[HN Gopher] The product of the railways is the timetable
___________________________________________________________________
The product of the railways is the timetable
Author : NaOH
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-10-06 16:02 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (springbett.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (springbett.substack.com)
| jacknews wrote:
| It's one product, sure.
|
| Arguably more important is standard time.
|
| Before the railways towns ran on local-noon time, so the railways
| and their timetables required time to be synchronized across
| regions.
| immibis wrote:
| The most important product a train system offers is getting you
| from A to B.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The GP is referring to the very early days of railway - only
| in 1840, the railway emergence led to standardized time [1]
| to make drafting timetables and schedules easier.
|
| The benefits and downsides are something that we still
| experience two centuries later, all thanks to the railways.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time
| immibis wrote:
| And yet, the most important product provided by the
| railways is getting you (or stuff) from A to B.
| dajonker wrote:
| That graphic from the Swiss Railways is absolutely wonderful
|
| https://sma-partner.com/storage/app/media/Dokumente/Netzgraf...
| bloak wrote:
| Nice, but I did one of the obvious things and looked for
| Geneva. Near the bottom left it says "Geneve-Aeroport". Is that
| labelling the small portrait-format grey rectangle to the left
| of the larger landscape-format rectangle that should be
| labelled Geneve-Cornavin?
| lmm wrote:
| Yes. I guess the main station is considered obvious from
| context?
| telefun5463 wrote:
| Noticed it as well, it seems they forgot the Geneve-Cornavin
| label indeed.
| globular-toast wrote:
| If I could find one like that for London I'd probably get it
| printed and hang it on my wall.
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| Not quite but nearly: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/travel-
| information/maps-of-th...
| superpope99 wrote:
| huh I find this totally incomprehensible. Is this easier to
| read if you spend a lot of time looking at wiring diagrams?
| brainwad wrote:
| It's a technical diagram - it's really not supposed to be
| that comprehensible, but more of a reference. The passenger-
| facing publications use regular timetable layouts.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Is it? What problems do you face?
| globular-toast wrote:
| This is the way I like to think about problems. Essentially you
| start backwards from the problem and (hopefully) arrive at a
| solution. If at some point in the depths of abstraction you lose
| touch or forget what that original problem was, you've already
| failed.
|
| Building infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is a good
| example of being completely out of touch. The problem was there
| weren't enough trains at the right time to the right places. The
| bridge builders clearly weren't thinking about that.
|
| In my work this often happens because of the XY problem. People
| ask for X, but in fact they need Y and X is just their proposed
| solution. This would be like people asking for a new train from
| Cambridge to London, but in fact they are really going to Oxford
| and were only using London to connect.
|
| There are also assumptions that even the most pedantic people
| don't mention all the time. If people ask for more comfortable
| seats on trains, they implicitly also mean at the right time.
| They don't mean a comfortable seat at 2:00 in the morning that
| takes 3x as long to get there.
|
| I've often thought some kind of daily meditation to remind
| yourself of what the problems are is useful. There are the
| "bedrock" problems (like the train timetable) that never change,
| and there is the specific problem you are trying to solve right
| now (like connecting Cambridge to Oxford). I think it's worth
| thinking about it every day lest you lose sight and build the
| bridge nobody needed.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| He missed something. The train means you dont have to park. That
| is often a big advantage. Parking is expensive and stressful if
| there are not many spots. In a city the train system can probably
| get you closer to where you want to be. Especially if you dont
| want to pay top $ for parking.
|
| Parking in cities is also stressful with finding tbe entry on the
| correct one where you booked. And you miss the entry? Yep that is
| a one way street. Go round the block? No right turn? Satnav says
| 15 minutes to get back there again.
| globular-toast wrote:
| If the only train was 6 hours before you needed to be there
| then you'd probably just deal with parking instead.
|
| The point isn't that the timetable is the _only_ reason to use
| a train, it 's that without a good timetable it really doesn't
| matter what other advantages it offers and planners need to
| keep this in mind at all times.
| Tade0 wrote:
| A while ago a train line that's around a kilometre from my
| place reopened after 20 years and I wanted to use it, as it
| would outright teleport me to the city centre in 8 minutes
| having no stops in between(vs 20min by tram), but it appears
| to depart every 1,5h on average and isn't very compatible
| with commuting.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Contrived conclusion: Given a good frequency, passengers can
| completely ignore schedules.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Truly a wonderful revelation I had to stop reading the time
| table and see that it says every 15 minutes or so a bus will
| come during the times I'd expect it to, worst case 45, etc.
