Sometimes ideas are borne from frustration. After reading for the umpteenth time on LinkedIn that Portugal will relaunch night trains to Spain in 2025 (it likely won’t), I snapped. I have hence come up with a simple system to call out bullshit stories about railways – the Rail Story Bullshit […]
A story entitled “I love to travel Europe by train. But here’s what a joined-up 21st-century network needs” by María Ramírez was published by The Guardian yesterday. ‘I don’t disagree with the piece’ was the gist of my answer when asked about it on social media, but the piece does […]
When – from a passenger point of view – I make the case why the EU ought to pass a Regulation to fix cross border railway ticketing, the reaction from the railway industry (especially state owned railway firms) is essentially “why should we make booking easier, because our cross border […]
Bruxelles-Paris by Eurostar (ex-Thalys) 300km/h high speed train takes just 1 hour 22 minutes, but as anyone who has taken it in recent years can testify, the prices can be horribly high, mostly because capacity is not adequate and no one has yet entered the market against the incumbent. This […]
A message from a friend this morning: “Have you seen that piece in The Guardian saying Eurostar is the worst performing train service in Europe?” Oh what now, my heart sinking as I waited for her to send me the link. This is The Guardian’s piece, and it relates to […]
It’s a pretty obvious point if you think about it. If all of Ryanair’s planes were all running full, all the time, what would Michael O’Leary (CEO of Ryanair) do? He’d order more planes. And yes, that’d mean more maintenance facilities and more staff and more costs. But it would […]
