"My train is even worse than your train!" and why that is quite tiring, especially from people from Great Britain

Yesterday I was looking at the ticket cost and regularity of service of the ex-Thalys, now Eurostar, Bruxelles - Paris service.

In terms of the speed of the service and the quality of the infrastructure, this route is excellent - more than 90% of the trip is on high speed lines where 300km/h is possible, and the line is 100% electrified.

But the problem is how often the trains go (not often enough), their capacity (many single rather than double units), and as a result the high cost of taking these trains. Despite taking 3x as long than the train, plenty of Flixbuses ply the Bruxelles - Paris route every day. All the numbers about this route from 2023 are here (and yesterday I concluded not much changed in the 3 years in between).

What was one of the first replies?

Someone living in the British Isles whingeing that getting from north to south Wales takes 4 hours on crap trains.

"Try Wales!" the person demands. Trust me, I was born in Newport. I have. But that is not quite the point.

I was rather flippant in my reply, and promptly got blocked.

But let's unpack all of this.

First and foremost this is a question of the quality of the infrastructure. This varies enormously across Europe, and the UK has been one of the slower western European countries to start to build high speed lines. Given Cardiff (383k) and Wrexham (45k), the biggest cities in south and north Wales, are not quite Bruxelles (1.3m, 2.5m urban) and Paris (2m, 13m urban), and the topography of the land in between in Wales is not easy, whether you could justify a high speed line I do not know, but the question is basically this: should infrastructure be upgraded, and if so, how and paid for by whom? Also less than 10% of the route Cardiff to Wrexham is electrified.

Then from that point you can ask: is the infrastructure being used as well and as intensively as possible? This is essentially the question I was trying to answer for Bruxelles - Paris. By contrast if we look at that for Cardiff - Wrexham we see there is a direct train every 2 hours (taking 2 hours 44 minutes), and the first departure is at 05:19 and the last at 21:26, and the hours there are no direct trains there are options with changes in Shrewsbury. If anything the this looks better than Bruxelles - Paris, also bearing in mind it serves fewer people.

And once we have answers to those points, we come to further questions: is the ticket cost appropriate, both at peak and off peak? Are the trains adequate and comfortable for a journey of this length? Are the trains going to be clean and safe for any sort of passenger? Are they going to run on time?

Trains in the British Isles (and indeed anywhere else for that matter) are not uniquely crap. Indeed pretty much nowhere are they universally good (I can even quibble about the line speeds and lack of on board wifi in Switzerland).

And, more importantly than that, even if a train service is objectively worse where you are than where someone else is, that is not a legitimate argument for that other person to not demand even better where they are.

Further, as this post makes clear, the issue might be the need to improve infrastructure, or it might be to make better use of existing infrastructure. Or might be something else, relating to costs, safety or accessibility. All are fair demands, and do not negate other demands.

And last but not least, one for English speakers resident in Great Britain: just because the rest of us read and write English does not mean we are that bothered with your rail problems over there. Not having invested properly in your rail network for five decades, and having cut yourselves off any EU wide assistance to help you put some of this right, are your problems not ours. Maybe whinge about that to your politicians, rather than griping at me when I write about Bruxelles - Paris? Deal?

[Update 7.10.2026, 16:07]
Before anyone Great Britain/United Kingdom/British Isles-splains me, there is a very explicit reason I chose the terms I did in each part of the text here. I know precisely what I am doing, and if you disagree with what I wrote it is because you disagree, not because I defined something incorrectly.