European railway companies are stepping up their efforts to make trains a viable alternative to planes by cutting ticket prices and speeding up journey times, the Telegraaf reported on Thursday.

Dutch ProRail chief Piers Eringa, the new chairman of European rail body EIM, says that ‘smashing the competition’ would be at the top of the EIM agenda in the coming years.

In order to do this trains on journeys of up to 600 kilometres must become at least 30% cheaper through clever adaptations of the tracks, preventive maintenance, more cooperation between train firms, staff exchanges, and more efficient border controls at big stations, he said.

This will make short-haul journeys from Amsterdam to Berlin, Paris or London a matter of three to four hours.

‘Early next year we will introduce passport and security controls on platforms in Amsterdam and Rotterdam stations before travellers board the trains. That means that they will not be asked for their identification for the rest of the journey,’ Eeringa told the paper.

Ticket prices

The EIM also plans to tackle the cost of an international train ticket which is frequently higher than the price of a flight.

‘Our costs can come down considerably. But we also have to be able to compete in the field of taxes. And that is a matter for the authorities and the European Commission,’ the paper quotes him as saying.

Eringa wants to schedule more and cheaper journeys to European destinations using high-speed trains which, he said, are now unnecessarily expensive and inefficient because of border red tape.

Stepping up the efforts to make trains a serious alternative for planes also means the international lingua franca should be English, the EIM chairman told the paper.