While links between the capital and the rest of the country are frequent and excellent, and links with Sweden have developed rapidly since the completion of the Øresund fixed link, connections to the rest of Europe are rather poor.

From the rest of Denmark connections are frequent and numerous. In Jutland several railway branches from Aarhus/Aalborg in the North, Struer in the north-west, Esbjerg to the west, and finally Sønderborg in the south convene in Fredericia, where they connect to a main line with up to four intercity trains per hour, divided into Express and Intercity trains, which runs across Funen before crossing the Great Belt (Storebælt). From there it reaches across the length of Zealand before terminating at Copenhagen's central station. If you are going in the reverse direction without a seat reservation, be mindful that the train is often broken up at Fredericia to serve the different branches, so if you don't have seat reservation, it's a bad idea just picking a random carriage in Copenhagen. All cross belt trains are operated by DSB (Danish State Railways ).

From the island of Bornholm, a high speed ferry shuttles passengers to Ystad in Sweden, where the IC-Bornholm train awaits the ferry to shuttle passengers to final stretch to Copenhagen, the whole trip takes little over three hours, and a one-way combined ferry/train ticket will set you back 245 Kr.

Across the Øresund strait in Sweden, the Øresundstog  trains departs from various towns in Southern Sweden, and via Lund and Malmö crosses the Øresund fixed link to Copenhagen, with a stop at the airport. The journey time from Malmö to the central station is 35 minutes and trains run every twenty minutes all day on this stretch, and every hour during the night. A one way ticket between Malmö and Copenhagen is 75 Kr. Swedish Railways  operates up to seven X2000 express trains from Stockholm every day (five and a half hours). An easy change in Malmö almost doubles that number and also gives you the option of a night train connection.

To continental Europe, Eurocity trains connect Hamburg with Copenhagen, up to six times per day; a single one of those trains runs directly from Berlin daily. Standard prices are ?130 from Berlin and ?78 from Hamburg, but it's often possible to find discounted tickets - in Denmark those are called Orange Tyskland. There are also night train connections from Munich (fourteen hours), Basel (fifteen hours) and Amsterdam (fifteen hours) operated by the German railways (Deutsche Bahn ).