You're viewing a single thread.
I’m just a silly American here, but how does Luxembourg have long distance trains?
And even Switzerland is tiny compared to most states in the US. It’s only a little bigger than Maryland, which takes about two hours to pass through on the interstate (and has some of the worst traffic in the country near Washington DC).
Trains can cross borders
I live in Luxembourg and I have the same question!
I suspect it is trains going outside of the country but it's funny to see nonetheless. I think most trains originate from Luxembourg (when travelling to other countries over anything that would be considered a long distance which I suspect gives them a scheduling advantage).
Yeah, way less stations for trains to arrive at late as well, which was actually my less facetious question, since I assumed the long distance trains would be leaving the country pretty quickly.
Regarding Switzerland:
From Zürich you can go to Hamburg, Venice, Paris, Budapest etc. without changing, so there are plenty of long distance connections that just end in Switzerland.
But we have a lot of intercity lines internally too. Some of the longest are:
- Geneva Airport to St. Gallen is about 4h,
- Lugano to Zürich is only 2h these days thanks to the longest rail tunnel in the world,
- Zürich to Visp is also 2h.
But the most important are probably Geneva-Lausanne-Bern-Zürich and Basel-Zürich and Bern-Basel because those are our big economic centers. They are called intercity here as well.
Not sure if you count any of those from an American perspective.
I don't know what long distance means in this regard, but i suspect everything on the level of an IC. We do have some routes that take over 4 hours though, lots of mountains to go around ;-).
Long distance trains usually go to neighbor countries. Also a lot of people prefer to take a train (where your can relax, read, watch a movie, work or whatever) instead of driving for 2 hours. Most European cities are built around train stations and have very good public transport, so it's very convenient.