| immibis wrote:
| In Berlin, in a large part of the city, the trains come every
| 4-5 minutes. You rarely need to check a timetable (and when you
| do, you'd rather check the app, which knows where the trains
| actually are, not just where they should be). You just show up
| at the station and wait for the next train.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| If trains are frequent enough, passengers do ignore schedules
| and just turn up. This is common on metro/subway/underground
| services.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Something which I only realised by watching a London
| Underground driver who was vlogging for a while (before he was
| asked to stop) is that, yes, the frequency of the trains is the
| main metric for customers.
|
| However, once things go off schedule it can have pretty acute
| consequences for drivers and operational staff. The timetables
| are built around having drivers at specific places at specific
| times who will have required breaks at certain times and a
| maximum allowable working time. The rolling stock itself needs
| to be where it's needed as well, it's easy for it to get
| bunched up behind a track circuit failure etc.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Yes, that works great in dense cities that can justify running
| a train every 5 minutes. What sets Switzerland apart is that it
| can offer reliable, punctual service to tiny mountain villages
| that may only have a couple of trains a day, but those trains
| are carefully scheduled so that you can get there from Zurich
| or wherever with an absolute minimum of waiting around for your
| connections or fretting if you'll make it. (In the unlikely
| event that your train is a few minutes late, they will hold the
| connection.)
| eru wrote:
| > Yes, that works great in dense cities that can justify
| running a train every 5 minutes.
|
| Indeed, here in Singapore during peak hours the trains come
| even more often. And that's not counting all the trains in a
| station, just the ones from one metro line that come and go
| on one platform in one direction.
|
| Every once in a while, they are upgrading the signalling
| systems, so that they can squeeze even more trains in.
| dvdkon wrote:
| This is an interesting conclusion to a problem other countries
| are facing as well. The Czech Republic fully divided its railway
| infrastructure (under SZ) and national train operator (CD) sooner
| than most of the EU. SZ being incompetent is a favourite topic of
| railway fans here, but most everyone agrees that this kind of
| split was for the best, at least for long-distance trains.
|
| Pretty soon after the railways were opened to non-state
| operators, quality of long-distance train routes improved, both
| by new trains by private operators and increased competition
| forcing CD to improve. On regional railways, where the state pays
| for train operations, costs have gone down thanks to competition.
| It seems to me like this model can work well, you just need an
| infrastructure operator that's receptive to its "customers"
| (which SZ often isn't), or a political structure that can force
| them to listen.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > On regional railways, where the state pays for train
| operations, costs have gone down thanks to competition.
|
| German here. Yes, costs have gone down thanks to competition,
| but at what cost?
|
| IMHO, the cost of "competition" on regionals has been massive.
| A lot of infrastructure has had to be rebuilt (e.g. maintenance
| shops), a huge expense and waste of space (think about how long
| a regional train is - easily 150 meters [1], which means the
| shop has to be at least that long). Some operators chose to run
| with old, run-down rolling stock or go for the absolutely
| cheapest options. Others, and that has happened at least twice
| in the last few years, calculate their offers to be barely
| profitable and then a crisis (Covid, Russian invasion and
| energy cost explosion) hits, forcing the companies into
| bankruptcy. Cleanliness of trains, regular expulsion of toilets
| takes a hit as that's a very easy way to save a few hundred
| euros. In the case of demand surges (e.g. soccer games,
| Oktoberfest, Karneval), there's no way to ad-hoc add rolling
| stock and drivers because there are no spares and modern
| rolling stock isn't compatible with anything other than its
| specific model and configuration.
|
| And some regional tender processes have gotten even worse,
| where the state prescribes or outright buys the rolling
| stock... and suddenly the only way the providers can compete is
| staffing cost.
|
| Thanks but no thanks, I'd rather like the old system back!
