New High-Capacity Trains Promise More Comfortable, Greener Hamburg–Copenhagen Journeys

I’ve traveled by rail through the northern German city of Hamburg three times so far this year. It’s the hub for train journeys through to Copenhagen in Denmark, across the Oresund Bridge into Sweden and then on to Stockholm, Gothenburg and cities and regions even further north.

On my most recent trip—I returned to my home in Newcastle, northern England, at the weekend—I traveled between Hamburg and Copenhagen on trains that have seen better days. For my next trip, however, I’ll be able travel in more comfort because DSB, Denmark’s state-owned rail service, has started to replace dated, often unreliable engines and carriages with new EuroCity trainsets.

Traveling from Copenhagen to Hamburg via Ringsted, Odense, Kolding and Padborg in Denmark and Schleswig in Germany, DSB’s new carriages will be brighter, better equipped with plugpoints for digital-native passengers and, crucially, with their 492 seats, will have triple the capacity compared to the current 136-seater trains.

This is a big deal for me and others who consider Hamburg as their main hub for traveling to and from Scandanavia.

Eight new EuroCity trainsets have already been delivered and will gradually enter service on the Copenhagen–Hamburg line over the coming months. DSB has ordered 16 trainsets, with the remaining eight expected to be delivered next year and 2027. The trainsets have been manufactured for DSB by Talgo of Spain, which, like other train manufacturers, is benefitting from greater demand for cross-Europe rail travel. Passengers are increasingly seeking out alternatives to the more carbon-intensive modes like road and air transport.

DSB’s new trains and carriages don’t just offer more connectivity and comfort, they’re also adding new departues. From May next year there will be ten daily departures in each direction between Copenhagen and Hamburg.

Denmark and Germany have set ambitious goals for the reduction of carbon emissions coming from transport. Talgo 230 EuroCity units are lighter than older trains, reducing energy consumption and therefore their impact on the environment.

Staying on the ground

As I gave up flying three years ago all of my long distance travel is now done by train. For my latest trip I started in my home in Newcastle, traveling to London on LNER’s fast trains on the East Coast mainline before taking the Eurostar beneath the English Channel to Brussels. I then transferred to Deutsche Bahn (DB), Germany’s national rail operator, for the services to Cologne and on the Hamburg.

My return journey was the same in reverse, with stopovers in Brussels on the way there and Hamburg on the way back. Leaving late afternoons I was able to reach my destinations by late evenings on the following days. Slower than flying, yes, but I was able to work solidly on my laptap. The journeys were also more expensive than flying—traveling with cheap airlines and booking in advance, I could have flown for half the price.

But flying is soulless. By taking the train I fitted in a couple of city breaks en route, spending downtime in historic city centers, not boring airports.

The ground–if it’s visible at all–looks lovely from 35,000 feet, but I can’t pop down to gawp in wonder at the interior of a medieval cathedral. That’s what I was able to do on my train journey.

It was a pleasure trip as well as a business one. And it was also a much more environmentally-friendly trip. According to the Ecopassenger website traveling by train from Newcastle to Copenhagen almost halved my carbon footpint compared to flying. Not only is fuel used more efficiently, but electric trains can run on green electricity, reducing CO2 even further.

Newcastle to Copenhagen is a long distance train journey but the time saved by flying between, say, London and Paris is marginal. Few European cities have city center airports. Once landside, other forms of transport need to be used, so why not take the train the whole way?

High Speed

In 2003, there were 12 flights a day between Frankfurt and Cologne, 190 kilometers apart. After a high-speed rail line opened, journey times were cut from two hours to just one. Today there are no flights between these two German cities.

An increasing number of people are now concluding that even long journeys between European cities–especially those linked by high-speed rail lines–are now best done by train.

Flight Shame

Greta Thunberg is today’s most famous flight-refusenik–she and her father famously travel by train. After her solo school strike went mainstream in 2018 the student quickly became the world’s most recognizable climate campaigner.

Thunberg’s mother–opera singer Malena Ernman–pledged in 2017 to stop flying, joining other Swedes who have coalesced around the concept of flygskam, or “flight shame.” (There’s a linked neologism, tagskryt, or “train bragging”–using social media to highlight intercity train journeys, often accompanied with the hashtag #stayontheground.)

Until recently, Swedes were among the most profligate flyers on the planet. According to a report commissioned by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, in 2017 Sweden’s entire aviation sector accounted for 1.1 tonnes of emissions per person, five times the global average of 0.2 tonnes per person. This love affair with flying is fading fast.

Bookings at the Swedish Centralens Resebutik agency–a specialist in rail travel–increased eightfold last year compared with two years ago. (This is the agency that books Thunberg’s rail travel.)

Swedes are switching fast because climate change is particularly noticeable in Sweden, with the Swedish Meteorological Institute reporting recently that the average annual temperature was rising twice as quickly in the country as the global average.

Train Bragging

According to German philosopher Anna Strasser, who I met in Sweden on a previous long distance train journey, train travel is more pleasant than air travel.

“I hate the check-in at the airport,” she told me. “It takes time; you have to take all your stuff out. There are so many rules: you can’t carry your cup of tea with you because you have to empty liquids from bottles. You spend a lot of time waiting; waiting for the gate to open, waiting for boarding. In the end, even if the overall time is shorter, you’ve wasted more time compared to going by train.”

Her colleagues admire Strasser for traveling long distances by train, but not all are ready to join her.

“People look at you and say they are proud of you for not flying,” she said, adding that for many, flying is still considered the cheapest and fastest option, even if that is not always the case, and even though flying is known to be a big carbon emitter.

“When I worked as a university scientific manager [at Humboldt-University, Berlin] we had a British person who didn’t want to fly to [Germany] for pollution reasons and administrators considered this acceptable even though the ticket cost more,” said Strasser.

“But it should be the other way around: for business travel you should now have to give a good explanation if you want to fly. Train travel should be the norm.”