Really, what’s the point of 260km if you stop 20 times on an intercity trip.
It’s great to see environmental organisations taking this up. I feel like European international train travel is on the cusp of a serious revival, especially with the current EU support.
But not everything can be made into direct connections, so we need better transfers than we have now and better rights for consumers for canceled or delayed transfers, similar to how it works for airplanes.
You mean lack of tax on kerosene ??
Speed and cost matter too.
There is no way I’m traveling from Sweden to Greece with a train, it’s gonna take ages.
Flight are cheap and trains are shit. Solving either or both of these problems will cause more people to take the train.
Within the UK it’s price and an utterly insane pricing system.
Taking a train from Newcastle to London has been shown to be cheaper to fly. Via Barcelona.
I mean, I don’t know if that’s feasible. With planes (and cars), you are pretty much free to go to any destination without hampering others. But with a train, the limiting factor are the rails. There are only so many available and congestion on the rails will be a big problem. You will have to balance local transport against national and international lines.
This is something that SBB is already fighting hard with, as there are so many connections that need to be managed. Their solution (that works really well) is using clock-face scheduling, which makes switching trains a breeze.
Additionally, I believe that affordable and comfortable night-trains would be a good solution, as during the night there’s usually less traffic on the rails. It’s growing again and the biggest problem currently is the lack of wagons that have sleeping cabins. Hopefully that will improve over the next few years.
For myself, if I have the chance to take the train, I’ll always prefer it to air-travel. The price difference is still ridiculous (and should be corrected).
Not to mention cost…
I love taking trains.
But honestly, I can get 100eur tickets from Amsterdam to many places in Europe.
A train to Frankfurt (ICE) recently cost me 170eur.
It’s a bit absurd I had flights for 60eur to Istanbul in comparison, booked at the airport.
Not really, the price is more of a problem. I can now take train trips to a lot of major European cities, but since I have a family of 3, accumulated price is so much cheaper with a plane compared to a train, although I love trains and hate planes.
direct and fast. A direct train which will take me to Frankfurt in 5 hours is about as useless for me as non-direct with 8
I could theoretically go from Budapest to Dresden via train, but it takes NINE hours, and the first class ticket costs almost the same as a flight.
Now why would I not want to fly when even with all the hassle I come out with quicker travel?
You cannot have a functioning international train records with Germany being in the state that it is. Also, if you want to get to the Black Sea, good luck: Romania and Bulgaria have speeds from the 19th century.
And even if there are trains.. they are more expensive than taking a flight
Went from Copenhagen to Nuremberg last weekend. Terrible experience. The second leg train from Hamburg was particularly shitty and the whole thing took from 7am to 630pm
Personally I’m not a super fan of either options, I don’t like flying (the huge environment footprint it has, and all the wasted time waiting in the airport, the whole security theatre etc), nor do I like being stuck in a train, where I can’t make a detour to grab something to eat, or go through a small town and explore/experience that.
So I actually prefer just traveling in a car (I got an EV (Audi)). We recently drove on vacation from Denmark, down through Germany, into Austria and around that whole area. The whole trip cost about 132€ in electricity*, you just don’t find much comparable options with public transport for that price for 4 persons in total. (And with flights/train you have to rent a car at the destination anyway, if you want to explore out in the less touristy areas). We are not big city persons, and don’t like sun bathing when on vacations.
(if we had more days, we would have driven to either Italy or France, maybe Spain, so those are up for future vacations, even though I have been there plenty of times before on vacations).
Don’t take this as hate on the trains, but personally I think they are more suited for 80% cargo, 20% person transport, I would love to see a lot more semi-trucks replaced with cargo trains.
*) We only charged on Tesla Superchargers, since it’s easy, has locations all over, you always know it’s fast charging, and it’s cheap, since you can opt in to “Tesla owner” prices with their subscription, which you can buy a month at a time as needed when traveling a long distance. We didn’t have a issue at any of the charging locations.
I wish a train ticket to Spain, France or Germany was cheaper than a flight
Can confirm, as a family without a car we would much rather take the train than fly, but the options are very limited or too slow due to ancient infrastructure.
