Transcript:
Mark Smith: If it's the start of a journey that I'm going on, there is a sense of anticipation. also a sense of possibility. The possibilities are probably more bounded by your imagination than by the actual train service. I mean, if it wasn't for the situation in Russia, you can get as far as Hong Kong or even Singapore by train if you put your mind to it.
Narrator: That's Mark Smith, a train travel enthusiast from the UK. Right now, he's waiting to board a train from Berlin to Warsaw, and we're joining him for this stretch of his journey across Europe. His final stop, Estonia, where he'll be speaking at a mobility conference about the benefits of rail travel. Mark's journey began in London, and he's going to need four days and eight different trains to reach his destination. The ticket price is about €420, or $90 by plane. He could have made the trip in under three hours for as little as €21. Even driving would have been quicker and cheaper. So why go to all this trouble? And more importantly, what would need to change to make train travel more competitive and more appealing for the rest of us?
Nacima Baron: There is a quite broad perception that the quality of train travel is deteriorating.
Peter Dyson: For too long, people have been treated like cargo. But we're all human. There are many things that could be done a lot better.
Narrator: You're listening to Living Planet, I'm Neil King. Time to hop on the train with Mark. The seats in our coach are divided into compartments of six. Marc quickly finds his reservation and gets comfortable on a blue upholstered seat by the window. He's wearing a grey full beard and is clearly dressed for practicality a brown light waxed jacket, trousers with large pockets and trekking shoes.
Mark Smith: Friedrichstrasse a bit different from previously.
Narrator: He looks outside as the train slowly makes its way through Berlin. There's a mum with her son in the compartment visiting family in Warsaw. An elderly couple from Switzerland is on a holiday trip through Germany and Poland. A businessman walks up and down the corridor, speaking into his phone to not disturb anyone with our conversation. We moved to the restaurant coach right next door. Some fellow travelers are having breakfast. Scrambled eggs with ham, judging by the smell. The red seats in the coach matched nicely with the tie of the waiter, who's walking up to us from behind the bar.
Mark Smith: Well, on these Polish dining cars. I like the Zurich soup and the schnitzel. The Zurich is absolutely lovely.
Narrator: The trips that got Mark hooked on international train travel were the school trips he did when he was 17 years old, he says. To the south of France to spend three weeks with a French family. And later the same year he went on the school Russian trip, where he took an old Russian turbine steamer from the UK to Oslo, Stockholm and Leningrad. It was an eye opening experience for him.
Mark Smith: You discover what a great way of seeing Europe it is. There are no seatbelts, there's no stressful airports, there's scenery, there's people, there's it has a reality that today's air travel doesn't.
Narrator: Mark made it his reality. Soon after, in his student job issuing European train tickets. And he already knew about the trains because he'd travelled on them London to Rome, Berlin, Budapest, Moscow, Istanbul, Lisbon, you name it. He would get a call or a letter from a travel agent, take a blank paper ticket and bullet point pen, fill in the destination and route and calculate the fare based on the distance.
Mark Smith: I was doing what I loved, I was learning I had all the sales manuals. I read them all. pretty one train journey where I got more than I bargained for was my first journey on the luxurious vintage Venice sampler Orient Express. So I thought if I took my Dutch girlfriend of six months, it wouldn't actually cost that much more. And she hadn't been to Italy, which I was, which horrified me. I don't know who said what to whom, but somewhere in the Brenner Pass, on the second day, we got engaged. and here I am over 20 years later with them two kids, a wife, four cats and a dog.
Narrator: Apart from his own travels, Marc had quite a career in railways. He managed stations himself in London and eventually ended up in the British Department for transport, where he regulated fares and ticketing for all train travel in the UK occasionally writing briefings for the minister until one day in 2001.
Mark Smith: I was commuting to him from London. I went into the newsagents at Marylebone station in London to look for something to buy to read on the train home. I spent £2.95, about €4 on a book. It wasn't in the book, it was more a magazine about HTML, about getting a website online. And it worked. It was probably the best £2.95 I have ever spent in my life.
