There has been some news on the Icelandic webpage www.vf.is with regards to a possible railway link between downtown Reykjavik and the Keflavik Airport. Reykjavik has two airports, one domnestic, which is basically next door to the Parliament and the main Hospital of the country and an international one, in Keflavík, about 1 hour drive from Reykjavik City Centre. If you want an English summary, there’s one the Reykjavik Grapevine here: Train Between Keflavík and Reykjavík Assessed.
The idea of scrapping the one downtown resurfaces once in a while. Sometimes its followed by an idea of linking the current international Keflavík Airport with a railway line. It is a beautiful and grand idea. Is it economically viable? That’s unfortunately rather less probable. But since the author of these words loves trains more than anything, he has his fingers crossed that someone will calculate it into affordability. How many passengers could use this train each day? There were in all 1.791 thousand passengers who went through Keflavík Airport in 2010, but 330 thousand of were transit passengers. Thus, counting only those who were coming to/from Iceland we get 1.461 thousand. Thats around 4000 a day. The domestic flight carried 412 thousand passengers in 2010 or around passengers 1.100 passengers/day. Now assuming that there are 500 people working at the airport, making 1.000 trips a day in all. We get around 6.100 trips a day to and from the airport. In the Oslo Gardemoen airport – the rail has around 34% market share.
| Domestic | 1100 | |||
| International | 4000 | |||
| Staff | 1000 | |||
| SUM | 6100 | |||
| est. RAIL MARKET SHARE | 34% | |||
| passengers/day | 2074 | |||
This would thus give us around 2000 passengers daily. That is not a ridiculous number for a railway station, although undeniably small in comparison with known airport based stations (e.g. Kastrup-railway station has around 18.000 passengers each day (see here for passenger numbers in Denmark). Looking further, based upon the numbers from the Strætó-bus company, some of the larger bus stations in the Reykjavik – area might have a train-potential, Fjörður in Hafnarfjörður has only 2000 passengers, Hamraborg in Kópavogur has 4000 and Hlemmur has 5000. So these might be worth the look. However, one must say that building a 40 km railway line to serve 2000 people is probably not the best use of money spent on public transport. Not that it wouldn’t be fun though.