One of my lockdown pastimes has been to explore Brandenburg, the Land that surrounds Berlin. One such trip took me to the village of Wendisch Rietz (population: 1620), south east of Berlin, and at the southern end of the lake Scharmützelsee – to walk along the edge of the lake was […]
Analysis
An annual cross-border rail index – a means to assess what’s going on with EU wide rail?
So goodbye Thello. A strange open access rail operator, providing night trains on the Paris – Milano – Venezia route, and daytime trains on the Marseille – Nice – Genova – Milano route, suspended thanks to COVID, and, now we know, never to return. Cue activists writing disgruntled letters, and […]
How to repair Serbia’s railways? A report
On 30th June 2021 I was a speaker at the Transport Community and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Rail Summer School in Belgrade. There’s just one caveat, I told Matej Zakonjšek the Director of Transport Community who invited me: I am going to make the trip to Belgrade from Berlin by train. […]
Turning the Connecting Europe Express into a Conversation Europe Express
I’m just back from speaking at a Transport Community event in Belgrade. The trip to and from Serbia, and some of the discussions at the event I was attending, were quite an eye opener (I documented much of it on Twitter here). But seeing the problems with Serbian rail with […]
What’s an appropriate level of ambition for a project about night trains in Europe?
My earlier post about new night train company Midnight Trains has drawn quite some critique – that having ambitious goals is all very well (people even cited Elon Musk), and that even including a Paris-Edinburgh train in the plans is hence fine. All that is needed is a bit of […]
Midnight Trains – we wish them well, but where are the carriages needed going to come from?
A new night train company has launched today. Paris-based Midnight Trains has launched with a very slick website, and promises a deluxe night train experience – private compartments with showers. The renderings are all soft furnishings and are akin to a smart hotel. RTL news has a report about the […]