The European Commission announced on Twitter (which I won’t call X) its plan to propose a single platform where travelers can buy a ticket to go anywhere in Europe, ensuring journey continuity and passenger rights from departure to arrival.
This is obviously a great step forward, but it doesn’t really solve Europe’s rail problems. First, while there are express trains connecting major cities in neighboring countries, traveling through multiple countries at once remains very complicated.
The advantage of flying over the TGV isn’t so much speed as it is uninterrupted routes. While it may reach three times the speed at its peak, you still have to arrive at the airport two hours early. I’m convinced that fast, affordable rail links (subsidized, for example, by taxing domestic flights) would be more attractive if they allowed seamless travel across Europe.
Here’s the current state of Europe’s high-speed rail network (according to Wikipedia):
As shown by the color-coded lines representing the main operators, they rarely extend much beyond neighboring countries.
I’m taking the train from Lyon to Helsinki this summer (what an adventure! I’ll share more in a future post), and you need to change trains at least in Mannheim and Hamburg before arriving in Stockholm, where you can take a ferry. And even then, direct ICE trains between Hamburg and Stockholm are rare and not high-speed.
This new ticket is great for trips crossing at most two countries (excluding the departure country), but it doesn’t really address the lack of high-speed trains crossing Europe. What we need are TGVs (or equivalents—something that travels at 300 km/h) that traverse the continent directly, from Lisbon to Vienna, passing through major cities. Like a structured urban network, but at the scale of the European Union.
While researching, I found this image on the European Parliament’s website :
It seems a project is already underway, but there’s no mention of routes! To go from Lisbon to Vienna, do you have to change trains in Madrid, Paris, and Berlin? If so, the oil companies still have a bright future ahead…
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