Why we built
RailOrFlight.

Train or plane, for a specific city pair

Most "train vs flight" write-ups quote the hour in the air and stop there. That is why a 55-minute SAS hop looks like it beats a 4h45 train. It doesn't, once you count the airport train, security, and the S-Bahn from Hamburg Airport into town. We do that counting, then pick one: train, fly, depends, or don't bother with the train.

We are not a booking site. No airline or rail operator pays us. There are no affiliate links on the verdict. Times, CO₂ and disruption notes are the evidence; the pick is the point.

City centre to city centre

People who actually take these trips — the Eurostar threads, the Seat 61 comments, the "don't fly Paris–Lyon" replies — always add the same extras the timetable hides: getting to Heathrow, the CDG RER, 90 minutes of airport buffer, waiting for a bag. We put those on the clock for both modes.

We time a normal weekday with one hold bag, not a lucky Tuesday with empty security. So our train times can look worse than the operator's poster, and the flights look worse too. That is the comparison worth making.

A small team, revisited every quarter

Routes are researched against operator timetables and disruption stats, then checked again as schedules change. We use a writing assistant to draft; every number on the page is checked against the sources named there. The last-reviewed date is when we last looked, not decoration.

Scheduled flight facts — carriers, frequency, time in the air, airport delay indices — come from ProFlightSearch.com, a sister project. That is the operational baseline. The pick itself is ours.

If a route has changed, or you want a city pair we don't cover, write to us. We read it.