Thrust Carbon’s new free public tool, train.thrustcarbon.com, plots the carbon footprint of any train journey in Great Britain on a map of the rail network, colour-coded by how each line is powered.
The emissions shown are based on Green Travel Data, Rail Delivery Group’s (RDG) new industry-benchmark dataset for rail emissions.
The tool is built using a carbon methodology co-developed by Thrust Carbon, calculated from granular inputs including engine and fuel type, carriage numbers, travel class, real occupancy and live timetable data.
The data is available across approximately 6.5 million station-to-station combinations.
The methodology means every train journey now gets a unique carbon calculation rather than an average.
Across British routes, rail produces lower per-passenger emissions than the equivalent car journey 79% of the time and can be up to 13 times greener than flying domestically.
On the 632km journey from London King’s Cross to Edinburgh, a standard-class ticket produces 13.8kg of CO2e per passenger. That compares with 68.2kg by car and 121.8kg by air.
The tool converts that 54.4kg CO2e saving into terms that everyone can understand: the equivalent of 13,265 cups of tea, 27,192 phone charges or driving 337km in a petrol-powered car.
The tool also puts a number on the value of time, which is often overlooked during travel. What the time is worth is a feature that compares the roughly 7.5 hours a driver spends hands-on-the-wheel travelling from London to Edinburgh against the time a train traveller gets back for themselves. It is enough for six episodes of The Traitors, 180 emails or 18 chapters of a book.
The data behind train.thrustcarbon.com is now open to the public and accessible by travel management companies, online booking tools and Thrust Carbon’s other industry partners for enhanced point of sale and analytical data.
Kit Aspen, Founder and CEO of Thrust Carbon, said: “We wanted to release something people would actually enjoy using – free, visual and, yes, a bit of fun. Most people have never really been able to picture their own carbon footprint. Behind every line on that map sits some of the highest-quality emissions data in the industry; we just wanted to give people a way to actually see it, and see the impact of their own journeys.”
