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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Leipzig & Dresden: A Case Study in City Pairs
Regional trains in Germany carried 1.6 billion passengers in 2022, ten times more than the high-speed ICE trains, connecting small towns with reliable service. Our journey between Leipzig and Dresden reveals the impressive frequency of German regional rail, with 40 daily trains between cities comparable to Austin-San Antonio, which has just one Amtrak service per day.
• Leipzig, Germany's 8th largest city with 600,000 residents, boasts Europe's largest train station by structure size
• Dresden, with a similar city population but a larger metro area of 1.3 million, is well-connected with 38 daily trains from Leipzig
• Austin-San Antonio (75 miles apart) could benefit from similar regional rail, especially with growing communities between them
• Tampa-Orlando represents another promising American corridor, with Brightline potentially providing 10 daily trains
• New York-Philadelphia demonstrates regional rail success in America with 45 daily trains between major population centers
• Effective regional rail doesn't require high-speed infrastructure—just double-tracking, electrification, and frequent service
• The Deutschland ticket (€58/month) covers all regional trains and local transit nationwide, eliminating fare barriers
If you're interested in supporting Transit Tangents and getting bonus content, check out our Patreon page.
This week on Transit Tangents, lewis rides regional rail in Germany between Leipzig and Dresden. What are these cities like, how many trains run a day between them and what lessons can we take away for similar city pairs in the United States? All of this and more, coming up on Transit Tangents. Regional trains in Germany moved a staggering 1.6 billion people in 2022, and that number has only gone up since then. While they're not as exciting or as fast as the high-speed ICE trains famous in Germany, regional trains carry 10 times the amount of people. They connect even the smallest towns across the country into the rail network and they run on a much more reliable schedule.
Speaker 1:This week, I'll take you on a regional rail journey between the cities of Leipzig and Dresden, share some information about the two places, and then Chris and I will make some comparisons to city pairs in the United States to see what we might be able to learn about how to make regional rail work back at home. To start, we'll jump right in with my first connection of the day, boarding the train at the train station in Jena, where I'm currently living. Jerry and I are on our way to the main train station here in Jena, basically heading from Jena to Leipzig and then from Leipzig to Dresden. We have a concert we're going to tonight, but I figured this could be an interesting opportunity to talk about regional rail here in Germany and make some comparisons to city pairs in the United States that are a similar distance between Leipzig and Dresden, similar metro sizes. So we'll pick it up from the train station over in Leipzig after we take our train, which will be about an hour hour and 10 minutes, while this leg of the journey is not the main point of the episode. There are roughly 14 direct trains per day per direction between Jena and Leipzig. This includes regional trains as well as a few ICE and IC trains. There are a lot more options to get between the two cities, though, many of which have a timed connection, making it so that you can have an easy cross-platform transfer that you'll know you'll make on time After about an hour. We made it on time from Jena to Leipzig Got the express train, the regional express, so we only made probably four or five stops along the way. It is about the same amount of time as driving.
Speaker 1:What we're here for is to talk about the connection from here in Leipzig over to Dresden, so we have about a 45 minute layover, which gives us just enough time to show you around what is actually Europe's largest train station. Most people probably if you're from the United States you might not even have heard of Leipzig before. If I'm being totally honest, until about a year ago, when Jerry and I were considering moving here, I had never really heard of it before. So to know that it has the largest train station in all of Europe is pretty impressive, and we're talking about structure. This is not the busiest train station in all of Europe, but it is the largest. It sees about 120,000 passengers per day, which is fairly impressive, but nowhere close to the busiest. In addition to having just this massive train hall with 21 platforms, you also have essentially an entire mall down below all of the platforms, which is pretty interesting. If you're based in Germany, it's fun to know that things in the mall a lot of them are actually open on Sundays. For those of you not familiar, on Sundays in Germany most stores are closed, even the grocery stores.
Speaker 1:A couple of fun facts about Leipzig, though. So population wise, just to give folks an idea, is about 600,000 people in the city of Leipzig. The metro area is not much bigger, it's only like 610,000. A lot of it has to do with the fact that Leipzig, once you get outside of the urban core, turns pretty rural pretty quickly. You can see that when you're kind of coming in on the train. Cities in the US like Portland, oregon, and Memphis, tennessee, are good comparisons for size. In a bit, when we get over to Dresden, we're going to talk about how many trains actually go back and forth between these two cities every single day. But that just gives you a little bit of a point of comparison, speaking of how many trains go back and forth between these two cities every single day as you're watching, think about it and take a guess down in the comments below before I give you the actual answer later on in the episode.
