And most obviously you can't run a TGV through the centre of Paris - the original through TGV Lille-Lyon through the suburbs on one of the Ceintures took twice as long as today.
I don't think anyone would suggest avoiding cities on the current route, but rather by adding bypasses you can run additional faster services. That way no one loses out, you get a decent end to end journey time between major conurbations and greater utilization of existing infrastructure.
although then you get into complex service patterns. It can be done
And each Land had its own state railway build around its regional capital, be it Stuttgart, München ect.
But is the demand for through services sufficient to justify it?
Exactly - that's the point I was getting at.
I'm very surprised that there is only an hourly service connecting two of the largest German conurbations, including major cities en route..
. To add to Austriantrain's reply, Germany is much less centralised than the UK: suppose we had no London, and the capital was in the Central Belt of Scotland - what service would be required to Liverpool via Newcastle-West Yorks-Manchester (bear in mind that West Midlands is the business centre and Oxford-Reading is the high-tech centre, both at least as important as M62-Stadt)?
This is a good point and something of a mystery to me why the UK has gone down that particular route. Given the cost of infrastructure and shortage of drivers it was a strange decision for the UK train operators to go for frequency rather than increasing train lengths. But presumably there was some logic to it; train operators (e.g. Midland, XC, Transpennine) elected to increase frequencies rather than increase train lengths even before the DfT started micro-managing franchises from around 2004. Did they consider that increasing the frequency would increase demand?Normal for Germany, they have always gone for hourly with very long trains. In fact, it is not unusual in Europe, even the Swiss have gone with hourly services for a long time before moving towards half-hourly some time ago. And don’t even start about the French
The UK model of sometimes extremely frequent, very often short trains, is rather an outlier. In most other countries, train capacity was increased before train intervals, since it was considered more efficient (see, again, the Swiss with their IC2000 stock). It is, of course much easier if you can go for 400m train sets, and double-deck if necessary.
The Deutschlandtakt, if it ever gets fully realized, sees half-hourly service on all major routes. And the Swiss will go for quarter-hourly, but only where there is no alternative because of passenger numbers. The required infrastructure improvements are simply too costly for any other way.
If the Scottish central belt had the population of the Berlin conurbation and was centred on a single urban core rather than distributed over 50 miles, I would expect there to be maybe double or triple the current demand between the M62 belt and Scottish central belt. Also imagining that there were no major mountainous areas to cross (as is the case between the Ruhr and Berlin), new lines could be constructed relatively cheaply (or perhaps the original lines would have been straighter) to give a journey time that would beat the car and the plane, further increasing demand for rail services between the two.
Not if it maxes out the infrastructure, which is what we were seeing at the UK's major rail hubs before COVID.
Just a note. The Torre del Oro service does not go through Alicante, it runs on the classical València-Madrid line from València to Alcázar de San Juan (stopping at Xàtiva, Almansa, Albacete, and idk if Socuéllamos and Villarrobledo too), where it reverses into the Madrid-Sevilla classical mainline, which it serves all the way through to Córdoba. The Cordoba-Sevilla section was rerouted on the high speed line two months ago.
That's exactly why they did it - because increased demand means increased revenue and increased profit.
This doesn't really explain the difference. From the 1980s onwards the UK replaced longer loco-hauled trains on many routes such as Leeds-Manchester, with shorter, more frequent trains, usually multiple units. There must have been a commercial incentive to do this.
