Wow, good question.
Let's see: French, German, Italian, Croatian, Dutch, Spanish, Portugese, Swiss, Finnish... can't think of any more but I'm sure there are more to add there... and that's easily within ten years, with repeat visits.
Ok, well, in the last ten years, I've travelled on French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Croatian, Slovenian, Hungarian, Slovakian, Czech, Polish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Swiss, Austrian, Greek, Romanian, Irish, Belarussian and Russian railways.
With many multiple visits to a lot of those.
My experiences: mixed. Some with ticket inspectors on most services, some with ticket inspectors on very few. Certainly some with ticket inspectors who weren't going to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, like the Italian train last year from Verona to Venice where a couple of tourists had bought a ticket but not realised they had to validate it on the machine at the station, and were charged something like 50 euro each on account of this. Not strictly on a train, but much the same thing happened to me on a tram in a provincial town in Hungary. A surcharge for a valid but slightly incorrectly filled in railpass on a night train somewhere through the Czech republic. Etc etc.
On every single service - which incidentally arrived and departed on time - there was a ticket collector on-board.
Either you have been very lucky, travelling on a few premium routes, or are talking bollocks. The Italians, Spanish and various Eastern European states can do delays every bit as good as the UK can. And, there is many a service where I have been untroubled by a ticket collector at any point, even on long distance journeys, and that applies to pretty much every country I've listed.
The fare was a fraction of the ridiculous cost of our UK tickets, and you don't get treated like a criminal as soon as you take a seat.
So, fares. Firstly of course we have to bear in mind that a not insignificant consideration is what those fares are relative to local living costs and wages. That aside, I would say that low walk-up fares generally tend to correlate with high levels of subsidy. There's no doubt that the manner in which our railways have been privatised has introduced an awful lot of inefficiencies, but the fact remains that the level of subsidy given to our railways is a fair bit lower than in most other European countries. That is primarily what you should be blaming for most perceived shortcomings in standards of service, instead of franchisees running services badly.
I was stuck on a train for an hour this week, power failure at Clapham Junction on Tuesday morning.
No refund on my ticket though, oh no.
Why's that then? As far as I'm aware pretty much all operators will offer at least a partial refund if you're delayed for that amount of time. Did you ask?
Fuck the lot of them. If they can't be arsed, neither can I.
And it's not about the money, it's the principle. If I can get on a train with a £20 note and tell them that I was unable to use the robot machine, they can take my word for it or they can get fucked.
When you say "they can't be arsed" - this is a rather vague statement and one that you haven't backed up with any kind of explanation. What do you mean by "can't be arsed"? Not believing you when you've lied about non-existent difficulties in purchasing a ticket (even though you have also claimed it's a fool-proof method that means you never have to pay a penalty fare)?
And what is the "principle"? Is the principle that we need to assume everyone is dishonest, and then spend massive amounts of money ensuring there is not the smallest loophole anywhere that woudl allow anyone to travel without paying the correct price (ultimately increasing the cost for everyone, dishonest or otherwise, whether through fares, increased subsidy, or enforced reductions of service due to lack of funds)?
It's not like I'm particularly inclined to defend most UK train operators, and I'm certainly no fan (and never was) of the way our railways have been trashed by the way in which they were privatised, but it does seem that whenever I hear someone trying to justify their fare-dodging activities, all the mumbling about the state of our railways (usually with a load of ill-infomed mythical stuff about how everywhere else in Europe is so much better* thrown in) is basically just a flimsy cover for the fact that they don't want to pay for what most people do - and the fact is, that if they don't pay for it, someone else does, indirectly or otherwise.
*In some cases it is, but this is almost universally the result of higher subsidy levels.
Fucking parasites.
