NS International has set itself the goal of doubling the number of train journeys by 2030 compared to 2018. Are you on track?
Luiten “Absolutely. More people now see the train as a good alternative to taking the car or a plane. People are becoming more aware of the need for a sustainable way of living, but it would be fair to say that we’ve also played an important part. We recently shaved 30 minutes off the IC service to Berlin, as well as 40 to 45 minutes off the IC service to Brussels, which is also running more frequently. And as icing on the cake, we’re also investing heavily in new trains.”
Van Wee “I’m glad to hear that the NS has set itself a high bar. That being said, doubling demand won’t help the planet if you’re primarily drawing in new customers rather than people who would otherwise have booked a flight. Research has shown that new high-speed train services can produce a 30% increase in new passengers, which means they could even make matters worse. Laying tracks, building trains and running services costs heaps of energy.”
Luiten “You’re not wrong: addition instead of substitution wouldn’t move the needle in terms of sustainability, but looking at the past can give us a good idea of what might happen. Thalys services between Amsterdam and Paris first began in the 90s, and the percentage of rail passengers on that route has since risen significantly compared to cars and planes.”
‘You don’t need to be at the station several hours in advance and you arrive right in the city centre’
The number of international bookings with NS International has increased significantly in recent years. Why is that, do you think?
Van Wee “Train tickets are indeed in high demand. Our surveys revealed that more people took the train in 2019 than expected based on supply and prices, probably because of flight shame. Lots of people want to do their bit for the environment and would now rather take the train. On top of that, research has shown that people prefer longer, direct journeys over shorter journeys with several transfers. For these people, overnight trains are a particularly attractive option. They don’t care about the extra time it takes; they’re concerned with getting to their destination well-rested.”
Railteam brings together high-speed operators such as ÖBB (Austria), NS International, DB (Germany), SNCF (France), Eurostar (UK, France and Belgium), SBB (Switzerland) and SNCB (Belgium).
© ANP/Walter Geiersperger
Luiten “The overnight train to Zürich, a service launched in 2021, is doing extremely well, but day services up to 700 km are our primary focus. Our goal is to show that taking the train is a legitimate alternative to a flight. You don’t need to be at the station several hours in advance and you arrive right in the city centre. Besides, you don’t have to pay extra for your luggage. More people are cottoning on to the idea that train travel is comfortable: the perception of trains is changing.”
Can railway infrastructure keep up with demand?
Luiten “Infrastructure is a bigger area of concern than demand. Europe’s patchwork of technical requirements is a big sticking point, with even things as basic as the voltage on the overhead lines differing from one country to the next. As a result, trains have to meet a wide range of different requirement. Ideally, you’d snap your fingers and have a new train waiting for you, but that’s not how this industry works. Building trains is extremely complicated and suppliers are few and far between.”
Van Wee “It’s no different in aviation, of course. I wonder whether it takes longer to produce a train than an aircraft. It is true that getting a new high-speed rail service up and running can take up to two decades.”
The (sustainable) future of mobility
What will mobility look like by 2050 if society embraces technological innovation? And what would happen in a world that progresses a lot more cautiously? How would different political climates affect the logistics of goods, from e-commerce packages to international freight transport? The Mobilisers, a team of 12 mobility scientists from TU Delft, have taken a deep dive into how technologies such as autonomous vehicles, sustainable fuels and new transport solutions can impact the way we live and work. Using four radical but realistic future scenarios, they explore the mobility of the future for both passenger and freight transport.
Their work exposes the complexity of greening the mobility system and shows the trade-offs involved in achieving sustainable, affordable, reliable, safe and inclusive mobility. The four future scenarios were co-created with government and industry stakeholders.
During TU Delft’s 183rd Dies Natalis on 16 January 2025, with the theme Making sense of Mobility, the Mobilisers will present their work.
What needs to be done now?
Luiten “We’ve got most of our customers’ preferred destinations covered, but there’s room for improvement in some of the connections. Besides, overdue maintenance is a big issue in the Netherlands and its neighbouring countries. We’re working hard to clear those backlogs as soon as possible.”
Van Wee “If you ask me, people are overly focused on infrastructure. We should worry about levelling the playing field between rail & air first, and soft factors such as information, ticketing and service second. Only when you have all that figured out, can you make full use of the potential offered by a new line. It would, however, be a good idea to explore which lines could be axed.”
Luiten “I’d definitely be in favour of an exploratory study, but getting our current rolling stock in order is priority number one, along with improving service levels”
What’s wrong with service levels?
Van Wee “I know people who would never even consider taking an international train because they don’t know what will happen if things go wrong. The other day, a friend of mine from Switzerland found himself stranded just before the German-Dutch border. No information, no hotel, stranded in the middle of nowhere. He ended up having a Dutch friend pick him up in the middle of the night.”
‘Have airlines pay VAT and slap an excise duty on kerosene’
Luiten “There are hiccups from time to time. It’s more difficult with trains than with planes. Take the Eurostar, for instance, which can carry nine hundred passengers. Try booking that many hotel rooms on short notice! That’s why we’re banking on people’s self-reliance, for instance by developing vouchers with a QR code that lets people book their own hotel.”
