# Revival of the TEE - Trans European Express - may be possible



## v v (Jan 20, 2021)

Short Article here

Revival of Trans Europe Express 'key to EU's carbon neutrality'


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## Devil's Advocate (Jan 20, 2021)

With Continental Europe's open market and the commoditization of more advanced technology it should be possible to eventually rebuild a faster and more efficient interchange network with more frequent service that can cater to a wider customer base. Even with the Brexit fiasco the London-Amsterdam Eurostar service is expected to finally work in both directions later this year. If the UK and EU can find a way to negotiate smoother interchange rules similar service could eventually be replicated to several other major cities as well. I support reducing rail interchange fees and adding/expanding carbon emission taxes to short haul flights to help cover the cost of reviving greener and more efficient passenger rail links that vast expansion of regional airlines has so thoroughly disrupted.


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## cirdan (Jan 20, 2021)

All this is a bit cynical in my view. Not very long ago you could buy a ticket from virtually any station anywhere in Europe to anywhere else in Europe. There was a standardized table for calculating the fare and that ticket was valid on any train on the given route.

There were also international rolling stocking standards laid down by UIC which basically permitted train cars to pass from one system to another with minimal restrictions. Thus there was a direct train from Minsk to Basel for example. Locomotives were a bit more difficult due to differing electrification and signaling systems, but these were typically switched out at border stations.

Then came this craze for non standard solutions. You can only travel on a Eurostar with a Eurostar ticket, and other international services have similarly used the transition to high speed and modern equipment as an excuse to create closed systems. Similarly the trains used on these lines are not able to run in other countries in the way the old trains could. In fact there has been a policy of fragmentation which has been wholeheartedly supported by politics. It's no longer possible to walk up to your village station and ask for a ticket from Budapest to Barcelona. You'd probably need a stack of tickets now, each sold by a different system. And probably the staff in your village station wouldn't know how to use half of them or even have access.


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## Mailliw (Jan 20, 2021)

Admittedly that is one of the few advantages locomotive hauled trainsets have over multiple units. As far as ticketing goes that's just a matter of software.


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## Willbridge (Jan 20, 2021)

cirdan said:


> All this is a bit cynical in my view. Not very long ago you could buy a ticket from virtually any station anywhere in Europe to anywhere else in Europe. There was a standardized table for calculating the fare and that ticket was valid on any train on the given route.
> 
> There were also international rolling stocking standards laid down by UIC which basically permitted train cars to pass from one system to another with minimal restrictions. Thus there was a direct train from Minsk to Basel for example. Locomotives were a bit more difficult due to differing electrification and signaling systems, but these were typically switched out at border stations.
> 
> Then came this craze for non standard solutions. You can only travel on a Eurostar with a Eurostar ticket, and other international services have similarly used the transition to high speed and modern equipment as an excuse to create closed systems. Similarly the trains used on these lines are not able to run in other countries in the way the old trains could. In fact there has been a policy of fragmentation which has been wholeheartedly supported by politics. It's no longer possible to walk up to your village station and ask for a ticket from Budapest to Barcelona. You'd probably need a stack of tickets now, each sold by a different system. And probably the staff in your village station wouldn't know how to use half of them or even have access.


Absolutely right. In December 1969 I walked up to the ticket counter in Braunschweig Hbf and asked for a 2nd class round-trip to Paris. In a minute or two I was issued a two-centimeter piece of cardboard and I was on my way. It barely had room for all the conductor stamps but it and I made the round-trip successfully. There are some features that are easier now but there is less continuity than in the 1960's private railways US/Canadian ticketing.


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## caravanman (Jan 21, 2021)

It is not just national borders that cause difficulties! Here in the UK, one can ask a Virgin Rail employee about the next train to xyz, and they have no clue, because that next train is an Arriva train, etc, etc. 
I have managed to book continental trains from home on the internet, but it is true that one has to chop and change websites to do that. I will mention "seat 61" website as a good way to find booking help.


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## Ziv (Jan 21, 2021)

Seat 61 is a great source! I travel by trains a good bit and I do a lot of research on their site before I book. The photos of the different trains and the insides of the cars is a huge help. I ignored their advice on which night trains to take from BKK to Chiang Mai and regretted it...


caravanman said:


> ...
> I will mention "seat 61" website as a good way to find booking help.


