Data story

Train vs plane in Europe

Door-to-door times and CO₂e on 109 busy city pairs — real sampled rail times against a transparent flight model, no cherry-picking.

Airport time is the flight's hidden fare: getting out to the airport, security, boarding, and getting back into town at the other end add close to three hours that never appear on the ticket. Count them, and on 29 of these 109 routes the train is simply faster — before the CO₂e math, which the train wins everywhere.

Pairs compared

109

Train faster on

29 (27%)

By over an hour

12

CO₂e gap

≥ 3.2× (conservative)

Where the train saves the most time

Door-to-door time saved by taking the train instead of a typical flight — all 29 pairs where the train wins, biggest saving first.

How we compute it

The train side is real data: typical (median) station-to-station times sampled from public European schedule feeds — the same figures as our city-to-city guides — plus 20 min of station overhead. The plane side is openly a model, not airline schedules: flight time ≈ 40 min taxi/climb/descent + straight-line distance at 750 km/h cruise, plus 2h 50m door-to-door overhead (25 min city→airport, 90 min check-in/security/boarding, 30 min deplaning, 25 min airport→city). Where no direct flight exists on a pair, the estimate is what a direct one would take — generous to the plane. Pairs under 300 km apart are not compared at all.

Emissions use the UK government's DESNZ/DEFRA 2025 conversion factors: 125.76 g CO₂e per passenger-km for short-haul flying (including radiative forcing, distance +8% for routing) against 35.46 g for rail (distance ×1.2 for the winding track). That rail figure is a deliberate ceiling — it reflects the UK's part-diesel mix; the EEA puts electric intercity rail at 12–33 g and Eurostar reports ~4 g, so the real gap on most of these corridors is 10–30×, not 3.2×. Rail times come from the same open data as the rest of the site — the TrainRouter Atlas (CC BY 4.0, archived at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21322030) — free to check or reuse.

All 109 pairs, ranked by the train's advantage

Each pair links to its full journey guide — typical times, direct-train availability and operators. CO₂e saved is per passenger, on the conservative factors above.

Is the train faster than flying in Europe?

On 29 of the 109 busy city pairs compared here — 27% of them — the typical train beats a typical flight door to door, and 12 of those by more than an hour. The comparison counts getting to the airport, security and the transfer at the far end, which is where rail makes the time back.

At what distance does flying become faster than the train?

There is no single distance, but there is a clear rule of thumb in the data: every pair the train covers in under 3h 43m goes to rail once airport time is counted. The advantage survives as far out as Marseille–Paris, 663 km apart, where the train is still about 35 min quicker door to door.

How much more CO₂ does flying produce than taking the train?

About 3.2 times as much per passenger on these routes, and that figure is deliberately conservative — it uses the UK DESNZ 2025 factors with a part-diesel rail mix. On typical electric intercity rail the European Environment Agency's figures put the real gap at 10 to 30 times. On London–Paris it works out at roughly 15 kg by train against 47 kg by plane.

Which European route saves the most time by train?

Rennes to Paris, where the train saves about 1h 55m against flying once airport time is included. Short high-speed corridors between city-centre stations produce the biggest gaps, because a flight's fixed overhead does not shrink with distance.