European Rail Should Learn From Airlines' Price-Slashing Measures

A round trip by rail from Berlin to Hamburg for less than $40. That’s the irresistible offer being made by Germany’s Interregio Express trains. Plying the 180 miles between Germany’s two largest cities, these daily trains have proved so popular with the budget-conscious that Interregio has just announced plans to double its service to two trains a day. Small in themselves, these plans are part of a steadily gathering European fight to get budget travelers off the road and onto the rails. Another German company, MSM, will soon lay on similarly cheap trains from Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city, to Berlin and Hamburg. Both companies are riding in the slipstream created by France’s Ouigo, which offers superfast travel from the Paris region to southern France at bargain rates. These efforts also reveal a story that wistful North American admiration for the European network often leaves untold: long distance rail travel in Europe may be great, but it’s increasingly for the well-off.

The continent’s various rail services are still broadly excellent in many ways, of course. Fast, clean and frequent, trains in most European countries still do a good job of getting you where you want to quickly and comfortably. And if Europeans of many stripes sometimes grumble about delays, complicated fare plans or slightly seedy stations, they’d probably be shocked back into gratitude by spending a mere 15 minutes in somewhere like the shabby bunker that is New York’s Penn Station.