The Amazing Race 35, Episode 7

Cologne (Germany) - Frankfurt (Germany) - Vienna (Austria) - Ljubljana (Slovenia) - Lake Bled (Slovenia) - Planica (Slovenia) - Ljubljana (Slovenia)

[Waiting for the morning train to Ljubljana on the platform at Meidling Station, Vienna.]

“Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”

The producers of The Amazing Race are trying to make a profitable TV show, not teach viewers of the show how to travel around the world. For the sake of entertainment and marketing, they sometimes have good reasons to make the members of the cast do things that would make no sense for real-world travellers. But that doesn’t mean that you should make the same choices if you find yourself in the same situation.

In this episode, the racers had to use a slow, expensive, uncomfortable, and unscenic combination of planes, trains, and automobiles to get from Cologne to Ljubljana, starting by driving themselves from Cologne to the Frankfurt Airport (FRA).

Why drive when it’s faster, easier, and cheaper to take the train? There are direct high-speed trains from Cologne to Frankfurt Airport several times an hour. The fastest ICE Sprinter trains cover the 151 km (94 mile) distance in 55 minutes. Even those ICE trains that make a few intermediate stops take less than 90 minutes.

The high-speed rail line is straighter and shorter than the autobahn. By car, it’s 177 km (110 miles) from Cologne to FRA. There’s no speed limit on the autobahn, as some of the contestants on The Amazing Race 35 notice, but you’d have to average 195 km/h (120 mph) door-to-door to match the train. During the day, traffic doesn’t generally allow such high speeds, even if your car and driving skill might be capable of it. Typical driving time in daytime traffic is between one and a half and two and a half hours.

Although it can be tricky to get it reserved and ticketed from the USA, Lufthansa offers an add-on for travel between Frankfurt (FRA) or Munich (MUC) airport and any train station in Germany on any Deutsche Bahn train, including high-speed ICE trains, for a flat price of EUR30 (2nd class), one-way, in conjunction with any international Lufthansa flight. Separate tickets can be cheaper, depending on the distance and how long in advance you buy them. Advance-purchase fixed-date ICE tickets from Cologne to Frankfurt Airport start at EUR15 one-way, 2nd class. At that price, tickets for two people would cost less than you’d probably have to pay for fuel, at typical German prices, to drive from Cologne to FRA in even a fairly small and fuel-efficient car. (Local trains between Cologne and Frankfurt Airport on which you could us a Deutschland-Ticket follow the scenic route along the Rhine River valley, taking about four hours.)

But why go to FRA to fly to Vienna? Cologne has its own airport, Cologne-Bonn Airport (CGN), much closer than FRA and connected to central Cologne by both ICE trains and and an S-Bahn subway line. CGN airport may have been more significant when Bonn was the capital of Germany, but it has become both a major air cargo hub and, as the Cologne Tourist Board boasts, “the largest low-cost [airline] hub in continental Europe”.

[Map from FlightConnections.com of scheduled airline routes to and from Cologne-Bonn Airport (CGN), including airlines operating between CGN and Vienna (VIE).]

There are no direct flights between CGN and Ljubljana (LJU), but there are direct flights from CGN to Vienna on Eurowings (a “low-fare” and charter-flight subsidiary of Lufthansa) and Ryanair, as well as on Austrian Airlines (also a subsidiary of Lufthansa, but a full-fare, full-service airline).

There are direct flights from FRA to LJU, so taking a train to Frankfurt to catch a plane might have made sense if speed was all-important and price was no object. But if the racers were going to fly to Vienna, not Ljubljana, there was no reason for them to go to Frankfurt.

But why fly to Vienna if what you want is to take a train to Ljubljana?

The rail route through Villach (Austria) over the eastern Alps and then down along the Sava River to Ljubljana is worth taking for the scenery.

[Misty mountains with late fall color as seen from the train between Ljubljana and Vienna.]

Both the Slovenian and Austrian railways operate daytime trains along this route, some with a restaurant car.

[Slovenian-operated day train leaving Vienna for Ljubljana.]

But the racers missed out on all of this the scenery by taking overnight trains (with a changes of trains at 2 a.m. in Graz). So what was the point for the TV producers of sending the racers to Vienna at all?

You might think that flying to Vienna and continuing from there by train would reduce the total journey time, but you’d be wrong. The overnight train the racers ended up on from Graz to Ljubljana actually originated in Stuttgart, Germany. The racers could have left Cologne by ICE at 5:45 p.m., hours later than they did, made one leisurely connection in Stuttgart or Ulm at 8 or 9 p.m., and then slept through the night in a couchette berth or bed in a compartment to Ljubljana, arriving at exactly the same time (8 a.m.) as they did.

The walk-up one-way fare on Austrian Airways from Frankfurt to Vienna is EUR473 (US$513) per person. That’s almost exactly twice the price of a 1st-class train ticket all the way from Cologne to Ljubljana, including a bed in a private compartment, or the price of two 2nd-class tickets including couchette berths.

The producers of The Amazing Race missed a chance to showcase this new sleeping-car service, which was launched in December 2022, and maybe even to get some product-placement and promotional money from the Austrian Railway (ÖBB).

I’ve written before about ÖBB as the largest operator of sleeping-car services in Europe and about the larger issues surrounding the revival of interest in European night trains. ÖBB is to be commended for continuing to expand its sleeping-car services, using mostly renovated older sleeping cars (some formerly mothballed by Deutsche Bahn and other European railway companies), as Amtrak did when it was first created. A fleet of new ÖBB sleeping cars is under construction, but will take time.

Despite Austria’s favorable location as a hub for through trains between Northwestern and Southeastern Europe, not all routes run through Austria. Other European railway operators will need to do their share to rebuild a truly integrated network of through international trains, including overnight trains, across Europe. Especially noteworthy in this regard is the work of freelance passenger rail advocate and gadfly Jon Worth, currently running for a place on the list of candidates to be nominated by the Green Party of Germany for next year’s elections to the European Parliament. Jon Worth may have done more than anyone else to identify the obstacles to cross-border European passenger rail service and what could be done about them by the EU. Everyone who supports European passenger trains has an interest in his nomination and election to the European Parliament.

All of this, of course, begs the question of why to go to Slovenia or what to see and do when you get there. Stay tuned for more on that next week.