The main Trains for Europe site has been rather quiet over the past few months as I have been running a dedicated project about cross border railways in the EU entitled #CrossBorderRail – and most of the daily reporting on that has been on Twitter.
Now the research for the project – on the rails of Europe – has concluded it is time for me to draw up my conclusions and proposals for change.
The first detailed conclusions will be presented at an event at Stadler Rail in Berlin on 29th August – at an event to be attended by Anna Lührmann (Minister of State for Europe and Climate Action) – it’s free to attend, so do come along! All the details here.
The broad diagnosis of the problems I found are summarised in this video:
It is also available on:
The statistics and timetables for the whole trip – as travelled – are in a Google Sheet here. The route-km from Pierre Beyssac’s tool then allow me to calculate the average speed of each train I took, and total up the kilometres – each day, and for the project as a whole.
It comes out as follows:
Border Crossings | 95 |
| Bike legs | 34 |
Scheduled buses | 5 |
Rail replacement buses | 7 |
| Ferry | 3 |
| Night train | 4 |
| Train | 186 |
Rail replacement Tesla | 1 |
| Taxi | 1 |
| Rail km | 30171 |
| Bike km | 956 |
Bus, ferry, taxi, Tesla km | 1562 |
Nice of you to having all your rail trips documented so we can pressure EU to do something to replace plain travel.