Interrail or fly? What crossing Europe actually costs you in time

The rail-versus-flying argument is usually had on price, which is the least stable and least interesting variable. Fares move constantly, an Interrail pass changes the maths entirely, and a 06:20 departure is cheap for reasons that show up later.

The variable that actually decides it, and that people are consistently bad at estimating, is door-to-door time. Not flight time. The time between leaving where you're staying and arriving where you're going.

Counted properly, it changes the answer for a surprising number of routes.

The flight is the short part

A two-hour flight is not a two-hour journey. The honest accounting, for a European city pair:

That is roughly three and a half hours of overhead, before the aircraft has moved. A scheduled 2h 05m flight from London to Vienna is a seven-hour door-to-door day, and that is the version where nothing goes wrong.

You can compress it — hand baggage only, a fast rail link at both ends, ninety minutes instead of two hours at the airport — and get the overhead down to perhaps two and a half hours. You cannot get rid of it, because most of it is structural: airports are outside cities because aircraft are loud.

The train's overhead is nearly zero

The corresponding list for rail is short, and that is the entire argument:

• Main stations are in city centres, so the transfer at each end is a tram ride rather than an expedition.
• Arriving ten minutes before departure is fine on most European services.
• There is generally no security theatre, and where there is (Eurostar, some high-speed services) it is thirty minutes rather than two hours.
• You get off the train and you are already there.

Call it forty minutes of overhead against three and a half hours. The train starts every race with a three-hour head start and then travels more slowly.

Where the crossover falls

Working through it with real journey times:

The pattern is consistent: rail wins up to about four hours of rail time, and loses beyond roughly five and a half. Between those it depends on the specific stations, the specific airports and how much you dislike airports.

Four hours of rail is a long way when the line is fast and a short one when it isn't, and the gap between those two cases is the whole story. Paris to Marseille is about 660 km and takes a little over three hours. Paris to Berlin is about 878 km — a third further — and takes roughly eight. One route has a dedicated high-speed line for most of its length and the other does not.

So the thing that decides these comparisons is rarely the distance. It is the track.

Night trains are a separate calculation

The sleeper breaks the model, because it spends the journey during hours you were going to spend unconscious anyway.

A twelve-hour overnight is not twelve hours of travel time in any sense that matters to your itinerary — it is an evening, a night's sleep of variable quality, and a morning arrival in the middle of a city, with a hotel night saved. Against a flight, the comparison is not 12h versus 2h; it is one travel day versus zero.

Judged that way, several routes that lose badly on daytime rail times win outright as sleepers.

What this means for your map

Here is the part that connects to keeping a flight log, and it cuts against the obvious direction.

If you take the door-to-door numbers seriously, a decent number of short European hops are journeys you should not be flying — not on environmental grounds, though those hold too, but because flying them is slower and worse. And every one of those you don't take is a line that never appears on your map.

That is fine. It is arguably better. A flight map padded with fifty-minute hops between cities that are four hours apart by train is not a record of having travelled widely; it is a record of having chosen badly, repeatedly, at some cost.

The maps that are interesting to look at — and there are only about six shapes — are the ones where the long lines were worth flying and the short ones weren't flown. A sparse map with six good arcs on it reads better than a dense one made of Brussels.

Orbit only records flights, because that is what it computes distance and time for. If you crossed Europe by rail, it will not be on the globe. What is on the globe will be true, which is the more useful property.

Related reading: thirty-four countries are within three hours of London and how many times around the Earth have you flown?