[majewsky]

Wendover had a video on this topic just this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9jirFqex6g

For a short summary, the basic problem is that rail infrastructure is paid for by national funds, so there is a bigger incentive to connect two places within the same country than to connect one place within the country to another place within a neighboring country.

Wendover theorizes that the decoupling of rail networks from rail service operators (as pushed by the EU-level government) can lead to new demand for international routes as budget operators spring up that are less tied to the demands of a particular national government.

[oittaa]

There are a lot of plans for international train lines in Europe and some of them are actually being built. If you check the Wikipedia page of the the Spanish rail service[1], you'll see that new connections to France should be completed sometime around 2023. Currently the only high speed link to France is from Barcelona, which makes traveling from Madrid and Spain's Northern coast to Paris more time consuming.

There's also a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel plan, which is more like in an exploration/planning phase, but that should connect those cities and make them function almost like one. Instead of a two hour ferry ride it would be more like a 30min train ride. Øresund Bridge basically did that to Copenhagen and Malmö.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE#Lines_under_construction

[littlecranky67]

Seems like those connections will all use the existing (standard gauge) Perpignan/Figueres route through the Perthus Tunnel in the Pyrenees. Your source mentions only one new cross-border connection but will essentially terminate shortly after the french border, with no connection to the french highspeed network. So I suspect connections to Paris from anywhere in Spain will go through Barcelona for the forseeable future.

[johannes1234321]

Yes, funding is one thing. Other thing is that history of control systems and regulations is wild. For each border crossing you need different pantographs (some locomotives have four different pantographs for different countries), the engineer has to be able to identify different signalling systems, the train needs different computer systems for interpreting different control systems ...

There are initiatives like ETCS which partially improve the control situation, but even that has lots of national variations and takes ages to rollout.

Historic systems with little funding (relative to need) are fun.

[terramex]

> For a short summary, the basic problem is that rail infrastructure is paid for by national funds

EU co-founded projects can be forced to operate only domestically too. For example polish high speed railways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendolino#Poland

> certification for international operation is not seen as a priority, as the trains are restricted to domestic services for an initial 10 years under the terms of a grant from the EU Cohesion Fund which covered 22% of the project cost.[31]

[majewsky]

> EU Cohesion Fund

Oh, the irony.

[mnd999]

I’m now looking at whether you can get to Paris and Brussels within 5 hours from the village of Wendover in the UK.

And yes, you can.

[iggldiggl]

> Wendover theorizes that the decoupling of rail networks from rail service operators (as pushed by the EU-level government) can lead to new demand for international routes as budget operators spring up that are less tied to the demands of a particular national government.

Some problems with that approach are

1. It doesn't take that many different operators before you start running into capacity limits of the network and get into a situation where additional services (when you want even more competition) cannot be scheduled without actively worsening the services offered by existing operators (including operators that might not even be competing within the same market segment, i.e. like long distance operators vs. regional and commuter service operators or freight operators).

2. In principle connections are a core part of railways' service offerings (especially in countries that aren't as centralised as e.g. the stereotype of France), but attractive connection times are only possible between a very limited number of trains, so with multiple competing long distance operators who gets to decide which operator gets the path with the attractive connection times and who doesn't? Attractive connections also require through-ticketing in terms of passenger rights, so you won't be left stranded if you miss a connection because of preceding delays, and both scheduled/coordinated connections and through-ticketing run counter to the mantra of absolutely free-for-all competition.

3. For the wheel-rail interface to work well, you definitively need to take a holistic approach between the needs of the infrastructure and the needs of the vehicles running on that infrastructure. Introducing a hard legal split between infrastructure owner and train operating companies in the name of free competition unfortunately tends to turn that interface into a legal and bureaucratic quagmire that is anything but efficient for the railway system as a whole.

For example in Germany construction works (outside of emergency repairs) are required to be scheduled several years (not just a year plus a bit so its known in time for the next timetable, but some years more) in advance. At that point you already need to specify the exact and precise length of any required possessions, but at the same time due to the rules for tendering construction works, you're also not supposed to specify the exact method of doing those construction works, so for anything slightly more complex how are you now supposed to calculate the exact length for the required possessions if you aren't actually allowed to specify how the construction works are to be executed?

Or for another example: Within the wheel-rail interface you cannot avoid a certain amount of wear and tear, especially on more curvy stretches of line. This affects both the train operators (wheels) as well as the infrastructure operator (rails). Ideally you'd work out some compromise that is tenable for both sides of the interface, and normally somewhat more wear and tear on the wheels is to be preferred, because wheels can re-profiled and/or changed in fixed, covered maintenance facilities (i.e. better working conditions) and while the trains are potentially out of service for regular maintenance anyway, whereas rail renewals need to potentially brave the elements and either block rail traffic or else need to be conducted at unattractive times (for workers, i.e. on weekends and especially at night).

The legal separation between train operating companies and infrastructure owners nevertheless has led train operating companies to possibly try optimising the wheel-rail interface for their own benefit, which has meant that on some heavily used routes with tight(ish) curves, due to excessive wear rails now have to be renewed every year or two, which longer term absolutely isn't sustainable in terms of the demands placed on the maintenance personnel of the infrastructure operator (and never mind the costs, too). (Normally, rail life before a complete renewal is measured in decades!)

So now "the empire strikes back" and the infrastructure operator installs hardened rails in order to return to a somewhat more manageable and sustainable maintenance schedule, but because the vehicle operators haven't been prepared for that switch, they now suddenly find themselves with excessive wheel wear (and unfortunately at a point in time when due to outside political events there isn't much excess capacity in the market for railway wheels). In the end, it's ultimately the passenger who suffers here.

[Aachen]

I will admit to having only read the first point of the long post, so I'll just respond to that:

> It doesn't take that many different operators before you start running into capacity limits of the network

Don't get this. If there is that much demand, then clearly it makes sense to build out the system? More rails, higher speed, and/or better bypasses for trains that need to stop at each station for example.

It's usually a hard question to predict where public or investment money is best spent, but this situation seems like it would be quite clear.

[iggldiggl]

Unfortunately these days building out capacity is usually neither cheap nor fast, so it's not uncommon to get stuck in some sort of intermediate twilight zone where you have somewhat too many trains for too little tracks, but not so many that building out additional infrastructure is clearly warranted (and even when it is warranted, planning and construction will unfortunately nowadays take years to decades, and what do you do until then?).

Open access operators also often start running only a few trains per day – building additional expensive infrastructure for just a few trains per day might not be worth it, but conversely a few trains per day are potentially already more than enough to upset an exiting regular interval timetable and timed connections.