Well it's hard to find things where all foreign railways are universally better than all UK railways (abroad is a big place) but I think the point is valid. There are cities where, like London, most railway connections will require a change of station. But looking at European cities on average, travellers are far less likely to need to transfer.
To take some of your examples... In Brussels, only a few obscure stations can't be reached directly from Brussels Zuid but can be reached from other Brussels stations, and even then they can be reached from Zuid with a single change (so no need to leave the railway system). In Amsterdam, very few stations can be reached from Amsterdam Zuid but not Centraal, and it's very unlikely anyone would transfer from Centraal to Zuid to catch a train - they would take a train from Centraal and change somewhere like Utrecht or Schiphol. In Berlin, most places can be reached directly from the Hauptbahnhof.
You can find examples where a change of station is needed, or faster, but in most cities the proportion of journeys requiring a passenger to leave the railway system and travel between stations is much lower than in London.
Hi - I take your points here - though I was responding to the assertion that, "In most countries, France being a notable exception : no need to transfer between stations in the capital cities...". Paris might be the only one where the hassle is similar to London, but it's
not the case that there is
no need to transfer in other cities. And it seems to me that an obvious reason is to do with the size of the country and hence the complexity of the railways, and the number of different destinations to be served. Since the majority of railway services are national rather than international ones, then a smaller country, with less of a variety of national journeys, is going to be able to manage with fewer stations in its capital for longer-distance journeys.
And in places where there
is now better integration and ease of interchange for longer journeys, it's not true that that's always because they built their railways more sensibly in the first place - it's often (as in Berlin and Vienna's cases) something they've done recently. (And in the former's case - though not the latter's - the amount of wartime damage meant that there were fewer untouchable historic sites that precluded rationalisation of infrastructure.)
So I agree with you that, "in
most cities the proportion of journeys requiring a passenger to leave the railway system and travel between stations is much lower than in London", but my point remains that while London might be an especially bad case, it's far from the only one. (And I speak from bitter experience of a late-night attempt to transfer between stations in Madrid many years ago.)
Obviously cross-city lines, where they exist, can help this. But in London's case, the Thameslink and Crossrail routes seem primarily for commuters and regional (ie long-distance commuter!) services, with no fast long-distance intercity service using them. (Not that avoiding the hassle of switching stations isn't helpful for shorter journeys too, of course.) Does the lesson of the West London line, and the history of intercity services using that, suggest that long-distance through services might need to go through the centre of London if they're to be viable?
