High-speed Swedish Railways engine at Copenhagen station.
Carlton Reid
A commercial flight from Berlin to Bonn emits the same amount of carbon as eight return trips by train. Despite the eco savings it’s often cheaper to guzzle avgas than to take to the rails.
I know this because I have just traveled–in one sleep-deprived journey–from Newcastle in the north of England to Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The 2,190-kilometer journey was split over seven connections, took 28 hours, and cost £260. Flying with cheap airlines and booking in advance, I could have flown for half the price.
Swedish teenager and environmental activist Greta Thunberg speaks during a Fridays for Future rally, in Rome. Credit: AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino.
Inspired by teen phenom Greta Thunberg, the eco-campaigner from Stockholm who has kickstarted a global conversation about saving our planet, I wanted to see if such a long and expensive journey was practical for a business trip. (I am in Stockholm to attend the UITP Global Public Transport conference which starts on Sunday.)
Flying would have taken about six hours from Newcastle. But add transit times to and from airports, buffer minutes for getting through security, and downtime waiting at gates, and the actual journey time would have been nearer ten hours. That’s 18 hours quicker than my train journey.
But, as a laptop junkie, I also have to factor in practical working time. Not much of the air journey is usable for writing–I find it easier to flick through social media, which is a time sink. On the train, however, I wrote this article and several others.
The Eurostar to Brussels proudly displays its speed.
Carlton Reid
The ground–if it’s visible at all–looks lovely from 35,000 feet, but I can’t pop down for a meal. That’s what I was able to do on my train journey. I live-tweeted from the trip, including brief visits to the Dom, Cologne’s grand cathedral, and I went for a 5 a.m. wander to the Hans Christian Andersen house in Odense, topping it off with a quick photo safari of Copenhagen.
It was a pleasure trip as well as a business one. And it was also a much more environmentally-friendly trip. According to the rail journey booking website Loco2.com, traveling by train to Stockholm saved 87.54 kg of carbon dioxide. Not only is fuel used more efficiently, but electric trains can run on green electricity, reducing CO2 even further.
The seven trains I took to get from Newcastle to Stockholm. Note some tight connections; all met.
Carlton Reid
Newcastle to Stockholm straight is an extreme train journey but the time saved by flying between, say, London and Paris is marginal. Few European cities have city center airports. Once landside, other forms of transport need to be used, so why not take the train the whole way?
On my arrival into Kings Cross station on the first leg of the journey I heard a middle-aged woman tell her friend that at least this London hub “wasn’t somewhere like Luton,” a reference to a satellite airport used by many cheap airlines and which is self-described as London-Luton but which is, in reality, 55 kilometers from central London, an additional hour by train, perhaps two by taxi.
High Speed
In 2003, there were 12 flights a day between Frankfurt and Cologne, 190 kilometers apart. After a high-speed rail line opened, journey times were cut from two hours to just one. Today there are no flights between these two German cities.
An increasing number of people are now concluding that even long journeys between European cities–especially those linked by high-speed rail lines–are now best done by train.
5 a.m. at the Hans Christian Andersen museum in Odense.
Carlton Reid
Flight Shame
Thunberg is today’s most famous flight-refusenik–she and her father famously travel by train. After her solo school strike went mainstream in 2018 the 16-year-old student quickly became the world’s most recognizable climate campaigner. She told MPs in April that the U.K. government’s aggressive support for fossil fuels and airport expansion was “beyond absurd.”
She added: “This ongoing irresponsible behavior will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.”
Thunberg’s mother–opera singer Malena Ernman–pledged in 2017 to stop flying, joining other Swedes who have coalesced around the concept of flygskam, or “flight shame.” (There’s a linked neologism, tagskryt, or “train bragging”–using social media to highlight intercity train journeys, often accompanied with the hashtag #stayontheground.)
A survey published on May 31 by Swedish Railways (SJ) found that 37% of respondents chose to travel by rail instead of air, compared with 26% last autumn and 20% in early 2018.
The total number of journeys on SJ’s network rose by 5% last year to 31.8 million, and then by a further 8% in the first quarter of this year, with business trips by rail increasing by 12%.
I arrived at Stockholm Central Station 28 hours after leaving Newcastle, weary but with much work in the bag
Carlton Reid
Until recently, Swedes were among the most profligate flyers on the planet. According to a report commissioned by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, in 2017 Sweden’s entire aviation sector accounted for 1.1 tonnes of emissions per person, five times the global average of 0.2 tonnes per person. This love affair with flying is fading fast: Swedavia, which operates Sweden’s ten busiest airports, has reported that domestic passenger numbers fell by 8% from January to April, following a 3% fall over the whole of last year.
Bookings at the Swedish Centralens Resebutik agency–a specialist in rail travel–increased eightfold this January compared with two years ago. (This is the agency that books Thunberg’s rail travel.)
Swedes are switching fast because climate change is particularly noticeable in Sweden, with the Swedish Meteorological Institute reporting recently that the average annual temperature was rising twice as quickly in the country as the global average. Last year, Sweden experienced the hottest and one of driest summers since records began, coupled with the country’s worst ever forest fires.
Train Bragging
Swedes opting for train travel in record numbers have been a problem for German philosopher Anna Strasser traveling from Berlin to an artificial-intelligence conference at Örebro University, 160-kilometers west of Stockholm. We were booked next to each other overnight from Hamburg in Germany to Copenhagen in Denmark, and she told me that her return journey would have to be done by bus because all of the train tickets were already sold out.
She was happy at this inconvenience because it indicated a strong demand for train travel, her preferred mode of travel.
She remarked:
I hate the check-in at the airport. It takes time; you have to take all your stuff out. There are so many rules: you can’t carry your cup of tea with you because you have to empty liquids from bottles. You spend a lot of time waiting; waiting for the gate to open, waiting for boarding. In the end, even if the overall time is shorter, you’ve wasted more time compared to going by train.”
Her colleagues admire Strasser for traveling long distances by train, but not all are ready to join her.
“People look at you and say they are proud of you for not flying,” she said, adding that for many, flying is still considered the cheapest and fastest option, even if that is not always the case, and even though flying is known to be a big carbon emitter.
“When I worked as a university scientific manager [at Humboldt-University, Berlin] we had a British person who didn’t want to fly to [Germany] for pollution reasons and administrators considered this acceptable even though the ticket cost more,” said Strasser, now sitting forward of me on the final, five-hour leg into Stockholm.
“But it should be the other way around: for business travel you should now have to give a good explanation if you want to fly. Train travel should be the norm.”
