Passenger trains that cross borders are overwhelmingly a European thing – it’s only in the European Union that you get the combination of small countries, wealthy economies and open borders that makes international rail travel possible. Compared to an Øresund train every 10 minutes or a Le Shuttle every 15 minutes, intercity trains that only run once every couple of hours have little impact on the total passenger count. International train journeys aren’t always glamorous long-distance adventures – a lot of them are regular commutes. You don’t need that many people crossing the border as long as they do it every day. This is the secret to racking up a really high passenger count. Why not get a house in French Thionville and take the train to work every day instead? If just 10,000 people did that, in a year they’d cross the border 5 million times. Luxembourg is a very expensive place to live, but its capital city is only a few kilometres from the border. With 4.3 million passengers a year, this pairing is twice as busy as France-Germany – how, when Luxembourg only has half a million residents total?
Rounding out the top five is France-Luxembourg. Not all international voyages are glamorous. Not everyone on those sections will have crossed into Switzerland (some will just gone from one German or French station to another) but it will still be responsible for a big part of the total passenger count for Switzerland.Ī commuter train from Basel, Switzerland to Zell, Germany. 25 million people use this Trinational S-Bahn every year, with about 10 million of those using the international sections. These share a suburban train network that crosses the German-Swiss border three times and the French-Swiss border once. The Swiss city of Basel, the French city of Saint-Louis, and the German city of Lörrach all lie right next to each other and form an urban area called the “Trinational Eurodistrict”. In these statistics, the two are counted equally, so each passenger could be a diplomat zipping first class from Paris to Brussels, or it could be a worker in Kortrijk commuting to their job in Lille in the morning.įor Germany-Switzerland, most of those 6 million are definitely commuters. Running every 10 minutes each way at peak times, it must be the most frequent international rail service on the planet.įrance-Belgium isn’t a single rail connection – instead, it’s a half a dozen or so lines ranging from high-speed TGV to tiny local services. As well as long-distance trains, the bridge also has a busy commuter service between Copenhagen and the nearby Swedish city of Malmö. Next is another international sea link: Denmark-Sweden over the Øresund Bridge (made famous by Scandi noir detective series The Bridge).
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