About the Target Network

Europe was once crossed by night trains. Back-on-Track works to bring them back at scale, and this tool is where the network gets designed in the open.

Why night trains

For journeys between 500 and 3,000 kilometres the night train is the realistic alternative to flying. In the EU, aircraft emit roughly 28 times more greenhouse gas per passenger than long-distance trains (IEA figures, via our position paper).

Aviation will not decarbonise any time soon. Sleeping your way across the continent already works. 😃

Target Network 2032

Europe runs about 150 night train routes today. Our general position paper puts the number Europe needs at 300, enough to triple passenger numbers within seven years and connect every major city.

Which 300 is the open question; Target Network 2032 is our proposal: a network built route by route, each one carrying its own economics and climate effect, addressed to the people who decide European and national transport policy. Almost all of it runs on track that already exists. What is missing is the network design, the right train concepts, fair operating conditions, and the funding to close the gap.

What the tool does

Draw a route on the map, set the stops, and the model returns what the service would cost to run for a year, what it would earn under a demand assumption you can change, and the emissions it would displace. It takes about five minutes and no expertise.

Three kinds of contribution are useful here:

• Travellers know which connections Europe is missing. Propose the night train you would take.
• Practitioners know what these services actually cost. Operations, rolling stock, infrastructure and demand are all modelled from parameters you can challenge, with the sources named on every page.
• Policy stakeholders need route-level figures rather than a wish list: cost, subsidy requirement, passengers shifted off aircraft, CO₂e avoided.

What happens to a proposal

Submissions are assessed on the measures that decide transport policy: climate impact, demand, and cost to the public. The strongest will then become the backbone of the target network. We close the remaining gaps, refine the train concepts, and publish the result as a study with a public map and a stated method. Contributors will be credited!

What this site documents

The rest of these pages are the model behind those figures: every formula, the parameters it reads, the source each parameter came from, and the assumptions still standing in for data.

Telling us something

A missing station, a charge that is out of date, a formula that does not hold in your country, a feature the tool needs: the feedback form takes all of it and reaches the working group. Every page here also ends with a short form for a correction to that page alone.

The text and figures on this site are published under CC BY 4.0 — quote and reuse them with credit to Back-on-Track; the tool's source code is on GitHub under the GPL.

Found a mistake?

This documentation describes a model that is still being built, and some of it will be wrong. If a number looks off, a source is missing, or an explanation does not hold up, tell us — it reaches the working group with the page you were reading.