Speaker 1:If you're interested in learning more specifically about this station, the YouTube channel City for All did a entire deep dive into the station, as well as the tunnel that goes underneath this station. It was really only opened in the 2000s. It had been talked about for decades and decades, but now the city of Leipzig's S-Bahn is able to be through, running right underneath where we're standing right now, connecting different parts of the cities together in a more seamless way. We just talked about the North Station and South Station in Boston. There used to be a similar arrangement here in Leipzig, where the S-Bahns did not intersect right through this Hauptbahnhof in the middle of the city, but now they do, and that YouTube video by City for All is definitely recommended to check out.
Speaker 1:As far as how folks are arriving here at the Hauptbahnhof in Leipzig, it connects really seamlessly to the city's tram network. There are a whole bunch of tram stops right out in front, as well as the bus network and then, as I mentioned, the S-Bahn, which drops you off right underneath the station. That will be important later when we talk about how folks can get to the Hauptbahnhof in Dresden and then when we start to talk about city pairs in the United States where this sort of regional rail could make sense, what the sort of transit connections are in those cities. One fun fact that Jerry just pointed out is there's a lot of bike parking right over there, which is pretty nice, and there's a lot of bike parking at all of these stations as well. So, in addition to the trams, the buses, the S-Bahns, a lot of folks are biking to the stations and you'll actually notice a lot of people taking the bikes on the trains with them as well. With all that being said, though, I'm gonna walk around the station, get some shots for you all to be able to take a look at what this station here in Leipzig is like, and then we're gonna head back over to a platform fairly close by.
Speaker 1:We gotta figure that out to catch our train to Dresden, there was a slight delay with a regional train of about 15 minutes, but we boarded the busy train and we were on our way to Dresden. Between Leipzig and Dresden, on the roughly hour and 35 minute journey, there are actually 15 stops. These stops are generally in smaller towns, as the area between these two cities is mostly rural. The ICE trains which go direct between the two cities cut almost 30 minutes off of the journey. For Jerry and I, though, taking the regional train comes at no extra cost, as we have the Deutschland ticket. This ticket covers the cost of public transportation in basically every city across the entire country, as well as regional trains, for only 58 euros per month. So for us, the extra 30 minutes was no big deal compared to the fairly expensive ICE train. This was a last-minute trip and the tickets would have been over 50 euros each. Instead, we were able to travel from Vienna all the way to Leipzig, covered by our Deutschland tickets.
Speaker 1:Dresden, though, has a population similar to the size of Leipzig, for the actual city of about 600,000, but the metro area for Dresden is a lot bigger, somewhere around 1.3 million. The actual amount of people who live in close-ish proximity to the city, though kind of like the urban area, is more like seven or 800,000. Dresden is, sadly, most famous for the fact that it was almost entirely destroyed during World War II. It was near the end of the war, and the entire city was basically bombed, so a lot of the buildings in the downtown area have actually been rebuilt and are not original to the kind of pre-war era. Dresden Hauptbahnhof, though, in comparison to Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, is definitely much smaller, still a nice looking station, but this really only has about eight platforms.
Speaker 1:Instead of the 120,000 visitors and passengers each day that Leipzig train station sees, this one sees about half that, at about 60,000. It does see all of the same types of services, though. You've got the regional trains, you've got the ICE trains, ic trains, connections to destinations both near and far in Germany, but also to neighboring countries. One other fun thing that I want to mention just before we kind of get into actually how many of these trains run back and forth each day, is that there are two other fun little pieces of transit in Dresden that we're going to check out as another train pulls in behind Jerry here, and there's a funicular as well as like a for lack of a better term it's a monorail that goes up a steep hill. So tomorrow at some point we're gonna check those out, as long as Jerry lets me to do that. They probably won't be included in this video, but we'll definitely make sure we put something together for folks on patreon, which is a good way that you can support the show, if you're interested in doing so, also outside of the station here.
