This is a new podcast from the creators of Lewackie Pitolenie.
Just like some chapters of Lewackie Pitolenie were available in English as Leftist Drivel, so some chapters of Mądrze Gada will be available in English as Talking Sense.
Our first guest is Jon Worth. In his own words, Brit who became German and is moving to France. Runs the #CrossBorderRail project and writes about railways and EU politics.
We invited him to talk about trains, mostly about his Cross Border Rail project, but also about the situation of the railway in Europe in general. If you don’t feel like listening, you can also read the interview below:
Okay, then. Hello. You’re listening to another of our podcasts. My name is Tomasz Oryński, and I have a guest for you today who has the best job ever. He rides trains, rides a bicycle and visits places in all of Europe and then writes on social media and blogs about trains. But I guess there is something more to it. So let me introduce Jon Worth and maybe Jon you tell me more how you became basically a train expert.
Thank you very much. And thank you for the invite, Tomasz. Um, essentially I come from outside the railway industry. I’m an independent communications consultant. I’ve been teaching and working Europe wide, and I wanted to travel in a green way and get to all of my work contracts Europe wide without flying, and I kept on getting stuck. Things didn’t work, and I started to ask myself the question, well, who’s actually trying to fix the politics of Europe’s railways? And the answer is no one, really. And then I eventually started asking ask myself the question, well, maybe I should do something. And out of that has come a whole series of projects to try to basically make it easier for people to cross borders in Europe by train. And while it might be a nice thing to do, it’s a bit of a difficult thing to finance. My projects are mostly crowdfunded, so it’s not easy to live off this railway work. Although of course when it does work and I go to nice places, it is a lot of fun.
Yeah, but like before we go to this, like technicalities, let’s put one thing aside or maybe forward. See, I always wanted to travel by train, but I was mostly when I lived in Britain. I wasn’t in a very good financial situation for many years. I was a student and of course I was working then I was having some other difficulties, and I always wanted to travel from Scotland to Poland on the train, and I simply could never afford it because while like driving my car from Poland to Scotland or the other way round, it was like – depends of the fuel price at the time – you could easily do it in under £200, with ferries included and everything. And, uh, the cheapest train ever I managed to find was £320 per person per one way, which I couldn’t afford because there was two of us. And guess what was the cheapest Ryanair ticket I ever flew from Scotland to Poland?
Oh, it was probably £10 or something.
No, it was £0.99.
Oh yeah?
It was like 2009 or something. So it was like £0.99 a ticket. I got it at least twice. So tell me why railway is so expensive in the first place. Like surely planes cannot be cheap.
Right? So it’s a bit more complicated than it sounds. And some of the reasons are actually quite sensible as to why trains are quite expensive. So basically a lot of the costs involved in flying a plane are involved in the airports, and a relatively low percentage of the total cost is actually the distance that you cover. When you run a train, the train has to pay a charge to access the tracks, add more kilometres of tracks, and so your cost goes up. So the cost structure, you have lower fixed costs and more costs per kilometre than flying a plane, right. So that basically means once you start to get up beyond the cost of, say, a distance of 2000 or 3000km, your train in Europe anyway gets prohibitively expensive. So that’s the reason why railway companies can’t offer you a 99 cent ticket. Second, and this is when it starts to get really interesting, even for shorter journeys, you would say, well, hey, hang on a minute. Why is Edinburgh to London crazy expensive? Well, the answer is the trains are full, so the train can be that expensive. So ultimately, I hear very often we should make trains cheaper. But the railway companies, although they’d never say it so bluntly, they would say, well, why the hell should we make trains cheaper? Our trains are full anyway. Right now you or I may say, well, okay, make the trains cheaper, more people will take them. And then you would create a positive cycle that the railway industry would then transport more people, and everything would get better. But unfortunately, for some of the reasons we’ll discuss throughout this podcast, the railway industry doesn’t really think that way. So it’s one of the things which I’m coming up against over and over is to try to facilitate cross-border rail. Before you talk about making it cheaper, you actually need to run more trains. To run more trains, you need more lines. You might need more trains themselves. You might need operators that recruit more staff. And all of that comes up against opposition within the railway industry. So ultimately it’s a cost structure problem, and it’s a capacity problem because on many of the key routes, notably from the UK, the Eurostar route from London to Brussels and Paris already comparatively full. And so therefore those companies can get away with setting very high prices.
