France: Any journey shorter than 4 hours by train should not be allowed to be taken by plane.
Me, after using French railways for a couple of weeks: They’re running plane services for distances of only 100km?
I’m honestly shocked at how functionally useless French railways are. “Welcome to our interchange. Please wait 2 hours surrounded by screaming kids and chain smokers for your connection. No you can’t have a fucking coffee”
Dear the UK, you have it better than you could possibly believe.
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ So my recent experience is Brittany, which has a couple of mainlines and a bunch of feeder lines. The feeder lines just ... do not link up with the mainline services. In Portugal, which also has this sort of arrangement on a massively shrunk network, the trains on feeders are timetabled to meet connections,. and the connections will be held if necessary. In the UK, connections are typically not held, but are frequent enough that it doesn't matter.
In France, neither of these appear to be true. You are left at a railway station and the next mainline train doesn't even stop there, despite it being an interchange with hundreds of people waiting on the platform. When one finally does stop, it's utterly rammed.
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ I can't agree. The UK, even in places as remote as North Wales, actually tries to timetable branch line shuttles to connect to mainline services in less than ninety minutes.
In France, it doesn't even seem to occur to them that this is a thing they can do.
@TimWardCam GB Rail doesn't wait for stragglers if the two trains are run by different companies (previously, different sectors) but at least if you have to wait an hour for the next clockface-ish service, the company causing the delay repays some of the ticket price. If you can plan to arrive an hour earlier than needed, it usually works well. If less, then it can get stressful
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ These were very clearly not lines short of slots. The branches were literal shuttles where they had pretty much total freedom of scheduling. Train goes from one end to the other. Has dedicated platform at the mainline station. Massive amounts of dwell time. There is literally nothing else on the line.
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ Closest equivalent I can think of in the UK that I’m familiar with is the Dengie Peninsula shuttle. Literally the only scheduling issue is that the train coming the other way needs to be in the passing loop to go past.
I’m fully aware of all the issues that you highlight. This wasn’t that. Connections just aren’t a thing, and it seemed systemic too. Get to the terminus of one of these branches and there’s a taxi rank. There are no taxis in it. Ever. There’s a piece of A4 with the numbers of a few minicab companies. The shuttle comes in 4 times a day. The idea that the people getting off it might want a taxi to the next town over, or a bus (because, surprise surprise, the buses do not attempt to link up with train times either), appears to be utterly alien.
@TimWardCam well, we do have some 1 #train per 2 hour services overdue for improvement like Peterborough-Ipswich and a few daily oddballs like Cambridge-Harwich, but in general, GB regional service frequency beats French. Slower and fewer high speed services in GB though. Lots of 180 and 160kph lines with little bits of 205.
Reading about the book that this Vance bloke wrote, and apparently it’s all, “I was poor growing up and struggled but saw people on benefits with phones and that’s not fair”.
And his conclusion seems to be that they shouldn’t have those things if he can’t.
I had a similar childhood, but reached a very different conclusion. I don’t want anyone to struggle. If someone else has something I don’t, I don’t actually care as long as I have what I need.
He seems to feel that what he wants is not for his own needs to be met per-se, but to be ahead of others. As long as he has the biggest slice of cake, it doesn’t matter how small the cake is.
I want enough cake, and I want the rest of the cake to have enough for everyone else.
same! I grew up in a declining industrial town, as the child of an unemployed single mother, growing our own food, couldn't afford a car, etc. I'm now a successful engineer and rich beyond my wildest childhood dreams (not a millionaire or anything, but still). And I want a UBI, and a free NHS with staff who get reasonable pay and work reasonable hours, and for kids to get free school meals, and nobody to be homeless or hungry. Can society afford that? Yes. Poverty costs us all.
I've never seen the alleged cyber truck, and until I do, and confirm it's realistically drivable, I will hold firm to the perception that it's nothing more than a very expensive joke by a very bored gamer.
Long form - on transphobia and trans women as basilisks
That thing transphobes do, where something trips in their brains and they end up doing nothing but obsessing about trans women, while probably in a darkened room with no clean underwear surrounded by empty pot noodles and bags of their own urine.
