Train travel in Europe is 30 times expensive than flights, says report

The cost of a long-distance train travel in Europe is 30 times as much as flying, adding further to the accelerating climate crisis by 'one of the world's most climate-damaging and inequitable industries', according to a report by Greenpeace. The report found that the train tickets were double the cost of flying which went up to four times in some cases.

The environmental campaign group carried out a study and compared the ticket prices of both flights and trains on 112 routes across Europe on different dates.

It found that train journeys from UK to Europe, which involves taking the expensive Eurostar, cost four times more than the price of flight tickets. Similarly in Spain, flights were cheaper on 71% of the routes that were analysed.

UK, Spain, France, Italy and Belgium are the countries with priciest train tickets as compared with flights.

Comparing the price-hike in both the modes of transportation, it was observed that there was around 29.6 times surge in train ticket prices during last-minute booking from London to Barcelona, the third most popular short air route in Europe, than flights. Greenpeace pointed out that switching all 3.36 million flight commuters to rail would reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses by 4.6 lakh tons – an equivalent to yearly emissions of over 3 lakh cars.

One of the reasons of flights having advantage over trains is the unavailability of train tickets more than two or three months in advance.