and that works so there's no need for bloody numbers.


I swear some of you in other threads say how difficult some stuff is but yet want to add to that by having more crap on the boards and tickets! Baffles me.

Click to expand...

That really isn't true. If implemented correctly, service numbers become the main way to quickly state what train you want. Obviously people in this country just use the destination and calling points, because that's what they're used to...

For example, China uses them almost exclusively from my experience travelling on the train there, and it makes buying tickets a hell of a lot easier even with a language barrier, I tell you. Plus it means at very large stations you can display hundreds of trains whilst mentioning only the final calling point - something somewhere like Waterloo could probably benefit from.

TheKnightWho said:

Obviously people in this country just use the destination and calling points, because that's what they're used to...

Click to expand...

Paris has another variation on this - at main line stations the suburban trains are not announced over the PA, but appear on the board with the destination and the 'Code mission' next to it ie. Mantes-la-Jole MALE. It is from the code MALE that you work out the train - the M gives the destination of Mantes (ok, we already knew that), then other letters give details as to whether the train is a stopper or not (or whether it is fast to a certain station and then a stopper), which way it goes to Mantes (there are two ways, either via Poissy or Conflans) and then in certain cases, the origin of the train.

It took me a while to get used to the system at first, and on first sight seeing Mantes-la-Jolie MALE and then Mantes-la-Jolie MOPE can be rather confusing, with no idea what the hell the difference is between the two trains - rest be assured on the platform they have screen showing the full station stops, and from that you can learn what the codes mean for next time

AdamW said:

Paris has another variation on this - at main line stations the suburban trains are not announced over the PA, but appear on the board with the destination and the 'Code mission' next to it ie. Mantes-la-Jole MALE. It is from the code MALE that you work out the train - the M gives the destination of Mantes (ok, we already knew that), then other letters give details as to whether the train is a stopper or not (or whether it is fast to a certain station and then a stopper), which way it goes to Mantes (there are two ways, either via Poissy or Conflans) and then in certain cases, the origin of the train.

It took me a while to get used to the system at first, and on first sight seeing Mantes-la-Jolie MALE and then Mantes-la-Jolie MOPE can be rather confusing, with no idea what the hell the difference is between the two trains - rest be assured on the platform they have screen showing the full station stops, and from that you can learn what the codes mean for next time

Click to expand...

That's really interesting. I don't have any experience of the French system you're talking about, but the Chinese system was also systematic in how numbers were distributed quickly made it very easy to work out where you're going and how quickly: they all began with a letter or number denoting the speed and type of the train: 6 and 7 being the stop everywheres, 1-5 being the slows, then K being the semi-fasts, T being fasts, Z being the high-speed sleepers, D being the high-speed and G being Shinkansen-esque at 300kph (there are a few other types for special things here and there too). Then that is followed by 1, 2 or 3 numbers which are the particular route in question. Odd numbers are down (away from Beijing) and even numbers are up (towards Beijing). Therefore you had some trains which changed codes en route as they switched from being up to down trains either going through Beijing or passing it by. For example, I was on the G1246 from Harbin to Qingdao that became the G1247 as it passed through Tianjin and became a down train (it never went through Beijing).

The whole system is pretty complicated at first, but pretty much everyone in China understands it well and can easily look up where they want to go and what train they need with no trouble. It's a pretty simple system when you get used to it, and helps enormously if you're at some gigantic station in some city where no-one speaks English and you're trying to work out where you're going. I mean, with the example above it's the difference between getting on a G train for 11 hours or a K train for 26 for 1/3 the price. I guess it matters a lot more in such a huge country!