I did Stockholm-Milan and vice versa at least 6 times in the past 10 years. In one occasion I did Milan – Marseille – Barcelona – Paris – Amsterdam – Copenhagen – Stockholm. For the lols. From my experience, the main challenges are:
– pricing – connections – time
On average it took me 23 hours, multiple changes (3 or 4), one of the legs done on a sleeper train. Without a sleeper train one needs to take into account an hotel stay. Let’s throw in 100/150 euros extra. Total price around 300/400 euros.
Most legs need to be independently booked unless you resort to services such as Trainline. In one occasion a train got delayed in Germany and I missed my connection for Denmark. There you go, add an extra 5 hours of trip. I’m a solo traveller. How about families?
Either this is made simple and convenient – for example selling full-packages including hotel stays and amenities and services of sort, where everything is taken care of – or they make it dirt cheap, which makes the effort worth it.
Else this will be forever an expensive exercise, a novelty or a trip riddled with inconveniences. I’ve got a direct route Stockholm-Milan with Ryanair at a fraction of the cost, return included, which connects the 2 cities in less than three hours (let’s include airport transfers: 6 hours?). That’s a hard one to match. Make your considerations.
Btw, I always recommend https://www.seat61.com/ for any train travel need. The guy did an amazing job.
I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in England, who occasionally has to travel to London to work, probably few times a month. I was shocked to hear how much it costs. It’s actually cheaper for me to fly to London from Dublin, even with public transport to airport included (which is admittedly a bus, but it’s a short journey for me).
It’s less a lack of direct trains, more a like of sane train connections
I just checked there are apparently no direct train from Berlin to Paris… Yeah I wonder why no one takes train…
Maybe if train tickets were cheaper they would be an alternative, but prices are quite high
Plus the inconvenience of commonly have to change trains, frequent delays, etc
I would be up to ignore those problems if the prices were more affordable than the plane tickets, unfortunately they are usually higher
Now, if there would be a direct train of 8 hours, I’d argue lots of people would still take the plane as it’s just faster. Or am I thinking this wrong?
Not to mention flying is just cheaper atm
Again, make them cheaper, on time and more connected. (looking at you especially germany)
Here is an example. I was looking to go to Dubrovnik for a conference and a flixbus was 80€ from Graz and took maybe 12-16h.
A flight from vienna was 30€.
Cries in Finnish.
Because at least you guys can realistically travel by train around Europe. From Finland it’s not a feasible means to move to any neighbouring country.
I’m all for it, I’d always take the train rather than a flight if the travel times are somewhat equal however I read somewhere that most people who take domestic flights like for example between Munich and Leipzig are those that fly from elsewhere. Like if you fly from São Paulo to Leipzig you fly to Munich first and there you have a connecting flight to Leipzig. Your bags are reloaded to the next plane and you continue on your journey.
Otherwise you’d have to take your bag leave the airport and go by train to Munich train station and from there take another train to Leipzig.
So basically big hubs distribute long haul passengers to their final destinations.
Europe should set a supranational agency that operates dedicated rail lines and network between major EU cities utilizing the fastest of the high-speed bullet train models like the MLX01 operating at 500k/h. Which is like Paris-Zürich in an hour, Vienna-Berlin, Warsaw-Berlin, Warsaw-Prague, Madrid-Lisbon, etc.
In Ireland, I can fly to London almost for the same price I can travel 1 hour on a train from Dublin to Kilkenny (another city not far from Dublin). Fix the pricing.
Lack of direct, fast and affordable trains.
Simplicity and price, honestly. I was thinking of travelling to Germany this summer, and was staunchly going to use train even at a higher price…. But man was it IMPOSSIBLE to book anything like in a travel site. Like flights, just let me pick start, end, and maximum changes.
End the DB monopoly or this will always be just wishful thinking….
Exactly!
I‘m from Hamburg, Germany. Our central station has 65 Million long distance travelers per year. Our airport has 14 million.
There is no (semi) direct train to Milan, Rome, Paris, London, Warsaw, Stockholm, Oslo… you name it. I don’t even think about looking at the DB website for any connections because I know they usually fail miserably.
