Quick takes Archives

Quick takes

Toute l’Europe – a future night train map that’s very, very bad

This cropped up in my LinkedIn feed earlier today. At the time I commented on it, simply saying it was bullshit. Now I am going to take it apart, and break down why it is bullshit. The map comes from this article from Toute l’Europe. We’ve been here before. Someone[Read More…]

12.04.2023 0 comments

TimeOut makes a right hash of the new Milano-München trains story

Christian Hunt (I was a guest on his podcast) just sent me this article from TimeOut about proposed Milano-München trains, and asked me if I could do some quick analysis of it. I have already written one piece about this proposed route here, but TimeOut makes such a complete mess[Read More…]

01.03.2023 0 comments

Viral rubbish about railways, this time about trains in Italy

This popped up in my Facebook feed just now: It links here. The graphic has 2.5k reactions, 375 comments, and 468 shares. The problem? Yeah, it’s pretty much ALL wrong. Mi O My Italy who posted it posted the right km/h to mph conversion in their text above the pic,[Read More…]

23.02.2023 0 comments

European Sleeper Bruxelles-Amsterdam-Berlin – you better know it exists!

In rail nerd circles we’ve had our eye on the launch of the European Sleeper service for some time – the new privately operated night train that will run Bruxelles-Amsterdam-Berlin, and eventually will be extended to Prague. As was announced recently in the company’s newsletter, tickets starting with the inaugural[Read More…]

20.02.2023 0 comments

When DPA gets it wrong about railways, the whole of the German media gets it wrong

Süddeutsche Zeitung. Hamburger Morgenpost. Bild. Stern. T-Online. NDR. RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland. Zeit. FAZ. They all wrote yesterday about the “new” night train Hamburg-Stockholm that – according to all the stories – had its premiere yesterday. The problem? The train has been running since 1st September 2022. Nothing new happened yesterday at[Read More…]

20.02.2023 0 comments

Taking apart Euronews’s puff piece about the new TGVs

One of the aims of this new “Quick takes” category here is for me to write things something longer than a toot or tweet, but not as well thought out as longer-form blog posts. So here goes. This toot – boosted into my Mastodon home feed by Aarne Granlund this[Read More…]

18.02.2023 0 comments

Bike parking at Berlin Hbf

Today I made a rather unusual trip to Berlin Hbf – I was not actually departing on a train anywhere! Instead the purpose of my trip was to a meeting for some media work – I will post more about that in due course. But the trip gave me the[Read More…]

15.02.2023 1 comment

Quick takes

A new departure: transport commentary has its own site

For a long time all my analysis of railway policy was bundled in with the rest of the things I have written over the years about other topics – Brexit, EU politics, UK politics and technology. But as I want to work more on railway issues, and develop campaigns and[Read More…]

14.02.2023 1 comment

ChatGPT vs. Adina Vălean – the machine does a solid job

One of my repeated frustrations when working on railway policy in the European Union is how imprecise and woolly the communication from policy makers in the area is. This is in particular the case when European Commissioner for Transport Adina-Ioana Vălean talks about railways. So as ChatGPT is now available[Read More…]

08.02.2023 0 comments

You are invited to the funeral for the Mons ?? – Aulnoye-Aymeries ?? train

One of the strangest experiences in my #CrossBorderRail trip this summer was as the only passenger on the Mons to Aulnoye-Aymeries train – it even features in my summary video. Given that the one I took departs Mons at 06:04 then I suppose that was no surprise. And then, as[Read More…]

07.12.2022 0 comments