I have just been in a focus group for an academic project about cross border railways in Europe, and ticketing was one of the aspects of it. Some of the others in the discussion were ticketing people from state owned railways, some from rivals to state incumbents, and some from […]
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 […]
It’s a common question I receive on social media, and from friends offline too: “can you recommend me a platform to book rail tickets Europe wide?” And the answer is, no, I cannot. Not universally. The answer to the question is normally: “can you tell me roughly where you’re going? […]
A train trip between small or medium sized towns at opposite ends of France by train normally works like this: TER regional train to the nearest city, TGV at high speed across the country, and then a TER for the last leg. So let’s take a worked example – Haguenau […]
“EU High Speed Network Plan Announced” screamed the headline on the Community of European Railways (CER) LinkedIn page this week. It caused me to scratch my head a bit, as there is no such plan yet – this was CER getting a bit carried away with one line in the […]