It’s just past 8am. I’ve been on the slow train to Paris Bercy from rural Bourgogne for an hour an a half. The sun has just about burnt off the fog of the morning along the Yonne and now the Seine. We are rumbling along the line somewhere between Montereau […]
The European Commission and the state owned railway companies are getting very excited about the idea there could be a EU masterplan for high speed rail. With that in mind, let’s do a little thought experiment. This started as a Bluesky thread, and has been lightly edited into this blog […]
No company wants to enter a market thinking they are going to fail. But what happens were they to fail might have a bearing on whether they succeed in the first place. It was with this in mind that I read this morning that Virgin Trains is looking for money partners. […]
For three weeks in late March and early April I am running a project called #CrossChannelRail that is looking at the future of long distance high speed train services through the Channel Tunnel. The future of Eurostar and any of its potential rivals if you like. A whole lot of […]
Geopolitics had the Schleswig Holstein Question. Machine intelligence has the Turing Test. Jumble those up, throw in a little extra European Union complexity, and I am proud to present you the railway equivalent: the Valence-Armentières Problem. At one level the theoretical solution to the problem is simple: calculate all the […]
A train trip between small or medium sized towns at opposite ends of France by train normally works like this: TER regional train to the nearest city, TGV at high speed across the country, and then a TER for the last leg. So let’s take a worked example – Haguenau […]