IDG News Service —
On Europe's roomy, comfortable long-distance trains, I feel so at home that the low, rhythmic rumbling along the track often makes me want to fall asleep.
If I can stay awake, though, I love journeys on these trains for the sensation of freedom they give. Unlike cars or planes, where I'm buckled into a cramped seat, on a train there's room to move around, to walk about, to go sit in the bar. Even to work without the screen of my laptop bashing into the back of the seat in front.
Trains are convenient in other ways too: If I leave home in Paris to visit our office in central London, just 30 minutes separate my seat at the breakfast table from my seat on the train -- a 20-minute bicycle ride to the station, and 10 minutes to stroll through passport control and down to the platform. After that, I can do what I please with the next three hours: work, read ... or snooze. On arrival, it takes just a few minutes to walk to the office -- but I could reach most of central London within 30 minutes on the Tube.
As Jean-Michel Dancoisne, CEO of international train operator Thalys, puts it, "When you take the train, your time is your own."
On the plane, it's a different story.
To make that same journey from home in Paris to our London office by air takes about the same time, door to door: four hours. But the time is broken into unusable little chunks: a 10-minute walk to the Métro, 50 minutes on three trains to reach the airport, half an hour waiting in lines at check-in, passport control, security and so on. Even on the 45-minute flight, by the time the seat belt signs go out and I'm allowed to boot up my laptop, I can work for less than half an hour before it's time to shut it down again. The longest uninterrupted stage of the journey is an hour spent on a crowded Tube from Heathrow into the center of London -- but that's no environment in which to whip out a laptop and concentrate.
Little wonder, then, that I feel more at home on trains than on planes: I have space, calm and coffee. The only thing missing is my broadband Internet connection.
Well, not any longer, at least on journeys via Brussels to Amsterdam or the German city of Cologne. On Wednesday, Thalys launched a Wi-Fi Internet access service, ThalysNet, on board the high-speed trains it operates between Paris and those three cities.
