Forget planes. Meet the person who will solely journey by practice – DW – 10/27/2025

It’s a daily morning of hustle and bustle on Berlin Central Station’s platform 12. Brakes screech as a practice is available in. Passengers transfer to the tune of a loudspeaker announcement, then a whistle blows, doorways slam and wheels begin turning. Mark Smith is off once more.

“When I am on a journey, there’s a sense of anticipation and risk,” he says, including that the chances are better than most individuals may think. “If it wasn’t for the situation in Russia, you could get as far as Hongkong or Singapore by train.”

Though he isn’t touring fairly that far, his journey is lengthy sufficient for most individuals to low cost the railway as a viable possibility. He is on his manner from his UK residence close to London to a convention within the Estonian capital of Tallinn. 

The journey will add one other 1,800 km (1,118 miles) to the a whole bunch of 1000’s of rail kilometers he has already clocked up. It may even take 4 days and eight trains and value about $500 for the tickets alone. By air, the identical journey can be accomplished in lower than three hours and will be as low cost as $25. So, why would anybody select the gradual and costly possibility? 

A life devoted to the railroad

Berlin was Mark Smith’s first in a single day cease, and the practice he boarded on platform 12 will take him to Warsaw in Poland, for the following one. As the carriages rattle by means of city outskirts and into fields and forests, he sits down within the restaurant automotive to recount how he first fell in love with rail journey on the tender age of 17. 

“What got me hooked were school trips by train to the south of France and to Russia,” he recalls. “There was surroundings, there have been individuals, it had a actuality that air journey would not have.”

Later, to earn cash throughout his research, he labored for a journey company, issuing practice tickets. “I used to be doing what I liked. I knew all of the connections since I had taken them myself,” he remembers.

He went on to handle stations in London and work for the UK transport division.

And then someday in 2001, he went right into a press retailer at London’s Marylebone station and purchased {a magazine} about the way to arrange web sites utilizing html. “Probably the best £2.95 ($3.96) I have ever spent in my life,” he recollects. 

A wikipedia for practice journey

Smith arrange a web site referred to as seat61.com, named after his favourite spot on the Eurostar practice that connects London with the continent by way of the Channel Tunnel. It quickly turned from a interest right into a full-time job. 

Over the years he has constructed what is basically a Wikipedia for practice journey, with details about routes, trains, fares, must-knows and little life hacks for practice journey in additional than 100 nations. 

The web site will get as much as 1 million visits a month, he says.

“When I started in 2001, people told me they have a phobia of flying or a medical restriction. But now they tell me they want to have a better experience than air travel and want to cut their emissions.”

Rail wins the emissions race

Globally, air journey is answerable for about 2.5% of whole human-caused CO2 emissions, personal automobiles for just below 10% and rail for 0.26%. 

To get from London to Tallinn in Estonia by airplane, the direct flight emits about 380 kilograms of carbon dioxide per passenger. By automotive, it is much more, relying on the gasoline and variety of passengers. 

The practice journey solely produces between 110 and 140 kilograms of CO2, nevertheless. And that shall be even much less when, within the coming years, the final diesel trains used on the route are changed with electrical ones powered with renewable power. 

Stress is the deal breaker

Apart from the local weather win, touring lengthy distances by practice has disadvantages.

“Fragmentation is the biggest problem,” Smith says.

For his journey to Tallinn, he had to make use of trains from six completely different rail corporations with particular person reserving methods, languages and currencies. And this isn’t uncommon. Neither is unreliability. 

“For too long, people have been treated like cargo,” says Pete Dyson, a behavioral scientist on the University of Bath within the UK. “The priority is merely to get people from A to B, as though you are a package to be delivered.”

He says the truth that trains can and do come to a sudden cease in the midst of nowhere can result in anxiousness that turns individuals off. Lines throughout elements of Europe have been deteriorating for a while, however modernization is dear.

In 2018, constructing a high-speed railway in EU nations price a median of 25 million Euros ($29.2 million) per kilometer. The similar stretch of freeway prices at most half of that. Electric wiring and signaling alongside practice routes additionally makes railway networks dearer to keep up. 

With air journey, the bodily infrastructure prices are restricted to airports. Airlines additionally get pleasure from tax exemptions on gasoline and VAT in lots of nations. 

In some instances, a lot to Mark Smith’s frustration, vacationers might need to pay tax on their practice ticket however not on their flight.

“It’s not that we need to make air travel less attractive. It’s that we need to stop deliberately making it more attractive than it should be,” he says.

Despite the fee drawback, in Europe and globally, practice journey is rising each when it comes to kilometers of monitor and variety of passengers. 2024 marked the primary time that multiple billion individuals worldwide traveled by long-distance or cross-regional practice.

After 5 hours, Mark will get off the practice in Warsaw and walks across the station to take photos for his web site. “We shouldn’t be telling people they can’t fly and have to take a train,” he says.

“Sustainability isn’t a punishment. It takes longer to get into train travel, but hey, it’s such a better, more rewarding experience. You’re doing yourself a favor as well as the planet.”

Edited by: Tamsin Walker