Climate change is for real, and we need of strong radical political solutions to reduce future environmental changes. But apart for voting and campaigning for political change, what can we do as researchers in this and other projects? One thing is to stay on the ground and not create an unnecessarily big carbon footprint by flying all over the world to meet each other and attend conferences. We decided therefore to go by train to and from our latest meeting in London. In this blog post Maria Berge will describe how she got to that decision and the pros and cons of doing such journey.
I never fly when travelling in Sweden and I travel a lot by train from Umeå (seven hours by train from Stockholm) to Uppsala, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Örebro to research meetings with colleagues as well as to see family. I find travelling by train fairly easy and convenient in Sweden (although it almost a sport here to complain about how bad the Swedish train company SJ is). However, before Covid-19 I went abroad as often as once a year to present my research and meet up with international colleagues. The excuses I used when making this choice was time and money. Strangely, we have built a society in which it is substantially more expensive to travel environmentally. Airplanes are also temptingly fast when travelling long distances and I do not like to be away from my children and partner more than necessary. However, three years ago my partner told me that he does not support me going away if I continue flying which made me reconsider this habit. I have never asked my children what they think about me flying, but I want them to inherit a planet in the best possible condition. The choice suddenly became easy: if I want to continue travelling in Europe, I have to do it by train.
Going to the meeting in London was my first experience of travelling long distances by train. (Okay, I back-packed in my youth but I am old now). The research project has a budget for travelling and we have not done much due to Covid-19, so the cost was not an issue. But time was; none of us wanted to be away from home more than necessary. Umeå university’s travel agency do not give any support to staff travelling by train internationally, so we put a lot of effort into finding the most time-efficient way to go from London for all three of us. We started planning the journey in detail in June. Heather was a great help here since she made this journey several times before. She recommended that we use The Man in Seat Sixty One website , written and maintained by Mark Smith. This website focuses almost exclusively on train travel and we used the routes and advice from him when booking – like allowing time for unexpected delays. We decided to take the new night train from Stockholm to Hamburg-Altona – that way Andreas could join us in Malmö.
In the end we used three train companies:
SJ – Svenska Järnvägar: Umeå – Stockholm and Stockholm – Hamburg
DB – DeutchBahn: Hamburg – Köln and Köln – Brussels
Eurostar: Brussels – London
Eva made this journey without any long stops and she started at 8.10 on Friday morning in Umeå and arrived 19:00 Saturday evening (in total 32 hours). It is difficult to say how much time we used discussing the journey and getting the tickets but booking a hotel in London was fairly easy after that.
This train journey had several limitations. First of all, going by train prolonged my “time away” by at least 24 hours in each direction, and I have to confess that I don’t like to be away from my family. Also, since it was the first time I did this, I felt confused at the Brussels station (they really should have better signage to find the Eurostar trains). The Brussels-London leg was far less convenient than all the others since UK is not part of the EU anymore. It was surprising how slow the security checks and passport control were; using Eurostar was the only time on our whole journey we needed to queue. We also got surprised by the Danish passport control on the return journey. In the middle of the night (!) two people visited us in our cabin. And why do people that check passports yell?
On the upside, I escaped the feeling of anxiety about destroying the planet and I have got a lot of supportive feedback from colleagues for doing this. People seem truly interested in this choice of mine. Railway stations are also much nicer and cosier than airports, and we had a chance to have a cute breakfast in Hamburg and to see the dome of Köln for the first time.
The view of the different landscapes when looking out of the window is definitely better and more interesting on the train. Another advantage was that we could actually work on the train. On our way to London we did a lot of reading, preparing us for our meeting and on our way home we wrote and caught up on things that has happened in Sweden while we had been gone. It is fun to travel like this together, we found out that we all have different travelling personalities. I would also like to add that the personnel on the new long-distance Stockholm-Hamburg route were lovely and helpful, one of them even admitted that he is a train-geek.
To sum up, I have started my journey of learning a new habit. And I will try to keep it.