TheKnightWho said:

That's really interesting. I don't have any experience of the French system you're talking about, but the Chinese system was also systematic in how numbers were distributed: they all began with a letter or number denoting the speed and type of the train: 6 and 7 being the stop everywheres, 1-5 being the slows, then K being the next fasts, T being the expresses, Z being the high-speed sleepers, D being the high-speed and G being Shinkansen-esque at 300kph (there are a few other types for special things here and there too). Then that is followed by 1, 2 or 3 numbers which are the particular route in question. Odd numbers are down (away from Beijing) and even numbers are up (towards Beijing). Therefore you had some trains which changed codes en route as they switched from being up to down trains either going through Beijing or passing it by. For example, I was on the G1246 from Harbin to Qingdao that became the G1247 as it passed through Tianjin and became a down train (it never went through Beijing).

Click to expand...

You used to get those kind of swaprounds on trains in Germany and surrounds as well, though rarely a number change - for instance, some night trains swapped between being D1234 and EN1234, and the Hamburg-Berchtesgaden IC was a RB after Freilassing.

Neil

Billy Hicks said:

Germany's region day tickets, go anywhere around an entire region of Germany including all bus, train, tram and metro routes. These happen up to a point in certain places here but the areas covered in Germany are absolutely massive - a North Rhine ticket will give you the entire networks of Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bonn and more for €28, inc. travel to and from airports.

Click to expand...

At least on local trains.

Billy Hicks said:

Spain's 'CombinadoCercanias' tickets - a long distance train from one city to another (say, Barcelona to Madrid) will include a free ticket to continue your journey anywhere in your arrival city, accessible by entering in a five-letter code into any ticket machine.

Click to expand...

Also in Germany, providing a long-distance ticket is booked with a "BahnCard" discount (it will be issued to e.g. "Hamburg+City"). A bit like Plusbus in the UK but for local metro as well, but theoretically only valid for one trip not a whole day.

You can also get tickets with "CityMobil" for tickets without "BahnCard" discount, which will add the price of local public transport at the destination; this doesn't save money but increases convenience because you don't have to puzzle out unfamiliar ticket machines or worry about which zones you might need.

Billy Hicks said:

Imagine if they did this on the London Underground!

Click to expand...

UK already has this, doesn't it? It's called Travelcards, as in you can book a long-distance ticket which includes a one-day Travelcard at the end.

Sounds as if Spain simply builds the surcharge into their ticket prices, meaning the local travel at the destination isn't really "free".

scarby said:

Open stations.

Luggage lockers.

Decent-sized trains.

No endless announcements about safety and security.

Don't shut down the rail system at Christmas.

Click to expand...

Like the SWT announcement "this train is formed of two (or whatever) coaches" also repeated on the information boards. Presumably continental passengers can work this out for themselves

Billy Hicks said:

Germany's region day tickets, go anywhere around an entire region of Germany including all bus, train, tram and metro routes. These happen up to a point in certain places here but the areas covered in Germany are absolutely massive - a North Rhine ticket will give you the entire networks of Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bonn and more for €28, inc. travel to and from airports.

pne said:

At least on local trains.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

"local trains" make it sound quite restricted; yes it doesn't include IC or ICE but it does include the RE trains which are still quite useful - and more interesting!. A few years back I used a couple of Baden Wuerttenburg tickets to firstly go from Heidelberg to Freiburg, and then another one to get from Freiburg to Schaffhausen.
The first one was a bit fiddly compared to direct; two changes and an extra hour compared to the IC, but nearly half the price. The second one there was no choice of trains really so it wasn't a disadvantage atall.

341o2 said:

Like the SWT announcement "this train is formed of two (or whatever) coaches" also repeated on the information boards. Presumably continental passengers can work this out for themselves

Click to expand...

Are you suggesting that is not a useful announcement? On the contrary - it is, for a commuter wanting to know where to stand, a *very* useful announcement.

"Continental passengers" often get a little diagram on the PIS showing which coach, or at least which class, stops where on the platform.

Neil

I think the systematic route numbers are useful from Europe, but less so the full train number.

While it's useful for someone like me to see ICE2345 or TGV9102 on my ticket and compare with what train is leaving, I'd suggest the presence of a route number with a prefix is more useful to the average user.

