The Trains that Killed an Airline - Italian HSR

Need more Italian trains? Check out RM Transit's video about Italian HSR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dID5VceD2I

“There’s something every country can learn from Italy” woah, as an Italian this is not only weird to hear in the first place but referred to trains it becomes almost incredible.

I've lived in Japan for 14 years and never taken a domestic air flight because the rail system is so amazing and convenient.

Italian here: i have to say that it has never crossed my mind to take a flight from Rome to Turin, despite it being considerably shorter than the equivalent train ride. Going to the station and jumping on an equally comfortable train is way more convenient.
Italian state-run companies usually have many management issues, but Frecciarossa is definitely not one of them.

Last week Frecciarossa started regular service connecting Milan to Paris in less than 6 hours.
..another milestone in train travels?

I always wondered in the UK how is cheaper to fly to fly from England to Scotland then just take the train.
A train is just a lump of metal that rolls along for A to B.
A plane is a giant lump of steel that can fly. Yet the plane is faster and cheaper in the UK.

FWIW: your videos are spreading. I keep seeing stroads mentioned around the web, and try to contribute my hate of them where applicable. Keep up this channel, it's fantasic.

I'm in Italy on vacation right now. It's hard for me to stress enough how amazing the high speed rail travel was compared to flying. We did Venice to Rome. Jumped on a water taxi that docked right in front of the terminal. Strolled right in, grabbed a coffee and pastry and a few minutes later our train pulled up. Walked onto the train, sat in our assigned seats and a few minutes later away we went. The seats had more legroom than your average domestic flight, the train is quiet and it was an easy 4 hour ride with free wifi, nice views of the countryside, snack/drink machines if you don't want to go all the way to the dining car. When we got to Rome, you can jump right off the train and right on the metro to get to close walking distance to wherever you want to go. Compare this to the debasing airline system and it really is a no brainer which you'd want to do for short haul.

Italian living in the Netherlands here: thank you for reminding me how nice transportation can be in my own country! The main problem with the Italian train system lays in regional and local level trains. In the Milan area where I'm from there are many connections that make very easy to choose public transport but especially in the south of Italy there is no public transport to connect smaller towns to bigger cities so people decide to commute by car. Oh and trains are often unreliable

Italian guy here. The section about "other trains" pretty much sums up the problems that we have with public transportation here. There are huge disparities between what's the best in the class and what's the worst. As soon as you switch from a "freccia" to a "regionale" (a regional or local train) you have to face the reality that a huge part of the country is really poorly connected, and that's the reason why a lot of locals actually still prefer to use cars instead of public transport for travelling between different cities, even if they're alone.

As Italian I'm glad you had (mostly) a good experience. A friend of mine goes from Rome to Bari quite often and she told me that while hsr costs around 60 euros, Ryanair costs only 8! I find this outrageous, as much as Ryanair can be efficient (at the cost of its employees welfare) it clearly doesn't have to deal with the pollution it generates and it benefits a lot from subsidies. As you said for national and most European travels, airplains should be avoided. Unfortunately due to the unfair cost of flights (no way flights can be cheaper than train trips per capita, all factors considered), people still choose the plane over the train. I hope this situation will change soon.

I took the Italo high speed train from Florence to Rome last week. It was bizarre to travel so effortlessly and comfortably over long distance. Trains have become so casual there, that you get on just 10 minutes before it leaves.

This exact situation happened in Spain when the high speed rail service "AVE" launched from Madrid to Barcelona, it replaced the air link that previously departed every hour from each city. Now, the 650km are covered in less than 3h hours. That means an AVERAGE SPEED of 250km/h. If you love high speed trains you should definitely check it out

My dad is a conductor for Amtrak and if he could work on a train like this he'd be so happy

Also, the Italians are really customer friendly. I went to Verona this summer with some friend and we decided that we also wanted to spend a day visiting Venice. So we booked tickets for a train. The thing is, we missed our train by a few minutes because of bad traffic. So we went to customer service at the station and they said "Oh just take the next one, we'll inform the people of what happened." I was so delighted. I though we had to pay for another ticket. I love how everyone was so helpful and understanding.

In about 10 years there will be the Brenner base tunnel between Austria und Italy. In Austria we hope to get rid of a lot of Semi trucks because of this tunnel, but we are still waiting on Germany to do their part. The Italians and Austrians really work great together, but the Germans didn't do jack sh*t. They signed the Memorandum of Montreux in 1994 and a couple of contracts in the meanwhile, but they didn't even start to improve their railways heading to the tunnel. This is BER and Stuttgart 21 all over again. Kudos to the Italians for these railway Ferraris. I saw one between Milan and Turin. They are also really beautiful.

I live in NYC and have experienced U.S. train stations all along the East Coast. I gotta say, the train stations in Rome, Venice and Florence really impressed me when I visited many moons ago. That's mostly because they were laid out so they were very idiot-proof. You got there, you knew where to get tickets, and you could find your train so easily ALL within, like, 5 minutes! It was the most pleasant and convenient transportation surprise I had on that particular trip to Europe. The stations themselves are far superior alternatives to airports, which require a long car/train/bus trip, and then a luggage check, then a security check, then waiting. I also compare those Italian train stations to what I've experienced here in the U.S. God, knowing where to get your tickets and then finding your particular train in stations in this country is sometimes like solving a Rubix cube. I remember I almost had a breakdown on my second visit to Penn Station in NYC trying to find my train in that horrible underground labyrinth after having an awful time figuring out where to buy the right ticket from the correct ticket machine. The layout is atrocious and the signs sometimes send you around in circles. Penn Station is easily the worst train station anywhere in the world. I only made my peace with Penn Station once I had been there about 10 times--I live in NYC after all--and I figured my way around. But that should never be the case with train stations. You should know how to navigate them very easily on your first visit. Which is what happened with Italian train stations.

While on vacation in Italy we stopped at a grocery store and they had fresh squeezed orange juice, the kind that have real oranges so we grabbed a big bottle and a bottle of vodka and had screwdrivers on the train…impossible to do on an airplane.

06:44 "It was strange to switch from the best (anything) to some of the worst" is a sentece that pretty much describes Italy all by itself, we have some of the top excelences in the world and than right next to them some some things to be ashamed of and so much wasted potential

I've lived in a few European countries (Italy being the one I've spent the longest time in, about 6 years). I've traveled a lot around Europe by both train and plane and I gotta say, traveling with italo and the frecciarossa by trenitalia have been some of the best traveling experiences I've had.