Jon Worth

European, originally a Brit, became German, moved to France. Runs #CrossBorderRail project, writes a newsletter about railways. Green, lives happily without a car Normally stuck on a train, stuck in a village, or escaping either on a folding bicycle

Belgium

You are invited to the funeral for the Mons 🇧🇪 - Aulnoye-Aymeries 🇫🇷 train

One of the strangest experiences in my #CrossBorderRail trip this summer was as the only passenger on the Mons to Aulnoye-Aymeries train - it even features in my summary video. Given that the one I took departs Mons at 06:04 then I suppose that was no surprise. And then,

Analysis

Why Interrail is structurally incapable of fixing the seat reservation problems with its passes

During my #CrossBorderRail project in the summer of 2022 I needed to take regional trains Badajoz-Merida and Merida-Madrid in Spain, and these trains require compulsory seat reservations. Buying a combined ticket and reservation online for these trains is no problem, but Interrail pass holders need just a seat reservation. At

Analysis

Why are Europe's railways a mess? Our public diagnosis of the problem falls short

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

Analysis

Bruxelles - Köln, and decision makers' disconnection from reality

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

Belgium

Mons-Aulnoye - Belgium and France close a cross border passenger railway line

It was one of the most surreal experiences of the #CrossBorderRail project: to be the only passenger on an international train for its entire trip. It even made it into my summary video. It happened on Day 1, at the Belgium-France border, between Mons and Aulnoye-Aymeries - and you can

Analysis

I ought to work more on European railway topics - but how?

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

Analysis

A different solution for night trains - a flexible leasing and operations company?

From the start of my Trains for Europe campaign I have argued that the absence of enough couchette cars and sleeping cars is the main constraint on the expansion of night train services. You cannot run more trains unless you literally have more carriages. I do not deny there are

Germany

Germany's 49 Euro Ticket Deutschlandticket - a FAQ

My Mastodon and Twitter feeds have been full of people asking about how Germany's new 49 Euro public transport ticket (also known as Deutschlandticket) is going to work. So here in this post I will try to give answers to all the frequently asked questions about the ticket!

Analysis

Illegal and systematic non-Schengen compliant border controls at Frankfurt (Oder), 31 August 2022 - every train controlled, every train Poland-Berlin delayed

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

Analysis

Autonomy, reliability, and public transport

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

Analysis

Europe's railways: unable to play the role they should in the climate transition

Two interesting pieces of information about transport and the climate transition crossed my timeline yesterday. This tweet from TUMI: https://twitter.com/TUMInitiative/status/1511405279103045635 And this New York Times story entitled In Europe, It’s Planes vs. Trains. For Many Travelers, Rail Is the Way to Go. The problem

Italy

A previous trip to Gorizia - Nova Gorica

One of the joys of preparing the website for this project has been to look back over the pictures taken at previous trips to some of these borders within the EU. Gorizia (IT) - Nova Gorica (SI) is one of the most fascinating, not least because the border between the

Analysis

Night trains, scale and standardisation

I listened in to the Back on Track Belgium conference last week, and the founder of a startup night train company said something interesting. "The reason we are against things like night train rolling stock pools," he stated, "is that means we cannot configure the trains the

Guides

How to use Deutsche Bahn's De Connect tickets for train trips between Germany and London

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

Analysis

Decarbonise rail: diagrams, battery trains, and a visit to Stadler's plant in Pankow

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

Analysis

A consortium to order night train carriages?

At the start Trains for Europe had two major questions: how could the European Union organise the procurement of a fleet of night train carriages, and how many carriages would you even need to run enough lines for which there is a market in Europe? We're still working

Analysis

Open Letter - Trains to Kaunas

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 Novi Sad

Analysis

Reflections on rail advocacy in EU politics

That the European Union needs to get more passengers and freight onto its railways is a no-brainer. Europe has a dense network of railways, with a lot of them in reasonable condition, a decent percentage electrified, and plenty of lines allowing trains to run at a good speed. With roads

Analysis

What Germany needs to do about night trains

The governments of France, Italy and Sweden are actively thinking about how they can renew night train networks in those countries. Austrian Railways ÖBB, notably in partnership with Swiss Railways SBB, is investing heavily in new night train carriages and proposing to open new routes - and is backed by

Analysis

Where we stand with the need to order new night trains: the EU, every government, every operator assessed

When I started Trains for Europe in mid-2021, the demand was that the European Union organises the procurement of a fleet of new night trains. Now - 8 months on - it is time to take stock of what has(n't) happened in the interim. We started with

Analysis

#CrossBorderRail - crossing every border in the EU you can cross by train

This entire blog post has been superceded by a separate campaign website! Please consult that first! When, in a quiet moment late last year, I wondered what had come of the missing rail links Michael Cramer had proposed to fix when he was a MEP, I could not have known

Analysis

Night trains to/from Berlin

We've been invited to present at an event in February about night train services to and from Berlin, the city where our campaign is based. That has led to some interesting reflections - rather than seeing the complete picture of night trains in Europe, what would work from

Analysis

Skyscanner for rail? Before we can even build such a thing we need a European rail timetable

In as far as there is a debate about the problems of cross border railways in Europe, one question crops up over and over: "why is there no Skyscanner for rail?" If one website can aggregate all the flights in Europe and allow a customer to compare prices

Analysis

Where is the ambition in the provision of international night trains?

When I started the Trains for Europe project a little over 6 months ago, I had identified the key problem - that the main barrier to scaling up night trains in Europe was the absence of the trains themselves. To get more night trains onto Europe's rails, someone

Analysis

If something is incorrect we should not repeat it, even if we want it

In the wider scheme of the ills of modern communication, this was a pretty minor one. In Time Out's "22 best new things to do in the world in 2022" this was at number 17: 17. Ride new Regiojet sleeper train all the way across Europe