On 30th June 2021 I was a speaker at the Transport Community and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Rail Summer School in Belgrade. There’s just one caveat, I told Matej Zakonjšek the Director of Transport Community who invited me: I am going to make the trip to Belgrade from Berlin by train. […]
I’m just back from speaking at a Transport Community event in Belgrade. The trip to and from Serbia, and some of the discussions at the event I was attending, were quite an eye opener (I documented much of it on Twitter here). But seeing the problems with Serbian rail with […]
What two consenting adults get up to in their free time is a matter for them. Even if there are husbands and wifes and kids involved, best let those families sort the problems out between them. So that Matt Hancock has been caught having an affair is not a problem […]
As a very heavy Twitter user, for years I was a fan of Tweetbot on iOS, an independent Twitter app made by Tapbots. Using an independent app made sense as I could configure how everything would display according to my needs, rather than Twitter chose that for the sake of […]
For years I have made pretty much every long distance trip I can by train. Conference in Iași? Sure, train via Ukraine to get there. Teaching in Geneva? Night train back to Berlin. Holiday in the Balkans? I’m the one who will take the Bar-Belgrade train. But what can I […]
It’s two years since the 2019 European Election, marking the start of this 9th term of the European Parliament. And for a while I have had this nagging feeling that something is not right about the Parliament in this term. So I will have a go at addressing this problem […]
This Twitter thread by Holger Hestermeyer caught my eye yesterday: Some thoughts on a trade tweet that – as many have pointed out – is wrong. Now I try to no longer critcise tweets of others, but there’s a point here and I would ask you to refrain from any […]
One of the questions I am often asked when discussing rail travel in the European Union is why there is no night train on a given route. “People would take it!” I am told, and I do not doubt that. It is not the demand side that is necessarily the […]
This week we learned that part of Europe’s night train renaissance is going to be built on… some couchette carriages that date from 1965. Yes you read that right – some 56 year old carriages are going to be deployed by ÖBB for its new Wien-Paris night train. This further […]
Back in 2013 when we naively thought social media could be a force for political good, Andy Carvin wrote a book called Distant Witness, which was about his experiences covering and understanding political upheaval from the other side of the world, and using social media (especially Twitter) to do so. The […]
Earlier this month European Sleeper announced its first route – Brussels-Amsterdam-Berlin-Prague – and the news was gushing. Euronews covered the story, saying how it was driven by flight shame, TimeOut talked of a “a ton of cool new sleeper trains“, and Travel+Leisure talked about a “major upgrade” of night services. […]
Yesterday the European Parliament Conference of Presidents agreed that two Committees – INTA and AFET – would vote on the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) this week, but that any decision as to when the plenary of the European Parliament would vote on it was deferred. The decision was […]
