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 […]
Quick takes
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 […]
Open source mapping tools
One of the headaches when planning the #CrossBorderRail trip was to be able to map railway routes adequately accurately. The number of railway routing tools available in public is considerably fewer than for road transport! But on this – as on so many other railway topics – it was a […]
Bloomberg publishes new interactive website about night trains in Europe
Entitled “Europe Asks Travelers to Ditch Planes for Night Trains“, Bloomberg has published a sort of interactive guide to night trains in Europe, and what the European Union is trying to do to solve the night train conundrum. It’s not all quite right in the technical detail, but it sure […]
A rail postcard from Passow (Uckermark)
Dear Violeta, It has been a little while since I last wrote you a postcard from one of my cross-border rail trips. But this week I took a little journey from Berlin to Szczecin / Stettin in West Pomerania in Poland, represented in the European Parliament by Bogusław Liberadzki – […]
A rail postcard from Brussels
(this is part of my Rail Postcards to the Transport Commissioner series – you can find all the other postcards here) Dear Violeta, I’d hoped to not have to write another one of these postcards to you so soon after my last one. But things go wrong all too regularly […]