I used to fly Stockholm-Copenhagen regularly some years back, and even though I would have preferred to go by train, it was much more expensive, and slower door-to-door.

It gets pretty hard to defend the choice when the economics look like that.

I had the opposite experience, my flight from Bordeaux to London was cancelled. By the time we’d realised the next available flight was 2 days later and €500. The train next day was €300. It took 2hrs for Bordeaux-Paris we decided to hang out in Paris for a few hours then 2hrs to London.

I would simply wait for the plane ticket to be available and cheap again, I know it will because I paid jack shit for flying a lot of miles over the last decade (your route is offered for 40 USD on Skyscanner right now).

The train ticket will never be one bit cheaper. No promo events, nothing; state-owned enterprises seem incapable of such thinking. The price is simply absurd - renting a car and putting enough diesel into it would've been cheaper even if you went alone.

Well I couldn’t wait, and the airline that cancelled my flight had to pay up to €400 costs anyway. The ticket to Paris was €60 for a 400 mile journey that takes 2hr15 pretty cheap. The cheapest option for that leg if we’d got up really early was €33, this was booking less than 12hrs before travel. That’s on the SNCF which is state run. The Eurostar from Paris to London is privatised and is much more expensive for some reason. Trains in the U.K. tend to be ridiculously expensive and slow compared to France but we have a privatised system that’s based on a poorly designed artificially created competitive market that just created a huge amount of expensive contract bureaucracy and no coordination between operations and maintenance.