Analysis of Potentially Efficient, Near-Term Realisable and Future Routes for High-Speed Overnight Trains

Abstract

Aviation within Europe has fully recovered from the COVID-19 disruption and continues to grow, making low-emission alternatives to short- and medium-haul flights an urgent policy concern. This study assesses whether a share of intra-European air travel could plausibly be shifted onto a high-speed night train network, and identifies which city pairs offer the greatest passenger volumes for such a shift. Origin–destination cities were combined with a routable model of the European long-distance rail network, built on OpenStreetMap and OpenRailwayMap data and solved with a Dijkstra-based shortest-path approach. Travel times were computed for the 2024 network and a 2050 scenario including planned and under-construction high-speed lines, at 200 km/h, 230 km/h and maximum permitted line speeds; flight relations falling into a 6.5–13 h rail window were then linked with Eurostat passenger volumes. The analysis identifies London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Milan, Amsterdam and Vienna as consistently high-volume candidates in both scenarios, with London and Vienna examined in detail as contrasting cases. The 2050 scenario integrates planned, funded and aspirational TEN-T high-speed projects and is therefore presented as an upper-bound accessibility experiment reflecting stated political intent, rather than as a delivery forecast; the identified corridors are candidate relations for subsequent, more detailed operational feasibility work, and the reported rankings are conditional on the applied 6.5–13 h rail-window definition. The results suggest, as a hypothesis to be tested in subsequent operational studies, that high-speed night trains and daytime high-speed services may act as complementary segments of a single long-distance rail offering, whose realisable modal shift will ultimately depend on price, comfort and operational conditions not modelled here.