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None of this is about romance or nostalgia. It is about system design. As long as trains are slower, more expensive and less predictable than planes, people will continue to fly. The structural conditions have to change first.
What would make you switch?
3. Long-term: faster lines.
The comparison is sobering. A train from Beijing to Shanghai, roughly 1200 km, takes around 4 hours 40 minutes. A train from Warsaw to Berlin, just 571 km, takes around 6 hours 30 minutes. Who wouldn’t take an Amsterdam to Vienna train if it took 5h? Or Copenhagen Brussels in under 4h?
2. More night trains.
In the short term, night services are the only practical way to cover very long distances without losing an entire day to travel.
1. Better, more interconnected timetables.
One early morning train from Berlin to Paris is not a serious offer on a continent of this size. Sparse frequencies and poorly aligned connections make cross-border travel stressful. If you cannot arrive in Berlin at a reasonable hour and reliably continue to Paris the same day, rail loses to aviation by default. Frequency and coordination matter as much as speed.
️ Why is it still so hard to choose a train over a plane?
On many long-distance routes in Europe, choosing the train can feel like a borderline heroic decision. It’s often more expensive, takes longer, and can be less reliable when connections are tight.
This week we spoke to cross-border rail advocate @jon about what Europe would need to change to make rail the obvious choice, not a moral gesture.
Here’s his recipe. THREAD:
@jon @sorenhave @Pepijn I think it has something to do with the proportional representation voting systems in so much of the continent that create such a huge spread of parties. The UK is the most obvious country where AOC/Mamdani/Sanders-esque candidates have emerged, and I think that's partly because of FPTP.
@jon @sorenhave @Pepijn Stubb is also a former guest on the Europeans podcast- a left-field Mamdani-style media appearance 
@bytesalat Politicians in general - can by MEPs but actually was thinking more on the national level.
We're crowdsourcing: Who is Europe’s answer to Zohran Mamdani?
Left-wing politicians who:
Nail social media Challenge the establishment Speak to everyday struggles
Who stands out in your country?
"On some invisible level, all of us knew that we have no other Ukraine, that this is our home, and all of us understood what had to be done... Our people did not raise a white flag – they defended the blue and yellow one."
Zelenskyy's address to Ukrainians, on the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion:
