According to GPT, the price per kilometre for rail travel is between €0.23-0.46 in the UK and €0.13-0.20 in Germany. I'm not able to verify those numbers but from my own personal experience I wouldn't doubt it.

Rail in the UK is just so bad that I stopped using it to go to the airport. Everything is constantly delayed or cancelled like I can plan a journey to arrive 2hrs before my flight and the train will randomly pause for 1hr when I'm half way... also the luggage situation is extremely stressful as the racks are out of sight and generally full, like where else am I meant to put my large suitcase after that?

It seems like trains are much larger in Europe with a lot of double deckers.

If there's two of us it's easier and sometimes cheaper to pay £100 for a taxi to the airport door to door (we're fairly rural)

There is very little true competition on UK railways. Most services are run on Government-granted franchises which give a monopoly or at best a duopoly on specific routes.

There are a handful of open-access train operators who operate outside the franchises, but they can't just decide to compete on a route if that route is already covered by a franchise.

To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations would need to be taken into public ownership and the train operators would run whatever services they see fit.

> To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations would need to be taken into public ownership and the train operators would run whatever services they see fit.

The problem with that is that on a mixed-traffic railway it's very easy to run out of capacity once you have a mixture of trains with differing stopping patterns (and perhaps some freight on top) running along the same line. Once you reach that point, competition stops being directly about passengers and starts being about train paths, which can have rather annoying side effects for passengers.

Plus connections don't really work well with competition, either, because a) that'd require coordination between possibly differing operators, which is anathema to unfettered competition, and b) where a regional feeder route might only run hourly or half-hourly, it's impossible to have good connections with more than one or at most two sets of connecting trains anyway.

(Also c) through-ticketing with sufficient passenger rights in case you miss a connection enroute – at least the UK kept a national ticketing system even throughout privatisation and including all open-access operators, whereas in Germany it's an incompatible free-for-all, despite a legal obligation for railway companies to ostensibly offer through-tickets.)