Okay, but is that also about profits because railway is considered to be like for profit enterprise, while like roads aren’t really for profit. It’s like I hear all the time, like we cannot renovate this railway line or that railway line because it will never be profitable. I never heard someone saying, oh, we cannot build a road here because only 50 people live in this village and it won’t be profitable to build a road here. So why is railway a business? And roads are like public service. That can come at a loss because still again, like you say? Like when you compare the flying to the railways. You said that railway pays for the infrastructure and everything. But if I pack myself into a pallet and send myself on a truck, I can, uh, like, reach Poland, uh, at a fraction of the price of the railway ticket. So how is that? That I can send a tonne pallet at a fraction of the price that’s sending a person by train?
Well, railways have, in large parts of Europe, lost this sort of public service ethos. This is a service which is provided at a fair cost to local people. Now it’s not only a case of public versus private, because actually there are some parts of Europe where there’s some private enterprises in railways, and actually the costs are still comparatively low. Parts of Czechia, for example. And there are other places, France, most notably where the railways are still extremely expensive in state hands. Sorry, but extremely expensive to take. Now, what you’ve ultimately got is all of the railway companies need investment in lines. They need to renovate their existing infrastructure, and they struggle to get enough public investment and investment from the state to actually do those works. And as a result, you have this weird deal basically between the railway industries and transport ministries, where transport ministries say, well, we are going to subsidise your operations less, we are going to invest less in your tracks and railway companies, how do they respond? They ultimately go along with that reduced subsidy. They increase the prices for passengers and you end up being in a negative cycle. And so ultimately, to put this right, you need a socially orientated railway policy, which very, very few European countries really have. Right? Finland, where your based now has it a bit, Poland, where you’re originally from, has it a bit. UK definitely has lost it. France has mostly lost it. It depends a bit where you are in Europe about whether that is still there. Is this a service for a low price that anyone can use? And largely across most of Europe, regardless of who actually literally owns or runs the trains, that public service ethos is gone from railways, and that has been done with the participation of the railway companies together with the Ministries of transport.
Okay. But I want to clarify something because you said that like railway companies and trucks. But correct me if I’m wrong, but I think under European law now, the companies that run trains are to be separated from the companies or institutions that maintain the rail tracks. So it should work in theory, as the roads work, that the roads are available to everyone, and everyone can set up a company driving buses on this road as long as they pay tolls. So this is the same situation with the railway now?
Yes, it is theoretically the same situation with the railway.
But.
It is easier said than done, right? Um, in some parts of Europe, and particularly with freight trains. Right. It already works comparatively well. You have lots of different private and state operators, uh, crossing borders that that largely works for passenger trains. It’s much harder, particularly for long distance and higher speed passenger trains. The cost of acquisition of such a train is very high. And then you need to get your train individually approved so it can run in more countries. Because unlike roads where basically the same bus can run on a road from the north of Finland right the way to Portugal, in railways you have multiple electrification systems. There are four main electrification systems in Europe and although you can overcome that one, you have the difficulty that there are more than ten signalling systems. So your train, if it wants to run on an international route, needs to actually be technologically quite complicated. And so it’s quite difficult if you’re a kind of a new start up company of some sort, to actually try to even literally purchase the trains to allow you to run those trains Europe-wide.
And if I may, if I meant to interrupt you a bit with train signalling, it’s not like with a car, you drive a car and there is like semaphore, and you can see if it’s red or green. It’s much more complicated. There are some special sensors which work with the train. They are like signals that display in the cab for the, uh, for the driver. So it is much more complicated than just sticking up the semaphore and showing the signal to passing trains.
