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Business Traveller

Europe By Rail

Aired October 13, 2007 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

RICHARD QUEST, CNN INTERNATIONAL HOST: Trains, trains and trains galore! Hello! And welcome to CNN BUSINESS TRAVELLER. I'm Richard Quest. This month's reporting from the railways of Europe.
We're abandoning the plane to show you that these days with so many hassles when it comes to flying, there really is an alternative for the business traveler by going on the rattlers. The phrase you're going to hear us say again and again is four hours or less. That seems to be the magic number where the train competes efficiently and effectively with the plane.

So, got your ticket? Let's head to the iron road. All aboard.

Coming up, joining the dance with Railteams. Interrailings (ph) grows up.

Overnight to Barcelona on the businessman's favorite, the train hotel.

And breaking the speed record. We're on the Eurostar.

Rail travel in Europe is enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment and for obvious reasons. Security delays, air traffic control problems, overcrowded planes and airports. It seems sometimes we'll do just about anything to avoid taking the plane.

Very often driving isn't practical for either reasons of distance or simply the roads are jam packed, too. It's not surprising that today we're deciding to let the train take the strain.

QUEST (voice-over): The railways have always had a romantic image about them. Steam trains. Night journeys. And the possibility of that "Brief Encounter."

Railways have shaped the landscape we know today. Before the iron road, there were no suburbs, no standard time, no seaside resorts. France became the first member of the European high speed club in 1981. Their trains, Train a Grande Vitesse, the TGV, have now carried more than 1.3 billion passengers in the years since.

CHRISTIAN WOLMER, TRANSPORT ANALYST: The railways have changed immeasurably over the last 20, 25 years. We almost got the idea that they're still pulled by steam engines and really most trains these days are modern, and they really are completely different, I think, from the image that they have.

QUEST: But the case for new rail wasn't always that straightforward. They were competing for funds against the motorways.

CHRIS GREEN, CHAIRMAN, RAILWAY FORUM: The British government went motorway mad in the `60s whereas the French government did both. So in France you've got your TGV and your toll motorways. In Britain we just got the motorways. Now there's been a complete change of view and the government is showing a lot of interest in accelerating trains and in high speed travel.

QUEST: After being overlooked in the `70s and `80s, the renaissance of rail is now well underway. Just as the budget airlines transformed air travel, high speed rail lines across the continent are bringing rail travel back into serious business.

They are capitalizing on the frustrations of queuing at airports, concerns about the environment and trumpeting the ease of city center to city center travel. It's a far, far cry from the steam age.

JONATHAN GLANCEY, ARCHITECTURE CRITIC: Railways are, at their best, a wonderfully romantic way of traveling as well as a very practical way of traveling and I think we can see in continental Europe and in Eurostar that it truly is a new age of the train. It's very different from the age of "Brief Encounter" films and people talking about the old accents and going on gorgeous steam trains. It's a different world.

QUEST: Modern railway is all about sleek efficiency. But it would be sad to think there's no room for nostalgia.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm so glad I chance to explain. I didn't think I'd see you again.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Perhaps (inaudible).

WOLMER: I'm afraid that brief encounter days are no longer with us. You can't even open the windows to kiss them.

QUEST (on camera): All too often the argument of the train versus the plane comes down to the simple mathematics of the time it takes to make the actual journey. But that ignores the train's biggest asset. Convenience. I'm about to board the train hotel from Paris to Barcelona. To be sure, the journey will take me 12 hours but it's overnight.

QUEST (voice-over): The Ellipsis train hotel has been running its sleeper service since 1974. We're on the Joan Miro (ph) from Paris Gare d'Austerlitz to Barcelona's Franca (ph) station. City center to city center convenience on this trip.

The train hotel likes to consider itself a hotel on wheels and it's got all the services to keep the business traveler happy, except Internet access.

(on camera): And on advantage of dinner in the diner, metal cutlery, room to spend out, and proper portions.

JOSE MANUEL ALBENZ, VICE PRESIDENT PURE PRESTIGE: The great thing with the train that I can leave my house, I go from work, I go home, I see the kids, I take the train at 9:00 so I have dinner here, I sleep, and I wait up at 8:00 and I am in (inaudible).

QUEST (voice over): The galley may be on the small side but it turns out impressively tasty fair. There's even a bar if you want to while a way a few hours. Food and drink is served in the evening until 2:00 a.m. Breakfast begins at 6:00.

There are four classes on this train. Most business travelers will go for Grand Plus (ph). Expect to pay around $530 for a one way trip or $850 with return.

(on camera): Let me show you around the Grand class accommodations. The beauty of all of this is there is plenty of room to hang up clothes so tomorrow morning everything will be just so. My own bathroom accommodations including a private shower and even a rather splendid amenity kit. Tomorrow morning, Barcelona.

(voice-over): There area lot of tourists on the train so occupancy often reaches 80 percent. Four hundred thousand people rode the four route network last year so it's certainly popular.

