4/16/2023 0 Comments Transport rail route![]() ![]() Russia and Ukraine would also have made it easily a few years ago – 5.1 million took the train between them in 2013 – but passenger numbers have crashed in the wake of the occupation of Crimea. (Please get in touch if you know otherwise.) Most of these probably went to Russia, but exactly how many is impossible to say. We know from the EU data that about 500,000 passengers went between Belarus and Latvia, Lithuania or Poland, which leaves 3.2 million to split between Russia and Ukraine. Belarus borders five different countries, three of which are EU members. OSJD (the railway authority for Eastern Europe and Asia) has published data saying that 3.7 million passengers travelled by train internationally in Belarus in 2017, but annoyingly it didn’t release where they were going. Not all of them will have been French travellers – there are regular trains to Italy and occasional trains all the way to Russia – but a bit of maths says there must still be well over 6 million people going between Monaco and France, putting it safely in fourth place.īelarus-Russia might deserve a place on this graph. There were 7.2 million people using Monaco-Monte Carlo station in 2017, and every single one was an international passenger. Train travel in Monaco (not technically an EU member state) is kind of weird, since it only has one station (operated by the French SNCF). Like Luxembourg, Monaco is tiny and extremely expensive, so a lot of people commute in from France. There won’t be many non-EU routes that can compete.įrance-Monaco is one. Passenger trains that cross borders are overwhelmingly a European thing – it’s only in the European Union that you get the combination of small countries, wealthy economies and open borders that makes international rail travel possible. Compared to an Øresund train every 10 minutes or a Le Shuttle every 15 minutes, intercity trains that only run once every couple of hours have little impact on the total passenger count. International train journeys aren’t always glamorous long-distance adventures – a lot of them are regular commutes. You don’t need that many people crossing the border as long as they do it every day. This is the secret to racking up a really high passenger count. Why not get a house in French Thionville and take the train to work every day instead? If just 10,000 people did that, in a year they’d cross the border 5 million times. Luxembourg is a very expensive place to live, but its capital city is only a few kilometres from the border. With 4.3 million passengers a year, this pairing is twice as busy as France-Germany – how, when Luxembourg only has half a million residents total? Rounding out the top five is France-Luxembourg. Not all international voyages are glamorous. Not everyone on those sections will have crossed into Switzerland (some will just gone from one German or French station to another) but it will still be responsible for a big part of the total passenger count for Switzerland.Ī commuter train from Basel, Switzerland to Zell, Germany. 25 million people use this Trinational S-Bahn every year, with about 10 million of those using the international sections. These share a suburban train network that crosses the German-Swiss border three times and the French-Swiss border once. The Swiss city of Basel, the French city of Saint-Louis, and the German city of Lörrach all lie right next to each other and form an urban area called the “Trinational Eurodistrict”. In these statistics, the two are counted equally, so each passenger could be a diplomat zipping first class from Paris to Brussels, or it could be a worker in Kortrijk commuting to their job in Lille in the morning.įor Germany-Switzerland, most of those 6 million are definitely commuters. Running every 10 minutes each way at peak times, it must be the most frequent international rail service on the planet.įrance-Belgium isn’t a single rail connection – instead, it’s a half a dozen or so lines ranging from high-speed TGV to tiny local services. As well as long-distance trains, the bridge also has a busy commuter service between Copenhagen and the nearby Swedish city of Malmö. Next is another international sea link: Denmark-Sweden over the Øresund Bridge (made famous by Scandi noir detective series The Bridge). ![]()
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