5 routes where it’s worth comparing trains and planes

There’s a little catch when people say a flight “takes an hour”. The plane does. You don’t.

You have to get to the airport, park (though with aparca&go, that part is already sorted), go through security, find your boarding gate, check that it’s still the same boarding gate, wait, fly, land and, once you’re there, work out how to get from the airport to the place you actually wanted to go.

Suddenly, that one-hour flight starts to come with quite a few asterisks.

And that’s where the train comes in.

Because on some routes, even if it looks slower on paper, once you do the sums properly it can turn out to be much more practical. And, in some cases, even quicker. Want some examples? Here are a few of the standouts:

Madrid–Seville: the original AVE. There’s a reason for that

Spain’s first AVE linked Madrid and Seville in 1992 and, more than three decades later, it’s still one of the best examples of trains getting the better of planes. The fastest trains cover the journey in around two hours and a quarter and drop you at Santa Justa, a short stroll from central Seville.

The airport, on the other hand, is about ten kilometres outside the city, so you can easily add another 30 to 45 minutes of travel to your flight time. And that’s after going through the whole pre-flight airport ritual. Security check included, of course. Nobody gets out of taking their belt off that easily.

Here, the train has a major advantage: you leave from practically the centre of Madrid and arrive in practically the centre of Seville. Fewer detours. Less hassle. Just how we like it at aparca&go