There is a pop-psychology concept amongst tech geeks of a "basilisk". This is something that, once you become aware of it, it breaks you. You cannot come back once you have experienced the basilisk. It's a one way ticket to, usually, madness, or perhaps total system shutdown. It's generalised from the idea from antiquity of the basilisk as a creature that turns you to stone.
There's a fun story called Blit - linked here, infinityplus.co.uk/stories/bli… about a visual basilisk. Another example is something called Roko's Basilisk which is basically Pascal's wager for atheists who spend too long in Silicon Valley (it's stupid, but some of the terrible people with more money than sense, like Musk and Thiel, actually appear
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That thing transphobes do, where something trips in their brains and they end up doing nothing but obsessing about trans women, while probably in a darkened room with no clean underwear surrounded by empty pot noodles and bags of their own urine.
There is a pop-psychology concept amongst tech geeks of a "basilisk". This is something that, once you become aware of it, it breaks you. You cannot come back once you have experienced the basilisk. It's a one way ticket to, usually, madness, or perhaps total system shutdown. It's generalised from the idea from antiquity of the basilisk as a creature that turns you to stone.
There's a fun story called Blit - linked here, infinityplus.co.uk/stories/bli… about a visual basilisk. Another example is something called Roko's Basilisk which is basically Pascal's wager for atheists who spend too long in Silicon Valley (it's stupid, but some of the terrible people with more money than sense, like Musk and Thiel, actually appear to believe it, and are therefore broken by it, and I reiterate, it's really, really stupid).
Anyway, in the latter case, Roko's Basilisk breaks you by becoming aware of it, BUT, here's the thing: it only works on certain people. They have to be susceptible, and in the case of Roko, the susceptibility lies around a particular weak spot in the ability of otherwise intelligent people to think critically and realise, "this is fucking stupid".
But, here's the thing, TO THOSE WHO ARE SUSCEPTIBLE, I've realised that trans women are a basilisk.
Look at people like Graham Lineman, J K Rowling, and a load of less famous people who have ended up in the same state. They all reached a point where SOMETHING relating to the fact that trans women exist tripped them into some downward doom spiral that has basically pushed their brain into a self-reinforcing state of insanity that they can't recover from.
There are probably several psychology PhDs for the taking on the subject of this.
But it seems I, and many women like me, are basilisks. This is a public post. Some of the people hate reading it have already passed the trigger condition. If you're one of them, you should probably empty some of those bags of your own wee and eat a fresh vegetable, if you can. Good luck!
Long form - on transphobia and trans women as basilisks
Sensitive content
transphobia rots the brain in a seemingly unique way. I've also been thinking for a while that there's a dearth of research on it.
One name that wasn't mentioned here: Notch. He was actually cool about trans people once upon a time, and then he became a billionaire and basically melted his mind on twitter becoming a transphobe. Bizarre how people will commit to being unlikable.
Oh, and for people who are not fluent in That Weird-looking European Language With Its Own Alphas and Betas, βασίλισσα ('basilissa') is the Greek word for 'queen'. Two alphas, a single beta, and a whopping three sigmas! What a mighty and beautiful word.
This reminds me of a video analysis of JKR's work (from Shaun..?) where they noticed how actions were seen as justified or cruel depending on what character did them. If a character was considered one of the good ones (like Harry, Ron and Hermione), barely anything they did to others would be portrayed as bad or cruel, and vice versa. If this is not just a book thing but how she genuinely believes the world to be, a bunch of good and evil people, not a world where everyone is capable of doing all kinds of actions.... It makes sense she feels like she is in the right, no matter what she does, and that every cruel action against trans people would be justified and wouldn't actually be considered cruel to begin with, because in her mind, she is inherently good and trans people are inherently bad. And nobody with a clear mind and also be one of the good ones would doubt her, so everyone speaking up against her is clearly rotten as well and pretending not to be, no matter if left or right.
@Tattie @geekylou Terrible people have a weird sort of solidarity. They recognize that growing social awareness threatens to destroy power structures they thrive in, so they can work together to some extent against the Woke Mob. This is the source of virtually all the "why I left the left" stuff. The right is full of terrible people who will extend their twisted version of solidarity to the former "leftist" so they can preserve the power structures they all depend on.