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## cirdan (Jan 22, 2021)

I agree, Seat 61 is not just good for Europe but has some advice on virtually every country in the world that has passenger trains (although for some of the more exotic destinations the level of detail may be a bit sketchy, but it's still way better than having nothing at all, because believe it or not, there are still many train companies out there in distant and colorful countries who do not have websites of their own, so even things like schedules are difficult to come by, let alone working out how to book or how to pay).


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## PaTrainFan (Feb 4, 2021)

A story on CNN.com with much the same theme.









How Trans Europe Express trains could be making a comeback


As short-haul air travel falls out of favor with business and leisure travelers, Germany is proposing a new network of high-speed, high-quality international rail routes linking major European cities.




www.cnn.com


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## jis (Feb 8, 2021)

Wasn't Trans Europe Express a _First Class Only_ service? Why would EU want to go for such an anti common man thing?

It seems to me that it would be more appropriate to resurrect and enhance the EuroCity network instead which catered to people of all income levels much better. And those trains like the TEEs continued to have neat names recognizing great artists, musicians, flowers etc.

I remember traveling by Monteverdi, Maria Theresa, Edelweiss, among the many I traveled on.


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## jiml (Feb 8, 2021)

jis said:


> Wasn't Trans Europe Express a _First Class Only_ service? Why would EU want to go for such an anti common man thing?
> 
> It seems to me that it would be more appropriate to resurrect and enhance the EuroCity network instead which catered to people of all income levels much better. And those trains like the TEEs continued to have neat names recognizing great artists, musicians, flowers etc.
> 
> I remember traveling by Monteverdi, Maria Theresa, Edelweiss, among the many I traveled on.


I'd have to do some digging, but believe there were two classes of service. That said, I don't think you're wrong and it was more like Amtrak's Acela, with two "upper" classes and no "steerage" (for lack of a better term). Like Acela, the delineation may have been the inclusion of food, but it's been a long time since reading up on the subject.


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## jis (Feb 8, 2021)

jiml said:


> I'd have to do some digging, but believe there were two classes of service. That said, I don't think you're wrong and it was more like Amtrak's Acela, with two "upper" classes and no "steerage" (for lack of a better term). Like Acela, the delineation may have been the inclusion of food, but it's been a long time since reading up on the subject.


From Wikipedia:


> The *Trans Europ Express*, or *Trans-Europe Express* (TEE), was an international first-class railway service in western and central Europe that was founded in 1957 and ceased in 1995. At the height of its operations, in 1974, the TEE network comprised 45 trains, connecting 130 different cities,[1] from Spain in the west to Austria in the east, and from Denmark to Southern Italy.


Indeed several of the originally TEE routes were converted to EuroCity routes by merely adding Second Class accommodation to the trains.

However later on, some TEE services that had previously been converted to EuroCity with the addition of Second Class, were re-christened TEE while retaining the Second Class service. That is how some TEEs landed up with Second Class near the end of their (second) life.


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## NS VIA Fan (Feb 8, 2021)

This is a Dutch TEE train that the Ontario Northland Railway bought in the late '70s and ran until the early '90s between Toronto and Northern Ontario. It had two types of accommodations: individual coach seats in a 2 & 1 open configuration and also enclosed compartments. The ONR sold both types at the same coach fare. There was also a dining car.




When they originally entered service the trains had a locomotive at one end and a coach-cab car at the other but both had this distinct European style cab.




By the mid '80s ONR had replaced the TEE locomotive with a modified F9.


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## jiml (Feb 8, 2021)

NS VIA Fan said:


> This is a Dutch TEE train that the Ontario Northland Railway bought in the late '70s and ran until the early '90s between Toronto and Northern Ontario. It had two types of accommodations: individual coach seats in a 2 & 1 open configuration and also enclosed compartments. The ONR sold both types at the same coach fare. There was also a dining car.
> 
> View attachment 20616
> 
> ...


The trainsets were also used for the Friday/weekend-only VIA service to North Bay. Back in my 9-5 days in downtown Toronto, my family would head up to our frequent retreat in cottage country in the car and I would board the 6:30-ish departure from Union Station, enjoying a nice steak dinner before being picked around 10 pm when the train arrived.


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## cirdan (Feb 8, 2021)

jis said:


> Wasn't Trans Europe Express a _First Class Only_ service? Why would EU want to go for such an anti common man thing?



Initially yes.

I think that in later years the brand was watered down and in some countries second class cars were added.

For example the Catalan Talgo added second class in 1982.


