Trains are about to get trendy. Across Europe, climate-conscious travellers are opting to ride the rails instead of flying. The movement started in Sweden, where it has developed its own vernacular: flygskam refers to the shame of flying, while tagskyrt – train bragging – is all the rage on social media.
In April, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg made headlines when she spent two days travelling from Rome to London via train to address Parliament, but there has been a spike in interest in international train travel over the last two decades, according to Mark Smith, who runs rail tourism website The Man in Seat Sixty-One.
When he set up the site, in 2001, most people who travelled abroad by train did so because they couldn’t fly due to phobias or medical problems. He attributes the surge in recent interest not just to environmental concerns, but also to people’s frustrations with the budget airline experience. But is travelling by train really that much better for the planet?
The headline figures certainly suggest so. According to the European Environment Agency, rail travel accounts for 14 grams of CO2 emissions per passenger mile, which is dwarfed by the 285 grams generated by air travel, and the 158 grams per passenger miles from journeys in cars. Taking the Eurostar from London to Paris instead of a plane cuts up to 90 per cent off CO2 emissions, according to the company’s calculations.
But that’s not the whole story. There are some other factors that it’s important to consider before you book those Interrail tickets. Depending on where you’re going, trains can be both slower and more expensive – even when factoring in the faff associated with air travel.
While it’s pretty easy to get from London to Paris by train, our most popular holiday destinations are further afield. Despite a slight shift towards non-EU destinations such as Turkey and Egypt since the Brexit vote, Spain remains the most popular destination for British travellers, with more than 17 million trips in 2017, according to an Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) spokesperson. Southern European cities such as Barcelona, Rome and Venice are not as easy to reach by train. A trip from Manchester to Barcelona, for example – two hours and 20 minutes by plane – would take almost 28 hours by rail, and cost £383 instead of £133 according to booking site Loco2.com.
The actual emissions generated by such a journey depend on myriad factors, including how full each carriage is. Train carriages often run below capacity – particularly on the longer distance, middle of the day services that tourists are likely to take – which raises the average emissions per passenger.
It also makes a big difference whether the train is diesel-powered or electric, and – if it’s the latter – how that electricity is generated. In France, for instance, where a lot of energy comes from nuclear power and trains are mostly electric, travelling by train is greener than in the UK, which has delayed electrification plans indefinitely – although even a journey by diesel train still produces 84 per cent less carbon than flying.
Different carbon footprint calculators can yield varying results. An estimate on Loco2 says a trip from London to Madrid by train will release 25.41kg of CO2 per passenger – against 119.57kg for the same trip by plane. But a calculator on EcoPassenger.org, which is funded by the International Railways Union and takes into account occupancy and engine type, says the same rail journey will release 44.7kg of CO2 – still better than car or plane, but by a much smaller margin. It also highlights some of the other environmental impacts that are sometimes overlooked, including particulate matter, which is higher for trains (17.3 grams vs 15.3 for cars and 11.8 for planes) on this trip.
In 2009, Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath – then of the University of California, Berkeley – calculated the ‘full life-cycle’ emissions generated by 11 different modes of transport in the United States. When they worked out how many passengers different modes of transport would carry over their entire working lives, the emissions of train travel almost doubled, while planes – which require less infrastructure – saw a more modest increase of between 10 and 20 percent.
“All transportation modes require processes beyond the movement of the vehicle,” says Chester, now an associate professor at Arizona State University. “In general, these processes are associated with the construction and operation of infrastructure, the manufacturing and maintenance of the vehicle, and the production and delivery of energy that is used by the vehicle.”
More than half of the emissions related to rail come from infrastructure activities such as building stations, laying tracks, lightning stations and powering escalators. Of course, that’s not enough to bring train emissions close to those of passenger flights, but it’s something to bear in mind when high-speed rail is touted as a greener alternative. If the routes don’t already exist, there will be a carbon cost to building them – and the rise of electric cars may change the equation further.
Smith says long-haul flights have skewed our perception of how much travelling long distances should cost. We’re able to jet away to Eastern Europe for a long weekend for £35, but only at a huge detriment to the environment. “People who are used to driving everywhere on boring motorways or sitting in airport terminals have stopped understanding that the journey is part of the holiday,” he says.
Travelling by train is greener, but it needs to become more practical. Better pricing would help – but rail companies struggle to compete with low-budget airlines, who don’t have to pay tax on the fuel they use. In some countries, train tickets attract VAT, but plane tickets don’t, and Smith says travel agents are geared towards booking flights and will nudge customers towards that option.
Smith believes the current trend towards more trips by train is happening despite the rail companies, not because of them. Although Eurostar offers through tickets to destinations in France, the Netherlands and Belgium, beyond that travelling internationally by rail is disjointed and fragmented process. “Rail needs to get its pricing and booking sorted,” Smith says. “They should make it as easy to book a train as booking a flight.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
