Millions of train commuters in the UK optimise for just this sort of thing. Not one minute before, because the doors typically close 30s to a minute before departure, but 06:55 for sure.

I am not a commuter, but later in the day I don’t leave the house much earlier than twelve minutes before the train I want to get will leave the station, which is a third of a mile away on foot, and I will have time to get a ticket from the machine.

If it's a train that runs every half hour or so, and my ticket is flexible (which is common) I might cut that to 5 or so.

Most trains you can board up to the departure time. There no need to be there more than 5 minutes before. The also take you to the city centre, which is probably both where you are coming from and where you are going to.

True, but 6:50 is plenty early enough depending on if you know the station and the size.

Getting to and from the stations are a wash because it's not like the airport drops you at the door either. Though, many EU cities have the train station near the city center which makes it easier for people to get to than the airport.

I did like to take the train more often, but travel times are just to slow. I'd need to set aside one day to just leave the country, then maybe I can get another train somewhere in Germany and then I can get pretty much anywhere in Northern Europe in a reasonable time. It's just that train travel in Denmark absolutely suck and is fairly pointless and you almost never travel more than 80-90kph.

Billund is $45 for a week and Copenhagen is $70 for a week. That covers the three busiest Danish airports. Parking is cheap, especially compared to the time save by taking the plane.

I get its different from country to country and I guess I'm just really annoyed with the continued insisting that trains are better than planes, when there's almost no benefit to trains in my country. They are practically pointless, out matched by busses, planes and cars, unless you just happen to have a usage pattern that fit exactly with the layout and timetables.

In Denmark specifically the border policy causes some slowdown. Other than that it probably has the same issue as the Netherlands where the trains that go across the border are infrequent and don't connect to major hubs. This creates a lot of friction in the entire network which makes the entire proposition fall apart. If you have to cross more than one border you really get into some hellish territory, speaking from experience.

Airport parking in Europe is pretty expensive. It could quite possibly be more than the flights for all passengers combined. A week at Brandenburg is about €150 Euros and at Heathrow is roughly the same (and needs a shuttle bus to the terminal, or it is over £250 plus for the short stay).

That is, however, still likely cheaper than a train to the airport in the UK and substantially less likely to have a cancellation cause you to miss a flight.

If you'd have to pay for long-term parking, why not instead pay for a taxi or Uber to the train station?

I don't think so. That gives you a 10 minute margin, which can get uncomfortable quickly if there are any delays in getting there.

If I can walk to a station and I know the route, 10 minutes margin is plenty enough. But if I have to drive+park or take public transport, I won't trust a 10 minute margin.

As soon as you have transfers in the mix (as you often would if travelling longer distances) or stricter tickets, not making it to the train is usually a really bad option.

When searching a journey, it's easy to see if the route with connections repeats every 20, 30, 60 minutes or something else.

Stricter tickets mattering or not depends on the country.

IMO booking strict tickets (e.g. booking a seat) makes sense on only a small handful of routes in the UK, for example, and may even result in you being offered fewer possible options.

There are some quite infrequent routes in rural areas where missing a connection is a bigger problem, but on those journeys I tend to consider my arrival time at that connection to be the starting point.

For the train journeys I take it’s pretty normal to have two or three changes, often including a trip across London. I rarely get into a situation where missing a train is a problem, because of the nature of the train timings. The last time I was delayed significantly was due to catastrophic flooding.

The fundamental difference between air travel and train travel is that missed flights have to be rescheduled. Missed train journeys, not so much. In the UK if you miss the train you had booked a seat on, you can usually still travel on another one if it's a travel period covered by your ticket (e.g. only travelling at peak with a peak ticket). You just don't get a seat guarantee.

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An aside:

Train travel is a flow state/mindset thing. Get one train earlier than you strictly need, find something to do while you're on the train (bonus points for something you can still do while standing). And then try to remember your journey is no more important than anyone else's, maybe a lot less, and you have no more right to timeliness or expedience than anyone else... maybe a lot less. As long as your journey is progressing, things are fine.

The other week I was on a train and there was a thirty-something woman and her parents, taking up a lot of space around me and chatting incessantly and being silly, and I was just about to performatively put my headphones on (the rudest you're allowed to get when people are crossing the threshold of appropriate levels of noise) when it dawned on me that they were being silly because this thirtysomething woman was going to a hospital to find out whether her tumour had returned. And then it dawned on me from their route-planning discussion which hospital it likely was, and what that likely meant for her, and I hugged myself and read my book.

I was on a train about 15 years ago, on a local journey, that was held outside a station about three quarters of a mile from where I worked. Stuck for three hours on a cold train in winter with no working toilet.

About an hour and a half in, people were getting very angry, until a member of the rail staff walked the line back to the train, boarded, and went through the carriage explaining carefully but respectfully exactly why the train couldn't get into the station and why we couldn't all walk along the track. Once they knew why, the angry people started chatting and sharing snacks and talking to strangers like they were old friends for whom life had suddenly become too short to be angry.

This is a great point. I also find train travel the least stressful over all other means of travel.

Also I might just be unlucky that it takes me >1h just to get from my apartment to the airport in Berlin, but generally trains beat airplanes for most destinations I have in Germany. For some destinations they're competitive, but rarely ever beat trains by more than a few minutes, while still being much more of a hassle. I'd rather relax in a comfortable train for 4 hours with every amenity I could wish for, going straight from city center to city center, than deal with airports for two hours just to spend an hour in a cramped airplane while still having to organize transportation between the airport and the city each leg.

Boarding an airplane ends a long time before the planned departure time. You need to go through security and border control. Airports tend to be in remote locations.