Speaker 1:This station is also served by the region's S-Bahn trams and buses, very similar to in Leipzig. Because we were spending the entire weekend in Dresden, we had a chance to really try out the city's public transportation system Overall, despite the city not having an U-Bahn or anything too fancy. I was really impressed. The trams ran frequently and on time, connecting us to most of the destinations that we wanted to get to. We even ventured off on some buses to make it out to the Dresden-Schwebebahn, which I had mentioned before. There's more on that posted in a bonus video on our Patreon. They were easy to navigate, the buses heavily used and they ran frequently, at least by my US standards. Even after our concert they were ready with extra trams stacked up, ready to take everybody home.
Speaker 1:Alright, now that you've learned more about Dresden, you've learned more about Leipzig, you've seen the train stations in each of these places, you've gotten to see a little bit of the journey. I'm going to give you one more moment here to think about how many trains go back and forth between these two destinations every single day, and then, after I give you that number, we're going to go back, I'm going to talk with Chris and we're going to try to find some other similar city pairs in the United States that are similar distances away from each other, that have similar populations, and kind of take some lessons from this corridor here between Dresden and Leipzig and kind of apply them to what could be in the United States. I also made Chris take a guess. Here was his answer.
Speaker 2:I would say, let's say there's 24 total trains a day, All right you've had enough time to guess.
Speaker 1:The number of trains that runs back and forth between these stations is nearly 40 every single day in each direction, which is pretty wild. I had to double count it this morning when I was like, is it actually 40? I'm going to go and look and it's like 37 or 38 trains, starting around four in the morning and running until basically midnight. Most of the day it's every half an hour or better. You've got a train, either a regional train, an ICE train or an ICE train kind of making that journey. So, without further ado though, let's jump back to a conversation with Chris back at home and we'll kind of talk about those city pairs in the United States. All right, I hope you guys enjoyed kind of our first dive into transit here in Germany Again, very excited to bring more of that sort of stuff to everybody, as I'll be living here for the next few years, and we also have a fun, exciting announcement here, chris. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I will be coming to Germany to visit you. We're going to do several cities across Europe, starting in Vienna, actually traveling back in through Germany and a couple other countries. We're still trying to figure out the final part of that plan, but I'm really excited to finally be on the ground and actually film some content in Europe.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah, there'll be a lot of fun stuff coming. If you want to find out about some of that stuff early and support trips like that to help make them happen, the best way to do so is via our Patreon. And if you haven't seen it yet, we also did an awesome summer trip where we took the Northeast regional between Boston, Philadelphia as well as Baltimore, and we also got to interview all sorts of transit advocates and actual like agency officials along the way too, which was pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:But if you're listening to us or watching us from Europe and you happen to be somewhere in that region between Vienna and lower Germany and all that area hit us up. Maybe we're going to be in your city.
Speaker 1:With all this, though, I've kind of promised on the show in the past that I've wanted to make all of this sort of content where we're looking at Europe and the United States, and not to do what some other folks on YouTube have done, which is essentially say North America is unsalvageable. I don't believe that. So we kind of wanted to take a look at a few city pairs in the United States and compare them to this city pair of Leipzig and Dresden, kind of treat them as a bit of a case study, and there are three we're going to dive into. The first two are actually pretty size, comparable, similar distances, and the last is more of like.
Speaker 1:Here's a success story of regional rail in the United States, but the populations are much bigger. So, to start off, though, we're going to stick close to home, because it's actually kind of the perfect example, if I'm being honest, both in terms of populations and the distance not necessarily the whole populations, because San Antonio is huge, but populations within a reasonable distance of a train station where it could be in the downtown core. So Austin and San Antonio are about 75 miles apart. The metro area in Austin is 2.2 million, metro in San Antonio is 2.6 million. So that does make them larger than Leipzig and Dresden. But if you kind of were to work into the urban core a little bit, more of folks who have some transit accessibility, it's fairly similar. And the driving distances or the, you know, the distance between the cities is similar.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but instead of having 40 plus trains a day, we have one Amtrak going in either direction per day. Yeah, not great. Not only is that not great, the train also takes around three and a half hours to go between Austin and San Antonio, and driving Typically, you can get there within about two hours, maybe just under, without a lot of heavy traffic. So the time savings also aren't really there on the train, but there is an effort to improve this. We did an episode many months back with Travis County Judge Andy Brown where we interviewed him and his effort to sort of kickstart this rail initiative between Austin and San Antonio. It used to be called Long Star Rail, now it has a different name, but there is still an effort that's alive between the two cities to connect them with more rail options.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what's nice is I mean there is a rail line that already exists. Unfortunately, it is owned by Union Pacific and they're not necessarily super excited about working with passenger rail groups here, but apparently some of that has changed. There have been some productive conversations, so fingers crossed that maybe, you know, something can still happen here. The main issue right now is it's single tracked, and Chris and I have actually ridden this train on our San Antonio using only public transit episode. We took the train down to San Antonio and we ended up taking a Greyhound bus back, but the vast majority of the journey that took a long time, was just the last stretch into San Antonio was on very, very slow tracks. So it does seem like the sort of thing that, with a bit of investment, could be improved.