(on camera): Well, we're just about an hour and a half out of Barcelona. So how was my night's sleep on Ellipsis? I would say it was OK. Not brilliant. I slept until about 4:00 in the morning and then the train started chuntering (ph) over the rails and being moved backwards and forwards and that was just about it. A bit more dozing and it was time to get up and breakfast.

(voice-over): As we draw towards Barcelona, breakfast is served. It's complimentary for both grand and business class customers.

(on camera): I've arrived in Barcelona. The train left on time and arrived bang on schedule. Barcelona, another magnificent European rail station. I have eaten well. Slept. Showered and am ready to do a day's work. It's just about half past 8:00. The first flight touched down from Paris also on time. The only problem is, those passengers are still waiting for their luggage and waiting to get into town. I'm already here.

(voice-over): Just time for a whistle stop tour of Barcelona for the next leg of my journey.

QUEST (on camera): Beautiful Barcelona. Now that we've done the long distance on the train, coming up after the break, how four hours or less means traveling around Europe puts the train in front.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

QUEST: Welcome back to BUSINESS TRAVELLER, where I'm now in Zurich in Switzerland. This is an ICE train, one of the workhorses of the German railway, the Deutschebahn. Now we're going to put to the test the idea that if you can make the journey in four hours or less, trains like this offer a real alternative to the plane.

So with organizations like Railteam joining up various European cities, taking a leaf out of the airlines books, it's time to see how quickly and efficiently I can get from Zurich to Stuttgart.

(voice-over): Europe's high speed rail network is anticipating a period of staggering growth from 15 million passengers a year to 25 million by 2010. And the track is growing just as fast. Three thousand miles of fast track in Europe will become 4,000 in just three years. There'll be 5,000 miles of track by 2020.

So it's not hard to see why the trains stack up.

CHRIS GREEN, CHAIRMAN, RAILWAY FORUM: It's quite simply speed and comfort. The people are getting fed up with the time it takes to get to an airplane and through the security systems. On a train you can be halfway across Europe by the time you actually got on the airplane.

QUEST: In France, the new TGV which opened in June has slashed journey times between Paris and Eastern France. It's now become possible to link more and more cities into the golden rule, four hours or less.

WOLMER: Travelers are considering that four hours is the point at which they might take the plane rather than the train. It used to be considered that that was two and a half hours that they might consider to take the plane. So that balance is moving in favor of the railways.

QUEST: Business travelers tired of the hassle of flying are voting with their feet and opting for rail.

SIMON WARBURTON, EDITOR, ABTN: We replicated a classic business travelers trip, which was London-Cologne, Cologne-Paris, Paris-London. And we did it over three days. It can be really noisy. The trip particularly I remember from Cologne to Paris even in the business class section was absolutely packed, with everyone on their phones, everyone trying to work. It was a real cacophony of noise.

And so in theory it's a great idea. In reality it's quite different.

QUEST: There is another advantage to rail. It's greener than flying. Luring travelers onto the track means there's a carbon footprint up to 10 times smaller than flying and the train consumes two to three times less energy than road travel. And don't forget that high speed rail lane takes up half the surface space of a motorway.

Best of all, if the passenger numbers are there, it's comparatively cheap and easy to expand capacity. You simply put on another train.

(on camera): If there is one route that they believe shows the viability of rail, it is this one. It is from Stuttgart to Paris. The journey takes three hours, 40 minutes. As long as the railway operators can keep it to under four hours, they know they have a realistic opportunity to beat the plane. Paris is next.

(voice-over): It's a simple idea. Copy the planes. Railteam mirrors the big code sharing alliances of the airlines. It comprised the great and the good of Europe's railways.

WOLMER: The Railteam I think puts them on the map in that respect. I think the Railteam is a very important development. It's taken a long time to negotiating between the different rail companies but it ought to take off.

QUEST: The heart of the scheme is through ticketing. Passengers will be able to use a multilingual Web site to book through tickets to 100 cities rising to 400 destinations by 2020.

KARL-FRIEDRICH RAUSCH, DEUTSCHE BAHN: It will bring better access to the tickets, better prices because we are sure the customer will know always the lowest fair in each sector. We will have better connecting times and better services.

QUEST: Railteam aims to grab half of all journeys taking four hours or less from the airlines. Changing trains will be rationalized at five major hubs, at Lille, Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. It will allow for swift, comfortable efficient travel all throughout the system.

There is even a service called hop. If you miss your connection, you can jump on the next train at no extra cost.

(on camera): The train arrived just a moment late, which frankly is on time in anyone's book. As long as the TGV and Railteam can offer this sort of reliability and frequency, they have a real chance of taking on the planes.

Coming up after the break, sleek and stylist with a hint of speed. No. I'm not talking about the train, I'm talking about the Zooker (ph). "Smart Traveler" puts this latest back to the test.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

QUEST: Let me introduce you to the Zooker. Our "Smart Traveler" test this month.

The Zooker is without doubt a very stylish looking bag. But there are some problems with it. For instance. First thing, you can get into it from the top. You have to roll it down and open it from the side. And once you're inside it has a lack of pockets on the inside.

