Another day, another earnest column in a broadsheet newspaper listing the problems with Europe’s railways – this time it’s Die Zeit. We should fly less, we need more high speed trains, we need more night trains, plans for more have come to nothing, why is infra investment in Germany so slow, […]
There is no international railway line I have travelled more often than Bruxelles – Köln. A good part of my life since my teenage years on language exchanges in the mid-1990s in Verviers and Lahnstein, through to professional life today in my early forties as a self employed person living […]
Years ago I used to run a little parody account on Twitter. Nothing major, nothing dangerous – just gently joking about a European Commissioner. The bio even said it was a parody. And then, from one day to the next, the account disappeared. No warning. I contacted Twitter’s support to […]
My Mastodon and Twitter feeds have been full of people asking about how Germany’s new 49 Euro public transport ticket is going to work. So here in this post I will try to give answers to all the frequently asked questions about the ticket! All of this is correct as […]
For the period spanning roughly 2015 to 2019, Brexit was my prime political preoccupation. Analysing what would happen next, and doing plenty of media work about the twists and turns of the sorry saga. When Boris Johnson won the December 2019 General Election it was time to step away from […]
One of the most unpleasant episodes during my #CrossBorderRail project – where I crossed every internal border of the EU you can cross by train – happened at Frankfurt (Oder) in Germany on 24th June, when arriving from Poland. Already four hours late due to a problem on the Polish […]
In Daniel Pink’s classic lecture about motivation and drive for the RSA, he talks about autonomy and the desire to be self directed. In recent weeks I have been wondering about this when it comes to public transport timetables. What constraints on a person’s autonomy are going to be too […]
In early April I took a leap into the unknown, asking my blog readers and followers on Twitter to help me fund the #CrossBorderRail project. Within four days my fundraising appeal was a success, and I could start the project planning in earnest – sorting out the timetables, tickets and […]
Two interesting pieces of information about transport and the climate transition crossed my timeline yesterday. This tweet from TUMI: Transport: Save money, protect the climate 🚶♀️🚶♂️🚲🚃🚋🔌@IPCC_CH pic.twitter.com/M04fFglFmN — 𝗧𝗨Ⓜ️𝗜 for 🚶♂️🚶♀️🚴♀️🚴♂️🚋🚍🔋🔌 (@TUMInitiative) April 5, 2022 And this New York Times story entitled In Europe, It’s Planes vs. Trains. For Many […]
Background Deutsche Bahn used to sell tickets called London Spezial that offered incredible value train tickets from Germany to London, changing onto the Eurostar in Brussels. These tickets were discontinued in March 2020, officially due to a change of Eurostar’s IT systems, but more likely because they were sometimes so […]
Rail might correctly consider itself the greenest transport mode, but there is nevertheless plenty railways can do to decarbonise – not least by doing away with diesel as the primary fuel to power trains on non-electrified lines. The question then comes: how best to do that? Anyone who follows the discussion […]
Back in January a post on the TrainTracks.eu blog by Sebastian Wilken caught my eye – the post rated how easy it was to get to the three European Capitals of Culture this year (Esch 🇱🇺, Novi Sad 🇷🇸 and Kaunas 🇱🇹) by train. I can confirm the trip to […]
