Trainline's 'Making New Friends' Ad Explained

The spot is called "Making New Friends" and it runs 61 seconds. Trainline made it. Dude London handled the creative, with Executive Creative Director Curro Piqueras Parra and Director Matthew Swanson behind the camera — DOP Pawel Pogorzelski on photography.

The premise is simple: train travel puts you next to strangers. And sometimes those strangers become something more than strangers. That's the whole emotional pitch.

It's not a product demo. There's no price comparison, no route map, no feature list. It's a feeling. The feeling of being on a train somewhere in Europe and something unexpected happening between two people.

That's the bet Trainline is making — that the brand doesn't need to explain what it does. It needs to make you want to be on a train. The Trainline app is the last card. The emotional sell comes first.

There's a real argument behind the sentiment here. Train travel is structurally different from flying. You're not locked in a seat staring at a headrest. You're in a shared carriage, at a table, with leg room, with a view. The journey is part of the experience, not just the inconvenience between departure and arrival.

Research on rail travel backs this up — passengers consistently rate social atmosphere and comfort as genuine advantages of trains over other modes of transport. That's not marketing. That's what people actually say when you ask them.

The ad leans into exactly that. The train isn't the product. The train is the situation that makes the product's value visible. You book on Trainline, you get on the train, and the train does things to you that a flight or a motorway can't.

Making that case in 61 seconds, without saying it out loud, is the craft.

The spot opens with a train to Milan. That's not accidental. Milan is connected to most of Western Europe by rail — Paris, Zurich, Barcelona, Vienna. It's a hub. And it reads as cosmopolitan without being obviously tourist-coded.

The European train network is genuinely underused by people who think flying is the default. Trains across Europe are faster city-center to city-center on most routes under 4 hours. Trainline sells tickets across all of them from a single app.

And Eurail still exists, for what it's worth — but that's a different product for a different traveler. Trainline is positioning for the person who wants to book a specific trip, not buy a pass and figure it out later.

The Milan opening sets the geography. It tells you this is a European story, not a British commuter story. That matters for the brand's ambition.

This wasn't a small shoot. The crew list in the credits is long.

Dude London on creative. Dude Milano on production — Matteo Pecorari producing, with Elisabetta Carli and Simone Raddi on the production team. Editing by David Whittaker at Tenthree. Color and online at Coffee&TV. Music and VO from Operà Music. Casting by Lesley Beastall. Production design by Momchil Tasev. Stills by Paula Patocka.

On the brand side: International Brand Director Leah Knighton, Senior Brand Managers Alessia Coletta and Silvia Olla, Brand Manager Helena Calvo, Senior Brand Marketing Manager Elisa Campofiorito. PR through theGarage, media through WaveMaker.

That's a lot of people for 61 seconds. But 61 seconds that run across paid media in multiple European markets is not a small activation. The corporate structure at Trainline reflects a company with serious marketing budget behind it.

The production service was handled by Solent Film — which places the shoot in the UK or nearby, then presumably dressed for European locations.

The interactive cards Trainline attached to this video are worth reading as a document of intent.

At 28 seconds — a link to a Bigfoot conspiracy video. That's a joke. It says: we know you're watching this on the internet, we're in on it, we're not taking ourselves too seriously. It's the kind of move that only works if the main film has enough warmth to carry it.

At 38 seconds — winter destinations 2025 via Monocle, pointing at the Bernese Oberland. That's not budget travel. That's telling you who this ad is for: someone with taste and money who has just never thought to take the train.

At 51 seconds — a Taschen travel book on remote travel adventures. Same audience. Aspirational, analog-curious, a little romantic about the world.

The last card is the app download. By then you've already been sold the feeling. The card just catches you.

Trainline doesn't own the trains. It doesn't run the routes. It sells tickets. That's a comparison-shopping business by default — you could go to the operator directly, or use any number of other aggregators.

So why make an emotional film about strangers on a train?

Because price comparison is a race to the bottom, and brand is the only way out of it. If Trainline can make you feel something about train travel — about the kind of person you are when you travel by train — then you open their app first. Not because it's cheaper. Because it feels right.

That's the whole game. And "Making New Friends" is a clean execution of it. Sixty-one seconds. No voiceover explaining the product. No list of routes or prices. Just two people, a moving train, and the implication that this is what travel is supposed to feel like.

Simple brief. Hard to do well.