• nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    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).

    • filtoid@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      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).

      • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 months ago

        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.

    • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      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:

      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.

    • Raylon@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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 ;-).

    • wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      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.