Plans are underway for new high-speed train services to link Brussels Airport to other hub airports, especially Amsterdam’s Schiphol and Paris CDG, making connections better for international flyers and others.
The move is spurred in part by Belgium’s two-year-old boarding tax on short-haul flights, designed to push more traffic onto environmentally less-damaging means of transport, such as trains.
However, while Brussels, Paris and Amsterdam are already served by a network of high-speed trains, those trains don’t stop at the airport in Brussels, requiring connections by local train between downtown Brussels and the terminals.
A feasibility study for a high-speed station at the airport is underway, one company, the Dutch travel company Corendon, has jumped on the idea, proposing running trains of its own on the route, and possibly later extending to CDG and Dusseldorf, Germany as well.
The company’s founder told press that “We want to be able to bring passengers from Belgium to Schiphol for our flights from Amsterdam to Curaçao.” He added that “The idea is that the holiday starts on the train.”