Right. Although it must be said that running up to 160km an hour, you can still do it with comparatively basic sensors and lights along the track. Not quite as simple as a traffic light, but a comparatively simple system. Once you get above 160km/h then you get into a much more complicated environment where you need much more expensive onboard systems. Also, you have to bear in mind that the braking distance for a train is very long because of its much greater weight and its much lower friction between the wheels and the tracks. So it basically means you can’t slow a train down as quickly as you could slow down a truck or a bus. And that therefore means that the necessary safety systems for the signalling have to be that much more, um, uh, for, for longer distances than is the case on a road. So that adds additionally to the cost. Now the European Union knows this. It’s building a unified signalling system, but the railway companies are very slow to adopt this unified signalling system, which is called ETCS.
Yes. And apart from this, I heard that there is also a problem with languages that the drivers needs to speak local languages. So if you drive a train, say from my hometown of Wroclaw to Budapest, the train driver should speak Polish, Czech and Hungarian. Or you can change the driver at every border. But then this driver had to be trained in, in like this kind of of of train engine which not may not be like local to Hungary. Or you can like send a classic train and change the locomotive of every border which will take ages. So because of this lack of of integration of the systems, the travel across the borders is much more complicated.
Exactly. So that’s all correct. Although it must be said that at some borders that works better than others. You you generally have the situation where you can, at least without the local language, can travel to the first station after the border in most cases, although at the moment even that has broken down at the France Spain border, for example. So ultimately there are many technical hurdles to overcome, which if you are a company with the right attitude and with deep pockets, financially you can overcome these hurdles. But there are many people within the railway industry that mitigate against overcoming these hurdles, do not want to fix those problems, and would sooner protect their national markets and protect their national monopolies, rather than actually putting these problems right Europe wide, either for passengers or for freight.
Why is that? Is that because, say, if PKP the Polish railways, I’m afraid that if I make it easier for Czech railways to enter, then the Ceské drahy will push me out of the market because they are better or.
It’s not České dráhy that PKP is worried about. Not directly anyway.
Yeah, it was just just a random example.
No, no, but it’s an important point because. So you traditionally had or traditionally have, although it’s broken somewhat. One main state owned operator in each country, although in Poland that’s got a little bit messy with the break-up of PKP and there are now some regional operators as well. But anyway, generally there’s one state operator and then there are normally some private rivals. Um, and each country there is often a tense relationship between the state operator and its private rivals. So in Czechia, for example, that’s Ceské drahy, the state operator against Regiojet and Leo express, two private operators. So what PKP in Poland is scared of is not the other state operator from the other side of the border. It’s actually that the Czech private operator, who would muscle in on Polish lines. In Italy it’s Trenitalia who is scared of Italo, its private rival. In Austria it’s state own ÖBB who is scare of WestBahn, it’s private rival. In Germany it’s Deutsche Bahn which is scared of Flixtrain, the spin-off of the Flixbus, the bus operator. The Deutsche Bahn it’s worried about it. Now, and indeed, in some borders it’s actually the state operators scared of another state operators from, for between France and Italy it’s the french SNCF who does not get along with Italian state operator, Trenitalia. So it’s actually these animosities between state owned companies either among themselves, or from the state owned company towards privately owned companies, often are what prevents collaborations in border regions. You don’t collaborate with a company on the other side border because you see it as a thin end of the wedge. If we collaborate with you, we’d have to collaborate with everyone and we’d sooner collaborate with no-one. It sounds ridiculous but ultimately that it is what drives the mentality of many big state owned railway firms.
Ok, but you know, I can see why it can be. And I’ll give you an example of buses in Poland. So we used to have a state owned bus operator PKS and they used to go to every single village. And then when the privatisation happened after, obviously, 1989, a lot of private companies started, and they took over the most profitable lines at most profitable times and leaving PKS to pick up the least profitable lines, like going to the small villages, or 5 in the morning or 11 in the evening lines, which meant they had to compete with those companies on those most profitable relations while having to use the profits from those profitable relations to subsidise relations that were not profitable. Which brings us to my original questions: wouldn’t that be much easier for the railways if they were as a service and not as a business, because if you want to provide reliable service to everywhere – well, at least everywhere reasonable, we cannot just allow a private companies to battle for the most profitable routes and leave like state operators to pick up the ones that nobody else wants to operate on.