To be sure, there's all this stuff in the lid, but it's cluttered and difficult to get to. In the main body of the bag, you're inevitably going to be pulling things out, pushing things round, dealing with bags. It's the lack of pockets inside that I find the most difficult with the Zooker. A bit of style over substance.

Where the Zooker really comes into its own is when you're waiting for a train or a plane. It's the only bag that I've ever come across that actually doubles up as a set you can get on with a bit of work while you wait for your departure.

I've now used the Zooker for several days and I like it. To be sure, the lack of pockets inside is a problem for me but as a bag that doubles up as a seat, it's a top tip for the CNN "Smart Traveler."

(on camera): Looking down on the Place Vendome is Napoleon. It was his engineer, Albert Mathieu-Favier who first had the idea of linking France with Britain by building a tunnel under the channel. That was in 1802.

(voice-over): For the first 100 years they had the will but not the way. A series of exploratory digs and fanciful ideas was started from both sides. The main problem, how to do it. No tunnel of that length had ever been constructed, and knowledge of undersea geology, that was patchy.

Within a few decades, technology was no longer an issue. Now it was the military's turn to object. Island Britain was not a defense they wanted to give up easily. It wasn't until 1955 that the British military dropped its opposition to a channel tunnel.

Now the issue was more financial. Like one enormous bouncing check, the dig kept failing because of insufficient funds. When the finance dried up, the tunneling stopped, sometimes only meters from the shore.

The story of today's tunnel in 1987. Thirteen thousand workers spent seven years driving a 31 mile tunnel through a single layer of chalk between Folkestone and Sangatte. It's actually three tunnels. Two for the trains in opposite directions and a service lane in the middle.

MARGARET THATCHER, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER, 1979-1990: When it's complete, it will be the first time man or animal has walked from this country to France for 40 million years.

QUEST: They broke through on December 1, 1990.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're through. They're through. Yay!

QUEST: Today's tunnel carries people, cars and freight and the future of Britain's high speed rail hopes.

Eurostar has always had a total travel time much less than flying between the various cities, if you allow for the fact of getting to the airport, security and check in.

(on cameras): And Eurostar is about to get a great deal faster with the opening of HS1, Britain's new and first high speed rail track. Christian Mahne tried it out on an experimental run from Brussels.

CHRISTIASN MAHNE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): From the cobblestones and chocolate shops in the heart of Brussels to central London in under two hours. That was the challenge Eurostar set itself for its new high speed rail link. After all, time is money.

And while the band played on, the invited passengers got in.

(on camera): We left Brussels' Midi Station at 11:05 on the dot. Now, if everything goes according to plans, the 186 mile an hour run along a High Speed 1 will get us to St. Pancras at 11:56. Let's see how they do.

(voice-over): Since the tunnel opened, Eurostar has priced itself as a premium product and the new link won't change that.

RICHARD BROWN, CEO, EUROSTAR: And a nice surprise to all of our passengers, we're not going to be increasing our prices when the new line opens and we start new service from November 14 to Saint Pancras International.

MAHNE: The reason for the time improvement? High Speed 1, the first new domestic stretch of British railway line for 100 years. The 12 billion dollar project is a record breaker on many fronts. Engineers worked 100 million hours over 11 years. They moved 530 million cubic feet of earth out of 37 miles of tunnels.

(on camera): So, here we are at the Saint Pancras International Station in London, 232 miles and one hour, 44 minutes later. A new record.

(voice-over): The new Saint Pancras International opens for business on November 14.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

QUEST: Saint Pancras Station. The new London terminus for the Eurostar. Just look at this magnificent Victorian building. This is the Barlow Shed. Constructed and finished in 1868 and now lovingly restored.

Saint Pancras, the cathedral of the railways. It's one of the most celebrated examples of Victorian engineering. Designed by George Gilbert Scott, it was built in the late 1860s to be a magnificent centerpiece of the Midland Railway. A hundred years later and high Victorian architecture was out of fashion, considered hideous and fit only for demolition.

But a new healthy respect for conservation saved the station. Unfortunately no one knew what to do with it and the building lay virtually empty for years.

Now the station is being reborn. A $1.5 billion revamp. Howard Towl (ph) from London and Continental Stations has been with the project throughout its development.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a very important building architecturally because when it was completed it was the largest closed space anywhere in the world.

GLANCEY: I think anybody coming out of the London Underground system up into Saint Pancras Station will imagine they they'd died and gone to heaven.

QUEST: On the upper floors, a facelift extension on what will be Europe's longest champagne bar, and down below, in the old undercraft (ph) where beer barrels used to be stored. There is a retail area and lounges for Eurostar passengers.

The hope is this will become London's Grand Central Station, an appropriately imposing building where a choir of commuters will bring life to this cathedral once again.

(on camera): And that's CNN BUSINESS TRAVELLER for this month. I'm Richard Quest reporting from the European iron road. Wherever your travels may take you, I hope it's profitable. And as they used to say and will say once again, let's meet under the clock.

END

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