Narrator: Marks website seat 61, named after his favorite seat on the Eurostar train, soon became his full time job. Over the years, he has built what is essentially a Wikipedia for train travel. The website explains routes in almost 100 countries, from the US to Nepal, on the Trans-Siberian railway or the Orient Express. It has summaries of what to expect, maps, timetables, ticket information, guides for the stations and all sorts of little life hacks and a lot of pictures from those stations, trains, coaches, even the food on the train.
Mark Smith: It gets up to a million visits a month. When I started the website in 2001, if somebody told me why they wanted to go by train, they would typically say they have a phobia of flying, they're afraid to fly, or they've got a medical restriction, an operation on their ear. Problem with the heart. Or they like trains. And what they say now is two things. They're fed up with the airport and airline experience. In other words, they want a better experience that rail promises to give them and they want to travel, sustain and sustainably cut their emissions.
Narrator: And talking of emissions, let's take a closer look at Mark's route from London to Tallinn. The direct flight takes less than three hours and omits about 380kg of carbon dioxide per passenger. By car, it's even more depending on the fuel and whether you're going alone. The train journey produces only about 110 to 140 kilos of CO2. That's roughly 70 to 75% less than making the same trip by plane or car. And the gap will grow even wider by 2030. The last diesel trains on this route are set to be replaced with electric ones running on renewable energy. Our choices really matter when it comes to long distance and international travel. A study from the University of Leeds found that while long distance trips of more than 80km or 50 miles make up just 3% of trips of a resident in the UK, they are responsible for 70% of their travel related emissions.
Looking just at international travel. The disparity is even greater. International journeys are only 0.4% of total trips, but are responsible for 55% of emissions. And if we look at the bigger picture globally. Air travel is responsible for about 2.5% of total human caused CO2 emissions. Private cars for just under 10% and rail for 0.2 6%. So to be clear, the mode of transport we choose for long distances makes a huge difference. And on that front, trains are the clear winners. But of course, there's always a trade off. We need to keep in mind.
Mark Smith: I'm having to overnight in Berlin, overnight in Warsaw and overnight in Vilnius, but it does promise to be quite a trip.
Narrator: Sounds like more hassle and it's certainly more expensive and time consuming for Marc, who loves train travel and in a way makes his living from it. That's okay. But for most of us, it's a tough choice. A trip that's quick and convenient but polluting or one that's sustainable but more complicated. And that's not all.
Train travel also faces other hurdles that make it less straightforward than flying or driving.
Peter Dyson: Yeah, I think control is a major issue or locus of control in the sense of, that brings is connected to other concepts as well, like trust.
Narrator: Peter Dyson is a behavioral scientist at the University of Bath in the UK and co-author of the book transport for humans. He researches why people travel the way they do. Take the example of the Eurostar, the train connecting the UK with mainland Europe through a tunnel under the sea.
Peter Dyson: It might come to a stop, but that stop isn't explained. when it's dark, you, the customer can't actually tell whether they are in a tunnel hundreds of meters under the ocean or whether they're in the countryside. and you can see how lots of this leads to a level of anxiety and concern. Being stranded with respect to train travel that you probably get a bit less of with car travel. And for air travel where they feel like the airline has a responsibility. My argument is that, for too long, people have been treated like cargo.
It's like imagining that the service being provided is merely the bottom of the hierarchy of needs, where the priority is merely to get people from A to B, as though you are a package to be delivered.
Narrator: The hierarchy of needs is a popular concept from the psychologist Abraham Maslow, pictured as a pyramid. It ranks what we need from basic things like food safety or shelter, to belonging and self esteem up to self-actualization that is becoming the best version of yourself. Travelling by car ticks quite a lot of boxes. It sits right outside your house or flat. You drive when and where you want to without strangers sitting next to you, you feel safe. A car can also make for a nice status symbol, something to shine with. The same goes for flights going to that one island or one world city you always wanted to see. In contrast, if you're stranded at some random train station because you didn't catch your connecting train, you can't forget about convenience or glamour. But we wouldn't be talking about train travel here if it didn't have good sides.
