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 […]
As I raced around Europe during my #CrossChannelRail project for the past three weeks, it looked like there were three or possibly four private companies in the frame to rival Eurostar on high speed routes through the Channel Tunnel – Virgin Trains, Gemini, Evolyn and possibly Heuro. But today’s news […]
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. […]
There is no way to sweeten this: my original conclusion that Alstom’s Avelia Horizon (known as TGV-M with SNCF) is not legal at higher station platforms outside France was incorrect. Because transparency and correcting my errors matters to me, you can read the original blog entry in full here – […]
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 […]