Why we built
RailOrFlight.
A decision engine, not a booking site
RailOrFlight exists for one purpose: to give you a straight, honest answer about whether a specific European city pair is better done by train or by plane. We are not affiliated with any airline, rail operator, or booking platform. We do not earn commission on ticket sales. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored verdicts, no tracking pixels.
The verdict — Train, Flight, Depends, or Avoid — is the product. Everything else (the time breakdowns, the CO₂ comparison, the disruption risk score) is the evidence behind it.
Door-to-door honesty
Most flight-versus-train comparisons cheat. They quote gate-to-gate times, ignore airport access, skip the security queue, and assume best-case connections. Our research starts at your front door and ends at your destination city centre. We account for getting to the station or airport, check-in and security buffers, time in the terminal, the journey itself, and the onward leg from airport or station to wherever you are actually going.
We also use realistic conditions: a normal weekday, average weather, a single hold bag. Not a lucky Tuesday in February with no queues. That means our train times sometimes look worse than what the operator advertises, and our flight times often look worse too. That is the point.
Built and maintained by a small editorial team
RailOrFlight is a small, independent project. Routes are researched by a compact editorial team who cross-check times against operator timetables, read disruption statistics, and revisit each verdict roughly every quarter as schedules change. We use an AI writing assistant to help draft initial copy, and all factual claims are verified against primary sources before publication. Every route carries a last-reviewed date — and those dates are real, not decorative.
Scheduled flight facts — carriers, frequency, block times, airport delay indices — come from ProFlightSearch.com, a sister project we built for European flight intelligence. RailOrFlight uses that data as an operational baseline; the verdict itself stays editorial.
If you spot something wrong, a route that has changed, or a city pair we should cover next, please write to us. We read every message.