This is the era of high-speed trains and more and more harassed businesspeople are consulting rail timetables rather than flight schedules. There’s almost certainly a high-speed train leaving within the hour from a railway station conveniently located near the central business district. And, depending on the distance you intend to travel, it will likely get you to the meeting significantly faster than would a flight. For good measure it will certainly land you there in a better frame of mind.
Take business travel aboard one of Rail France’s 320kph (200mph) TGV trains, flagship of its fleet. On a premium TGV Pro ticket, business people ride on a cushion of service and comfort. They can park near the station in a dedicated space a short walk from the platform. If there’s not been time to look up departure and other details, an assistant meets the car and guides ticket-holders to the train.
Hungry and harassed? Once aboard, you can repair to the bar and/or arrange for a meal – breakfast, lunch or dinner – to be brought to your seat while you work. Need a taxi at the other end? The train manager will book it ahead so that, engine ticking over, it’s waiting in a special rank outside the station. Arriving at rush hour in any one of Europe’s highly-congested cities? Your helpful train manager will arrange for a motorbike to meet you, complete with spare helmet, gloves and windproof jacket. Thus you ride pillion as the biker negotiates the heavy traffic through streets unfamiliar to you. If nothing else, it will make a talking point when you arrive at the meeting on a wind-blown high.
Too late for the train? Unlike low-cost flights, TGV Pro means your company is not out of pocket because the rail network will exchange free of charge the ticket for another one for a later departure. And it will do so at any time before the train leaves. Or too early? At eleven stations in France there’s a lounge with Wi-Fi and other services, rather like airline club lounges. These are instead called Salons des Grands Voyageurs, and are dedicated to first-class and Pro rail-goers.
All over Europe rail operators are falling over themselves to offer what businesspeople want. In rough order of importance that’s punctuality, Wi-Fi, plush chairs that are roughly the equivalent in size and comfort of business class on airlines, space to spread yourself around, table service for food, power sockets and private meeting rooms that can be booked in advance.
Eurostar, originally launched as a predominantly tourist train between London and Paris, is typical of the trend. It now provides a work-friendly business premium class as well as restful lounges in London, Paris and Brussels. Similarly, some of the Thalys routes into Belgium and the Netherlands offer lounges, at-seat meals included in the fare and free Wi-Fi in first class on all trains. On Deutsche Bahn’s ICE trains, there’s all of the above, plus group booking in special compartments for strategy-planning sessions.
In its dedication to commerce, Deutsche Bahn also offers quiet zones for businesspeople who don’t want to be disturbed and is catching up with French Rail by opening a network of first-class lounges in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt and Cologne. Not to be outdone, Spain’s high-speed AVE (for Alta Velocidad Espana) network offers most of the above as well as leather seats in its Preferente class. And going one better than everybody, Italy’s privately-owned NTV even boasts a cinema in its end carriage.
And as the facilities are improving, so is the high-speed network expanding. French Rail’s TGV trains, for many years confined to their home country, are pushing beyond France’s borders. Its Lyria network into Switzerland runs on much-travelled business routes such as Paris-Zurich and Paris-Geneva, reducing travel time in the former to 4hrs 40m and to 3hrs 5m in the latter. TGV trains are also linking up with Italy, Germany and Belgium. Its shared Thalys network takes the trains into the Netherlands.
The high-speed network is growing within national borders too. Within France, the TGV runs north, south, east and west to the Mediterranean, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Marseille and other provincial cities. Spain’s AVE now connects a host of cities on top of the main destinations of Madrid, Seville, Barcelona and Malaga. In Britain, Eurostar runs a schedule of up to 25 trains a day out of the magnificently refurbished St. Pancras station.
Competition is good for the business traveller in Italy too. The government-owned Trenitalia is opening high-speed runs through its heartland areas such as Milan-Florence-Rome-Naples while NTV (Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori), the first private operator allowed onto the Italian network, competes on the Naples-Milan run. The face of rail to come, NTV aims to offer routes to 12 Italian cities as well as to centres in Europe. NTV has also cut the travel time from Rome to Naples down to 68 minutes on a schedule of ten trips a day. It’s a move that must scare the living daylights out of Alitalia’s somnolent executives.
NTV also uses the latest, French-made Alstom AGV trains, which raises another point. High-speed trains such as the AGV (translating as automatic high speed) are the rail equivalent of supercars and jumping aboard one is both exciting and a privilege. With a maximum commercial speed of 360kph (220mph), this tilt-nosed monster holds the world record for high-speed rail. Made from aluminium and man-made carbon fibres, rather like F1 cars, it features among many other remarkable passenger-friendly technologies the ability to maintain the floor level almost constant, even between carriages. NTV has invested €650m in 25 of these sleek giants of the iron road and its passengers are the beneficiaries.
