Air France-KLM Expanding to Offer Rail Transport

Air France-KLM Expanding to Offer Rail Transport

In 2010, the rail network in the EU is set to be liberalized, allowing more companies to offer international train routes. Air France-KLM, Europe’s largest airline, is hoping to use this development to its advantage.

The new company is hoping to purchase several AGV trains, which can reach a maximum speed of 350 km/h (217 mph), to run between Paris and London and Paris and Amsterdam.

Should be interesting to see. At the very least perhaps we will get better connections between rail and air, and maybe the extra competition will drive prices down.

Greg

This would be great news indeed! Travelling throughout Europe is much faster by train than by plane anyway in most cases, so this could have a serious impact on the environment (in a positive sense) too. I hope it works out and they put one in place all the way up to Norway

A mere 2 days after I first reported it here (SCOOP for Travellerspoint!), the British press are all over this story. I saw it on the BBC London news last night, again on the BBC this morning and this story has now appeared on the trains in The Independent.

The big angle for the UK media seems to be the fact that Air France-KLM is saying that the journey will be under 2 hours. Currently, Eurostar takes 2 hours and 15 minutes, which was stated on the BBC with a tone of voice making it sound taking over 2 hours was complete rubbish.

Interesting in the Independent article is the following information:

Virgin Atlantic is also thought to be interested in setting up a European high-speed rail service under the liberalisation plan, while the German operator Deutsche Bahn has expressed interest in running a service from London to Cologne. From there, passengers would have easy access to cities including Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg.

All this is in addition to the soon to be running (fingers crossed) high speed service between Brussels and Amsterdam, which will see trains running at 300 km/h.

Man, I love Europe!

[ Edit: Edited on Sep 11, 2008, at 8:14 AM by GregW ]