It’s a regular morning of hustle and bustle on Central Station’s platform 12. Brakes screech as a train comes in. Passengers move to the tune of a loudspeaker announcement, then a whistle blows, doors slam and wheels start turning. Mark Smith is off again.
“When I am on a journey, there is a sense of anticipation and possibility,” he says, adding that the possibilities are greater than most people might imagine. “If it wasn’t for the situation in Russia, you could get as far as Hongkong or by train.”
Though he’s not traveling quite that far, his trip is long enough for most people to discount the railway as a viable option. He is on his way from his UK home near London to a conference in the Estonian capital of Tallinn.
The trip will add another 1,800 km (1,118 miles) to the hundreds of thousands of rail kilometers he has already clocked up. It will also take four days and eight trains and cost about $500 for the tickets alone. By air, the same journey would be completed in less than three hours and can be as cheap as $25. So, why would anyone choose the slow and expensive option?
A life dedicated to the railroad
Berlin was Mark Smith’s first overnight stop, and the train he boarded on platform 12 will take him to Warsaw in , for the next one. As the carriages rattle through urban outskirts and into fields and forests, he sits down in the restaurant car to recount how he first fell in love with rail travel. At 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 scenery, there were people, it had a reality that air travel doesn’t have.”
Later, to earn money during his studies, he worked for a travel agency, issuing train tickets. “I was doing what I loved. I knew all the connections since I had taken them myself,” he remembers. He went on to manage stations in London and work for the transport department.
And then one day in 2001, he went into a press store at London’s Marylebone station and bought a magazine about how to set up websites using html. “Probably the best £2.95 ($3.96) I have ever spent in my life,” he recalls.
A wikipedia for train travel
Smith set up a website called seat61.com, named after his favorite spot on the Eurostar train that connects London with the continent via the Channel Tunnel. It soon turned from a hobby into a full-time job.
Over the years he has built what is essentially a Wikipedia for train travel, with information about routes, trains, fares, must-knows and little life hacks for train travel in more than 100 countries.
The website gets up to 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 travel is responsible for about 2.5% of total human-caused CO2emissions, private cars for just under 10% and rail for 0.26%.
To get from London to Tallinn in by plane, the direct flight emits about 380 kilograms of carbon dioxide per passenger. By car, it’s even more, depending on the fuel and number of passengers.
The train trip only produces between 110 and 140 kilograms of CO2, however. And that will be even less when, in the coming years, the last diesel trains used on the route are replaced with electric ones powered with .
Stress is the deal breaker
Apart from the , traveling long distances by train has disadvantages. “Fragmentation is the biggest problem,” Smith says. For his trip to Tallinn, he had to use trains from six different rail companies with individual booking systems, languages and currencies. And this is not unusual. Neither is unreliability.
“For too long, people have been treated like cargo,” says Pete Dyson, a behavioral scientist at the University of Bath in 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 fact that trains can and do come to a sudden stop in the middle of nowhere can lead to anxiety that turns people off. And though lines across parts of Europe have been deteriorating for some time, .
In 2018, building a high-speed railway in countries in the cost an average of 25 million Euros ($29.22) per kilometer. The same stretch of highway costs at most half of that. Electric wiring and signaling along train routes also makes railway networks more expensive to maintain.
With air travel, the physical infrastructure costs are limited to airports. Airlines also enjoy tax exemptions on fuel and VAT in many countries.
In some cases, much to Mark Smith’s frustration, travelers might have to pay tax on their train ticket but 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 cost disadvantage, in Europe and globally, train travel is growing both in terms of kilometers of track and number of passengers. 2024 marked the first time that more than one billion people worldwide traveled by or cross-regional train.
After five hours, Mark gets off the train in Warsaw and walks around the station to take pictures for his website. “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
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