Rail Turkey En

Passenger rail travel needs to be marketed and encouraged locally and abroad as a
pleasurable experience and a relaxed and leisurely way of travel. Dining car offerings need
to be upgraded. It is really a wonderful way to explore and enjoy the country. Bring back Haydarapasa!! What a fantastic way to leave and enter that wonderful city.

It is stupid to believe that you can totally cancel all train-connections for years and the customers just will come back after the service is reopened. No! The travellers have been let in a cold rain by TCDD and they was forced to find other travelsolutions. And now a big part of them will keep this other solutions. In no other countries the railway-companies thread their customers such hardly then in Turkey. And even if the new high-speed-connections are very fine and they are good to win additional customers, to keep the old customers it is absolutely necessary to restore all old connections, what means not only to run YHT-trains between Istanbul and Ankara. People also want normal trains between this important cites with frequent stops and lower prices and also an overnight train with couchette and berth. 7 hours between Istanbul and Ankara is long enough to spend the night on rails and save hotelcoasts.

I would actually argue that even in electric cars, some of the responsibility for energy use lies with the car manufacturer and user. For example, the British government likes to say that it’s reducing carbon emissions, but sometimes the reason is because production has moved to China! In this case, clearly the emissions are still happening and the British government is still partly responsible, but in its reporting it’s able to make itself look more green. Some of TCDD’s energy impact MAY (I say may because I don’t know for certain!) be like this.
I think your report is largely very fair, I just wanted to suggest caution in interpreting the data. For example, because of the possible problems I listed in my last post, I don’t know if we can say for certain that TCDD’s electrification is worth a forest. In the short-term, all their hard work to prepare the railway may have cost a forest. I would also argue that we can’t say the decrease in fuel consumption means 80 million kg of CO2 have been prevented – some, most or all of this CO2 will still have been released, but just not from diesel.
However, I accept that in the long-term this is definitely a good news story that Turkey should be proud of and very important to share so thank you for reporting it.