Classic route
EIP Pendolino
Warsaw → Kraków · Poland
EIP Pendolino in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 293 km
- Fastest time
- 2 h 21 min
- Average speed
- 125 km/h
- Top speed
- 200 km/h
- Operator
- PKP Intercity
- Train
- ED250 Pendolino
- Countries
- Poland
- In service since
- 2014
- Runs
- roughly hourly
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Rides Poland’s 1970s Central Main Line (CMK), engineered decades ahead of its time and now being upgraded to 250 km/h.
Poland’s Pendolinos arrived in December 2014 and finally used the CMK, a central trunk line laid out in the 1970s for speeds Polish Rail could only dream of then, as intended. The ED250s hold 200 km/h down its arrow-straight kilometres, the fastest running in the country, before curving off through the Jura uplands to Kraków. Warsaw’s rebuilt skyline to Kraków’s Gothic Główny station takes about two and a quarter hours, quicker than the airport taxi queues it emptied.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 18237945 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within under 25 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 3 m from it
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: PKP Intercity — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Warszawa Centralna’s brutalist hall
- Masovian plains
- CMK racing straights
- Polish Jura near Zawiercie
- Kraków Główny beside the Old Town
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More train routes in Poland.
Planning this trip? Journey time & direct trains: Kraków → Warsaw · Warsaw → Kraków.