Knowing that you want RE2 is useful and tells you what sort of train you're getting, especially with large numbers of calling points. It's very good at reducing the number of people who get the slow train somewhere, when a fast train is more appropriate.

A good example would be at King's Cross, where you could nicely segregate the local Welwyn and Hertford trains as S, the Cambridge and Peterborough slows as RB (or R), and the equivalent fasts as RE, leaving East Coast to be IC. This would certainly help reduce any confusion over the choice of trains to Cambridge and Peterborough.

glbotu said:

While it's useful for someone like me to see ICE2345 or TGV9102 on my ticket and compare with what train is leaving, I'd suggest the presence of a route number with a prefix is more useful to the average user.

Click to expand...

Probably route numbers for relatively local trains that run frequently and people take often, and service numbers for relatively long-distance trains that run less frequently and people from other places (who aren't familiar with local route numbers) more often take.

Waddon said:

The title says it all really, is there any practices or innovations used in other European countries which you think would work well in the UK?

Click to expand...

Obvious one that springs to mind is bidirectional signalling on all double track main lines. This is very useful in facilitating weekday engineering work and keeping things on time when things go wrong.

Waddon said:

Off the top of my head, I like the way that major German station platforms are split into zones, and the passenger information indicators show exactly which part of the train stops in which zone, or where a shorter train will stop in the platform (much better than the vague way that stopping information is displayed in the UK, usually resulting in people running up and down the platform, or all squeezing in through one door, delaying the service).

Click to expand...

To be fair, Virgin have done this on the WCML.

341o2 said:

Like the SWT announcement "this train is formed of two (or whatever) coaches" also repeated on the information boards. Presumably continental passengers can work this out for themselves

Click to expand...

I find this information really useful when the train can be either 4 or 8 coaches. Lets me know where I can stand on the platform

Edit: I see Neil Williams beat me to this

glbotu said:

A good example would be at King's Cross, where you could nicely segregate the local Welwyn and Hertford trains as S, the Cambridge and Peterborough slows as RB (or R), and the equivalent fasts as RE, leaving East Coast to be IC. This would certainly help reduce any confusion over the choice of trains to Cambridge and Peterborough.

Click to expand...

Or the ridiculous Oxford slows, which take 2 hours rather than 1... They even mark them on the boards as going to Radley, but I think with route numbers they could correct this inaccuracy.

I imagine its timings will increase dramatically more than the fasts with electrification though, given the far superior acceleration.

TheKnightWho said:

Or the ridiculous Oxford slows, which take 2 hours rather than 1... They even mark them on the boards as going to Radley, but I think with route numbers they could correct this inaccuracy.

I imagine its timings will increase dramatically more than the fasts with electrification though, given the far superior acceleration.

Click to expand...

There's nothing ridiculous about a long-distance stopping service which isn't intended to carry passengers end to end. Though I agree route numbers can help identify this kind of thing without confusing people by showing an incorrect destination.

Neil

Neil Williams said:

There's nothing ridiculous about a long-distance stopping service which isn't intended to carry passengers end to end. Though I agree route numbers can help identify this kind of thing without confusing people by showing an incorrect destination.

Neil

Click to expand...

I'm not saying the principle is ridiculous - I'm saying it's ridiculous that it takes that much longer.

TheKnightWho said:

I'm not saying the principle is ridiculous - I'm saying it's ridiculous that it takes that much longer.

Click to expand...

Fast services (VT) MKC-Euston 30 mins (ignoring recovery time). Slow services approximately an hour.

Not really surprising nor ridiculous.

Neil

I definitely agree some of commentators here with displaying train service number.

Text displays inside the train and on the platform should be used more than just regularly scheduled messages, even the TV screens at Coventry, International and some other large stations wasn't very useful.

I was on DSB train in Copenhagen and was delayed on way out of the terminal. Apologies and reasoning for the delay was displayed on the text display.