Reach Barcelona from Prague by train and in… thirty hours: this is the long journey in which a Czech journalist recently embarked, passing through Vienna, Paris and Valencia. And the memorable account he gives of it in the weekly Respect is an ode to slowness, to regaining time, to the pleasure of admiring landscapes and sharing moments of intimacy with fleeting traveling companions. “It requires a lot more planning and also more time than an extremely easy air transfer”, he writes. But this kind of journey offers “something the plane can never offer […]the feeling that the trip as such is already a life experience”.
At the time of the first departures on vacation, this is the tone that we wanted to give to this dossier.
Like him, more and more of them (we?) are once again enjoying the pleasure of rail across Europe, where the opening of cross-border lines is increasing. Mainly night trains. In 2021, European Year of Rail, Austria, Germany, France and Switzerland “have agreed to cooperate so that thirteen European cities will be connected by night trains by 2025”, Explain The country.
“Unprofitable compared to low cost flights and high speed trains, they had disappeared. In recent years, they have experienced a revival hailed by Brussels, as part of a vast program to revive the railway, a means of transport much less polluting than the car or the plane.
The figures from the European Commission quoted by the Spanish daily are eloquent: “Transport accounts for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2018, road travel contributed 71.8% of the sector’s emissions, while civil aviation’s share was 13.2% and maritime transport’s share was 14.1%. Rail traffic, meanwhile, only generated 0.4%.”
Greener, more user-friendly, the train is on the rise in Europe (and elsewhere in the world), but there is still a lot to be done in terms of transport policy. There is today “too many lost links, sections of track crossing borders that have been lost or are no longer used. Everything that makes the whole network very weak”, says a German MEP quoted by The country.
We can see this in France, where the performance contract signed between the SNCF and the State, which provides for the allocation of 2.8 billion euros to the maintenance of infrastructures over the next ten years, is arousing the dissatisfaction of trade unions such as users. Because the secondary lines are suffering, and certain regions are increasingly underserved.
However, small lines are sometimes also synonymous with amazing journeys. To stay in this register, nourished by a certain nostalgia, we have selected eight journeys hailed as so many timeless moments in the foreign press.
For example, the new line between Ljubljana, in Slovenia, and Budapest, in Hungary, which “crosses the old iron curtain twice”. “No other train journey will allow you to grasp how much Europe has changed in the last thirty years”, observe The Guardian.
Between Oslo and Bergen, in Norway, travelers can feast on unforgettable panoramas, enthuses CNN : “Crystal clear lakes, majestic glaciers and, as you approach the terminus, breathtaking fjords.”
There are others including, of course, the famous “cloud train” in Argentina, between Salta and the Chilean border. “Towards the end, the train climbs an impressive height difference to reach 4,200 meters above sea level”, moves Clarion.
An invitation to travel that we wanted to highlight from this second summer issue (after the one devoted to “The race to the oceans”, last week). Also discover, in 360° pages, the story that The Atlantic dedicated to Rachel Carson, one of the pioneers of the modern environmental movement who was passionate about the sea. “Throughout his life, [elle] will maintain this deep conviction that wonder must be at the heart of any relationship with nature”, writes the magazine. A welcome read for the summer.