A Sixty-Year-Old Name Disappeared From European Rail Today

The Eurail Pass, the ticket that has carried non-European travellers around the continent by train for more than six decades, no longer exists under that name. As of 10 September 2026 the company retired the Eurail brand and brought every pass holder under a single banner: Interrail. Travellers from the United States and other non-European countries will now buy an Interrail Pass rather than a Eurail Pass, joining the European residents who have been buying Interrail Passes all along.

The change is cosmetic where it counts. The company was explicit that this is a name change and not a product change: the same travel benefits, the same country coverage and the same flexibility carry over intact under the new label. Anyone holding a valid Eurail Pass purchased before the switch is unaffected, and the practical difference for a traveller planning a trip is which word to type into a search bar. What ends is a two-brand structure that split the same product along the lines of where the buyer happened to live.

That split was always slightly odd. For more than 60 years Eurail Passes went to travellers from outside Europe while Interrail Passes went to Europeans exploring their own continent, producing two marketing operations, two sets of customer expectations and a persistent low-level confusion about whether the two products were actually the same thing. Merging them into one global brand consolidates the offer and, the company hopes, one global community of rail travellers rather than two parallel ones separated by passport.

Alongside the rename comes a brand platform the company calls The Interrail Effect, built around the argument that a European rail journey changes the traveller as much as it changes their location – the conversation across the aisle, the dining-car hour, the town glimpsed through the window that pulls you back years later. It is marketing, but it points at something real about how rail travel differs from flying between the same two cities, and it signals where the company intends to compete as more Europeans and visitors alike choose trains over short-haul flights.

Sources: TravelPulse, Interrail