Friends know I work on railway policy in Europe, and from time to time they tweet me about the personal difficulties they are having with railway booking. My old friend from Brussels, Anna Drozd, tweeted me today about some headaches she was having trying to find trains between Split in […]
This tweet caught my eye this morning: Underlines the problem facing the EU as retaliatory steps liable only to reinforce this perception. The EU may be an effective negotiator, but it is pretty terrible when it comes to comms. https://t.co/zaBwCAtf5L — Anand Menon (@anandMenon1) August 2, 2021 My first reaction: […]
One of my lockdown pastimes has been to explore Brandenburg, the Land that surrounds Berlin. One such trip took me to the village of Wendisch Rietz (population: 1620), south east of Berlin, and at the southern end of the lake Scharmützelsee – to walk along the edge of the lake was […]
So goodbye Thello. A strange open access rail operator, providing night trains on the Paris – Milano – Venezia route, and daytime trains on the Marseille – Nice – Genova – Milano route, suspended thanks to COVID, and, now we know, never to return. Cue activists writing disgruntled letters, and […]
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 […]