Van Wee “Self-reliance sounds nice, but you can’t just simply tell passengers to figure it out for themselves. I’ll only believe that it works when I see it with my own two eyes. I’ve heard plenty of stories about towering ambitions in the past, and still progress has been agonisingly slow over the past decades. I sincerely hope you guys can pull this off.”
‘Rail travel is not a market where supply and demand can be perfectly matched’
What about pre-trip service levels? For many, booking a train journey is a hassle, while booking a flight only takes a few clicks.
Van Wee “This has always been a weakness of international train travel. Just try booking an international train trip. In some cases, you’ll find that the information on the websites of NS, Deutsche Bahn and ÖBB is in direct contradiction. Besides, you can only book three months ahead, and you often can’t even book your entire train journey in one go. That’s something we really need to improve.”
Luiten “Unlike aviation, trains have always been a predominantly domestic affair, which means the ticketing systems are too. Currently, all ticket sellers have their own databases, which have to be linked together to allow users to purchase an international train journey. While this is not always the case yet, we have started working on an open-source and data model: one big database that can be accessed by all ticket sellers, so that travellers can book their trip in one go. If all goes well, we’ll have it up and running by 2025.”
Van Wee “If you do manage to build a system with all the necessary information that’s both up to date AND user-friendly, it would be a tremendous help.”
What do you need from the government?
Van Wee “I don’t like the idea of subsiding international train tickets just to make them a viable alternative to air travel. All that money would mainly flow to people who are already well-off, as they’re the most likely to purchase international train tickets. A much better idea would be to scrap financial benefits for aviation. Have airlines pay VAT and slap an excise duty on kerosene. Fair prices for air travel would make it a lot easier for NS to double ticket sales.”
Luiten “You’re right that the playing field is far from level. It should be noted that there are big differences across Europe, as the VAT rate for train and plane tickets vary from one country to the next. Some countries make short flights almost impossible and incentivise train travel, but the Netherlands is certainly not one of them. I reckon that many passengers would choose differently if the price levels were closer together, due in part to different VAT rates.”
Countries decide on their own VAT rates. What role does the European Union play?
Van Wee “The EU says it wants to build all kinds of new connections, but it sounds more than wishful thinking than realism to me. I’d argue that the EU should not spend a penny on cross-border infrastructure before the soft factors are in place to maximise the returns on new lines.”
Luiten “It’s always struck me as odd that while the EU actually wants to encourage competition, they’re also forcing us to cooperate. The incentives simply aren’t aligned. I would rather see the EU focus more firmly on competition between modes of transport than between railway companies.”
Van Wee “Competition and cooperation aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. They can go hand in hand, as evidenced by coach sharing practices between airlines.
The railway sector is the only sector that advocates as little competition as possible: From other markets, I don’t hear that.”
Luiten “I’d never suggest opposing market forces, but rail travel is not a market where supply and demand can be perfectly matched: infrastructure is a hard constraint. That’s why we’re doubling down on international cooperation. We would love to move to cross-border planning and financing, and cross-border projects would be a dream come true.”
© Alena Kravchenko/Getty Images
If you’re interested in this topic, TU Delft Learning for Life offers a range of courses and programs to empower professionals and support their careers, including relevant courses on the future of transportation.
From airport to air-rail hub
An Embraer 190 city hopper flying from Amsterdam to Brussels can take 100 passengers, only a handful of whom have to be in the Belgian capital. The rest continue their journey from the Brussels airport to a multitude of faraway destinations. A train trip from Brussels to Bangkok is a challenging sell, but on the high-speed line it only takes two hours to get from the heart of Amsterdam to Brussels-Midi. So how do you get passengers out of a Cityhopper and into the Eurostar? That’s one of the questions Suzanne Hiemstra-van Mastrigt, associate professor of future-proof mobility at Industrial Design and director of the Seamless Personal Mobility Lab, is trying to answer.
“Those short flights matter,” she explains. “Since taking off and landing are both very energy-intensive, short flights emit relatively large amounts of CO2.” As part of the European Tulips consortium, she and her team are exploring ways to reduce aviation emissions. A smooth rail-air journey starts at home, says Hiemstra-van Mastrigt. “It all begins on the supply side. Customers searching for a long journey with a transfer close to home on a booking website should be offered the option to take a train.”
KLM already has a so-called AirRail product, which includes a train ticket. As well as being convenient, it has the advantage of requiring the operator to arrange an alternative if you miss your connection due to a delay. Transferring from a train to a plane is also slightly different from transferring between flights. There’s no one to carry your luggage from A to B behind the scenes: you’ll have to check in your bag yourself after you get off the train or wait to collect your luggage before making your way to the train station.
There’s still too much friction between processes says Hiemstra-van Mastrigt: and we’ll have to eliminate those bottlenecks to truly transform airports into air-rail hubs. Many booking sites primarily show flights, but Hiemstra-van Mastrigt’s team is working on an alternative: a system that compares all transport modes and combinations for door-to-door journeys. The new system is to show every single part of the journey: from the journey to the airport, the waiting time there, the cycle to the tram, the metro from the airport to the train station, the shuttle bus after arrival at the airport and all possible combinations, all of which are also given a sustainability label ranging from A to E. Simply cutting down on short flights alone will not do the trick, however, as Hiemstra-van Mastrigt is quick to add: “Next, it’s key that the leftover capacity isn’t filled up with new long flights, so governments will have to step in too.”