It’s not as bad as you say. Forget the British situation which is totally different and come to what happened tin Germany. We have in Germany a clear distinction between regional trains and long distance trains. Regional trains are done using the competitive tendering model where state and private companies bid to run the lines. And how many trains run, and the tariffs, that you have to pay to take one, are determined by the public authority that handles the bidding process and therefore sets the tariffs. So for example if you go to Berlin main station, you have predominately two operators of the regional trains, there are red ones, run by Deutsche Bahn, the state operator that won the tender for some of the lines and the white and yellow and green ones run by the private operator called ODEG that won the tender for other lines. But in terms of the cost per kilometre for passenger, it’s the same regardless of if the line is ran by the Deutsche Bahn or ODEG. Now that basically says these things are run in the public interest but whether the operator is state or private it does not matter. And what you basically done there is created the competitive market in order to win these tenders. And those competitive tenders have generally speaking driven down the cost of operating regional lines. You get more trains for less money invested, which, if you are a transport authority, is probably a good thing.
Ok, but you have to explain that to me, because I still don’t understand how it works, see… Let’s stick to Britain, because I am quite familiar.
No, we should not stick to Britain. Britain has messed this up royally. And so if you take the example how you liberalized railway in Britain, Britain got the worst of the private enterprise and the worst of the monopoly operations.
Ok, so I tell you what I know about Britain, and you’ll tell me how what’s the difference between Britain and, say, Germany. So in Britain the deal is that there is like the tender for servicing the line, the government sets the timetable, they provide the trains, the trains do not belong to local operator but they are owned by ScotRail for example, and you can win this tender by offering that you’ll do it by the least government funding, which is basically you propose that you’ll do it by the lowest profit margin, because the ticket prices are also set by the government, so you basically cannot decide about anything, and you just compete on price, and then, of course, if you run into trouble, you just give up and hand the trains back to the government, as it happened several times in recent years, with the East Coast Line for example, and… Why it makes sense? Scotland now nationalized their trains…
…and they did not get better…
…well, yes, so why? Because they basically do the same, except that they don’t have to profit on that and pay the shareholders, so why is private better in this matter?
Private is not necessarily better in that matter. You have to take a step back here. If you just have everything owned and run by the state, like you have in Switzerland for example, you can end up with excellent railway, but often with very high costs. If you want to have a unitary state owned railway, where the stay owns the tracks and operates the trains, and sets the prices for the tickets. That creates the situation where the cost of, for example, running the workshops to maintain the trains, you have little in the way of cost control. Now, conversely if you have everything run by the private sector, you have the problem, as you have a race to the bottom of the poor quality service at the end of the day. If you put this together in the right way with some state operation and some private operations, you can do it right and you’ll end up with ideally with the situation where you keep your cost under control and you can run the railways that transport rather large amounts of people for the comparatively low price. And that’s what Germany or Czechia, or, to some extend, Austria has managed to succeed in doing. Now for every well-run state owned railway, like the Swiss, I can point you to a really malevolent evilly run one like the French. So this notion, if you take it from real every-day lived experience Europewide, and I travelled in every EU country where there is a railway, you end up with the situation when you can’t simply say “state it better and private is worse” or “private is better and state is worse” because it simply don’t match the facts on the ground. There are good state operators and bad ones and there are good private operators and bad ones and there are good and bad ways to liberalizing your railway if you wish to do that. And so therefore if you look in the experience, if you take the best of experience of some things that have been done in regional railways in Germany, long distance high speed trains in Italy, the provision of the information in the liberalized railway in Czechia, you pull all of that together and you can make the case to say that actually the mixed model of part-state and part-private is actually not a bad model to operate. Not least because if – particularly for international routes – if the state owned railway companies refuse to cooperate with each other, you can have a situation where the private operator will step in and say “Ok, well, we will try”.
Ok, so basically the bottom line here is that while someone may profit on providing railway connections, the profits that we pay to these private companies will still be cheaper than the wasted costs that are likely to happen if the railway would be run by the state owned company without competition.
