Credit to one of my students at TU Braunschweig, Roland Sivonen, for discovering this one – Deutsche Bahn’s cheap Sparpreis train tickets now work correctly from Germany to Strasbourg, and some other new destinations in France as well. In this blog post I am going to explain how this change can […]
European Union
International rail ticketing that is customer unfriendly – that is the system working as intended. We need EU law to change the system.
Justin Scholz, a thoughtful friend of mine, sent me a link to this post by Anil Dash, entitled “Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does” – do read it in full. Let’s have a go applying this to international railway ticketing, and use what – superficially – […]
The Stadler RS Zero: the new solution to save the smallest branch lines
Harrachov, Czechia Adorf (Vogtland), Germany Černousy, Czechia Selb-Plößberg, Germany Holzhau, Germany Bayerisch Eisenstein, Germany On the smallest branch lines in Germany and Czechia (and even just into Poland on one line) you will find them – Stadler RS1 railbuses, with their characteristic trapezoid shaped […]
“Summer 2025” for the new Régiolis trains France-Germany – Leroy and Hermann are just picking dates at random
So the new Régiolis trains are going to be running on France-Germany routes in “Summer 2025” according to Transport Minister, Baden-Württemberg Winfried Hermann and President of Région Grand Est, Franck Leroy. They may as well be picking dates at random. It is all because of delayed approval of the trains […]
Deutsche Bahn has an amazing opportunity in ticket sales, but is too blinded by Flixtrain to seize it
While clearing old belongings here (pre-move to France) I stumbled across a 2003 Interrail diary of mine, and in it were timetables for trains in Italy and Romania printed out from the website of Deutsche Bahn. Today, 21 years on, I am still using Deutsche Bahn’s website to plan my […]
Peel back the rhetoric and state railways are naked on Europe-wide ticketing – only EU law is going to fix this mess
For the past few years the state owned railways in Europe – represented in Brussels by Community of European Railways (CER) – have been working on their “Ticketing Roadmap” (yes, don’t laugh, railway companies really have a roadmap). This roadmap is the railways’ response to customer and political demands to […]