Peter Dyson: Authenticity is really important to people. People talk about the convenience and enjoyment of a train trip, the convenience of a table, a big window, the ability to walk and stretch your legs. But they also talk about a sense of nostalgia and, history, the way in which it engages with the landscape that it passes through in a way that a plane obviously doesn't, flying, 30,000ft. And in the same way that a car doesn't as often go through a landscape that has a scene scenic as the railway, so that embedded nature of feeling connected to your trip has been stronger for rail.
Narrator: As our train makes its way from Germany to Poland with 157km/h. The landscape outside is slowly changing from the outskirts of Berlin, through forests of pines and birches onto fields full of yellow rapeseed, wheat and fruit trees. Every few minutes we pass through villages or all towns. It's a smooth ride. No sudden drops, no pressure on our ears. No signals that tell us to fasten your seatbelts. Nobody weighed or scanned our baggage.
And it's generally quite easy in Europe to travel through several countries in a day without any major holdups at the border. But the smooth ride covers up a problem that international train travel does have.
Mark Smith: Fragmentation is the biggest issue, which leads to everything else. It leads to needing to buy multiple tickets to complete one journey. It leads to not knowing where to book a particular journey. It leads to not understanding how to put together a longer journey that requires multiple bookings on multiple websites. It leads to differing standards.
Narrator: On this trip, Mark relies on six different rail operators, each with its own ticketing system, passenger rights, website, language, even currency, and sometime the same route is priced differently depending on where you book. For example, our cross-border trip from Berlin to Warsaw was actually cheaper on the Polish Rail website than on the German one. For much of his journey, Marc uses an Interrail pass, his favorite travel hack for Europe. It's an all in one ticket that lets him hop on and off trains across multiple countries without booking every connection separately, saving him a lot of time and hassle.
But even that can't compete with flying with planes. You just search for a connection on platforms like Google Flights, Skyscanner or Kayak. Pick your flights, fill in your details, choose your seat and meal and you're off. It's fast, simple and almost effortless compared to the patchwork of rail options. And then there's a difference between air, road and rail travel that's almost invisible but hugely important. We've touched on one downside of flying being high up in the air. Disconnected from the world below. And that's the point. Air in the skies. There's no infrastructure to build or maintain. But trains, they rely on tens of thousands of kilometers of steel tracks, electric wiring and all the supporting systems to keep them running. Highways to require constant upkeep. But rail networks take it to another level.
Nacima Baron: So that's why the structure of costs between air and rail is so different.
Narrator: Nacima Baron is a professor for transport and mobility policies at the Gustave Eiffel University in Paris, particularly for railway network development. And these physical networks, she says, are often in a bad state.
Nacima Baron: High speed Apart, which is maybe younger in terms of age of construction. The rest of conventional lines are structurally aging and being obsolete, and being less and less robust.
Narrator: Lines in Europe in particular can be a little antiquated.
Nacima Baron: Some parts of the infrastructure can be as far as 100 years in France or elsewhere.
Narrator: 200 years ago, something remarkable happened in northern England. On September 27th, 1825, the world's first public steam railway carried passengers along the Stockton and Darlington line. The journey stretched about 26 miles, and while the train only moved at around 15 to 30mph, it marked the beginning of a revolution in transportation. Fast forward to today and the picture couldn't be more different. The fastest passenger trains now are reach speeds of about 250mph. And from that single line in England, rail networks have expanded to cover more than 1.3 million kilometers of track worldwide. Building and maintaining this infrastructure is expensive. There isn't a global average, but to build high speed railway and countries of the EU on average costs €25 million per kilometer, one kilometer of highway costs half of that at most.