This is an interesting take, the basilisk framing makes sense! But I still don't get what the trigger is. What is the SOMETHING you refer to? Do you know?
I'd like to understand it, because I like to understand why people think the way they do, especially when I disagree with them. I can't fathom TERFs. It doesn't make sense, it is so irrational. With ordinary bigotry is possible to understand where it's coming from. Racism kind of makes sense, conservative transphobia and homophobia kind of makes sense, etc. The position that trans women is a threat to cis women is a complete mystery to me. It is, as you say, fucking stupid.
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It's so bloody infuriating. What's worst are those ignorants smoking at bus/tram stations... That was banned (and people respect it) even in my otherwise super backwards Czechia. Ugh.
In lieu of the whole "starter motor catching fire" incident, we have decided to end our voyage south for this year and leave the boat here in Quiberon. We Weill resume our journey south in the spring, after repairs and annual maintenance out of the water.
@Sarah Brown Don’t you mean in light of? While stopping the voyage here instead of the motor having caught fire is appealing it offers certain causality related technical difficulties
@Alexandra Lanes @rooftopjaxx The marina we are in is large, but not enormous. Thankfully this means it has facilities nearby It's probably not Solent level, but it's close.
@Brian R. Pauw 240ish nautical miles. For the part around Brest, hitting the tidal gates at the right time is utterly compulsory. We also had to leave Tréguier on an ebb tide because it's up a river.
The orcas attacked and disabled a boat really close to where we are two days ago. They were also seen in the western English Channel at a point where we sailed right by them.
We didn't know. I thought they were still near Lisbon.
They have NEVER been this far north this early before. I thought we had until September.
Planning tomorrow's passage. Going to stay in shallow waters as much as we can. Actually quite frightened.
@BashStKid They leave megayachts alone. Contrary to popular jokes about how the orcas are some kind of class warriors, they are pretty much exclusively attacking small sail boats of the sort that cost about the same as a family car.
@rachel maybe. However, my AIS B transponder does not allow me to set decimal meters at all. I haven’t checked the standard, but maybe it’s supposed to be entered in whole meters? It’s a pretty moot point anyway, at most you’ll confuse a passing submarine…
Update: More dolphin sightings through the day. No orcas. We are now rafted up in the outer harbour at the island of Groix. 4 hours to our destination for this leg, Quiberon, tomorrow, then we go home.
Thames swan counters hope numbers recover after avian flu
It got me thinking of how we read things. We know (probably subconsciously) that English is mainly Subject-Verb-Object so unless there's a word that suggests otherwise, the first thing we're looking for is a noun to be the subject. That's fine, we have "Thames". So the next token is a verb, right? Nope, "swan" doesn't fit because if it were a verb it would be "swans", so we conclude that's actually a noun phrase talking about a "Thames swan", a swan on the Thames. Fine.
Now can we have a verb? "counters". Yeah, ok, that's good. Next, an object noun? "hope". That'll do as well. What do we do with "numbers"? Because this is headline-ese we expect to miss out words like "the" and "that" so this is a subordinate clause about the hope. The hope is that numbers recover after avian flu.
But why is the Thames swan countering this hope? Wait. Counters can be a noun too, people who count. Let's back track. The Thames swan counters are our subject -- p
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The other day I came across this headline:
Thames swan counters hope numbers recover after avian flu
It got me thinking of how we read things. We know (probably subconsciously) that English is mainly Subject-Verb-Object so unless there's a word that suggests otherwise, the first thing we're looking for is a noun to be the subject. That's fine, we have "Thames". So the next token is a verb, right? Nope, "swan" doesn't fit because if it were a verb it would be "swans", so we conclude that's actually a noun phrase talking about a "Thames swan", a swan on the Thames. Fine.
Now can we have a verb? "counters". Yeah, ok, that's good. Next, an object noun? "hope". That'll do as well. What do we do with "numbers"? Because this is headline-ese we expect to miss out words like "the" and "that" so this is a subordinate clause about the hope. The hope is that numbers recover after avian flu.
