Scenarios and main figures

The scenario

Every figure answers a question with a condition attached: what would this train cost, and what would it achieve, under these circumstances? A scenario fixes the circumstances. It has three parts.

Rail network. Infrastructure 2026 is today's network. Infrastructure 2032 (coming soon) is the network expected to exist by 2032, including the fixed links and line upgrades now under construction or firmly committed — journeys that take a long detour today become direct.

Operating conditions. Night trains may use high-speed lines is a policy change, not a construction project: infrastructure managers open existing high-speed track to night trains, and journeys shorten wherever such a line runs alongside the conventional route. Optimised timetables gives night trains well-designed paths instead of the generous padding they carry today, because they rarely hold priority and are planned around other traffic. It is only modelled together with high-speed lines.

Price and regulatory measures (coming soon): a VAT exemption on tickets, an energy tax exemption, and track access charged at direct cost only.

The baseline is Infrastructure 2026 with nothing switched on — the realistic answer to what if this train started running this year? Every figure is shown against the baseline with the same train, so the difference is the scenario's alone.

The main figures

Eight figures summarise a proposal. Unless stated otherwise they cover a full year and both directions, at the frequency and demand set in the Details section.

Journey time

The scheduled time of one direction, from the first departure to the last arrival, averaged over the two directions. It includes braking and acceleration at every stop, the timetable buffer and the dwell times — see Route planning.

Passenger trips

The passengers the train carries. This is the demand you set, as far as the train's classes can seat it: demand that no class on a traveller group's list can take is not served and not counted.

Passenger-km

Each passenger trip multiplied by the distance that passenger travels, summed. It is what the revenue per kilometre and the CO₂e saving are built on.

Necessary subsidy

What the route would need per year from public funds: every cost of running it plus the operator's profit margin, less ticket, services and catering revenue — the negative of the net result. A route whose revenue covers all of that shows none, with its surplus beside it; a negative subsidy is never shown.

Shifted from air

Passengers who would otherwise have flown. The share depends on how far each passenger travels: nobody under 300 km, a quarter at exactly 300 km, rising evenly to everyone from 1,200 km. It is applied per origin–destination pair, so a route with many short hops shifts fewer flights than its length suggests.

Shifted from car or induced

Everyone else: half would have driven, and half would not have made the journey at all — induced travel.

CO₂e saved

The greenhouse gas the route avoids per year, in tonnes of CO₂-equivalent — including the non-CO₂ warming of aviation, which is most of what a flight causes. Each shifted passenger-km saves the plane's or the car's factor less the train's own; an induced passenger-km adds the train's. The factors and their source are on the emissions page.

Subsidy per tonne of CO₂e

The necessary subsidy divided by the CO₂e saved: what one tonne avoided costs the public purse. It reads 0 when the route needs no subsidy, and has no value when the route saves nothing.

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.