Why would anyone take a train?

Unlike cars, there's no traffic to deal with and you don't have to worry about taking a wrong turn and getting lost. On a train, you get to see countryside you often wouldn't see if you were driving the highway or flying thousands of miles in the air. Train travel is also more social.



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Train travel is often cheaper than flying, in part because you can generally take more with you before paying extra baggage fees. It can also be more convenient and relaxing than driving, especially if you'd be driving in an unfamiliar place or driving for many hours nonstop to get to your destination.

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“Generally speaking, traveling by plane is faster and more convenient, but can be more expensive and stressful. On the other hand, traveling by train is usually cheaper and more comfortable, but can take much longer.”

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Trains are predictable - they always run on time and follow the same route. Train travel can be one of the most reliable modes of transportation for those on a schedule. With highly precise timing and a reliable route, it's no wonder that trains are often preferred for traveling long distances.

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The post-war era was also an era of growing prosperity, resulting in two related trends: the rise of the mass automobile, and the move to the suburbs – which in turn dealt a further blow to passenger rail use.

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Trains are three times more dangerous than flying but safer than traveling by car (which is 40 times more risky than flying), according to Savage.

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Why are flights often cheaper than train tickets? “There's an unfair taxing system which makes trains more expensive,” said Herwig Schuster, a transport campaigner at Greenpeace who authored the ticket prices report. “There are a lot of polluting subsidies on the airline side.”

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The reasons for this are varied: from the privatisation of the rail industry to the rising cost of infrastructure. The UK does not have fixed rates like other European countries such as France, which can result in flight tickets being cheaper than a regional train journey in the UK.

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Every year, as train prices go up, car rental becomes a better option for budget travelers in Europe. While solo car travel is expensive, three or four people sharing a rented car will usually travel cheaper than the same group using rail passes.

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When comparing fuel alone, driving is cheaper than peak train tickets 100% of the time and against off-peak train travel tickets 87.5% of the time. Much more than expected – an average difference of £71 per journey. Regular car users will be savvy enough to know that driving costs you far more than just fuel.

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Britain's railways remain the safest and greenest forms of land transport, but there is no room for complacency.

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says approximately every three hours, a person or vehicle crashes with a train in the U.S. About half of all crossing collisions occur at highway-rail intersections with flashing lights or gates leaving nearly 1,000 people dead each year as a result.

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About 1,000 derailments occur every year across the United States, according to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). In 2022, there were 1,044 instances of trains coming off their tracks. Broken or defective railroads are one of the most common causes of derailments, according to the FRA.

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The growth in train overcrowding is largely attributed to increased passenger demand, and the 'walk-up' nature of British railways, in which seat reservations are not required, combined with the inability to run extra trains due to the limitations of the current railway signalling system.

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Compared to other popular forms of travel, such as cars, ships, buses, and planes, trains are one of the safest forms of transportation in the United States.

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The reason that trains honk their horns so much at night is because it's dark and the trains aren't so easy to see. Even though the lights are on, we sometimes can't see them coming, especially around the many blind curves near or ahead of the train station.

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There were no fatal train collisions, derailments or overruns in 2019 for the twelfth consecutive calendar year. That continuing good performance contributes to a further reduction in the estimated mean frequency of such accidents from 0.20 per year in 2017 to 0.17 in 2019.

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It is not easy to derail a train by force or collision, but derailments are the most common type of train accident.

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Motorcycles had a fatality rate of 212 per billion passenger miles, by far the highest of all modes: “A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year, had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying — 29 times the risk for automobiles and light trucks.”

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With high-speed rail, train travel is always faster than driving. In many cases, it's even faster than flying, once you factor in the whole air travel song-and-dance. And if you do need to catch a plane, trains make it easier to get to the airport.

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