Europe Asks Travelers to Ditch Planes for Night Trains

By Hayley Warren, Pablo Robles, Aggi Cantrill and William Wilkes

May 7, 2021, 12:00 AM EDT

One of the hardest climate puzzles to solve is how to cut greenhouse gases from airplanes. International travel is essential, but zero-emission flights are decades away. In Europe, where transport accounts for a quarter of emissions, policymakers may have a solution: get people to take the train instead.

Countries including France, Germany and Austria are spending billions of euros to remake the continent’s aging railway system. Their leaders are hoping to spur a renaissance in international train journeys, especially as the coronavirus pandemic ebbs and travel picks up again. After all, hopping on a train is often more convenient than flying (for one thing, there’s no airport security).

The European Union has an interest in pitting modes of transport against each other—it could push operators to find ways to lower their climate impact without passing costs on to the consumer. It’s a question of making rail more attractive, “instead of banning or disincentivizing aviation,” says European Transport Commissioner Adina Valean.

A revamped Vienna-to-Paris sleeper service, operated by Austria’s state rail company OeBB in partnership with Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, is set to start next year. While the 1,000 kilometer trip will take eight hours more than going by plane, it’ll generate a tenth of the emissions.

Note: Domestic flight and road emissions. High-speed rail emissions are for Eurostar trains.

Sources: Deutsche Bahn, BEIS/Defra Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors 2019.

The new night train routes are just the beginning. European policymakers plan to roll out more cross-border rail lines over the coming decades as they seek to zero out emissions by 2050.

As a condition of Austria’s aviation industry bailout, a minimum price now applies to tickets and a levy for flights within 350 kilometers of the country’s airports. Many of those journeys are covered by existing night train services.

Leonore Gewessler, Austria’s mobility and environment minister, says the ultimate goal is to make public transport more economical.

A 44 km railway tunnel through the Alps is due to be completed in 2028. The project, which will cost about 8.4 billion euros, cuts the travel time from Innsbruck, Austria to Bolzano, Italy from two hours to 50 minutes. Future plans include a 1,000 km high-speed route connecting Berlin and Rome.

Germany’s Deutsche Bahn aims to cut 10.5 million metric tons of emissions each year by shifting traffic to rail and doubling long distance passenger transport. Direct and indirect CO₂ emissions from train traffic are tracked and shown here. Over 1 million passengers travelled between Munich and Frankfurt in 2019, on almost 10,000 flights. The journey takes on average 3 hours 40 mins by rail.

Zurich is the second-largest night train hub in Europe. The OeBB plans to add three new international connections there by 2024, in partnership with Swiss Federal Railways (SBB).

Germany plans to launch high-speed trains from Amsterdam to Rome, Berlin to Barcelona and Stockholm to Warsaw, but those will take time and billions of euros in investment.

Adina Valean, European Transport Commissioner, says the potential for rail travel hasn't been fully tapped

French lawmakers are set to ban Air France flights for journeys that can be made by train in two and a half hours or less, with some exemptions. The carrier booked 200 million euros in losses on its domestic operations in 2019 because of competition from the country’s cheaper and more efficient high-speed rail network.

The revival of Europe’s train network comes more than two decades after the original Trans-European Express, which linked 130 cities across the continent, collapsed alongside a boom in short-haul flying. Today, increasing climate awareness has helped renew demand for overnight train routes. “This is a sustainable trend and the demand for environmentally-friendly and resource-efficient mobility will continue to increase,” says SBB Chief Executive Officer Vincent Ducrot.

The question for governments is how far to go in shifting support from airlines to train operators. The aviation industry was hit hard by the pandemic, and it’s not clear countries will be willing to hurt the sector even more after spending billions to support it during the crisis.

Governments across the continent also have shares in regional and international airports. Germany is the biggest investor in national carrier Deutsche Lufthansa AG after a $10 billion bailout of the company last year. France and the Netherlands own the largest stakes in Air France-KLM.

Aviation made up 15% of the more than $1 trillion in post-Covid stimulus distributed by governments around the world to carbon-intensive companies and sectors without any green conditions, according to clean energy research group BloombergNEF. Billions of euros were spent bailing out airlines, though only Austria and France attached climate strings to the money. Austrian Airlines has to cut emissions 50% from 2018 levels by 2030 and Air France has to halve domestic emissions by 2024.

Trains have already proven to be more popular than planes on short trips. In Italy, the completion of a high-speed train line linking Milan and Rome in the late 2000s sparked a precipitous decline in flights. A high-speed link between Paris and Bordeaux that started up in July 2017 led Air France to pull rotations between the cities as rail demand picked up.

“We see that a lot of people are looking for alternatives because they see the way we are mobile is a way to act against the climate crisis,” says Austria’s Gewessler.

But there’s no guarantee that enough people will flock to trains to travel longer distances. Austria is relatively compact with a reliable and affordable rail system, but Vienna received almost 5,000 domestic flights in 2019.

The nation has invested in its night trains—even purchasing rolling stock off Germany’s Deutsche Bahn—despite the industry shutting down several routes in recent years. It now runs Europe’s largest night train network and plans to spend another 17.5 billion euros over the next six years on rail infrastructure. It has a 1.5 billion euro order from Siemens AG that includes 13 seven-car trains for night services, which are expected to start operating next year.

Travelers on the Vienna to Paris route would pay about 110 euros for a compartment with a toilet, shower and bed. Gewessler says she uses the Nightjet to get to all her council meetings in Brussels. “It’s for me one of the most comfortable ways of travelling,” she says. “I leave Vienna in the night and wake up in the north of Germany or even in Brussels in the morning.”

Sleeper trains provide other conveniences over airplanes. Stations take passengers right into the city center, meaning you don’t have to pay for and arrange additional transport. There’s space for oversized luggage, and in some cases you can take your bike or car. Passengers also save on one night in a hotel.

Note: One-way minimum prices for July 2021. Prices have been rounded.

Sources: OeBB, Austrian Airlines

Well-connected capitals in some of Europe’s richer countries, like France and Austria, will have the easiest time executing the ambitious rail makeover. But the EU doesn’t want to stop there. The plan is to have all the continent’s capitals connected by a high-speed rail network, even if that means eastern European nations will need significant infrastructural support, says transport commissioner Valean. “Our ultimate goal is to complete the single European rail area, in which the same trains and the same company can operate efficiently across borders, leading to better services and lower costs.”

Europe doesn’t have much of a choice if it wants to meet its net-zero target. International aviation has been responsible for the region’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, according to the European Environment Agency. At least for now, there are no quick solutions for cutting emissions from the sector other than to fly less.

Europe Asks Travelers to Ditch Planes for Night Trains

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