‘Sorry, but this train has been cancelled.’

The email arrived the day before I was due to get the night train from Brussels to Vienna, on the way to Budapest. The reason for the cancellation: severe flooding in central Europe. My colleague Oonagh was due to travel on the same train, and we both ended up booking flights to Budapest, me from London (that is, an airport outside London) and Oonagh from Brussels (that is, an airport outside Brussels). 

You may have heard the phrases ‘runaway process’ or ‘positive feedback loop’ in relation to the climate crisis. The terms comes from basic systems theory. A sustainable system is self-regulating: if something tips it out of balance, the system responds with a counterbalance. A runaway process is when the system response magnifies the imbalance. That’s what happened here, in a small but concrete way. Imbalance: the floods, which were made significantly more likely and more severe by carbon emissions. Response: the floods prevented Oonagh and me from taking one train – which emits around 90% less carbon than a plane – and instead put us instead onto two flights. Result: the consequences of carbon emissions became the cause of more carbon emissions. That’s a runaway process, and I participated in it.

Travel rerailed?

I was at least heartened to hear that three of our group had managed to travel by long-distance train to Budapest: Jordi Ribot and Rebecca Douglass from Amsterdam, and Beatrix Joyce from Switzerland. Jordi, having had several trips this year between his home cities of Amsterdam and Barcelona, felt that he should try to avoid another flight, if possible. Rebecca had similar feelings (she lives between Amsterdam and the UK), and had already been finding that long-distance travel by train or coach is occasionally (by no means always!) cheaper; plus, she has a certain fear of flying. Beatrix, who lives in Berlin, added the Budapest travel onto a family holiday in Switzerland and did the whole journey by Interrail, saying that it felt better to do one round trip by train than to take four flights from and to Berlin. All agreed that a few years ago they would have taken the plane without much thought, but now they think more consciously of alternatives.

So change is happening – and not just in people’s minds, but also in the increasing provision for rail travel across Europe. Still, there are many practical obstacles, and two main ones keep coming up: time and money. 

Time. In response, Rebecca gave this one sound piece of advice: remember that flight time is not the same as travel time. Always calculate the door-to-door travel time, which includes waiting time before the flight and after landing, plus travel to and from the airport. This typically adds at least 4 if not 6 hours to the flight travel time. Don’t conveniently forget it. It’s worth that your time on a train is often more productive (it’s easier to do work) compared with the ‘dead time’ of the plane.

Money. Obviously, calculate the cost of the whole door-to-door journey, not just the plane ticket. With the plane, remember to account for baggage charges and seat reservations, often hidden from headline flight prices. Remember above all that our current policies subsidise air travel (which is exempt from fuel tax and VAT) compared with train travel. A 2023 Greenpeace report found that the tax gap between air and train travel within Europe amounted to €34.2 billion in 2022, and pointed out that low-cost airlines operate with far more exploitative working practices. Their conclusion:

‘This unfair regulatory playing field for travel is undermining Europe’s railways, exploiting workers and polluting the planet, all to the benefit of airlines: it is time to reverse the trend.’

Resources

Consult ecopassenger.org for a comparison of carbon footprints for your journey

For practical and regularly updated info on train travel check seat61.com – a UK-based but truly international treasure trove of information

See also jonworth.eu – a useful news and opinion blog about European train travel

Check out European organisations such as stay-grounded.org