But will you make that appointment punctually? Almost certainly yes, because Europe’s high-speed network is accelerating because of technical improvements to the infrastructure. On the books are a series of high-speed links across the Pyrenees, joining up France and Spain, Helsinki and Berlin, Lyon and Budapest. From next year Austria’s Railjet network is slated to speed up to 230kph from the present 200kph. Although it’s still eight years away from opening day, a rail tunnel will link Klagenfurt and Graz with trains that, travelling at 250kph, will cut the journey from three hours to just one.
And in Britain, long the laggard in high-speed rail travel, upgrades to the much-used Great Western and East Coast main lines will push maximum velocities up to 225kph, not as fast as in Europe but technically classifiable as high speed. As they cut travel times, rail networks are rapidly turning into a serious threat to airlines. Indeed on some routes such as Paris-Brussels, London-Paris and Paris-Amsterdam infamous for red-eye, early-morning flights, many airlines have thrown in the towel.
“There’s never been a better time for business travellers to choose train not plane in terms of avoiding the hassle and time-wasting nature of modern flying,” explains Britain’s Mark Smith, founder of the website ‘The Man in Seat 61,’ a compulsory port of call for train enthusiasts and businesspeople alike. “Also, the high speed network is growing and the quality of the trains is improving.”
A widely accepted rule of thumb dictated that rail became a serious alternative to airlines only when the flight took less than three hours. Another guideline had it that rail was the better choice on all journeys of 650km (400m) or less. These assumptions are being rewritten because of security-dictated check-in delays at airports as well as the higher speeds of the rail network. About three and a half hours of every “flight” is now spent getting to the airport and lining up in queues. The issue of comfort aside, travel experts now believe rail travel could become viable when flights take five hours.
Courtesy of airguideonline, the aviation database, here’s a comparison of train and flying times between some major European centres, taking check-in and queuing times into account. However bear in mind that these are mere statistics and do not measure the quality of time, a vital element for businesspeople. It’s also important to remember that flying times are not reducing while rail times are. Between Geneva and Paris, assuming the businessperson travels on the Lyria service, the times are pretty much exactly the same. Between Geneva and Milan, the plane is less than half an hour faster. Between Paris and Brussels, trains are nearly half an hour quicker. Meantime the time between London to Paris by Eurostar has fallen to two-and-a-quarter hours because of higher-speed infrastructure while even on longer routes such as London and Cologne, planes are only 1.5 hours faster.
But these statistics measure only chronological time. Assessed by the more meaningful yardstick of quality time, high-speed trains are runaway winners. According to airguideonline, on a typical three-hour journey from one city centre to another the rail-goer gets 2.5 hours of “undisturbed time” compared with just half an hour for the flyer.
Precise price comparisons between rail and air that take into account the equivalent level of comfort are impossible, given the vast range of offers. However it’s generally assumed that business-class flights cost a lot more than business-class rail. What’s certain is that, as rail companies get up to speed with online booking, prices are becoming more easily obtainable. Thus on an ICE train between London to Frankfurt, first-class with all the perks starts at €99. Lower prices are available by booking in advance, just as they are with low-cost airlines. For instance, an ICE trip between Hamburg and Landau, a distance of 380-mile journey, falls by over €40 to €79 if booked early.
Booking sites are becoming more user-friendly, such as Rail Europe. Tickets on sites of national networks are usually cheaper, but you have to know the language if they are not translated into your own, as is often the case. Several national networks such as Trenitalia and Spain’s Renfe have helpful sites, but most of them are only partly translated into English.
And, another drawback, if travelling across borders, passengers generally have to pick up the ticket they have booked within that country, generally from an electronic dispensing machine, once you’ve arrived from an outside point of departure. Some rail-goers are nervous of trying to prise their tickets from a machine with instructions in a foreign language.
As an historical aside, it’s a little-known fact that we’ve gone backwards in this area in the last 150 years. Between 1850 and 1990 – that is, before privatised rail became the fad, every national operator could sell tickets not only for itself, as you’d expect, but for every other national operator. They did so by using a simple, easily comparable kilometric tariff that gave a uniform price.
Often overlooked in the train versus plane debate is the overnight journey for people with business in different cities on succeeding days, although night trains are not of course high speed. Here the key point of comparison is the relative cost of a hotel room, which varies greatly from city to city. A simple bit of arithmetic helps though. Simply deduct the full cost of overnight rail including food and drink from the price of the air ticket and your hotel. Almost surreptitiously, the quality of cabins has improved greatly in recent years. For instance, Trenitalia’s ‘Notte’ single-berth overnighters are clean and comfortable, often with their own bathroom and shower.
If we look a few years ahead, high-speed rail will have an even brighter – and faster – future. Alstom, for example, is working on a train with a projected top speed of 400kph in both single and double-deck version. For some business travellers who aren’t in a tearing hurry to get to the next meeting, that may be too fast.
