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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%).

“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.


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)

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