Denmark

Denmark is the smallest and southernmost of the Nordic countries, made up of the Jutland peninsula and an archipelago of some 406 islands, of which about 70 are inhabited. It covers roughly 43,000 square kilometres and is home to around six million people, most of them in and around the capital, Copenhagen, on the island of Zealand. Denmark shares its only land border with Germany to the south, faces Sweden across the Øresund and the Kattegat, and faces Norway across the Skagerrak; the land itself is almost entirely flat, low-lying and given over to farmland, coast and dune.

Trains here mostly do ordinary work: the state operator DSB and a handful of private regional companies run frequent, everyday services between the mainland's cities and out onto Zealand and Funen, connected by bridges rather than the ferries that once linked them. The network is compact — some 2,600 kilometres of track in total — and only about a third of it is electrified, so diesel and battery trains still do much of the regional work outside the main Copenhagen corridor. Around the capital one zone ticket covers train, bus, S-tog and metro alike, and an ordinary commuter fare is often all that stands between a city platform and somewhere worth going.