When – from a passenger point of view – I make the case why the EU ought to pass a Regulation to fix cross border railway ticketing, the reaction from the railway industry (especially state owned railway firms) is essentially “why should we make booking easier, because our cross border […]
Bruxelles-Paris by Eurostar (ex-Thalys) 300km/h high speed train takes just 1 hour 22 minutes, but as anyone who has taken it in recent years can testify, the prices can be horribly high, mostly because capacity is not adequate and no one has yet entered the market against the incumbent. This […]
A message from a friend this morning: “Have you seen that piece in The Guardian saying Eurostar is the worst performing train service in Europe?” Oh what now, my heart sinking as I waited for her to send me the link. This is The Guardian’s piece, and it relates to […]
The Verband Deutscher Verkehrsunternehmen (VDV) (Association of German Transport Companies) has a detailed new website about reactivation of railway lines, and a PDF report with more detail. And one aspect of their proposals are cross-border reactivations that they have been publicising with the little infographic that I reproduce here. So […]
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 […]
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 – […]