A year ago I concluded I could no longer continue to dedicate my political energy on (post-)Brexit questions, and instead would focus on sustainable transport and railways. In the past year I have managed to be reasonably successful at that – my small campaign Trains for Europe has found its […]
Two interesting pieces of information about transport and the climate transition crossed my timeline yesterday. This tweet from TUMI: Transport: Save money, protect the climate 🚶♀️🚶♂️🚲🚃🚋🔌@IPCC_CH pic.twitter.com/M04fFglFmN — 𝗧𝗨Ⓜ️𝗜 for 🚶♂️🚶♀️🚴♀️🚴♂️🚋🚍🔋🔌 (@TUMInitiative) April 5, 2022 And this New York Times story entitled In Europe, It’s Planes vs. Trains. For Many […]
Background Deutsche Bahn used to sell tickets called London Spezial that offered incredible value train tickets from Germany to London, changing onto the Eurostar in Brussels. These tickets were discontinued in March 2020, officially due to a change of Eurostar’s IT systems, but more likely because they were sometimes so […]
Rail might correctly consider itself the greenest transport mode, but there is nevertheless plenty railways can do to decarbonise – not least by doing away with diesel as the primary fuel to power trains on non-electrified lines. The question then comes: how best to do that? Anyone who follows the discussion […]
Back in January a post on the TrainTracks.eu blog by Sebastian Wilken caught my eye – the post rated how easy it was to get to the three European Capitals of Culture this year (Esch 🇱🇺, Novi Sad 🇷🇸 and Kaunas 🇱🇹) by train. I can confirm the trip to […]
That the European Union needs to get more passengers and freight onto its railways is a no-brainer. Europe has a dense network of railways, with a lot of them in reasonable condition, a decent percentage electrified, and plenty of lines allowing trains to run at a good speed. With roads […]
This entire blog post has been superceded by a separate campaign website! Please consult that first! When, in a quiet moment late last year, I wondered what had come of the missing rail links Michael Cramer had proposed to fix when he was a MEP, I could not have […]
In as far as there is a debate about the problems of cross border railways in Europe, one question crops up over and over: “why is there no Skyscanner for rail?” If one website can aggregate all the flights in Europe and allow a customer to compare prices and book […]
In the wider scheme of the ills of modern communication, this was a pretty minor one. In Time Out’s “22 best new things to do in the world in 2022” this was at number 17: 17. Ride new Regiojet sleeper train all the way across Europe – Prague, Czech Republic, […]
Back in 2015, Michael Cramer MEP published his list of missing links in the European railway network. Cramer – a politician from the Greens-EFA group and chair of the TRAN Committee of the European Parliament at the time – had the idea that smaller, cheaper, lower scale cross border railway […]
This tweet has been doing the rounds, claiming to map the longest train journey in the world: The new longest possible train journey in the world. pic.twitter.com/W9ajgTyY0b — Epic Maps 🗺️ (@Locati0ns) December 12, 2021 The problem is… it’s not right. At the time of writing this route is impossible […]
I am writing this blog post at the end of a 5 day trip from Berlin to Bled in Slovenia by train and back, through the 4th wave of the COVID pandemic and crossing Austria in lockdown. I’ve been tweeting about the trip as I went along on the hashtag […]