Maintaining the railway network is more expensive as well because of all the electric wiring and signaling along the routes. And for air travel, the physical infrastructure costs are limited to just airports. On the surface, comparisons like these can make rail travel look like a poor investment. But here's what they leave out. Flying and driving come with hidden costs. The carbon they pump into the atmosphere fuels global warming. And with it, more droughts, floods, hurricanes and other extreme events. And according to scientists, those disasters will carry a very real price tag in the years to come.
Nacima Baron: So, it should be transport mode that is supported and co-financed by, the public realm, by, the politicians, whatever level and institutions.
Narrator: In truth, it's aviation that enjoys the political perks in many countries. Like tax breaks on fuel and exemptions from VAT. That's why on the very same route, you might pay tax on your train ticket, but not on your plane ticket. And that's a sore point for rail advocates like Marc, which is.
Mark Smith: Like you or me filling up our car for half price. It's not that we need to make air travel less attractive, it's that we need to stop deliberately making it more attractive than it should be.
Narrator: Despite all the challenges, rail travel is on the rise. Both the length of the networks and the number of passengers keep growing. In fact, 2024 was the first year that more than a billion people worldwide took a long distance or cross regional train. Leading the way are Asian countries India, Indonesia, Taiwan and especially China, where most of the new lines are being built. At the other end of the scale are the Americas, where train travel still lags far behind.
Mark Smith: I've crossed America coast to coast six times by various different routes. It's absolutely lovely. Although ridership of the existing network has grown and grown and grown and achieved records every year, it's still a skeleton network by international standards, and the United States simply hasn't had the infrastructure, the rail infrastructure investments in passenger rail that other countries have had.
They decided that the airliner and the motorcar were king, but trains were old hat, and they ran down their infrastructure and everyone had to buy a car or go to a plane, go to an airport.
Narrator: We'll be right back after this short message.
Trailer
Narrator: Five hours after leaving Berlin. We arrive in Warsaw as scheduled and Marc is in work mode again.
Mark Smith: Now where do we need to go? I've seen the international ticket office photographed. I've seen the main ticket office. I've seen the main hall.
I've seen the supermarket. I've seen the left luggage. They've got platforms. I've got the passageway above the platforms. Both this one and the other one. But that is the other side.
Narrator: There is out of ten points. How was the trip?
Mark Smith: Oh, that train ride was a good nine. Classic old school comfort with a vase, restaurant car. I didn't get to try the Zurich and Schnitzel this time, but next time.
Narrator: So where does that leave us at the end of this journey? For most people, flying or driving still feels like the obvious convenient choice for long distances, but both come with a heavy carbon footprint at a time when cutting emissions is more urgent than ever. Trains are the green option, no doubt. Still, as our interviewees pointed out, rail needs to become more seamless both in infrastructure and in the passenger experience. Not necessarily faster or cheaper than planes or cars, but more enjoyable.
Nacima Baron: I really love going through industrial or post-industrial regions in Europe.
Peter Dyson: In Switzerland, there's both a holiness to it and a nostalgia.
Mark Smith: We shouldn't be telling people they can't fly. They've got to travel by train. It'll be horrible. You'll hate it. You'll suffer. But you have to. I've come across this phrase punitive sustainability. Sustainability is some form of punishment. It's not a punishment. Actually, it's a better experience. It takes a bit more to find out about train travel. It takes a bit longer. But hey, it's such a better, more rewarding experience. You're doing yourself a favor as well as the planet.
Narrator: Today's episode of Living Planet was researched and written by Jonas Yohannes Maya. It was narrated and edited by me, Neil King. Our sound engineer was Juergen Kuhn. To download this and past episodes of Living Planet, go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You'll also find some bonus material on our YouTube channel, DW podcasts. If you like what we do, make sure to hit the subscribe button and leave a rating or review. Thanks for listening and sharing Living Planet with friends and family.