Keep our news free from ads and paywalls by making a donation to support our work!
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
A record number of passengers travelled with PKP Intercity, Poland’s main long-distance train operator, in the first half of this year.
Between the start of January and end of June, 40.4 million passengers used the carrier’s intercity services, which was over 9% more than in the same period last year and 31% up from two years ago. On 1 June, PKP Intercity carried 332,000 passengers, which was a record number for a single day.
The connections that saw the largest year-on-year increases were Poznań-Szczecin (up 60%), Kraków-Zakopane (59%), Szczecin-Warsaw (53%), Poznań-Toruń (47%), Warsaw-Zakopane (37%) and Białystok-Warsaw (34%).
🚆 W 1. połowie 2025 roku PKP Intercity przewiozło 40,4 mln pasażerów – rekord w historii spółki.
📍 Aż 514 połączeń dziennie
📈 +9% rok do roku
🆕 Nowe trasy i inwestycje w tabor
Więcej szczegółów👉https://t.co/qmuT7MU4MV@J_Malinowski @DariuszKlimczak @PiotrMalepszak… pic.twitter.com/lweVQXfowt— PKP Intercity (@PKPIntercityPDP) July 30, 2025
“More and more Poles are choosing rail as their means of transport,” said infrastructure minister Dariusz Klimczak, celebrating the new figures. “This proves that our consistently implemented investment strategy is yielding tangible results.”
The latest data continue a trend in recent years for growing rail use, though that was briefly dented by the pandemic. In the whole of 2024, PKP Intercity carried 78.5 million passengers, up from 68 million in 2023 and 58.9 million in 2022.
To meet the growing demand, PKP Intercity has expanded its timetable, currently offering 514 daily connections, which is 80 more than two years ago. It has also added more carriages on some routes and modernised its locomotives and wagons.
This year, the operator also launched the first direct train route from Poland to Croatia, which operates during the holiday season. The infrastructure ministry announced this week that most seats on the service are already booked until the end of the summer.
After decades of neglect, Poland’s rail network is expanding and modernising.
However, more needs to be done to integrate it with other elements of the transport system, writes @MarcinZyla https://t.co/I3AnCXgBsh
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 11, 2022
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: Maksym Kozlenko/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