But why is the Thames swan countering this hope? Wait. Counters can be a noun too, people who count. Let's back track. The Thames swan counters are our subject -- people who count swans -- and they hope numbers (of swans, presumably) recover after avian flu. That's actually the right reading.
But do we actually read left-to-right like that? I think I actually approach it a bit more holistically. I see a bag of things that could be nouns and could be verbs, and perhaps wonder alongh the way to the correct meaning whether hope is numbering anything, or whether hope numbers are the thing that is recovering.
Have psycholinguists done studies of what people's brains do when they read sentences like this?
Yeah, I read it first as "Thames swan counters hope; numbers recover…" (which is not supported by the provided orthography but people sometimes type sloppily) and then wondered what hope numbers were, then got the right parse.
Just seen the best bit of commentary on transmisogyny I’ve seen in ages: if you want to know how a man treats cis women in private, look at how he treats trans women in public.
@JustinMac84 ... The way a trans-man treats "otherness" in respect to this whole cluster of aversions correlates how they treat otherness in other circumstances in this bundle. Trans-people at present can be attacked under the cover of "concern" which doesn't look overtly misogynistic, society is (infuriatingly) making this a "free hit" in this game under cover of concern and is powered by the uncanny feeling that comes from a threat to the deep sense of the inherent naturalness and defaultness of not being "other" in any of these categories. Which carries across to other categories in the cluster.
If someone feels a deep need to police bathrooms for genitalia, that likely carries over to policing jobs for genitalia too, or strength, coming from the same deep tangle. It's all the same gig.
@JustinMac84 No, I'm reading your replies. But I'm not going to reply substantively, as these debates are tedious to me, as they are old and unoriginal. If I had a Patreon you could pay to continue if you are motivated to do so, but I don't and I have to make a dairylea toasted sandwich and go see the ducks on the reservoir.
@JustinMac84 a misogynist is someone who mistreats some or all women on the basis of their gender identity. That is not a “generalization” that is simply the definition of the word. A generalization would be correlating misogyny with a random unrelated trait like eye color or astrological sign.
@JustinMac84 i think bioessentialism is the core presupposition of both transphobia and misogyny. I think that if a man holds these essentialist views, he will hold them across the board for trans and cis people but keep them better hidden when applying them to cis women since we hold relatively more political power in society compared to trans women.
@JustinMac84 yes it is a fact. In order to believe men are inherently superior to women (misogyny), you must first believe that there is some fixed essence of femaleness that is fundamentally important to who one is as a person. And if this essence is fixed, then trans people aren’t valid (transphobia). That is the link and you still haven’t been able to disentangle that link.
@JustinMac84 yes terfs are always misogynistic because they attack trans women and reduce cis women to reproductive functions. I said misogyny and transphobia have a root cause in common. Not that they are exactly the same. Batting southpaw is not the same thing as using left handed scissors but the two behaviors are closely related due to sharing a common root cause.
@JustinMac84 how come transphobes always accuse trans women of being perverts in women’s locker rooms oogling cis women but they never accuse trans men of sneaking into men’s locker room to oogle cis men? If they view the genders as equal why not criticize all trans people the same way accross the board?
@JustinMac84 yes exactly. Transphobes are sexist just like you said. Some prejudices are not separable from one another because they rest on the same assumptions.
I honestly do not see how, given the events of the last few years and especially the last week, the USA is able to see the decade out. I think it’s going to just collapse in on itself from the top.
@imitation smitten I feel like one bullet brought the end of the age of empires by hitting Franz Ferdinand, and another just brought about the end of the world as we know it by not hitting Trump.
And I am really scared about what that means. I don’t think we’re going to make it.
I've got an outline in my head of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story set in a collapsed America, and one of the twists is that the rest of the world is still fine. It's America that chooses to be a fucked up hellscape.
@marlies :tblverified: yeah. It’s looking pretty fucking scary. I think this is out civilisation’s inflexion point and I don’t think we come through the other side at all well.
I used to think 9/11 and the wars in its aftermath would be the part of my life that’d be in the history books of my hypothetical grandchildren. Now I think that part is yet to come and we’re in the prelude to it.