Speaker 1:One other thing that this section has going for it between Austin and San Antonio, the area is growing so fast. You've got both New Braunfels as well as San Marcos, which are both really growing communities. You've got University in San Marcos. There's a lot of potential ridership between San Antonio, austin, new Braunfels and San Marcos. You could have this with the two stops in the middle and, yeah, I just really think that it would be heavily used. You know you mentioned the driving distance between Austin and San Antonio. That time is super unreliable just given the amount of traffic that's going between these. And it's only going to get more unreliable as all of these areas continue to develop more and more and more, unfortunately, in a lot of cases, just like huge sprawling suburb after huge sprawling suburb after huge sprawling suburb. That's not to say that there isn't density, you know occurring in a lot of these places, but there is a ton of sprawling suburbs with a lot of kind of car dependent infrastructure.
Speaker 2:But once you are in these cities there is a pretty robust public transit network. I lean a little more heavily on Austin being a little easier to navigate, but San Antonio also has a massive bus network that is really centralized on downtown where you would arrive via that train. So if you are coming into San Antonio, you arrive in downtown. The network sort of spiders out and you can get almost anywhere that you need to go fairly reasonably. If you're interested in seeing more about what public transit is like there, you can go back and look at our San Antonio in a day episode to check that out.
Speaker 1:Totally yeah, and I mean when I look at it it's just like you know, is there halfway decent frequent service getting you to these places? Because what's important to note about Dresden and Leipzig is that there isn't a fancy U-Bahn network subway that kind of takes you all around the city. The most kind of integral part of their transit systems are buses and on street trams there is an S bond system that kind of stretches further out, but it's not among the bigger ones, like in some of the larger cities. You'll see. Most people are riding the trams and buses to get around and, like you know, we can do that in the United States, like there you don't. It doesn't have to be some massive undertaking to have reliable, frequent buses and if you have reliable, frequent buses mixed with this regional rail, it really could be set up for success. So fingers crossed that we can maybe someday get this over the hump in Austin and San Antonio to get some regional rail going.
Speaker 1:The next city pair that I wanted to compare is Tampa and Orlando. So we've talked about Tampa and Orlando a handful of times now when we've covered Brightline. So Brightline obviously currently runs from Miami kind of up the east coast of Florida and then currently terminates in Orlando. We talked about earlier this year how both Brightline as well as Sunrail, which is kind of the one commuter line in Orlando, have been talking about extending further to the west using the Sunshine Corridor and that would be able to bring Brightline to Tampa, which would actually give us the beginnings of regional rail between Tampa and Orlando, which I mean again we kept making the joke in that episode like this is Florida, like if Florida can do it, we should be able to do this in the rest of the United States.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think Texas needs to look at Florida and say like, oh, we can do better. I also think Texas should look at California and say we can do high speed rail better. But you know, that's that's going to take Texas really really pushing it. These two, the city pair, is really interesting to me because both are fairly large cities but also they attract a lot of tourists. Orlando is the most visited city in the United States, I think, as far as number of tourists go, because you have Disney and Universal and all of the parks and entertainment that's happening In Tampa. You have beaches along the Gulf, you have Busch Gardens, you have the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. You have a lot of stuff happening in Tampa as well that draws huge crowds of people. It seems like a no-brainer to connect these two cities and then continue on and even connect Miami to Tampa and make sure that this sort of central Florida corridor is well served. This seems like another perfect option, as you said, for this better rail connection.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and when we look at the kind of existing public transit networks in both of these cities, this is the area where it could use a little bit of work. You know, if you were to look at Austin or San Antonio's kind of frequent routes map, you would see. You know, every 15 minute frequencies covering a decent amount of the city, at least during peak times, weekdays. When you look at Orlando, and full disclosure. I haven't used public transit in Orlando before. I haven't been to Florida in a very long time. Same goes for Tampa, but just looking from afar, orlando's map shows their most frequent ones, like you know, your frequent network as every half an hour or better. They have buses that run every 15 minutes or better in some cases, but there are so few of those routes that they're not even allocated like a specific line color. The main section on the map is every 30 minutes or better.