It’s possible. That’s not the case in all the cases, but in some cases yes. Now, if you hear for example that opinion of the state owned company České dráhy in Czechia, that their chief of international affairs says “having private rivals on our network has made us, the state operator better. The threat of competition has forced the company to become cleaner and more flexible”, which is probably not a bad thing.
Ok, but now let’s head back to this German example. So if I wanted to run a private trains in Britain, I can basically only compete on my profit margins. What is difference in Germany?
There are couple of cases in the UK as well. It’s what is known as open access. You can basically say “Hey, I wanna to run a train from A to B. Network operator, have you got a space on your line to give me a path to run my train on this route at this time”. And the network operator might say “No, sorry, we can’t do that because we don’t have capacity” or the network operator might say “Sure, we got capacity, providing your train respects our safety and security norms – here, run”. And you pay the charge to access the track, and you pay a charge to access the stations. What you can also do as a state, you can change those access charges according to the time of a day, to prioritise the type of services that you want to see. So for example maybe your network is quite empty late in the evening, make the route charges very cheap then, and maybe a low-cost operator steps in and run services for students in the late evening hours which allow students to get home cheaply for example. So there is a way and means that you can work with those charges to kind of shape the kind of the service you want to see. That’s actually an important lever that state would still have. But that’s the basis for, for example, Flixbus, when it wanted to make a train operations, which is now known as Flixtrain in Germany, it said “Ok, we want to run something that is faster than a bus, but it’s not as de lux as German DB trains, they went to the network operator, asked for paths, asked for access to the stations, paid those dues to the network operator and now they run dozens of trains every day across Germany. That is what eventually will happen in Poland, it is what already happens in Italy and Austria, it has been a little bit slower to the other parts of Europe, it has not happened in Portugal or Croatia and hasn’t had happened to passenger trains in Finland yet either.
Ok, and the second option. Because that’s basically the open access. But I guess there are some franchises elsewhere in the EU.
Yes, so these franchises are for regional operations, they are not for long distance operations so they are for trips about up to a hundred kilometres, so you have multiple operators that are competing to run these operations and of course there have been a few stories where some of those companies had gone bankrupt, but what authorities that give out those contracts are ultimately doing is actually to set the available price carefully at the beginning in order to make sure that you don’t actually have the race to the bottom in terms of the quality of the provision in those cases. So pretty much everywhere across Germany you see many of the regional trains that are no longer run by the DB but are run by a series of a different operators. One of the biggest operators is quite interestingly, although you won’t see their logo on the trains, is actually the Italian state railways that owns many of the German regional operations, so you have Italian state railway that runs the regional trains in Germany which I find quite interesting development.
Ok, so that’s about the local trains, but now, let’s go to, I guess one of your favourite topics which is international train travel. And let’s start with something I remember from since I was a kid and I was travelling by trains which are the crazy prices for trains that are travelling across the border. So if I travel 200 km from say my hometown to a Czech border or I travel 200 km in Czech Republic, it’s much cheaper than if travel 200 km across the border. And I remember when we were a kids, or teenagers, and we travelled to Slovakia to see the Tatra mountains from the other side, we were travelling to Chalupki, then in the middle of the night we were getting out of the train, the whole class excursion was getting off the trains and walking 2 kms or whatever it was to Bohumin and getting back onto the same train that was held up on the border for so long because of the passport control, and that way we were saving a fortune just by walking 2 kms across the border. So why is that, if I travel Flixbus from Helsinki, or, I think there is now a crazy one from Tampere to Hannover or whatever, which travels across several countries, there are different toll systems in all of those countries, there are different charges for using bus stops or bus stations, and yet I can buy just one simple bus ticket. And why it is so crazy with trains?
But Flixbus is reacting to the market. It’s reacting like a private operator it is, essentially, setting the price the market would bear.
