It’s faster

Apart from long distances, that's true only if you count flight time. To take a plane, you need to drive to the airport (which is far from the city), show up at least 2 hours before your flight, go through check-in, wait in line and do the reverse on arrival; and if there's a sudden storm or something you gotta wait on the runway for another 3 hours. Trains take you from one city center to another city centre, you need to show up 20 minutes before departure and there's no check-in (unless you live in Canada).

and cheaper

Artificially cheaper, planes are subsidized, trains are not. When you buy a plane ticket, you're actually paying for only a fraction of the real price.

Most commonly you want to go from city center to city center. Airports are outside, so you have to get there. that takes time. Then you have security checks, boarding and so forth, which takes hours. If trains are reasonably fast trains are faster at something like 500km, for really well built high speed rail you end up at 1000km.

As for cost, as the article explains, trains have to pay fuel taxes and VAT, which flights do not. The price difference is low enough, that that would make trains cheaper or at least as expensive as planes on many journeys.

Oh, so the reason why flights are cheaper is because they’re cheaper? Yeah that makes sense.

🤡

The actual flight might be cheaper, but the airport bureucracy isn't. The security theater wastes a ton of time.