Speaker 1:Waiting for a bus every 30 minutes when you're relying exclusively on public transit is just so annoying and hard. Um, I've actually had more experience. Here's a little bit of a knock on German transit. Actually. I've actually had more experience having to do that here now because I'm car free here. I don't. I don't have a car on Sundays in Germany Famously I guess not famously, because I didn't know this before necessarily Everything's closed, basically grocery stores closed, like you can go to restaurants and stuff, like stores are closed and the transit, at least in Yenna, where I live, basically drops down to not on everything but on some of the routes it's basically every half an hour and it's hard to plan around.
Speaker 1:Like you really have to be thinking about what you're doing, so I'm not going to go stand somewhere for 25 minutes waiting for a bus or a tram to come, so every half an hour.
Speaker 1:When you're talking about regional rail, like you just took a train from Orlando to or from Tampa to Orlando, you get off and you just missed it and now, after taking the train, you're now just standing there for 25 minutes to catch a bus and you definitely don't want to have to do a transfer from there, like it. Just the time adds up and makes it tricky. So as far as the local transit goes, definitely some room for improvement, although Orlando does have the SunRail and are planning on expanding it with this kind of Sunshine Corridor, just to put some context to how many trains per day Tampa to Orlando could see, we're guessing a little bit here, but presently between Orlando and Miami, brightline has 10 trains per day per direction. So if we extrapolate that out to you know that they're going to continue along could be estimating again 10 trains per day per direction. So it's not bad. It's not 40 per day per direction, but 10 per day per direction is a great start for.
Speaker 2:Florida, great in the US.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And that brings us to our third pair that we want to really highlight here, and this will be no surprise to anybody who knows anything about transit, but our most successful city pair in the United States would be New York to Philadelphia. Obviously these are two massive cities, with New York being the largest city in the United States and Philly being also in the top 10 largest cities. New York Metro is around 8.5 million, philly is around 6.2 million, so massive population centers. And when I say they're a success, they are a success because there are 45 trains a day between Amtrak, northwest Regional and, I think, the Keystone, so a lot of options to get between these two cities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and both of these cities are supported by some of the better transit networks in the United States as well. Unfortunately, we did cover this. A while ago I did an interview with Stephen from the YouTube channel how we Get Around on SEPTA. We had a fairly optimistic tone to the funding situation in that interview and unfortunately I mean usually I'm pessimistic and he really convinced me and I actually thought too that there would come to an agreement here. But we're hoping to do a detailed update on this situation in next week's episode. So keep an eye out for that.
Speaker 1:If you're not subscribed, make sure you are so you don't miss it. Not the point of this episode. Philly and New York both have robust transit systems which kind of help feed riders into the system. I also think here and let me know you think, chris, I don't know I think that the fact that these cities are old helps here. I mean, the rail infrastructure was built up so long ago. There's some of the first cities in the United States was built up so long ago. They're some of the first cities in the united states, so it was kind of already set up for success in that regard, because you know, in like florida, these cities in florida are not not nearly as old.
Speaker 2:these cities in texas are not nearly as old, although in texas, I mean, a lot of this was built around the railroad, so I don't know yeah, sure, uh, I think there are city pairs in the country that are pretty old that could have better connections, but I think one of the larger contributing factors is what you said. They already have pretty robust public transit networks within the city. They're incredibly dense cities, so people are already used to using public transit, and the highways between these two cities get very congested as well. So public transit is generally around the same amount of time, if not a little quicker, than driving in some cases. So I think all of that contributes to, you know, more riders using the service.
Speaker 1:Right, and to kind of compare this to Leipzig and Dresden a little bit. So they do have a handful more trips per day between Philly and New York City, but I will say, like, the cities are, you know, almost 10 times as large. So you know, that's not to say that. And to be clear too, between Philly and New York City there are other ways to make the journey. So you can do it with a transfer in Trenton right now, utilizing both New Jersey Transit and SEPTA, although I actually do think that the SEPTA portion of that is going to be more difficult to do with the transit cuts, because I know the regional rail is seeing a lot of cuts, in addition to, like, the subway service ending at 9pm and things like that. So you know, when we make the comparison, it is great that we have, you know, 45 trains per day on Amtrak between Philly and New York City, but that's almost the same as, like, what Germany has between their eighth and ninth largest cities or something like that.