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## cirdan (Feb 8, 2021)

Mailliw said:


> As far as ticketing goes that's just a matter of software.



Yes and no.

An appropraitely designed software should be able to create a convergence of the national booking systems, and its a bit sad that nobody has done that yet.

But in the old days you had UIC tickets that were valid on any train on a given route for the given class of accomodation. Maybe at most you might have to pay a modest supplement if it was a high-value train, or buy a reservation on trains that required that (again for a very moderate sum). I remember the times that in Germany for example a supplement for an Inter City was 6 DM and a reservation was 5 DM (regardless of distance travelled). So going by Inter City was a maximum of 11 DM (about 6$) more expensive that catching the all stops local. Even if you were going from Hamburg to Munich.

Nowadays you can't do that. If you have a local train ticket from Lille to Paris, don't even dream of walikng up to the Eurostar, or the regular TGV even.


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## John Bredin (Feb 9, 2021)

cirdan said:


> But in the old days you had UIC tickets that were valid on any train on a given route for the given class of accomodation. Maybe at most you might have to pay a modest supplement if it was a high-value train, or buy a reservation on trains that required that (again for a very moderate sum). I remember the times that in Germany for example a supplement for an Inter City was 6 DM and a reservation was 5 DM (regardless of distance travelled). So going by Inter City was a maximum of 11 DM (about 6$) more expensive that catching the all stops local. Even if you were going from Hamburg to Munich.
> 
> Nowadays you can't do that. If you have a local train ticket from Lille to Paris, don't even dream of walikng up to the Eurostar, or the regular TGV even.


All that was a function of government-fixed fares, whether by regulation (US) or ownership (Europe), whether airlines or railways, which prevailed pretty much everywhere until the late '70s. I'm too young to have experienced this, but I've heard stories that, because the airfare between City A and City B was fixed by the CAB regardless of which line you flew on, one airline at City A airport would honor your ticket to City B issued by another airline. I've also heard that it was the same on non-premium services on the pre-Amtrak railroads due to ICC-fixed fares.

Those days are long gone, and pretty much only transit and commuter rail systems still have universal tickets. But while regulated fares were only a minor drag on the growing aviation business, they were a significant drag on dwindling pre-Amtrak passenger rail, at least partially because airfares were regulated high to encourage a new industry while railroad fares were regulated low due to pricing and other shenanigans by railroads in past decades. Which weren't necessarily needed when the railroads no longer had the pricing power, at least for passenger fares, that they had in the pre-automobile era when they were seen as "robber barons" and fare regulation was arguably a necessity.

And while Amtrak shouldn't be run as a profit-seeking business, IMHO it makes no sense when it has to go to Congress to make a case for funding to leave money on the table with fixed fares when demand is high. (The flipside of that is also true: it was stupid micromanaging for Congress to limit Amtrak's ability to discount tickets when limited periods of lower demand mean that it's better to collect some fare for a seat than none. If wholly private hotels can do it, Amtrak should be able to as well.) 

I don't see how that's any less true for the European railways, which as I understand it are no longer the government operations they were in the days of the TEE and are now expected to be profitable except for provincially-subsidized local services. The German states each have their interchangeable state ticket for local services, for instance, but IIRC you can't hop on an ICE or TGV with one even for a wholly intrastate trip.

And the death of the regulated fare system has brought cheaper travel to way more people (large cities connected with frequent and competing services) than it's brought higher fares (smaller cities and towns with one airline and infrequent service) that the end of regulation would imply. To your point about fixed and interchangeable fares, people joke and grumble about having to check multiple websites multiple times to find the best fares on the right days, and still finding that a seatmate paid less than you. But I don't think many people want to go back to the fixed-fare days, at least for air travel. Air travel was nicer in the '50s and '60s with passengers wearing their best clothes and service being premium because the fares were also premium and the average Joe and Jane couldn't afford it. Flying now (outside of Covid-time) feels like taking a bus because the fares have gotten nearly as cheap.


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## jis (Feb 9, 2021)

Among other factors, CAB managed levels of fares became quite untenable with the introduction of the 747s on hub to hub service domestically, while retaining significant narrow body presence. It became necessary to have pricing flexibility based on time of day with 747 seats priced much lower than narrow body fares to cover cost of operation. That and several other factors exposed the unworkability of CAB style regulation and so it eventually fell by the wayside.

Here is a nice little discussion of the complex issues...