Yeah, but what I mean, why is buying a ticket for an international bus is so simple, and why I cannot just go online and buy easily the international ticket for a train. There is this guy who is literally making a living by explaining how to buy a ticket for international train, you know, the Man in Seat 61
Yeah, the Man in Seat 61. Look. It’s back to national monopolies again. And how are those national state-owned companies politically controlled or controlled by their customers. Let me give you an example. The high speed trains that run from Paris to Brussels and Paris to Lille, thelarge city in the north of France. Those trains are using about 75% of the same tracks, Lille is basically on the way to Brussels, but the cost of the tickets to Brussels is always at least double or more than a cost of the ticket to Lille, despite, based of the what we were just talking earlier on, the track access charges are not double. They are a little bit more, because the distance is a little bit further, but they are not double. Why is this? Because it’s not a political accountability when it is an international train. Why is SNCF sets a relatively low price for the ticket to Lille? Because if they set a high price, it will be in the French media that it’s a scandal, that it costs too much to get to the France’s fifth largest city. This is unacceptable, we need to fix it. In which newspapers does anyone write that it costs to much to go from London to Brussels? The French go “ah, it’s all those tax exiles that escaped to Belgium to live there and the people who go from Brussels to Paris are the bunch of rich Eurocrats that don’t have any public discussion about costing too much to cross the border. Or another one, if you want to cross the border from France to Germany at Strasbourg, all of the cheap ticket in Alsace they work to Krimmeri-Meinau, the last station in France. All of the cheap tickets in Germany they work to Kehl,the last station in Germany, but they don’t work on the 4 km on the border in between. When I put this problem to the politicians, including the members of the European Parliament that work in Strasbourg and travel across this border, they say to me “Oh yes, we see your problem, but it’s too complicated to fix” they tell me. Well you have to understand the problem as a politician before you can begin to fix it. How many politicians active in European railway policy know this type of problem? Pretty much none. So you have no political pressure to solve a problem like that. And indeed craziest of all, Belgium, they just launched a new train, it starts in Liège in Belgium, it goes through Maastricht in the Netherlands and it finally ends up in Aachen in Germany, it’s called a three country train. So they launched the train and only then they realised that you can’t actually buy a ticket for an entire train, because nobody thought of that.
I remember that
That’s how messed up the railway company is: yes, we’ve launched the three country train, but we don’t have the three country ticket for it. This kind of things drive you crazy. And the amount of kind of tricks you have to pull, like you have to buy a ticket to the last station before the border, and then one from the first station across…
Yes, that’s what I wanted to ask now. Because I had a friend who was Polish but she lived in East Germany and she travelled a lot from Wrocław, where she studied, to her home in Germany. That was like 20 or some years ago, so I am not sure if that’s still the case, but she was buying a ticket to Zgorzelec and then she was buying a ticket from Görlitz to her destination and she was basically running across the border without paying, because even if they would catch her – which would basically never happen, they would just sell her a ticket on the train with some penalty charge and it would still be worth it, because if she would buy two separate tickets it was like 40% of the price of the full ticket for the whole distance from Wrocław to her destination in Germany. So why there is a special ticket just to cross the border? There is nothing like that on the buses.
Because no politicians give a damn. That’s the reason.
Ok, but politicians are like the next level. I am trying to find why there is a thing like that in the first place. Why there is that cross-border ticket.
So it’s not from malevolence, mostly. It’s from incompetence and lack of customer-friendliness. So for example, your question of Wrocław to Zgorzelec. The ticket on the Polish side is not set by the railway company. It would be set by the public transport authority of Lower Silesia. They would say we want to set the ticket price at whatever amount per kilometre, or from this part of the region to this other part of the region, this is what it will be and if it does not cover the cost of operating the train, we will give the train operator a subsidy, that’s how it will work.
Yes, and just on technicalities: in Poland there is that thing I like, the further you travel, the cheaper each kilometre is.
Yes, that’s right. A lots of companies do it, I don’t have a problem with that, right. But when they did their tariff system, did they remember that there is a train that literally crosses the bridge and goes to Görlitz. Well, that’s actually a bad example, because they have actually fixed that one, but there is another border crossing a bit north of there, the border at Forst-Lausitz, which goes to Cottbus, lies on the line from Żary in Poland to Cottbus. There, they not only did not calculate the tariff, but you can’t buy an online ticket for the 4 km of the border section. They just forgot about it, they never calculated it. And so you have the situation where often they just… No-one has thought to put this problem right. No-one has the will, the leverage, the determination to fix it.
