I Rode One of the Greatest Train Systems in the World. It Taught Me a Lot about My Own City...

Comments · 570

• LO

  @lordpalle1 · 1 year ago

  I respect this guy for insistently trying to pronounce the name of danish cities.

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• KL

  @klavsen · 1 year ago (edited)

  As a Dane living quite far from Copenhagen and not really used to driving in a big city. When ever I go there I park my car somewhere free/cheap at the edge of the train system and just use those for getting around for my entire time there. It is so much more convinient than trying to get around the city by car. And if only have to be in Copenhagen on my trip, I often just leave my car at home and take the main train line there.

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• EM

  @EmrielZ · 1 year ago

  no way i got a DSB ad while watching this 😭

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• OR

  @orangefoxxd6120 · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VCmIHD4Bk0&amp;t=736">12:16</a> <br>As a Copenhagener and DSB employee myself I would like to point out that these trains have no functional air-conditioning because they literally don&apos;t have it at all... 😅 <br>It has air-circulation and small windows that can open and THAT&apos;S IT!🤪 <br>But I&apos;m glad you like our S-train network, hopefully America will be able to up their game too for the benefit of its huge urban population... Kind regards <br>Marius (from Copenhagen)

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• EL

  @ElectroTone · 1 year ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VCmIHD4Bk0&amp;t=732">12:12</a> Dane here. You are by far not the first passenger on DSB&apos;s trains, who didn&apos;t realize how those door sensors work.<br><br>There are <i>two</i> IR beams coming down from the top, each set at an angle toward the center, middle of the doors. To activate, simply hold one hand horizontal, palm up or down, at waist level, <i>exactly</i> where the signs with the hand on the doors are. At that exact spot your hand will intersect both IR beams, and the door will open with zero fuss.<br><br>But yes, even many locals do the silly &apos;wave to the gods&apos; in a frustrated attempt at opening the doors.<br><br>Tl;dr: Do a karate chop at the signs on the door, peeps. They aren&apos;t supposed to be automatic.

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• JE

  @jedimalone · 1 year ago

  They&apos;re called S-Tog (S train) because there was a competition in a newspaper to name the new system. However, they&apos;d already hung the big S&apos;es which was supposed to signify &quot;Station&quot;, so people had already started calling them S-Tog, so that name won the competition.

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• SA

  @Sakkura1 · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VCmIHD4Bk0&amp;t=938">15:38</a> Bear in mind Copenhagen for the longest time did not have a metro system. So the frequency of the S-tog was making it a pseudo-metro especially in the central sections (where multiple lines converge, so intervals are short enough you&apos;d never bother to look at a timetable).

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• KR

  @KristiansShenanigans · 1 year ago

  As a Dane who loves trains I love this video. I just wanted to point out that while it&apos;s true that the first railroad in Denmark was the one from Copenhagen to Roskilde in 1847, the first railroad in The Kingdom of Denmark is Altona to Kiel which opened in 1844 with the name The King Christian VIII Baltic Railway, but of course that railroad is now a part of Northern Germany. That is BTW also still operating to this day.

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• MA

  @Maitch3000 · 1 year ago

  The s-tog network has one design flaw. All lines except F are going into the same tunnel with 4 stations. This means, that if something goes wrong in that tunnel, then everything is running poorly.<br><br>There are now plans to build a 2nd tunnel that will serve as an express tunnel through Copenhagen but with new stations. When that is completed, they can make the train go every 7.5 minutes instead of every 10 minutes.

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• XE

  @xenotimeyt · 1 year ago (edited)

