Lately I've been working in Brussels and Amsterdam several days a week. As my schedule has been a bit unpredictable, I've frequently changed my plans at the last minute. Most of the time, I don't even change my ticket. Luckily for me, both Brussels and Amsterdam are along the same Thalys train route. Thalys is really one of the several varieties of high speed trains (think TGV) in Europe. It links Paris with Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam and Amsterdam and also has extensions towards northern Belgium and Germany. One of the many great things about taking a train is that the stations are in the center of the cities as opposed to outside the perimeter for most airports. In addition, you can get up and walk around, use a cell phone the whole time, use the internet as they have Wi-Fi, and buy food and drinks in the dining car.
The trip from Paris to Belgium covers the 180 miles in about an hour and 15 minutes. That is an average speed of over 100 miles per hour. In fact, the train reaches about 180 mph in the open stretch between the cities! Outside of the train, the landscape blows by at unreal speeds. Inside the train it's really quiet and comfortable. Even the second class cabin has seats that would be considered first class on a plane.
It's such a smart, convenient way to travel that you wonder why the U.S. doesn't have something similar and as fast as one of the high speed rail systems.
1 comment:
I think there are few different reasons we never developed our own high speed train system, the first being the sheer size of our country. The second would be the billions and billions of dollars it would cost to lay all of that rail track.
And my last argument is that Americans in general are much more independent. Because of the size of the US, most Americans don't take public transport on a regular basis, and we love the independence that driving a car brings. We don't want to be tied down to certain hours - we like the freedom of being able to stop and get groceries on the way home, or to make a quick run to Target. I know personally speaking, I'd never taken a train or even the metro or a city bus before moving to France (not by choice, but just because there wasn't any).
Conversely, in Europe, the countries are small (relatively speaking, of course), the cities are close together and gas is 3-4 times as expensive as in the US meaning people don't like to drive very often. And all of that combined together encouraged the development of public transportation.
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