Ahhhh 😊

[jon@gruene.social]

@semireg yes. That sums it up.

[lionelb@expressional.social]

@jon

No incessant adverts for the British Transport Police.

[jon@gruene.social]

@lionelb Right.

[paavi@mastodontti.fi]

@jon I've got only one thing that I unconditionally dislike about this class of trainsets: the seats.

[jon@gruene.social]

@paavi eh? The seats are great! Among the most comfy.

[paavi@mastodontti.fi]

@jon If you have the right mindset it often is pleasant enough and you'll eventually get where you need to get to.

[paavi@mastodontti.fi]

@jon Compared to RENFE, which is "sorry you missed your connection, next train tomorrow"

[paavi@mastodontti.fi]

@jon I might be wrong, but aren't the seats the usual ICE4 type? I've got opinions about those, but then again I am shorter than the average Central-European with slighlty short legs compared to my back and I have angle preferences when it comes to the nearly horizontal part of the seat my bottom and thighs are supposed to rest on. :)

[jon@gruene.social]

@paavi No. The seats are different. I get your critique of the ICE4 ones.

[paavi@mastodontti.fi]

@jon Ooh, that's nice to have confirmed. Thank you! ...and sorry for my ignorance.

[semireg@nrw.social]

@jon To illustrate it perhaps even more poignantely:
While in France, the players sit around for hours in rural towns or even in Paris because there is no option for them to get away.
Whlie in Germany, they sit around in trains that should be moving but are held up somewhere on the line.
😃

[erebion@chaos.social]

@tal @tml Just imagine how hard that can be for tourists from countries that don't speak German/French/Dutch.

Brussels has a lot of EU and other organisations, therefore English for Belgian trains makes sense. More so than in many other countries in Europe.

[tml@mementomori.social]

@tal Have you had the opportunity to enjoy Trenitalia (machine) announcements? Very repetitive, very verbose and tedious, fairly odd English pronunciation. (One would think that when recording announcements, they would find a professional native English speaker.) You might feel forced to adjust your enthusiasm...

"tap tap mode"
"easy and convenient"
long harangue about some law including its number and date that mercifully is only in Italian
etc.

[tml@mementomori.social]

@erebion @tal How hard *what* can be? Understanding what essentially is an ad on the outside of a train?

[stefanlindbohm@mastodon.social]

@jon And the value for money with DB tickets can be incredible. I’m working on our integration right now and testing cases like Gothenburg to Swiss/Austrian ski resorts that can come in at under 100€ door to door.

Plus if you miss a train there’s always another option available. 15-60 min delay to destination might be common, but multi-hour delays rare. Compare this to many other countries where a small problem will often end up making you 3 hours late.

[notsoloud@expressional.social]

@jon
This question may be a bit too wide-ranging, but what are the perspectives to improve service in France by operators competing under open access?

[tal@mastodon.social]

@tml not even holiday, unfortunately

[partim@social.tchncs.de]

@stefanlindbohm @jon Almost always – which may be a good warning label to add in Railfinder: “last connection of the day.”

[stefanlindbohm@mastodon.social]

@partim Yep I have some ideas on how to do this in our journey planner. We would search extremely pessimistically first, then pick earlier connections as a plan A and keep the pessimistic as the plan B. For connections we don’t have a plan B we would have that warning. It’s quite difficult to implement technically so it’s further in the future though.

In the meantime we always recommend at least 1 hour before any night train, in some cases more. That protects a majority of cases :)

@jon

[jon@gruene.social]

@notsoloud between big cities, good. On older lines… I’m not hopeful at all.