If you want the cheapest way out of Brussels this summer, book a coach. If you want the quickest, fly. The train, the mode Europe's governments most want you to take, was rarely the cheapest option on any of the 26 routes we tracked, and only occasionally the quickest.
That is the headline from a data set we assembled over 2025: the cheapest available ticket for every travel day over about two months, for trains, coaches and flights between Brussels and twelve European cities; the best fares to several thousand stations from Brussels and from Berlin; and a year of Eurostar arrival times. Everything below is an aggregate, a median, a quartile or a share, rather than the fares themselves.
The coach wins on price, the plane on time
Across the 26 routes, the coach offered the cheapest ticket of the day most often on 22. On the other four, to and from Barcelona and Rome, it was the plane. The train was never the mode most likely to be cheapest.
The gap is not small. From Berlin to Brussels the median cheapest fare was €38 by coach, €77 by train and €304 by plane. From Barcelona to Brussels the plane was the bargain at €59, against €82 by coach and €292 by train.
Price buys time. On Berlin to Brussels the train takes 9h12 door to door, the coach 13h21 and the plane 4h25, even after adding three hours for getting to, through and out of the airports. The train sits between the two on almost every route: slower than flying, faster than the coach, and priced like neither.
Where a kilometre of rail is cheap
Looking only at the train, and dividing the cheapest fare to each station by the road distance, Europe's rail bargains lie to the east and south-east. From Brussels, Hungary costs €5.1 per 100 km and Austria €5.5. From Berlin, Croatia costs €4.7 and Switzerland €5.3.
France is the outlier in both directions: the dearest destination from Brussels at €13.3 per 100 km, and also by far the fastest, at 105 km/h door to door, the high-speed network doing exactly what it was built for. From Berlin, France costs €8 per 100 km at 92 km/h, against €6.6 and 56 km/h for journeys within Germany. Short hops skew the other way: the Netherlands and Luxembourg look expensive per kilometre, at €8.2 and €12, because a €18 ticket for 213 km is still a lot of ticket per kilometre.
Eurostar: the later the train, the later it arrives
Over twelve months and about 100,000 arrivals, the average Eurostar arrived 6.6 minutes late, and 17.4% of arrivals were 15 minutes late or more. The average hides a clean pattern. Trains due before 7h arrived on time, within a minute or two. From there the delay climbs steadily through the day, to around 10 minutes for arrivals scheduled between 20h and 23h. Delays accumulate along the day's rotations and are never quite recovered.
Where you are going matters as much as when. Arrivals at Amsterdam Centraal averaged 10.7 minutes late, with more than a quarter of trains 15 minutes late or more. Lille Europe, at 4.4 minutes, was the most punctual station in the network; Brussels Midi, at 5.9 minutes, sat near the top, London St Pancras at 6.7 and Paris Nord at 7.1 in the middle.
The calendar tells the same story at two scales. Friday is the worst day to travel, at 8.7 minutes of average delay, and Sunday the best, at 4.9. Across the year, October 2024 and March 2025 were the most punctual months, at 4 minutes, while July 2024 and June 2025, at 9.6 and 9.3 minutes, were the worst: the summer peak loads the network and the delays follow.
Brussels to Paris: when the detour pays
The direct train between Brussels and Paris takes 82 minutes. Booking a connection through Lille instead, a trip of two trains and a change, sounds like a false economy. On many days it is not. Over 61 travel days in summer 2025, excluding the low-cost Ouigo services, the Lille connection was cheaper than the cheapest direct train on 25% of days towards Paris and on 39% of days towards Brussels. On those days the median saving was €5.50 towards Paris and €12.50 towards Brussels, and the largest about €35 in both directions.
The saving concentrates on a handful of days, often in the first and last weeks of the window, when the direct trains are nearly full. For the rest of the summer the direct train is cheaper and the detour is simply slower.
About the figures
Fares are the cheapest ticket available for each travel day at the time of collection, for one adult, one way. Plane travel times include three hours for airport transfers. Eurostar delays are measured against the scheduled arrival time, one record per train arrival. Country figures use the cheapest fare to each station and the road distance from the origin, and only countries with at least ten destination stations are shown.
To plan regional trains in France, see the TER planner in Ticket to Ride.