🚄✈️ Why is it still so hard to choose a train over a plane?
On many long-distance routes in Europe, choosing the train can feel like a borderline heroic decision. It’s often more expensive, takes longer, and can be less reliable when connections are tight.
This week we spoke to cross-border rail advocate @jon about what Europe would need to change to make rail the obvious choice, not a moral gesture.
Here’s his recipe. THREAD:
1. Better, more interconnected timetables.
One early morning train from Berlin to Paris is not a serious offer on a continent of this size. Sparse frequencies and poorly aligned connections make cross-border travel stressful. If you cannot arrive in Berlin at a reasonable hour and reliably continue to Paris the same day, rail loses to aviation by default. Frequency and coordination matter as much as speed.
2. More night trains.
In the short term, night services are the only practical way to cover very long distances without losing an entire day to travel.
3. Long-term: faster lines.
The comparison is sobering. A train from Beijing to Shanghai, roughly 1200 km, takes around 4 hours 40 minutes. A train from Warsaw to Berlin, just 571 km, takes around 6 hours 30 minutes. Who wouldn’t take an Amsterdam to Vienna train if it took 5h? Or Copenhagen Brussels in under 4h?
None of this is about romance or nostalgia. It is about system design. As long as trains are slower, more expensive and less predictable than planes, people will continue to fly. The structural conditions have to change first.
What would make you switch?
@europeanspodcast plus it's so hecking EXPENSIVE.
(we were discussing it in the context of summer holidays. If you decide to limit yourself to train travel, it limits your range severely. So I guess we're taking the car again)
One word: reliability.
Last year I took the train from the Netherlands to the south of Spain for work. A trip that should take about 24 hours. My very first train was delayed by an hour and I ended up scrambling to rebook all my trains, booking a last-minute hotel in Paris, and finally taking 48 hours to get to my destination.
A few weeks ago I took the train from Belgium to the south of Spain for work. A trip that should take about 17 hours. My train from Lyon was cancelled without warning and I ended up scrambling to rebook my trains, getting a six-hour BlaBlaCar ride, booking a last-minute hostel in Perpignan, and finally taking 34 hours to get to my destination.
Honestly, I feel like an idiot for even taking the train, but I refuse to fly over these short distances because it's just ridiculous to do so.
@europeanspodcast
To mention the elephant in the room: You would have to flip Germany.
It's a central transit country, and it tries to sabotage trains as hard as legally possible, in an ill-suited attempt to protect it's car industry. If you want an efficient European train network, you must somehow make our politicians win elections for doing longterm investments in the privatized rail network.
@europeanspodcast Long term, sadly, but it's like 30 years overdue. If not more.
The state of non-national high speed rail in the supposedly connected Europe is abysmal.
@europeanspodcast Especially the speed and the convenience would help do it for me.
I was in Brussels recently from Copenhagen by plane. I passed close by Copenhagen Central station, and I think I all in all took 3.5 hours from passing Copenhagen Central to being at Brussel Central. And I had at least 6 different departure times from Copenhagen airport to take from.
I did look at trains, but I got tired just by looking at it.
@europeanspodcast @jon My partner and I love train travel! So much more romantic than nasty planes! For a sole passenger in a hurry planes may be OK (although I stopped flying years ago for climate reasons).
If people are travelling for pleasure and to see the countryside, trains are the way to go. Those Scenic Train programmes are great adverts for that.
Even for shorter distance commuters, trains are better than cars and buses! No parking issues, more comfortable and more reliable!
Try the UK, some of the worst train services in Europe, a consequence of privatisation leading to multiple train operating companies. Slowly being put right as train companies come back under government control but still not great.
The best example of the problem is Ticket Splitting - depending on starting point, final destination and intermediate stations, how and where you buy tickets results in different costs.
I have saved up to 50% by ticket splitting.
I guess a lot of this is because they have the infrastructure in place already? After hearing Brits complaining I was surprised by how easy it was to travel by train in the UK, but it's probably true that parts of the experience has gotten worse compared to how good it used to be. It's just way ahead of countries that never made the investment in the first place.
Germany seems to me to be in a similar situation.
@jon @gwentlarry @europeanspodcast
We know there is a problem with rail ticketing in the EU - anyone who has ever tried to book trains cross-border has encountered the issues. If you can find the trains you want, you often cannot get prices for the tickets. And even if you can get prices, you
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