A Facebook group brings together tens of thousands of Swedes who, following Greta Thunberg's example, have decided to take the train instead of the plane, prompting the rail company to offer new night routes.
Ever since Greta Thunberg decided to travel by train to reduce her environmental impact, more and more Swedes — and not only Swedes — have chosen to give up flying for their journeys.
Bjorn Ferry, a Norwegian biathlon athlete who won a gold medal at the Olympics, has also committed to making his work travel more sustainable. Swedish television channel Svt agreed, as a condition for having Ferry as a sports commentator, to a clause committing the Scandinavian public broadcaster not to schedule any air travel. Bjorn Ferry takes the train even for long distances, such as travelling to Italy to take part in certain competitions. Meanwhile, in the Swiss city of Zurich, some politicians have proposed banning the use of flights for work travel by the city's public employees.
As reported by the website Klimareporter, Swedish politicians have also begun opting for train travel, as culture minister Alice Bah Kuhnke did in 2018. There is a Facebook group bringing together Swedish citizens interested in travelling by train rather than by plane: the group Tågsemester (train holiday) currently has almost ninety thousand members, while the page of the same name has more than twelve thousand.
Several hashtags have spread across social networks, including #jagstannarpåmarken (I'm staying on the ground), #flygskam (shame about taking the plane) and Tågsemester itself. What happened in the summer of 2018 — with temperatures well above average in Sweden — led many Swedish citizens to ask themselves what they could do to reduce their environmental footprint. Temperatures above thirty degrees at the Arctic Circle and thirty-five degrees in other parts of the country brought a period of drought that allowed numerous fires to break out, an anomaly for a country like Sweden.
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Interest in train travel has grown thanks to the decision by Greta Thunberg to travel only by rail or electric car, and to forgo all trips that would require flying.
The European tour that brought the Swedish student to Italy as well was organised by a small travel agency. Resebutik enabled the young activist to depart from Stockholm on 14 April 2019 using Interrail tickets, to reach Strasbourg on the 16th, and to arrive in Rome the following day, where she met the Pope and took part in the Piazza del Popolo demonstration on 19 April, before travelling to London for the meeting with the Extinction Rebellion movement, returning to Stockholm on 25 April.
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The travel agency that handled all of this decided to offer a sustainable alternative to those who had resolved never to board a plane again because of CO2 emissions. This gave rise to the idea of reviving long-distance train travel (including to Italy), making particular use of night trains.
The success of the Swedish Flygskam movement and the Tågsemester group led Karlsson to struggle to keep up with travel requests due to the high volume of phone calls and emails received: bookings have essentially quadrupled since January.
According to a survey carried out by Wwf in March 2019, twenty-three per cent of Swedes said they had given up flying to protect the climate, an increase of six per cent compared to the previous year. As many as eighteen per cent expressed a preference for rail travel over air travel.
As reported by the website aero.de, the number of passengers using Sj, the state company that operates Sweden's railways, has risen to a record level of thirty-two million. As a result, the Swedish rail operator has also expanded its range of rail connections, in particular night services. Sj has furthermore shown how train journeys within Sweden are currently cheaper than flights on the same routes. A pricing policy that will certainly encourage a shift of travellers from flights to rail.
Interrail is also generating renewed interest among Swedes, with ticket sales rising in recent years. The European Union's decision to give Interrail tickets to all eighteen-year-olds to travel around Europe can only encourage this trend beyond Scandinavia as well.
