European rail mileage

[westernsmt]

Sorry if this has been asked before but I'm trying to find some European train mileage , specifically St Pancras to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Zurich , Zurich to Paris and Paris to St Pancras . Is there a source for this info online ? Thanks in advance to anyone that can point me in the right direction .

 

[hexagon789]

Sorry if this has been asked before but I'm trying to find some European train mileage , specifically St Pancras to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Zurich , Zurich to Paris and Paris to St Pancras . Is there a source for this info online ? Thanks in advance to anyone that can point me in the right direction .

The European Rail Timetable includes kilometrages; the DB Online Timetable I think does or it did.

Some national operators list them in timetables or route maps, but the problem a lot of the time is that 'tariff kilometres' are what is often shown in timetables in Europe.

That is the distances used to calculate the fares rather than the 'true' distance.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

ERT gives St Pancras-Brussels Midi as 373km, Brussels Midi-Amsterdam C 212 via the HSL.
Paris Nord-St Pancras is 492.
Paris Lyon-Dijon-Basel SBB is 525, and Basel SBB-Zurich HB is 91.

Routes through Germany are a bit messy, even in the ERT.
Routes can vary, some going via Frankfurt Hbf or the Airport, or even the classic route along the Rhine.
Basel SBB-Frankfurt Hbf is 332.
Frankfurt Hbf-Koln Hbf is 180 via the HSL, 221 via Koblenz.
Koln Hbf-Arnhem C is 163, Arnhem C-Amsterdam C is 96.

You need the ERT for the detail. There is an e-version at a lower price than the printed edition.
The Schweers atlases are the ultimate reference in DE and CH (also AT, SI, IT), giving precise distances from the original sources.
I haven't got the Northern France volume but it probably covers your French mileage.

For online sources, there's a very useful series of wiki sites covering specific railway lines in Europe.
For instance, this is the page on LGV Sud-Est (Paris-Lyon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Sud-Est
This is the English version.
However, there is often much more detail in the local language: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Sud-Est
This includes things like kilometrage and line speeds.
You can always translate the French text to English using your browser, but beware it can go haywire on the columns of data typical of railways.

This is LGV Nord (Paris-Lille-Calais) - again, there is more detail in the French version than the English:

LGV Nord - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

LGV Nord — Wikipédia

fr.wikipedia.org

The classic railway routes generally use old names going back to when they were built.
eg this is the Mannheim-Basel railway (built by the Grand Duchy of Baden):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannheim–Karlsruhe–Basel_railway (English)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnstrecke_Mannheim–Basel (German, note the detailed km data in the route diagram)

You can often hop from one route to another using the links on the web page, rather than searching again on wiki.

 

[XAM2175]

https://signal.eu.org/osm/ will give you reasonably correct distances (AFAIK), but it takes a bit of massaging sometimes. As @LNW-GW Joint suggests, you will need to be able to provide appropriate "via" points in places where your route deviates from whatever the routing engine considers to be standard.

 

[dutchflyer]

That ERT used to be called the Thomas Cook-every 3 monthes now still as printed, but for this purpose any old (if it has those lines after opened) will do.
As an aside, I am now on day 28 of a 2-month InterRail on mobile and this has statistics-it will show how many countries and how many KMs one has done with it and how many hours as scheduled sitting in trains-this latter does not count any delays, nor sudden bus-substitutes as I have endured. And right now in Bulgaria, Sofia, where I noted that at its quite un-busy main station are several large maps of its system with all the KMs between stations-but that is quite unique in Europe now.

 

[westernsmt]

Thanks for all the help , not as easy as I first thought to get this info !

 

[The exile]

Don’t know whether it still does, but the db electronic timetable used to include a section that you could use to calculate the cost of track access for any journey. As distance travelled is a significant determining factor, you could calculate most db routings that way. For fairly obvious reasons it didn’t like things like the Hamburg or Berlin s-bahns. I’ve long since switched to Schweers and Wall atlases and Wikipedia, though, backed up by a map measuring tool as a last resort.

 

[Watershed]

https://signal.eu.org/osm/ will give you reasonably correct distances (AFAIK), but it takes a bit of massaging sometimes. As @LNW-GW Joint suggests, you will need to be able to provide appropriate "via" points in places where your route deviates from whatever the routing engine considers to be standard.

I find this by far the best tool, as it contains almost all rail networks out there throughout the world. I accept it won't always be 100% accurate but it's good enough for my purposes.

It's not very easy to use on mobile but it's fairly straightforward on a desktop device.