I just took a train from Mannheim DE to Lille FR. It required one swap and cost me about €250. I felt like that price was too high for that distance and speed (5.5 hours roughly) but that’s comparable to a plane ticket in the US from one major city to the next so it’s a better way of traveling in this instance because trains are more enjoyable than planes for me.
That being said I agree with other commenters that we need to continue to invest in our international rail systems and continue to improve speeds, reliability, and cost.
I’d like to take trains all over the EU in the future (rather new to DE). If someone could get me a single train from Frankfurt to Madrid in under 8 hours for €250 I’d be in love. Make planes obsolete for distances a high speed rail can achieve in under 8 hours. Get me into Italy and Portugal and Sweden and Turkiye and Ukraine (after they’ve defended their home successfully against the imperialists) via train. I want to see the world by train.
Hydrogen is a stop-gap resource that is being pushed by oil companies to continue both producing destructive energy sources and slowing our transition by wasting money on less efficient projects.
“As at the end of 2021, almost 47% of the global hydrogen production is from natural gas, 27% from coal, 22% from oil (as a by-product) and only around 4% comes from electrolysis.”
Everytime someone hears or talks about or supports hydrogen we should cautiously assume oil companies are funding the project and it’s worse than other already established solutions.
Will there be a place for hydrogen? Yes, probably in several niche or minority cases. But it won’t be good for 90% of cars, trains, energy storage, etc because in each of those situations we have a clear path to full electrification or cheaper less harmful solutions that don’t require an oil/gas byproduct.