Mastodawn

波鉄 (Hatetsu)

So, what happened in Hungary in 2024?

Okay, so the methodology for the core price comparison (this is meant to show the wisdom of Open Access, is it) is that they took the one of the most important domestic routes in each country, looked at the highest-category trains, on midweek Tuesday-Thursday dates in November-mid-December, between 8 and 10 AM. They compared prices 30 days ahead (Polish booking horizon yay) and 1 day ahead, in 2nd class or whatever equivalent could be found, non-refundable where that was an option, converted to Euros.
Now, the choice of routes is… kinda interesting. (trains divided as in original report)
PL - EIP Warsaw-Kraków (who would've guessed - please keep in mind that those are significantly more expensive than other trains in Poland)
High-speed:
FR - TGV InOui Paris-Marseille
ES - AVE Madrid-Barcelona
IT - FR Rome-Milan
SE - Snabbtåg Stockholm-Gothenburg
TR - YHT Ankara-İstanbul
Non-high-speed:
DE - ICE Berlin-Hamburg (how much are you willing to bet they picked this one specifically to avoid what high-speed rail Germany does have?)
CH - IC Zurich-Geneva
FI - IC Helsinki-Tampere
HU - IC Budapest-Debrecen
GB - London-Birmigham (I'm not going to call it an IC like they do)
AT - EC Vienna-Graz (predates Koralmbahn)
CZ - EC Prague-Brno (so in these two cases they've clearly opted to avoid routes with developed open access competition… But not in Spain or Sweden?)

These are rather diverse routes, but I guess the idea is to have similar journey times, roughly 3 hours?

Then there's a page on booking horizons and the only one as short as Poland's is in Turkey. Well, I did now *we* were behind

They sorted the price chart be difference between early and late booking! …And the Polish Pendolino is number two, somehow! (See page 17 in the original report for the full one)

I'm kind of surprised by the Frecciarossa being the most expensive last-minute at €125 (and just barely short of the AVE at a month out at ~€68 - I guess affordable AVE tickets sell out earlier, since there was literally zero price movement there, in turn?)

Also, the YHT actually got slightly cheaper. Last minute pricing (advocated in the conclusions) or just Lira things?

Then they decided to derive price per 100 km as share of monthly salary. Unsurprisingly, UK last minute takes the cake at a whopping 1.05%, EIP last minute distorts the stats at 0.77%…
And on the other end of the scale is the TGV at 0.18%? How degressive is SNCF's tariff?

And at the low end both UK long-distance and EIP are 0.23%. So I guess I can now say Pendolino prices are for us somewhat like British prices for Brits except less terminology and there is a good number of options that are actually affordable

OMG, that last bit XD

There are screenshots of that for each of these routes, except for the one in Turkey.

I admire the sheer dedication but that person needs to be introduced to OpenStreetMap-based tools posthaste ;)

10/

Oliver Blanthorn Mar 10

@HaTetsu TGVs aren't priced per kilometre. Fairer to say that they're priced per leg based on demand and how much the SNCF thinks they can get away with restricting supply

e.g. today

Paris - Le Mans: €70, 1h, 200km

Paris - Nice: €80, 6h, 900km

so if you divide by km on one of the longest journeys in the country they look very cheap

Cycling on Rails Mar 9

@HaTetsu Any price comparison methodology based on cherry-picked examples is doomed to be highly biased. Reminds me of the Greenpeace piece last year (https://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/issues/climate-energy/47717/low-cost-flights-up-to-26-times-cheaper-than-trains/).

For an accurate comparison we need a holistic price database, but as we often discuss here in the #bahnbubble that requires strong open data regulation 😉

Low-cost flights up to 26 times cheaper than trains - Greenpeace European Unit

Brussels, 21 August 2025 – A new Europe-wide Greenpeace study shows that climate-damaging flying is still cheaper than taking the train on a majority of cross-border routes – even though…

Greenpeace European Unit