That is not as easy to answer as it should be – so I set about making a map of all the cross border railway lines in Europe.
The map is a work in progress, and was first published in April 2026 as part of a project with Europäische Akademie Berlin.
The icons indicate the situation at each line – train and a track indicates there is a passenger service running regularly. A train indicates an active line with passenger service. A track indicates an active line but no passenger service. A track with a cross indicates the line is not in an operable state or has been dismantled. Narrow gauge lines are indicated with a mountain railway icon, and tramways indicated with a tram icon. Various other lines or planned lines are shown with a question mark. Icons that have a black background are places I have personally been, ones with a light grey background I have not been. Grey icons with a crossed arrow indicate Transits – places where a line crosses a border more than once.
And then to the question: what to include?
The map shows every cross border line I can find, both current and former, between any European countries. For political reasons I have not included any borders to/from Russia or Belarus, but have included border lines to/from Moldova and Ukraine. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are Europe, but are not included as I cannot get to those without impossible transits or flying currently.
Any heavy rail lines, either 1435mm, 1520mm, 1600mm or 1668mm gauge, are listed the same way. Narrow gauge lines, and cross border tramways are listed as far as is possible.
Much of the data that went into the map is from European Commission, Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy, Sippel, L., Maarfield, S., Nolte, J., et al., Comprehensive analysis of the existing cross-border rail transport connections and missing links on the internal EU borders : annex 6 : expanded fact-sheets for each border section, Publications Office, 2018. However the more my work has advanced, so the map has grown to list a lot more borders than the European Commission did.
If you spot an error or omission, please let me know. And by all means use this map for whatever purposes you wish – it is licensed for re-use under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License – credit Trains for Europe, like the rest of this website.