W Europe Travel

For almost three decades, the French Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) has brought the countryside into day and weekend trip reach from Paris. In Germany, sleek white Inter-City-Express (ICE) trains provide fast services between all major German cities.

These fast trains now also operate on international routes. French TGV-based trains are crossing the borders into Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland while the German ICE trains can be seen in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria. More recently, TGV trains have made it into Germany (Cologne and Stuttgart) while ICE trains go to Paris.

Eurostar trains go from London to Paris and Brussels and could actually operate on the full TGV network. Persistent rumors that German Railways want to send ICE trains through the Chunnel all the way to London are constantly being denied. A pity, as competition will almost certainly bring prices down.

Just because you are seated inside an ICE or TGV train does not mean the train is actually going at high speed. Trains can slow down significantly on older tracks especially once outside Germany or France.

More than once, on the four-hour ICE journeys between Frankfurt am Main and Amsterdam, I have experienced going flat out at 300 km/h (186 mph) between Frankfurt International Airport (FRA) and Cologne (Köln) just to have the train slow down and outrun by shorter commuter trains once inside the Netherlands.

Fortunately, tracks are constantly being upgraded throughout Europe to speed up journeys. Railteam reckons that business travelers prefer trains to planes if the rail journey is less than four hours while leisure travelers will ride the rails for six hours before low-cost airlines are seen as an alternative. Those numbers sound about right to me.