Korea recently decided to terminate its AREX (Airport Railroad Express) train service from Seoul to Incheon Airport. This service began in 2014 as one of the projects for getting the country ready to host the 2018 Winter Olympics. International passengers could leave the Incheon Airport (which serves Seoul) and take a KTX (Korea Train Express) train about 100 miles direct to PyeongChang, where the Olympics took place, on a new high-speed rail line built to that region.
Korea’s KTX trains were based on French TGV designs; the first ones were built in France while later ones were built in Korea under license to and using many parts imported from France. Wikipedia photo by Subway06.
After the Olympics ended, however, ridership on the airport line dwindled. The 44 trains a day (22 in each direction) carried an average of 78 people. Since the trains had well over 300 seats, they operated just 23 percent full, and were most heavily used on weekends while weekday trains were nearly empty. If all of the train passengers were air travelers, they accounted for less than 1.5 percent of people arriving or departing from Incheon Airport. However, it is likely that many of the rail passengers were airport employees, not air travelers, which means the train probably carried around 1 percent of airline passengers. Continue reading
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