Remember how the Brexit referendum was won days after a politician on the remain side was assassinated by someone supporting leave, and the whole thing was apparently just forgotten about?
@Colman Reilly like, “aw, did someone get lost on the way to LHR? Did the lack of a second runway not tip you off? Did we want to feel big and important next to all the 737s?”
Preparing for phase 2 of operation “Oui Oui Baguette”.
When last you left our heroes, @Zoë O'Connell, @Sylvia Knight, and me, we had snuggled Scarlet down in the marina at the delightful Brittany town of Tréguier, and turned off everything including her 12 volt system because the marina there doesn’t like you leaving boats connected to shore power unattended. Whatever.
On Saturday we fly to Nantes which a slightly different line-up: me and Zoe again, but also joined by Sara, who comes from the land of the bouys being the wrong colours.
Anyway, our objective is the French yachtie town of Bénodet, at the northern end of the Bay of Biscay. There s basically an end of level boss between the English Channel and Biscay called the Raz de Sein (pronounced RAAAAAAAAH!, apparently)
This is a gap of
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Preparing for phase 2 of operation “Oui Oui Baguette”.
When last you left our heroes, @Zoë O'Connell, @Sylvia Knight, and me, we had snuggled Scarlet down in the marina at the delightful Brittany town of Tréguier, and turned off everything including her 12 volt system because the marina there doesn’t like you leaving boats connected to shore power unattended. Whatever.
On Saturday we fly to Nantes which a slightly different line-up: me and Zoe again, but also joined by Sara, who comes from the land of the bouys being the wrong colours.
Anyway, our objective is the French yachtie town of Bénodet, at the northern end of the Bay of Biscay. There s basically an end of level boss between the English Channel and Biscay called the Raz de Sein (pronounced RAAAAAAAAH!, apparently)
This is a gap of a couple of kilometres where the Atlantic gets squeezed through a 15km long ridge, culminating the the Île de Sein, and the mainland. The gal is characterised by over falls and tide races into which the tide forces the water which has nowhere to go but … up
Chaotically
The passage notes from all sources share one thing: they implore people to be really wary of this place. Apparently you go through in the calmest weather you can at slack tide. You’ve got something like a 30 minute window in which you need to arrive and then you just … GO. Miss that window, and the sea will try and murder you, and might actually succeed.
Immediately north of the RAAAAAAAH, is another inshore passage called the Chenal du Four, which looks scary on the chart but which is a pussy cat. The only issue with it is that it’s a tidal gate. As the Raz is also a tidal gate, despite being quite close to each other, you can’t really pass through them on the same day unless things align precisely. Next week they do not, so we will be overnighting at the small marina of Camaret-sur-Mer.
We have been checking the developing weather forecasts. They are characterised by an Atlantic low coming through Monday and Tuesday, followed by several days of flat calm weather.
Our plan is to hunker down at L’Aber Wrac’h, the last safe haven going west on the southern shore of the English Channel, and wait out the low, then go for it. Chenal do Four, Raz de Sein, anchor overnight in the bay of Audierne, and then sail leisurely to Bénodet, where we await phase 3, the final phase of Oui Oui Baguette which gets us to La Rochelle for the winter, and the launch point for Operation Churro next year.
We have two scenarios. The nice, low stress one is to sail to the port of Roscoff on Sunday and then have a short sail to L’Aber Wrac’h on Monday, followed by a day off, and then run for Biscay. This very much depends on precisely when the low arrives. 36 hours ago it was looking like Monday would be doable, but we would end up exhausted and covered in our own vomit. It’s looking a bit better today, but still marginal.
The alternate plan is to do Tréguier to L’Aber Wrac’h in one shot on Sunday. This is a 73 nautical mile passage which will take about 14-15 hours and requires us to depart Tréguier the moment there is enough daylight to see what we are doing. We need to exit the river before the flood tide starts, which is about half an hour after sunrise, then fight the eastbound tide for a few hours until it turns and starts pushing us west again.
That will be a LONG day and I’d rather not do it, so I hoping for better weather. Let’s see.
