It’s a common refrain: more people would take the train – especially on international routes – if only it were cheaper! That line of argument assumes that there are actually more trains to take. In other words that there is spare capacity. The problem is that – in many cases […]
European Union
Faster trains between München and Milano, and München and Roma? Possible, but not quite in the way Merkur frames it
Over on Mastodon, Gregor Herrmann pointed me towards this story in German publication Merkur about German, Austrian and Italian railways planning faster rail connections between München and Milano, and München and Roma. ORF and Die Presse covered the story in Austria, but here I am going to focus on the […]
When DPA gets it wrong about railways, the whole of the German media gets it wrong
Süddeutsche Zeitung. Hamburger Morgenpost. Bild. Stern. T-Online. NDR. RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland. Zeit. FAZ. They all wrote yesterday about the “new” night train Hamburg-Stockholm that – according to all the stories – had its premiere yesterday. The problem? The train has been running since 1st September 2022. Nothing new happened yesterday at […]
ChatGPT vs. Adina Vălean – the machine does a solid job
One of my repeated frustrations when working on railway policy in the European Union is how imprecise and woolly the communication from policy makers in the area is. This is in particular the case when European Commissioner for Transport Adina-Ioana Vălean talks about railways. So as ChatGPT is now available […]
A diagram to explain EU cross border rail passengers rights – and to push for political change
I managed to make a bit of a name for myself throughout the Brexit process by turning the complexities of the it into complex flow diagrams. I’ve used similar techniques to explain party leadership processes in UK and Germany, how to choose a Bundesliga team to support, and even a […]
Mapping all of Europe’s #CrossBorderRail lines
In the summer of 2022 I crossed all of the internal borders of the European Union (and Switzerland, Norway and Liechtenstein) you can cross by train. That ended up with 95 borders crossed (you can find all the routes I took here). But that is long way away from crossing […]
