Friends of the Rail Forum

All domestic plane journeys in Britain should be banned and passengers told to take a train. So says the Campaign for Better Transport in its contribution to the climate emergency debate. Planes emit six times more CO2 per passenger mile than trains. The trouble is that plane tickets tend to be half the price of train ones. So tax planes, and subsidise trains...

Travel was the great beneficiary of the leisure society. Only now are we appreciating its cost, not just in pollution but in the need for ever more extravagant infrastructure... The answer to CO2 emissions is not to shift passengers from one mode of transport to another. It is to attack demand head on by discouraging casual hyper-mobility... The answer to CO2 emissions is not to shift passengers from one mode of transport to another. It is to attack demand head on by discouraging casual hyper-mobility...

Britons should rediscover the virtues of locality and neighbourhood. The way to protect life on Earth is not to fly to Glasgow for the Cop26 summit. It is to stay at home...

Figures released in 2019 by Italy state railway company Ferrovie dello Stato show that the number of passengers taking the train on the country's main business route, between Rome and Milan, has almost quadrupled in a decade, from 1 million in 2008 to 3.6 million by 2018. Over two thirds of people traveling between the two cities now takes the train. It's a remarkable endorsement of Italy's high-speed rail network, which debuted in 2008. Traveling those near-400 miles between Milan and Rome takes as little as 2 hours and 59 minutes. And, of course, the train stations are in the city center, and there's no need to turn up long before your train -- the doors close two minutes before departure. Contrast that to a minimum half-hour drive to Rome's Fiumicino, checking in 90 minutes before departure, an hour in the air and then landing outside Milan -- Linate airport, the closest, is about 20 minutes' drive into town -- and it's obvious why people are opting for the train.

Which leads you to wonder, as Italy's national airline prepares to shut down on October 15 -- did the high-speed railways kill Alitalia?...