Sarah, I've sailed the Raz - it was so rough the autopilot gave up in disgust and we were on the wheel for hours. Biscay was worse - heading from La Coruna NW the weather turned so bad half way across and the seas were so high we ended up diverting to Bilbao and then going N hugging the West Coast to Brest. Fun times!
@Mel Jane @Sylvia Knight @Zoë O'Connell had a similar autopilot “you’re on your own, mate” episode rounding Beachy when it blew up to a 7 gusting 8. That was fun.
RAAAAH! Looks like you've got yourselves a convoy.
I'd forgotten to look for a day or two then clicked on the bookmark and saw you're at the exciting bit and making good progress. Good luck with the rest of the trip.
@andrewducker I knew someone who claims that the brain should be considered as an organ like the stomach, secreting ideas and worries because it's a brain (sometimes getting ill, or having a bad day, or whatever), it's what it does, like the stomach secrete's acid and gurgles. And that it's that we worry about worrying, more than we worry about our stomach stomaching that's the real problem.
@chiffchaff @andrewducker it's an intriguing model. I'm not sure how far it supports the conclusions though. If I have recurring stomach aches then it seems reasonable to ask if I'm throwing the wrong stuff at my stomach.
So delighted at the news from France. Definitely needed that. The French two-round system may be bonkers but it does give the public the chance to say “non” to an inadvisable outcome from the first round.
It’s not bonkers. It’s not as good as ranked choice. It’s FPTP but “Vote! No, vote properly!” which could be better but is certainly not as bad as the UK system (apart from the (Northern) Irish system which youse should all adopt).
♪ Right now you are down and out And feelin' really crappy […] And when I see how sad you are It sorta makes me happy […] Human nature- Nothing I can do It's Schadenfreude Making me feel glad that I'm not you♫
Commiserations to Emily Brothers who failed to win her election as the first openly transgender woman to parliament, but also congrats on avoiding the awkward conversation with her boss about which parliamentary loo she should use.
Pervasive microplastics equals infertility. I've disliked Atwood since I first encountered her many moons ago, precisely because I think she is prescient
Yeah we really need PR, however some parties have gotten very good at targeting. The Lib Dems went for the seats they knew they could win and that's it.
I think at this point I'm off to bed, and will see the results in the morning. Not least so I don't have to listen to any more right wing politicians tonight.
@Eleanor LNR Blair They are fucking terrible human beings and I hate that the media gives them a near monopoly on public discourse. We will never have an equitable society while we have a public discourse dominated by ghastly cunts engaging in performative cruelty.
I've finally realised what I am reminded of by the end stage of obsessive transphobes like Lineman and Rowling, who start out "having concerns" and end up empty hollow shells of human beings, their friends and family having given up on them, or been driven away, probably neglecting their personal hygiene and health for days on end while they rant about their foaming conspiracy theories on Twitter:
Heroin addicts
Specifically the depiction in all the "drugs ruin lives" awareness campaigns from the 80s.
I'm not even joking. These are people whose lives have been slowly consumed by their obsession until they reach the point that there is nothing else there.
The media, which encourages this sort of intense self destruction, should be utterly ashamed of itself. These people are utterly evil because their obsession destroys lives far beyond themselves and their own (former) circles, but they also need help.
And instead of being offered it, politicians, the media, and much of the public, encourages them to sacrifice more and more of their vestigial hu
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I've finally realised what I am reminded of by the end stage of obsessive transphobes like Lineman and Rowling, who start out "having concerns" and end up empty hollow shells of human beings, their friends and family having given up on them, or been driven away, probably neglecting their personal hygiene and health for days on end while they rant about their foaming conspiracy theories on Twitter:
Heroin addicts
Specifically the depiction in all the "drugs ruin lives" awareness campaigns from the 80s.
I'm not even joking. These are people whose lives have been slowly consumed by their obsession until they reach the point that there is nothing else there.
The media, which encourages this sort of intense self destruction, should be utterly ashamed of itself. These people are utterly evil because their obsession destroys lives far beyond themselves and their own (former) circles, but they also need help.
And instead of being offered it, politicians, the media, and much of the public, encourages them to sacrifice more and more of their vestigial humanity to their dreadful obsession, and cheers whilst they do it.
