Rail travel in Europe gets even better

Wow, is Europe kicking our butts. It was bad enough when each of its national rail networks could whip up on us on its own. Now they’re all joining up, and making high-speed European rail travel even faster and easier.

Not that they haven’t always been well linked. But traveling between countries sometimes meant changing trains, with different tickets for different legs, maybe from different companies. Enter Railteam. A partnership of Europe’s largest national rail carriers and their major subsidiary lines (like Thalys and Lyria), Railteam aims to make travel along all of Europe’s high-speed lines seamless, says a recent AP report.

Take a train trip from London to Frankfurt. Before, you’d likely to have to book one ticket from London to Paris or Brussels with Eurostar, then another to Frankfurt with Thalys or maybe the Deutsche Bahn. With the Railteam alliance, though, you’ll be able to book both legs through any of the participating team members. So, you’d turn up in London, buy one ticket, and alight in Frankfurt less than six hours later.

That’s right: Six hours. Booking with Railteam will make finding international connections much easier, thereby making trips faster – and cheaper. Sharing a booking system – as Railteam members soon will – will also improve fare transparency. Eurostar CEO Richard Brown explains: “One of the objectives of having the Railteam (booking) broker is to have that information on those fares easily available to all passengers so they can make a direct comparison on a single Web site, which isn’t possible now.”

So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. For now, it’s fun just to play with the feature on Railteam’s Web site that shows you how quickly you can travel between their hub cities. Taking notes, Amtrak? (Actually, they might be…)