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Desiro_HC
| eru wrote:
| Complaining about disastrous and unnecessary competition has
| a long and proud tradition.
|
| > And some regional tender processes have gotten even worse,
| where the state prescribes or outright buys the rolling
| stock... and suddenly the only way the providers can compete
| is staffing cost.
|
| Sounds pretty bad.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| In Czechia, competition was a huge boon for the railways. I
| still remember the rusty, hopelessly dirty Communist trains
| with fake leather seats that glued your buttocks with sweat,
| "open hole" toilets that stank to high heaven in summer and
| froze your ass off in the winter. Nowadays, we usually ride
| in nice and clean trains, and on the main lines of some
| operators, there is a delivery service where you can order
| small snacks or even warm meals to your seat and get them.
| Compared to the past, it is a freaking luxury.
|
| Maybe the problem that you described is German-specific. Over
| my lifetime, as I visited Germany, I noticed a steady drift
| towards lower quality in almost all public services, not just
| trains. As if the German voters just somehow stopped to
| demand or value quality of governance. IDK why, but it can be
| seen everywhere. And there is already a visible contrast in
| public cleanliness and order when you travel, say, from
| Zurich to Munich. Germany looks like a has-been.
|
| That wasn't the case in the 90s. Back then, the difference
| between BRD and Schweiz was negligible.
|
| My pet theory is that Merkel's 16 years of sleepy rule was
| too much. Most politicians need to fear replacement in order
| to do something. If the nation votes for the same person over
| and over again, there will be no real political competition.
|
| But IDK how that works on the Lander level.
| usrnm wrote:
| Absolutely the same change happened in Russia over the past
| 30 years or so, but it had nothing to do with privatisation
| or competition, all trains are still operated by the same
| state-owned corporation.
| eru wrote:
| You might the Wikipedia page on the impact of British Rail
| privatisation at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
|
| Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics
| straight after privatisation, you might think the change would
| be universally acclaimed. High fives all around. Instead, it's
| one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done.
|
| I especially like the almost miraculous recovery in rail's
| share of passenger transport. Or just the very first graph on
| the page, that shows the total number of passengers.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics
| .. one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever
| done
|
| This is a classic of metrics driven management, isn't it.
| Customer satisfaction isn't in the metrics so people stand
| around saying "well they should be happy!"
|
| Mainly about the cost, but the overcrowding on certain lines
| and the unreliability are also major factors. Commuters end
| up using the train because they're more or less forced to -
| you're not going to drive into rush hour London, and there's
| nowhere to park; and that's also a matter of policy to get
| people on the trains for sustainability reasons.
|
| The "playing at shops" market setup exacerbates the problems.
| Original comment says "costs have gone down due to
| competition", but since the UK's operators are little
| regional monopolies they don't actually compete. The
| operators own neither track nor rolling stock; most of the
| money flows to the "train landlords", the ROSCOs.
|
| Privatising the track, through "Railtrack" was the big
| disaster. They cut maintenance, but when you enshittify
| railways eventually people get killed, and nationalization
| was inevitable after Hatfield.
| eru wrote:
| They managed to increase rail's share of overall transport.
| Reversing long running trends from before.
|
| > Commuters end up using the train because they're more or
| less forced to [...]
|
| Rail transport had been losing passenger share. Did the
| private companies somehow figure out how to 'more or less
| force' people to take the train? Why couldn't the
| government rail do that before?
| ben_w wrote:
| > Why couldn't the government rail do that before?
|
| They didn't want to. Privatisation was the era of
| Thatcher and Major, the discovery of North Sea oil
| reserves, and of the same general desire to culturally
| align with US (including car culture) that to the uban
| design found in Milton Keynes 30 years earlier.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| I agree privatisation did indeed cause a massive revamp of
| train usage, and I feel like the nostalgia is sometimes rose-
| tinted and misplaced because 80s BR by all accounts was
| pretty bad even in the context of the UK in the 80s.
|
| On the other hand, from about the 90s onwards there was a
| huge increase in London employment relative to the rest of
| the country, and also a huge (5x or more over that time)
| house price increase in London. This pushed a lot of people
| into the commuter belt. and As you basically cannot drive
| into London from there, those miles can only be provided by
| rail.
|
| It would be interesting to know how much of the effect is in
| the South east, and how much is showing labour migration into
| a rail-centric region after industrial sectors outside the
| South-east were dynamited in the 80s.
|
| And privatisation does usually have a cycle: influx of cheap
| capital in a boom phase, followed by a slow ratching squeeze
| as you struggle to exceed that great initial growth every
| year thereafter.
