Travel Diaries: European High Speed Rail

Partly for environmental reasons, and partly because I want to see more of the countries I'm passing through, I try to avoid flying as much as possible, and prefer to take the train instead. So now that I'd arrived in continental Europe, with its fairly comprehensive long-distance rail network, there would be no more flying and no more investigating airport rail - it's overland High Speed Rail all the way to Amsterdam.

My HSR trip up through Europe started at Barcelona Sants station. One of the positive aspects of HSR is of course that you don't have to travel all the way out to the airport, and that you don't have to arrive there hours in advance; Sants station is very central and accessible, and I just got up at a reasonable hour, checked out of my hotel, and walked the ten minutes to the station.

Barcelona Sants Station

The station building on the surface is quite modern, light and open, and it has quite good connections to the local bus routes. It has a Metro connection, and if you head down to the Metro platforms they suffer from all the issues I mentioned in the Barcelona post (hot, dingy, inaccessible), but the long-distance platforms are a little better - they have both lifts and escalators. Once you pass through security, there's quite a nice waiting area with plenty of seats, where you can sit and wait for boarding of your train - they only start checking tickets and letting you down to the platform a relatively short time before the train leaves, so in this sense it's rather like boarding a plane.

The train from Spain

The train I caught was a relatively older model - the AVE Class 100, which was the first HSR train introduced to Spain in 1992. The interior reflects its age, and feels a bit dated - but was nonetheless quite spacious and very comfortable. From Barcelona, the train speeds you through vineyards and terracotta-roofed villages, past the Pyrenees and across the French border, to Perpignan. Despite both countries being in the Schengen zone, there is at least a show of border control; nobody needs to get a visa so nobody's passport gets stamped, but a bunch of heavily-armed police are waiting on the platform, and will do a walk-through of the train, checking passports. This means the train sits on the platform for a while, slowing down the journey a bit; but you can stay in your seat the whole time so it doesn't generally cause much hassle.

The views of northern Spain through the window are outstanding

From here, the train cruises (relatively) slowly across the only section of non-HSR track on the Paris-Barcelona-Madrid route, the 150km stretch from Perpignan to Montpellier. The French do plan to upgrade this section to full HSR standard, but apparently they're not in any hurry. After Montpellier, the pace picks up again, and soon we're zooming through the south of France at 300km/h to Lyon Part Dieu.

The non-HSR track between Perpignan & Montpellier in grey (cropped from Wikimedia Commons)

If you really wanted to, you could continue onto Paris, and travel all the way from Barcelona to Amsterdam by HSR in a single day - it'd take you all day, but you could do it. However, I wanted to break the trip up a little bit, and see a bit along the way - so I split the trip over two days, and spent the night in Lyon.

The view over the Rhone in Lyon

Being quite a whirlwind trip - really just one afternoon and evening - I only gained some quick impressions, but here they are:
 - quite a beautiful city, with gorgeous views over the Rhone
 - not the easiest place to walk, with quite a lot of cars and mopeds, narrow footpaths, and an absolute plague of e-scooters lying around everywhere
 - cool little funicular railway to get people up the steep hills west of the Saone

The funicular leaving the station

The next day I returned to Lyon Part Dieu station, to catch my train to Paris. It must be said that the station seems to be undergoing pretty extensive renovations at the moment, but the experience was much less nice than at Barcelona Sants. You're still expected to wait around the concourse until they check your tickets and let you up to the platform - but there's much less capacity to handle all those people waiting around. There's only a tiny number of seats, almost none of which are near the screens that tell you where and when to board. Once you do get up to the platform, there's still a bit of a wait till the train arrives, and there's the same problem - WAY more people than seats.

The SNCF train from Lyon to Paris

When the train did arrive, it was fully booked and the "large luggage" area near the carriage door filled up quickly. Luckily I was able to ask a fellow passenger if there was another luggage area, and she helped me find one in the middle of the carriage (YMMV, but I found the reputation the French have for not speaking English and/or being rude to English-speakers to be completely unfounded). It was a double-decker train, and I was on the lower level; the train had quite a nice modern interior, with club-style seating and tables in front of every seat, which I am a big fan of. I didn't realise it when I booked it, but the train I was on turned out to be a super-express - nonstop all the way to Paris, arriving at Gare de Lyon in under two hours.

Paris Gare de Lyon

I didn't have a lot of time in Paris - the intention being to come back later, since a weekend jaunt from Amsterdam would be relatively manageable - so again only some basic impressions. Like London, Paris doesn't have one big terminus right in the centre of the city, it has many long-distance termini that kind of form a ring around it - I had to get from Gare de Lyon, the station for trains to/from Lyon and the southeast, to Gare du Nord, the station for trains to England, Belgium and the Netherlands (among various domestic destinations). But also like London, these termini are linked by the city's PT network - in this case the RER commuter rail system rather than the Métro - so that was relatively straightforward.

Paris Gare du Nord

Both Gare de Lyon and Gare du Nord are stunningly gorgeous stations from the outside, but unfortunately they both seem to suffer from the same issue as Lyon Part Dieu - there's the expectation that huge volumes of passengers will be waiting around for long-distance trains, but hardly any seats. This approach isn't too bad for local metros, or even regional trains like in Victoria - I often have to wait around for a V/Line or Metro train (or a bus, for that matter), I usually have to stand, and it rarely bothers me. But when you're travelling a very long distance on a high-speed train, and you've got a lot of heavy luggage (and usually a longer wait) suddenly it matters a lot more.

The slightly boxy Thalys trains at Gare du Nord

From Gare du Nord, it's the Thalys to Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The Thalys rolling stock is of a similar vintage to the Spanish Renfe trains (built in 1996 but to a 1992 design) and you can tell - although I'd say the colourscheme has aged better. Again - a very spacious and comfortable way to travel, regardless. The weather on the Lyon-Paris leg had been quite drizzly which meant I didn't get to see a lot of the countryside of central France, but by the time I left Gare du Nord the weather had cleared, and I was treated to a great view of the changing landscape as I moved up through northern France. In what seemed like no time at all, my phone buzzed to announce I'd arrived in Belgium (with the standard warning about roaming charges), and not too long after that, it buzzed again for the Netherlands. Passing by green fields, historic windmills and more modern wind turbines, and eventually arriving into Amsterdam - my home for the next few months.

Amsterdam Centraal Station

All in all, the experience of travelling by HSR through Europe is much, much more pleasant than travelling by plane. It wasn't 100% as smooth as I'd expected it to be; perhaps naively, I'd expected trains to immediately accelerate to 300km/h and then stay there for the whole journey, brief pauses at stations excepted - no slow sections of track, no pauses at junctions or lengthy waits at stations - which obviously wasn't the case. But it was still very quick and easy.

Over the whole distance from Barcelona-Amsterdam, the trains can't really compete on time. Even with the need to get to and from the airports at both ends, even with the huge amount of security rigmarole to go through, the plane is faster over that kind of distance. But for anything shorter, the train is definitely time competitive - and of course, orders of magnitude more pleasant. Not to mention significantly better for the environment.

There is clearly more for governments to do on both sides of the equation - filling gaps in the HSR network and extending it to new destinations, and properly taxing the CO2 externalities of flying - but even with things as they stand today, it's very possible to get around much of Europe without flying. It may be a very different story around the rest of the world, where the alternatives aren't as good, but around here the flygskam movement has the potential to drive some real change.