Railways--and public transit generally--is optimized for people who speak the native language and use the system regularly and more or less ignore the jet-lagged person just off a flight who doesn't speak the language. In general, a lot of systems do a bad to terrible job of accommodating people who are unfamiliar with them.

It also doesn't help when so many countries (and even cities) have totally different systems for paying, etc. Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others. And, no, having to scour guidebooks (of possibly outdated info), for all the right incantations for a given locale isn't really satisfactory.

>Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others

The tapping out thing can be so confusing, even as someone that uses transit a lot. I was traveling recently and encountered buses where you had to tap in only, ones you had to tap in and out on, and ones where you had to tell the driver where you were going before tapping in. None of which had clear signage on the bus itself.

Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when trying to get home.