| jstanley wrote:
| Could you have it backwards? Viable rail transport could
| have increased the amount of people who can work in London,
| and increase the radius in which they can live.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Indeed, it's possible. It's probably a mutual thing, and
| the existing rail-centrism of London would certainly have
| helped fuel the financialisation of the UK economy. You
| couldn't build Canary Wharf if no one could get to it.
|
| London always had the better railway lines anyway,
| privatisation or not. In particular, radial London
| commuter lines mostly escaped the Beeching cuts. Post-
| industrial financialisation in London was the crown jewel
| of the 90s economic strategy. So it feels (feels/reals
| alert) unlikely that it was specifically the railways
| being private that led to the boom, but injecting private
| investment right then could well have been some grease on
| the wheels.
|
| Of course every private cash injection comes with the
| long term squeeze as the initial YoY becomes hard to
| sustain over decades.
| eru wrote:
| > London always had the better railway lines anyway,
| privatisation or not.
|
| Well, they were first privately built, anyway. At least
| most of them.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It was always viable? It may not have been as comfortable
| or safe (slam-door trains) as people liked, but it was
| always crucial to London working for the 20th century.
|
| Privatization didn't increase capacity, did it? It
| certainly didn't build any new lines.
|
| I'm not sure it injected any capital either, subsidy was
| maintained throughout? Arguably paying dividends while
| receiving public subsidy has been taking capital _out_ of
| the system.
| eru wrote:
| Well, a well run mature company should return money to
| shareholders. That's why shareholders give money to
| companies in the first place.
|
| > Privatization didn't increase capacity, did it? It
| certainly didn't build any new lines.
|
| I don't think they privatised the rails themselves, only
| the trains.
| twic wrote:
| They did. Then later on nationalised them again.
| robocat wrote:
| New Zealand sold the national network to Toll of
| Australia, who slowly ran it into the ground (I suspect
| one underlying problem is that it just wasn't at all
| profitable). Labour later bought it back from Toll
| (costing about $550 per working person). Passenger
| service is a very minor component of the national service
| (mostly the interisland ferry, which is a complete
| cockup).
|
| Upthread comment: >[privatisation is] one of the UK's
| most hated things the government has ever done
|
| In New Zealand, a lot of the political fallout from
| privatisation came from older people who love trains and
| talk a lot of crap about how good they are. They are
| uneconomic in New Zealand, regardless of how efficient
| people think they _should_ be.
|
| Voters don't like reality (few have any working knowledge
| of business), and most politics seems to be about finding
| alternative acceptable ways to present reality to voters.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Well, a well run mature company should return money to
| shareholders. That's why shareholders give money to
| companies in the first place.
|
| Sure, but what does any of that have to do with TOCs?
| They're badly run, transient shells, which are given
| money by the government.
|
| It should be illegal for any company to take public
| subsidy and pay dividends at the same time.
|
| > I don't think they privatised the rails themselves,
| only the trains.
|
| See the sad history of Railtrack Plc.
| youngtaff wrote:
| BR was deliberately underfunded throughout the 70s / 80s
| prior to privatisation
|
| They did some fantastic work on high speed trains etc but
| it was all scrapped
| walthamstow wrote:
| I'm surprised the author doesn't mention that centralised time
| itself was a product of the railway. Prior to that, every town
| had its own time, London and Bristol were 20 mins apart. In order
| to have a central timetable, there had to be a central time.
| zzbn00 wrote:
| Yes, and it was a huge thing at the time. The social effects of
| all this time coordination and time tabling are one of the
| underlying themes of Stoker's novel Dracula.
| Juliate wrote:
| And it's still a huge thing that shifted with the Internet
| too.
|
| Prior to it, yes, there was international phone lines, but
| those were still expensive enough you might ignore them.
|
| Before then, I'd say around start of the 90's in Europe, you
| did not represent yourself being in sync with someone, anyone
| abroad (but perhaps that started to become conceivable for
| people who could afford frequent international calls or
| travel).
|
| And that conditioned how you perceived your own time, the
| time of others, the events here and over there, and the
| effort you took into communicating long distance, through
| letters.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I was recently a guest staying at an elderly woman's large
| house.
|
| The room I slept in was full of junk, but what caught my
| eye were envelopes with stamps from the 1950s/1960s. The
| "From" name was the woman's late husband, and they were all
| from two African countries that were then part of the
| British Empire.
|
| I had heard her talk about when her husband was working in
| Africa, but until I saw the big pile of letters I hadn't
| considered that this was the only way the young couple
| could keep in contact when someone's work required long
| periods of international travel.
| zzbn00 wrote:
| No need to go as far as Africa. Basic landline telephones
| spread into poorer/more rural parts of Europe only in
| 1980s and 1990s. Until then it was either taking the bus
| to see people in person, or sending a letter....
|
| E.g. quick search revealed this pamphlet from 1988 Spain,
| showing that ~30% of households did not at time yet have
| a telephone: https://www.telefonica.com/en/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/5/202...
