EU to give young people free train tickets to explore Europe

[ignhelper]

https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/eu-give-young-people-free-train-tickets-explore-54907769

Goddamn what the fuck I'm jealous

[monky]

That's pretty neat. I never really travel by train but if this is going to be a thing then I'm totally in.

[Mrgrim333]

Oh yeah?! Well.. WELL... The US gives our youth crippling debt for a piece of paper that is virtually useless these day!
HA! Suck that EU!
Wait...

[SaintBaron]

I imagine that's not trouble for France and Germany given that the profits from UK railways pay for their

[Geferon]

I don't really know much about it but, I do know that my father travelled all around europe when he had my age (around his 20~) and bought this Interrail pass to do so, and, young people (<26) can have a big discount on this passes (or however the fuck you want to call them).
I started also investigating recently to do this myself but, I never thought they'd change it to be something free, which might be GREAT for people like me, as I would LOVE to explore all Europe (I live in Spain).

[lolita la vida]

This is pretty neat to be honest, hope I'm not too old to qualify when this comes around, I'll be 26 in November ..

[Halite]

Brexit stop, I wana go do europe for a couple of weeks.

[AxeI]

What

[DokVis]

Sources on that? Aren't UK railways privately owned.

[Crumpets]

I think he was making a joke about the fact that many of the private companies operating on our railways are in fact state owned European companies.

[SaintBaron]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/01/02/britains-railways-already-state-owned-just-not-uk/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/apr/01/british-rail-franchises-foreign-owners-subsidy
Yes, by foreign states. People don't like to acknowledge it because it'd mean admitting that Europe isn't perfect.

[Crumpets]

That's an interesting angle. I always took it as more of a point against our complete swindle of a privatized network.

[SaintBaron]

Oh definitely - it's terrible that it's privatised. Foreign companies aren't entirely to blame - they just took advantage of bad situation

[RainbowStalin]

I for one am honored to spend hundreds of pounds a month to ride on our shitty victorian rail system that barely works and if you don't love it too you're just a dirty traitor.

[ペゴボド]

Not that someone local wouldn't have done so if they hadn't

[SaintBaron]

You could make a case for local privatisation being better than foreign privatisation as the profits would be reinvested domestically

[ペゴボド]

Of course, but big private entities haven't shown a good track record of investing their profits back into anything besides themselves lately.

[SaintBaron]

Absolutely - I'm not arguing that it's a good system. It's just that statistically, domestic companies, simply by virtue of being domestic, end up investing more into domestic countries and thus domestic ownership should be preferable to foreign ownership, with domestic state ownership being the best option.