While I’m sure it has been misquoted to hell by now, opiate for the masses still rings true.
The line between religion, ideologies, movements, etc are so blurred it’s all one and the same. And it rots people’s empathy and they are clearly addicted.
They get high on hurting others. Fascism feeds their ego.
I don’t want to hurt them, I want them to wake up and see that they aren’t right or doing good. It’s just hate.
American rail experience: there's a rail line that goes where I want to get to, but the branch lines are all freight lines only these days, so I'll have to pack myself into a crate or take multiple buses.
Yeah. I went to Madrid last month. I went by train, because I feel sufficiently strongly that it's the right thing to do, but the difference in price between the train journey and flying was not funny.
I have To travel regularly to Copenhagen. Bed to office chair is about 6 hrs by plane and 18 hrs overnight by train or driving, and a lot more expensive.
@Sasha And that's the tragedy. You want to do the right thing, but the people who are supposed to be managing our infrastructure aren't interested in facilitating that.
@FeralRobots imo interrail/eurail are pretty fantastic for exploring Europe.
A couple of weeks ago I needed to get to Vienna from Nice, so I took some trains down to the Cinque Terre, explored those for the day and then took a night train from La Spezia to Vienna. I could have flown direct with WizzAir instead and it would have been quicker, a lot simpler and a little cheaper, but much less memorable.
On the other hand: while direct trains can be nice, it's often just as good to have frequent trains with timed connections. gruene.social/@jon/11271632597…
This is somehow right and wrong simultaneously. Sure, some routes we need are missing. *But* for example I’d prefer a Frankfurt-Paris every hour than a Paris-Berlin once a day…
@StrangeNoises There were a group of American and British journalists who went on a tour in the mid-1920s and they set the station clocks forward so their trains appeared to have arrived exactly on time and several of them wrote that their trains always arrived on time in their stories writing up how great Fascist Italy was.
@FeralRobots For touring around on holiday, they're fine, especially because you can get an Interrail/Eurail pass and tickets become much cheaper then. But if you just want to travel from A to B, flying is a lot cheaper.
@StrangeNoises I can't find the source for that story, but I can find several saying that the Italian railway was organised under Mussolini to have the diretissima (fast expresses; the Florence-Rome line is still called that to this day) having priority over local and commuter trains that normal people used so tourists found the service good and locals didn't.
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ So my recent experience is Brittany, which has a couple of mainlines and a bunch of feeder lines. The feeder lines just ... do not link up with the mainline services. In Portugal, which also has this sort of arrangement on a massively shrunk network, the trains on feeders are timetabled to meet connections,. and the connections will be held if necessary. In the UK, connections are typically not held, but are frequent enough that it doesn't matter.
In France, neither of these appear to be true. You are left at a railway station and the next mainline train doesn't even stop there, despite it being an interchange with hundreds of people waiting on the platform. When one finally does stop, it's utterly rammed.
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ I can't agree. The UK, even in places as remote as North Wales, actually tries to timetable branch line shuttles to connect to mainline services in less than ninety minutes.
In France, it doesn't even seem to occur to them that this is a thing they can do.
MJ Ray
Unknown parent • • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ These were very clearly not lines short of slots. The branches were literal shuttles where they had pretty much total freedom of scheduling. Train goes from one end to the other. Has dedicated platform at the mainline station. Massive amounts of dwell time. There is literally nothing else on the line.
They weren’t even trying.
Sarah Brown
in reply to MJ Ray • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ Closest equivalent I can think of in the UK that I’m familiar with is the Dengie Peninsula shuttle. Literally the only scheduling issue is that the train coming the other way needs to be in the passing loop to go past.
I’m fully aware of all the issues that you highlight. This wasn’t that. Connections just aren’t a thing, and it seemed systemic too. Get to the terminus of one of these branches and there’s a taxi rank. There are no taxis in it. Ever. There’s a piece of A4 with the numbers of a few minicab companies. The shuttle comes in 4 times a day. The idea that the people getting off it might want a taxi to the next town over, or a bus (because, surprise surprise, the buses do not attempt to link up with train times either), appears to be utterly alien.
Adam
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •MJ Ray
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •