The map above shows how far you can get from London’s St. Pancras Station by train within 12 hours. It was created by Chronotrains.com.
Here are just some of the places you can get to (from the website):
Within 2 hours, you can reach:
- Reading
- Brighton
- City of Westminster (You can walk it in less time than 2 hours)
- Bexley
- Luton
- Sutton
- Crawley
- Croydon.
Within 3 hours, you can reach:
- Paris
- Brussels
- Birmingham
- Sheffield
- Anderlecht
- Bristol
- Lille
- Leicester
- Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
- Ixelles
Within 4 hours, you can reach:
- Antwerp
- Ghent
- Leeds
- Schaerbeek
- Cardiff
- Manchester
- Leuven
- Bradford
- Reims
- Coventry
Within 5 hours, you can reach:
- Luxembourg
- Rotterdam
- Liverpool
- Lyon
- The Hague
- Charleroi
- Liège
- Bettembourg
- Strasbourg
- Brugge
Within 6 hours, you can reach:
- Amsterdam
- Marseille
- Esch-sur-Alzette
- Basel
- Dudelange
- Cologne
- Glasgow
- Utrecht
- Schifflange
- Stuttgart
Within 7 hours, you can reach:
- Geneva
- Lausanne
- Frankfurt
- Montpellier
- Essen
- Nijmegen
- Dortmund
- Arnhem
- Apeldoorn
- Toulon
Within 8 hours, you can reach:
- Zürich
- Toulouse
- Groningen
- Bern
- Winterthur
- Luzern
- Drogheda
- Enschede
- Biel/Bienne, Bray
Now if you know UK trains you may notice that several of these times are slightly off. On the original reddit post, some people mentioned:
clearly not very accurate as you can certainly get to newcastle and carlisle in less than 4h… and this seems to think it’s 6ho to edinbugh. As if you can get to strasbourg faster than Edinburgh
To which nano_72 (the author) replied:
I’ll work on the data accuracy! It’s from the Deutsche Bank but it seems to be missing the higher speed trains nationally.
So while the map looks very beautiful do take it with a pinch of salt. Then again given the reliability of British trains, this map may not be that bad after all.
For similar maps see:
- Travel Times From London In 1881: The First Known Isochronic Map By Francis Galton
- Travel Times From London in 2016 vs 1914
- Travel Time Maps To Wembley & Other London Football Stadiums
- Travel Time from Ancient Rome
What do you think of the map?
Jonathan Wadman says
From my recent experience I would say that British trains are no more unreliable than German ones. Long journeys in both countries have produced similar levels of delay, cancellation and missed connections.