Airline Deregulation - Econlib


The 1978 Airline Deregulation Act partially shifted control over air travel from the political to the market sphere. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), which had previously controlled entry, exit, and the pricing of airline services, as well as intercarrier agreements, mergers, and consumer...



www.econlib.org





And here is a nice little article on the progression of ICC and STB control over passenger railroads...



https://www.fedbar.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/P2-Histoey-of-Rail-Passrnger-Regulation-pdf-1.pdf


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## NS VIA Fan (Feb 16, 2021)

Just got my _Passenger Train Journal Magazine _today and there's a nice article..... "Return of the _Trans Europe Express_"


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## Willbridge (Feb 16, 2021)

I rode two TEE trains in 1970 when they were all First Class. However, there were differences in how they were operated. On _Ile de France _out of Amsterdam, the NS did not control boarding so there were standees and passengers just camped out in the dining car (with their luggage, not eating). We couldn't get into the dining car until Belgium.

On _Rheingold_ between Bonn and Hoek van Holland the reserved seats were handled correctly (selbstverständlich!) but the dining car was off at Duisburg in the middle of supper time. There was just time for a snack. Later, they did extend the diner into NS territory. So there were individual quirks in spite of the "common marketing" of TEE service.


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## cirdan (Feb 21, 2021)

John Bredin said:


> I don't see how that's any less true for the European railways, which as I understand it are no longer the government operations they were in the days of the TEE and are now expected to be profitable except for provincially-subsidized local services. The German states each have their interchangeable state ticket for local services, for instance, but IIRC you can't hop on an ICE or TGV with one even for a wholly intrastate trip.



I think the comparison to airlines is not fully applicable.

Nowadays most airlines are grouped into alliances and alliances try to act like one big airline and offer you a ticket from anywhere to anywhere else, even if this involves several layovers and different carriers or codeshares. So when you compare flights you are essentially comparing one alliance to another, and then you base your decison on the fare and on the practicality and timing of the connection being offered, as well as such factors as your personal airline preferences or frequent flyer and membership benefits. So if I want to fly, say, from Budapest to Denver, there are different combinations of airlines and layovers that I can chose from. So maybe I have a stopover in Paris, and then one in Atlanta, or maybe with a difference alliance I have a stopover in Frankfurt and then Washington, or whatever. And if for any reason I miss a connection at any of these points, the airline will offer me an alternative solution within the realms of the possible and still get me to my destination by reasonable means.

European trains, with very few exceptions, typically don't compete over the same or comparable routes. If I want to go from London to Paris by train there is really only the Eurostar. Maybe there is something involving a ferry too, but the ferry companies have basically stopped working with train companies so it's unlikely that schedules will be coordinated, or that there will be a transfer from the train station to the ferry port as there used to be, and I would have to book each leg separately. And despite being slower and more hassle, it probably wouldn't be cheaper either. So it's highly unlikely I would be going down that route unless I had a very specific reason to chose it.

But if I now want to go from London to Budapest by train I would have to find a train from Paris to say, Zurich, and that train wouldn't be in the same "alliance" as the Eurostar - despite SNCF co-owning Eurostar. So again it would take a separate booking. And if the Eurostar was running late and I missed my connection, then I would get no sympathy from SNCF. Back in UIC days, I had a ticket stamped London to Budapest, with maybe some vias added so I couldn't interpret it with an overly circuitous route. But because no specfic trains or even companies were specified, I would just walk up to the next train after the one I'd missed, and nobody would quibble. So actually the old system was more like airlines in that respect than the new one.

I fully get that it makes sense to vary fares depending on demand. But I don't think that the only thinkable alternative to a fully unified and fixed fare system is a fully disjointed flexible fare system. If airlines can do it, so can railroads. Because there is hardly any real competition between train companies, all train companies need to be in the same "alliance" over this and stop pretending they are somehow in competing alliances.

In other words, they need to move towards a unified anywhere to anywhere booking system (at least anywhere in Europe) and then rebook passengers who are unable to make a connection. Beacuse bookings are computerized and train locations and delays are also computerized, they should know you are going to miss a connection before it actually happens and then automatically rebook you and send you a text notification or whatever so you know what's going on. We're not in the 1990s any more. This sort of stuff is doable.


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## Just-Thinking-51 (Feb 21, 2021)

> This sort of stuff is doable.



Very much doable, but with all the moving parts to do, and keep it updated, sorry just gave myself a migraine thinking about it.


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