35 comments
Really, what’s the point of 260km if you stop 20 times on an intercity trip.
It’s great to see environmental organisations taking this up. I feel like European international train travel is on the cusp of a serious revival, especially with the current EU support.
But not everything can be made into direct connections, so we need better transfers than we have now and better rights for consumers for canceled or delayed transfers, similar to how it works for airplanes.
You mean lack of tax on kerosene ??
Speed and cost matter too.
There is no way I’m traveling from Sweden to Greece with a train, it’s gonna take ages.
Flight are cheap and trains are shit. Solving either or both of these problems will cause more people to take the train.
Within the UK it’s price and an utterly insane pricing system.
Taking a train from Newcastle to London has been shown to be cheaper to fly. Via Barcelona.
I mean, I don’t know if that’s feasible. With planes (and cars), you are pretty much free to go to any destination without hampering others. But with a train, the limiting factor are the rails. There are only so many available and congestion on the rails will be a big problem. You will have to balance local transport against national and international lines.
This is something that SBB is already fighting hard with, as there are so many connections that need to be managed. Their solution (that works really well) is using clock-face scheduling, which makes switching trains a breeze.
Additionally, I believe that affordable and comfortable night-trains would be a good solution, as during the night there’s usually less traffic on the rails. It’s growing again and the biggest problem currently is the lack of wagons that have sleeping cabins. Hopefully that will improve over the next few years.
For myself, if I have the chance to take the train, I’ll always prefer it to air-travel. The price difference is still ridiculous (and should be corrected).
Not to mention cost…
I love taking trains.
But honestly, I can get 100eur tickets from Amsterdam to many places in Europe.
A train to Frankfurt (ICE) recently cost me 170eur.
It’s a bit absurd I had flights for 60eur to Istanbul in comparison, booked at the airport.
Not really, the price is more of a problem. I can now take train trips to a lot of major European cities, but since I have a family of 3, accumulated price is so much cheaper with a plane compared to a train, although I love trains and hate planes.
direct and fast. A direct train which will take me to Frankfurt in 5 hours is about as useless for me as non-direct with 8
I could theoretically go from Budapest to Dresden via train, but it takes NINE hours, and the first class ticket costs almost the same as a flight.
Now why would I not want to fly when even with all the hassle I come out with quicker travel?
You cannot have a functioning international train records with Germany being in the state that it is.
Also, if you want to get to the Black Sea, good luck: Romania and Bulgaria have speeds from the 19th century.
And even if there are trains.. they are more expensive than taking a flight
Went from Copenhagen to Nuremberg last weekend. Terrible experience. The second leg train from Hamburg was particularly shitty and the whole thing took from 7am to 630pm
Personally I’m not a super fan of either options, I don’t like flying (the huge environment footprint it has, and all the wasted time waiting in the airport, the whole security theatre etc), nor do I like being stuck in a train, where I can’t make a detour to grab something to eat, or go through a small town and explore/experience that.
So I actually prefer just traveling in a car (I got an EV (Audi)). We recently drove on vacation from Denmark, down through Germany, into Austria and around that whole area. The whole trip cost about 132€ in electricity*, you just don’t find much comparable options with public transport for that price for 4 persons in total. (And with flights/train you have to rent a car at the destination anyway, if you want to explore out in the less touristy areas). We are not big city persons, and don’t like sun bathing when on vacations.
(if we had more days, we would have driven to either Italy or France, maybe Spain, so those are up for future vacations, even though I have been there plenty of times before on vacations).
Don’t take this as hate on the trains, but personally I think they are more suited for 80% cargo, 20% person transport, I would love to see a lot more semi-trucks replaced with cargo trains.
*) We only charged on Tesla Superchargers, since it’s easy, has locations all over, you always know it’s fast charging, and it’s cheap, since you can opt in to “Tesla owner” prices with their subscription, which you can buy a month at a time as needed when traveling a long distance. We didn’t have a issue at any of the charging locations.
I wish a train ticket to Spain, France or Germany was cheaper than a flight
Can confirm, as a family without a car we would much rather take the train than fly, but the options are very limited or too slow due to ancient infrastructure.
