I was recording an episode of the Human Risk podcast with Christian Hunt this week – basically about humans and railways – and the conversation came back to what I think I ought to call the implementation gap in railway policy. “When I moved to München“, Christian was telling me, […]
European Union
Autumn press coverage of the #CrossBorderRail project
Guest on #RailNatter with Gareth Dennis – 4 Jan 2023 Han har krydset alle EU’s grænser i tog i 2022. Nu er han mest af alt bare sur Information – 3 Jan 2023 – Mathias Sonne Aktivisten Jon Worth har i 2022 kørt Europa tyndt og krydset alle europæiske […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 way we want […]
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 on our […]