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| The product of the railways is _the successful arrival of
| passengers at their chosen destination_.
|
| The fact that this isn't obvious, and that instead the _means by
| which that product is delivered_ is considered more important
| than the actual arrival of passengers, is very telling.
|
| This is a common issue in the technology world - too often, the
| actual end result is overlooked, for the sake of the means by
| which that product is produced. Your special organisational
| tricks mean nothing if the customer is left at the station,
| standing in the rain, hundreds of kilometres from home.
|
| The timetable doesn't get anyone home. The trains do. The
| timetable just describes the intent - it is a _requirement which
| describes a service_ , not a product. The train is required to
| show up at that time, and by publishing it the train company is
| establishing agreement with its customers in an open and fair
| manner.
|
| A product is something _which is produced_ , and the word
| 'product' describes, after the fact, that which was produced. A
| service is an act which is performed in support of producing
| something. Timetables are a service which are subservient to the
| fact of actually producing the desired result. I do not go to the
| train station to look at the services being promised delivery; I
| go to engage in the act of using that service, to gain my desired
| product: my ass at home, making a cuppa.
|
| Disclaimer: if you've taken a train in any one of 38 different
| countries around the world, chances are your safety has been
| being predicted by SIL4-level online tests I've written for that
| purpose ..
| winternewt wrote:
| The article got off on the wrong foot from the start by
| separating the purpose from the product. To my mind the purpose
| _is_ the product and always will be.
| superpope99 wrote:
| I think the "successful arrival" framing isn't accurate. Or at
| least not comprehensive. Granted, "Commuter travel" vs "Leisure
| travel" are probably two quite different products.
|
| Marketing guy Rory Sutherland talks about the product of the
| train journey a lot. I think there's a lot of wisdom in the
| idea of spending finite budget trying to make the travel
| experience more enjoyable rather than trying to make the
| journey quicker. (excuse the shortform slop)
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Bywe3NUOB1I
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| Tell me the percentage of passengers that get on a train not
| intending to arrive at their desired destination ..
|
| >Granted, "Commuter travel" vs "Leisure travel" are probably
| two quite different products.
|
| The distinction is irrelevant, since both groups are
| travelling and, presumably wish to effect the end result of
| that travel: to arrive.
|
| Sure, travelling in style and class and comfort - for sure,
| these are secondary sub-products/-services. But I don't get
| on the train for its food or for the disco car - I do,
| eventually, actually want to arrive in Hamburg.
| Retric wrote:
| People sometimes take leisure train trips that drop them
| off at the same location they boarded the train. That
| destination can be reached faster if the trip never
| occurred, so that's not what people are paying for.
|
| Similarly leisure trips can be vastly less sensitive to
| moderate delays, thus some sleeper trains stop at night so
| people can get a better rest even if it defeats the
| purpose.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| Yeah, but those are edge cases and are in no way
| representative of the final services and products of rail
| companies across the world.
| Retric wrote:
| Everyone is looking for a slightly different product, but
| edge case can tell you a lot about market conditions.
|
| A highly optimized overnight train to Disneyland should
| look different than an optimized overnight train to
| Chicago.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| Yet .. both cases have a destination.
| Retric wrote:
| A stop sure, but the vast majority of people would want a
| round trip to Disney.
|
| Chicago is likely a stop along a longer journey and a
| significant number of passengers would happily skip it
| allowing for more freedom in timing.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| Cool. Now you're no longer discussing the nature of the
| product of rail transportation, but rather the nature of
| consumers' free will.
|
| Either way, if you got on a trip to Disney and ended up
| in Chicago, would you say that the rail company delivered
| the product as promised?
| slavoingilizov wrote:
| Did you read the entire article? That's exactly the point it's
| making, but you decided to pick on the word "timetable"
| crazygringo wrote:
| To be fair, the article is terribly written.