I did Stockholm-Milan and vice versa at least 6 times in the past 10 years.
In one occasion I did Milan – Marseille – Barcelona – Paris – Amsterdam – Copenhagen – Stockholm. For the lols.
From my experience, the main challenges are:
– pricing
– connections
– time
On average it took me 23 hours, multiple changes (3 or 4), one of the legs done on a sleeper train.
Without a sleeper train one needs to take into account an hotel stay. Let’s throw in 100/150 euros extra. Total price around 300/400 euros.
Most legs need to be independently booked unless you resort to services such as Trainline.
In one occasion a train got delayed in Germany and I missed my connection for Denmark. There you go, add an extra 5 hours of trip.
I’m a solo traveller. How about families?
Either this is made simple and convenient – for example selling full-packages including hotel stays and amenities and services of sort, where everything is taken care of – or they make it dirt cheap, which makes the effort worth it.
Else this will be forever an expensive exercise, a novelty or a trip riddled with inconveniences.
I’ve got a direct route Stockholm-Milan with Ryanair at a fraction of the cost, return included, which connects the 2 cities in less than three hours (let’s include airport transfers: 6 hours?). That’s a hard one to match.
Make your considerations.
Btw, I always recommend https://www.seat61.com/ for any train travel need. The guy did an amazing job.
I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in England, who occasionally has to travel to London to work, probably few times a month. I was shocked to hear how much it costs. It’s actually cheaper for me to fly to London from Dublin, even with public transport to airport included (which is admittedly a bus, but it’s a short journey for me).
It’s less a lack of direct trains, more a like of sane train connections
I just checked there are apparently no direct train from Berlin to Paris… Yeah I wonder why no one takes train…
Maybe if train tickets were cheaper they would be an alternative, but prices are quite high
Plus the inconvenience of commonly have to change trains, frequent delays, etc
I would be up to ignore those problems if the prices were more affordable than the plane tickets, unfortunately they are usually higher
Now, if there would be a direct train of 8 hours, I’d argue lots of people would still take the plane as it’s just faster. Or am I thinking this wrong?
Not to mention flying is just cheaper atm
Again, make them cheaper, on time and more connected. (looking at you especially germany)
Here is an example. I was looking to go to Dubrovnik for a conference and a flixbus was 80€ from Graz and took maybe 12-16h.
A flight from vienna was 30€.
Cries in Finnish.
Because at least you guys can realistically travel by train around Europe. From Finland it’s not a feasible means to move to any neighbouring country.
I’m all for it, I’d always take the train rather than a flight if the travel times are somewhat equal however I read somewhere that most people who take domestic flights like for example between Munich and Leipzig are those that fly from elsewhere. Like if you fly from São Paulo to Leipzig you fly to Munich first and there you have a connecting flight to Leipzig.
Your bags are reloaded to the next plane and you continue on your journey.
Otherwise you’d have to take your bag leave the airport and go by train to Munich train station and from there take another train to Leipzig.
So basically big hubs distribute long haul passengers to their final destinations.
Europe should set a supranational agency that operates dedicated rail lines and network between major EU cities utilizing the fastest of the high-speed bullet train models like the MLX01 operating at 500k/h. Which is like Paris-Zürich in an hour, Vienna-Berlin, Warsaw-Berlin, Warsaw-Prague, Madrid-Lisbon, etc.
In Ireland, I can fly to London almost for the same price I can travel 1 hour on a train from Dublin to Kilkenny (another city not far from Dublin). Fix the pricing.
Lack of direct, fast and affordable trains.
Simplicity and price, honestly. I was thinking of travelling to Germany this summer, and was staunchly going to use train even at a higher price…. But man was it IMPOSSIBLE to book anything like in a travel site. Like flights, just let me pick start, end, and maximum changes.
End the DB monopoly or this will always be just wishful thinking….
Exactly!
I‘m from Hamburg, Germany. Our central station has 65 Million long distance travelers per year. Our airport has 14 million.
There is no (semi) direct train to Milan, Rome, Paris, London, Warsaw, Stockholm, Oslo… you name it. I don’t even think about looking at the DB website for any connections because I know they usually fail miserably.
no it’s the price