Speaker 2:So you know and I think this is a good case study to look at for other city pairs in the United States, because another I think another reason people take the train more often is if you're traveling between these two cities. They're not far enough to fly between you can. You can definitely fly from Philadelphia to New York. That's an option. But in general, if you want to have a more leisurely experience, it's not going to really be any more inconvenient to take the train than fly between these two places, similar to Austin-San Antonio. You can't fly between these two cities. You have to do a connection in either Dallas or Houston. But you know we should look at these city pairs that people probably do travel to and would prefer an alternative to flying. Now the airline industry is not going to like that, but if we were being really serious about things like climate goals, which we're not currently, that would be the option to look at is how do you replace these flights with really fast, reliable electric train service?
Speaker 1:For sure, and I would say even in the beginning, you mentioned fast in particular flights with really fast, reliable electric train service. For sure, and I would say even in the beginning, you mentioned fast in particular. I also want to be clear that I don't think in all of these cases, we need like full high speed rail right away. Like high speed rail is great. I think full high speed rail should be the goal in a lot of these cases, but some of these systems can be really successful with just like halfway decent speed rail. So, for example, the fastest that I could catch the train we were on between Dresden and Leipzig going was about 160 kilometers per hour, that is, about 100 miles per hour. So that is fast. Now I will say, though, that that regional train that between the one that actually makes the stops, the ICEs, go direct. Those go just directly from Leipzig to Dresden, but the regional ones have 15 stops in between, which is that's a lot of stops. Now it is a fairly quick journey still. It's only about an hour and a half to get between. On the, it's an hour and 35 minutes, versus about an hour and 10 minutes on the direct. Uh, kind of higher speed line there. But, um, it doesn't have to be super fast for it to be effective. It's, you know, comparable to the driving time between them, uh, except you're just getting dropped off right in downtown, you're not worrying about parking. You wouldn't fly between these two cities either to your point. Um, so you know, for example, with either the Tampa example or Austin and San Antonio, if you could have a train that was averaging even 70 miles per hour, it would be a major win.
Speaker 1:I keep going back to the Austin and San Antonio one, because it would be so clear that you would just have two stops really in between, maybe a third somewhere, if it. You know you could, or you could have some express trains and some that stopped at every station. You could make that journey really seamlessly with just some. You know, you would definitely need to do a couple adjustments. You would need to double track it, obviously, which is probably the biggest hurdles of this, but it doesn't need to be high speed or nothing, it can be all right, let's see what we can do with what we have for now and then, over time, continue to work. You know, how can we make this section faster? How can we make this section faster? Because, as I've been here, like you know, germany's system, from what I can tell, is it's older and they're currently going through a lot of issues right now in terms of trying to do these modernizations of their older systems.
Speaker 1:But the high-speed trains here are not on their own dedicated systems. For the most, for the most part, the ice trains are running on on dedicated tracks where the infrastructure has been built, but on the areas where it's not, they're going as fast as they can. Um, but they're working with what they have and trying to build out more over time. And more recently there's been money kind of being allocated to some of this stuff, but the can was kicked down the road for too long. So in the United States, I mean, let's chip away at what we can. I think the bones are there. We have the rail infrastructure in some places. We have the right of ways in some places. In some places we're going to have to have some conversations about finding the right of ways, but it's not, it doesn't have to be some massive undertaking, we can achieve it. Yeah, absolutely agree.
Speaker 2:I just want a train that runs an average of 90 to 100 miles an hour, and I'd be happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Absolutely, but with all that being said, if you are interested in other city pairs that you want us to look at, or if you have examples that you think would fit into this model of city pairs that would benefit really greatly from increased rail traffic, um let us know, put them in the comments and and provide that feedback absolutely uh, and if you want to support the show directly, the best ways to do so are via our patreon.
Speaker 1:You can also buy us a coffee or check out the merch store down below. If you are in europe, as chris said earlier, somewhere in kind of Austria, southern Germany we're still kind of deciding where we will head off from there. Definitely reach out. We would love to connect with folks on that trip. But, with all that being said, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit. Tangents Tuesday.