A lot of people in the UK seem to think the trains in Europe are so much better, but that's not the case, at least in my experience. We took an interrail trip a couple of years ago and spent half the time sat on the floor and waiting for delayed trains. If anything, the overall experience was much worse than trains in the UK, especially if you factored in the difficulty in procuring the correct tickets.
Talking about "trains in Europe" as one thing doesn't really capture the complexity of the system – it varies a lot between different countries and operators. For example Swiss trains (SBB) are extremely reliable but Deutsche Bahn is famously unreliable.
