Another day, another earnest column in a broadsheet newspaper listing the problems with Europe’s railways – this time it’s Die Zeit. We should fly less, we need more high speed trains, we need more night trains, plans for more have come to nothing, why is infra investment in Germany so slow, […]
IMPORTANT: this blog post is correct as of 15 December 2021, and all the text below is unchanged since then. At that time two borders – Russia to China, and China to Laos – could not be crossed due to COVID. The outbreak of war in Ukraine has also meant […]
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 […]
After having been stuck again this morning due to lack of collaboration between EU rail firms, I started to wonder: can liberalisation of EU rail actually ever work? And, were it to ever work, what are the prerequisites to making it work? The blog entry tries to at least pose the […]
I travel a lot on German railways. Barely a week goes by without me making a long distance trip from Berlin to Brussels (via Köln), or somewhere further afield. I paid the company more than €2000 in the calendar year 2013, and the sum will be roughly the same in […]