|
| It doesn't even get to its main point, which is that it's
| about _connections_ between trains, until halfway through.
| And then it goes into privatization vs nationalization.
|
| A good article should tell you what it's about in its first
| few paragraphs. But the beginning of this article is some
| weird high-concept claim that isn't what the rest of it is
| about, and completely deserves GP's criticism.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| SIL as safety integrity level ?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| What the article points out is that the distinguishing feature
| of the railway is that the company has no control how and when
| you use the train. It's less like someone selling you a journey
| and more like renting a car. You do not get promised to be
| brought to your destination, you get promised the availability
| of the vehicle. That's the same with railways, you get promised
| the availability of movement at a specific time. That's what
| the timetable is.
|
| That's also a common criticism by people who prefer there cars:
| With a railway you need to put in work and decision how you
| want to travel to a degree that you don't need to in a car.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Now replace "timetable" with OKRs (objectives and key results).
| Juliate wrote:
| It's an interesting take, and you may as well map it to
| industrial projects, architecture, software to see it from a
| different perspective.
|
| The timetable is the specs. The product is what your customers
| experience.
|
| The specs (loose or... very specific) is definitely a major
| product step. But in that it is a mean to deliver the
| service/experience in the end. Without the implementation details
| (that do not live in the spec), you get often unsatisfied people
| everywhere.
| maelito wrote:
| In codeberg.org/cartes/serveur I'm building a stack to visualise
| transit plans using node-GTFS and setup and update a motis
| instance for transit calculations.
|
| Open source transit plans are under-developped. Almost everything
| still needs to be invented.
| emersion wrote:
| There are open-source projects trying to replace older closed-
| source software used to produce these timetables:
|
| - Netzgrafik-Editor:
| https://github.com/OpenRailAssociation/netzgrafik-editor-fro...
|
| - OSRD: https://osrd.fr/en/
|
| (Disclaimer: I'm working on OSRD.)
| jsdalton wrote:
| I simply don't agree with the conclusion though I appreciate the
| approach to thinking about products.
|
| I recently chose to take the train vs driving and the factors
| behind that decision were:
|
| * Time, yes. Train was approximately the same but an actually a
| bit slower.
|
| * Cost. Train was slightly cheaper when looking at the true cost
| of driving. Also significantly cheaper than flying.
|
| * Experience. This is entirely overlooked in the timetable
| centric approach. Train is simply the most pleasant way to travel
| long distances (maybe ferry is competitive there). I was able to
| move around and get work done and enjoy the view. If the train
| company had swapped my train for a bus I would NOT have been a
| satisfied customer.
|
| * City center to city center (vs airport to airport). Had the
| train company said "we swapped the arrival location to the
| airport but technically we still got you to the city" I would NOT
| have been a happy customer.
|
| The "trains as timetables" hypothesis would imply that the train
| could meet my needs via something other than rail travel and
| would definitely lose me as a customer.
|
| On the other hand, improvements such as better wifi service (it
| was terrible and not sure why cell service is also poor on a
| train) or a route that was more scenic but did not impact my
| arrival time significantly would positively affect my likelihood
| of choosing train.
|
| So the better lesson is know your customer needs and know their
| specific jobs to be done and center your hypothesis around this.
| NoNameHaveI wrote:
| "The product of the railways is the successful arrival of
| passengers at their chosen destination." Clearly, this was not
| written in the USA. With a few exceptions (NE corridor, Wolverine
| route), Amtrak is forced to share rails with host freight (goods)
| railroads who could give a hoot about the expedient delivery of
| passengers. The Big 4 (BNSF, UP, CSX, NS) would rather just let
| their freight have priority and pay a minimal fine. Sadly, this
| will continue to be the case where Amtrak does not have their own
| right of way (NE Corridor, Wolverine).
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I can make some guesses as to where the author lives, purely from
| their confidence that trains will keep to their schedule.
|
| People will still show up for trains that fail to meet their
| schedules. They just have to have a high enough frequency that
| you aren't sitting there for hours, or for there to simply be no
| other option.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Is anyone else getting bored with these "insights" which are
| flippant to the point of being rdiculous? Many things are
| necessary to have a "product", not just a timetable. Anyone can
| scribble a time table.
|
| I swear this is an industry. "I'm so insightful, don't forget to
| like and subscribe"
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