I am at World Passengers’ Festival in Vienna today, and four ticket vendors are here: Trip.com, Trainline, Rail Europe and All Aboard. So, I wondered, how do these platforms do with some pretty simple international journeys? And based on this research I am going to go to their stands here […]
My previous post was a kind of hopeless “well we know the problems with railways, but what do we do?” Here – and motivated by Justin Scholz who has been pushing me to write this sort of thing for months – here are a series of policy proposals to fix […]
Another day, another depressing study. Greenpeace looked at rail and motorway investments across Europe, and found 66 % more budget spent to extend roads than to extend railways. Between 1995 and 2018 there was a 60% increase in the length of Europe’s motorways – more than 30,000 km – while […]
I am doing some comparative research about railways in Europe this summer and that has led me to the question: what makes a good train timetable? And that then leads inevitably to a Taktfahplan or, better still, a Integraler Taktfahplan (German language Wikipedia here) By which point I have lost […]
It was one of the weirder experiences of my #CrossBorderRail project last year. I had arrived in Belfort in eastern France from Besançon, and needed to get to Delémont in Switzerland. There is a line between the two, but Swiss trains mostly depart from the TGV station that is 10km […]
For most of the past two years I have poured all of my political energy into transport policy topics – the Trains for Europe campaign, and the #CrossBorderRail project. And this website that has become a kind of hub for my railway commentary. At one level that has all worked […]