  This was a great video..... and I was surprised to see it as I also spent an extended amount of time in Copenhagen recently and literally had a prospective video along the lines of &quot;The Copenhagen S-Tog Changed How I See Transit Everywhere&quot; kicking around in my planning docs!!<br><br>I love that you gave the finger plan proper emphasis and talked about the surrounding context of it&apos;s development too- I&apos;ve noticed that a similar concept exists with metro networks, when you have a well designed inner city, with these sort of centres of activity in pedestrian squares and the like, it becomes almost trivial to choose where to put your metro stops. Copenhagen is a great example of this too, and this isn&apos;t just like optimal in terms of moving humans around but it just makes things feel natural too. Kongens Nytorv just feels like the natural place for all the metro lines to meet up, and it&apos;s this that felt most dramatic about Copenhagen to me. It was great to hear you touch on it too, in Copenhagen the structure of the transit mirrors the structure of the city really well. It&apos;s not perfect of course, but that combined with the actual service quality in terms of frequency (and i love the wide boi seating) is just great. <br><br>I also find the Copenhagen S-Tog really interesting in the context of the rather trendy &quot;optimization&quot;, especially in the context of P3s and the like. &quot;We shall build the perfect transit system that does exactly what it needs to without spending a penny more.&quot; (this might seem a bit non sequiter but i promise theres something here) I&apos;m not saying this is always bad, and there have been great successes building &quot;exactly the transit we need and nothing more&quot;. The Copenhagen S-tog despite having a fairly humble history did not do that. Complete grade seperation when stuff was first built is absolutely not &quot;optimized&quot;, and it&apos;s not hard to imagine folks talking about how ridiculous it is, adding all this extra cost for grade seperation in areas that probably did not look like they needed it. But holy balls was that a good decision in retrospect. And coming back to SEPTA, they were doing the exact opposite. They created what was effectively the minimum possible service you could call an &quot;S-Bahn&quot; and Denmark created what could I think honestly be called an &quot;overbuilt&quot; S-bahn...... until they were able to up frequencies and then CBTC and now automation. Philly did not invest in their S-Bahn, not just in terms of infrastructure but in terms of investing into the concept itself. Copenhagen did. The complete grade seperation is a great example of how that kind of thing really is an investment, they put a bunch of money towards it without really getting that much value back from it.... until holy shit is that investement paying off. <br><br>On the other hand one of the really great things that we&apos;re seeing more of that the S-tog also falls under imho is this &quot;treat everything like a metro&quot; concept. Most S-bahns feel like a metro on the interlined routes that near the centre and some suburban areas if it&apos;s good. The S-tog feels like a metro for the suburban area because the frequencies are so good. It&apos;s kind of a similar thing to how &quot;grade seperation everywhere&quot; means &quot;we just dont think about it&quot; from an operations perspective, &quot;10 minutes everywhere&quot; means &quot;we just dont think about it&quot; from a user perspective. The mainline rail in the centre of the Netherlands feels like a metro system but for most of the country. Even when you get to HSR, great systems like the shinkansen and Italian HSR can run at metro-level frequencies. The S-bahn almost feels like the progenitor of that concept and the Copenhagen S-tog to me contains that aspect of S-bahns in it&apos;s current form. It was cool to see it presented along those lines. <br><br>sorry for that rant but great video, thanks a lot for scooping my next hit masterpiece /s /s

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• GE

  @genoobtlp4424 · 2 days ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VCmIHD4Bk0&amp;t=1290">21:30</a> I know I’m a year late, but the Zürich S-Bahn system has a similar idea of express runs, though (no doubt due to the general punctuality of the network) the lines tend to switch branches on either end of the city, thus enabling more direct connections (also, the west has more parallel regional routes that run express, so the S-Bahn express runs are in the east…ish). The notable express runs: S5/15 running express from Wetzikon (with stop in Uster), where S9/14 run local, S11/12(/23) running express from Winterthur with various lines running local, S19(/42) running express through Dietikon with S11/12 on the local, S7 on the express from Meilen with S6/16(/20) on the local, S25 running superexpress through Wädenswil, S2 running express through Thalwil and S8/24 on the local. Lastly, S24 runs express from Winterthur to Schaffhausen with S12/33 running the local.<br><br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VCmIHD4Bk0&amp;t=1630">27:10</a> it not being a problem may be true, but some systems made it work non-problematically: especially Switzerland has multiple systems with multiple operators (or track owners) in every system except Zug (SOB S31 is technically S-Bahn Schwyz), though I would count their system as part of Luzern and Zürich. But Switzerland is good at getting various companies to work together seamlessly. S-Bahn Rhein-Ruhr has multiple operators, but there it’s due to different operators winning tenders to run trains.

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• PU

  @Purplefishish · 1 year ago

  Every time I go to London, I fall in love with our danish trains all over again 🙂 Those rattling, dirty tubes are horrendous. Even when a danish train isn´t clean, it is cleaner than most trains around the world.

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