So, basically, before we go to politics, it’s basically the problem of the lack of cooperation between the railway authorities because they only think inside the country. It’s like this road, you probably seen the memes recently, like Poland has completed the expressway from the sea to the Czech border and the road just ends up in the field, you drive the dual carriageway and it just cuts off and there is just a field on the Czech side. So this is basically that but for trains.
Yeah, that’s similar to how it is. I have a lots of photos like you literally see where to border is, like the track is renovated on the one side of the border and then it immediately turns to shit the moment that you cross, so yeah, it happens on the railways all of the time.
Yeah, and actually Western Poland is a good example of it. I’ve been in the railway college in the 1990s and even then it was always the problem because for Poland direction West is an important direction, so we were renovating the railways to the higher standard, electrifying the lines and so on, and for Germans some trains that go to the East, they don’t care about it, so they were doing nothing to them, so it was actually funny when you were going to this mythical West where everything was supposed to be better and you were crossing the border into Germany and the train infrastructure was totally crap, and that was years and years ago.
And that’s still the case. And now there is that case, it’s the craziest of all, Zgorzelec to Görlitz, Poland has electrified the line and they have built electrification masts to the middle of the bridge as a provocation to Germany, because Germany has not begin to electrify their line, so there like these masts which end in the middle of the bridge right in the middle of the Nysa river.
It seems like like railway authorities because they only think inside our country, it’s like with this road, you’ve probably seen the memes recently like Poland has completed the Expressway from the sea to the Czech border and the Expressway like ends in the field like you drive door carriage way and then it just cuts off.
Yeah
OK. So so that’s that’s the technicalities, but you already started ranting about politicians. So let’s go that route because I guess you have a lot to say about them because politicians don’t care. But like if I may suggest a direction is that big. Because there is like no voice of railway passengers like every politician is scared about car drivers and they want there to do anything to worsen, like car travel, like, see how much opposition there every time like there are congestion charges or tolls or even speeding tickets when they arise. How heavy it is for politicians to do so is that the case that politicians don’t care about trains because train passengers have no voice.
Yes, that’s a very important and very central point and train passengers often nationally have a bit of a voice that are often passenger rights associations in individual countries, but they often don’t care about the international aspects of solving these problems. That’s the first, and the second is you need to understand the problem before you can fix it, and the really depressing thing I’ve encountered in all my railway work is when I go and talk to politicians or even go and talk to officials about this is they often tell me: Ah, but we didn’t know it was so bad. It’s like, hey, you’re relying on some independent campaign, a guy to go and tell you how bad the situation is on the ground. Now that has been really disappointing and has been quite a sort of eye opening situation. I assumed that at least within the EU that the European Commission knew where the problems were but didn’t think it could fix them. But I’ve ultimately come to the point of view that actually most of the time the European Commission doesn’t even know the problems are. And indeed, then the most important thing I would say is if you as a politician would want to fix these problems, is, first of all go to the ground, go and meet the people who rely on these services, and then begin to work out what they’d actually need in order to manage to fix them. So yeah, there’s no passenger rights lobby really, and there is a lack of understanding from the from politicians and officials about what the problems really are.
OK. And there’s one thing I also notice about politicians. Politicians love, at least in Poland and in Britain as well. As you probably know, love to speak about high speed trains because they are like shiny and swift and look space age and everything. But do we really need to focus on high speed trains? like can we at least start making the trains we already have reliable and good like transport options and also?
Like I don’t really need to travel 300 kilometres per hour. Because long distance because then I would, uh, write on this train all day and then I will have to go to the hotel anyway. I would rather right on the sleeper train, which can drive like 160 kilometres and then I I will sleep on it so I won’t need a hotel. And I see European Union is is working towards this rebuilding networks of the sleeper train and…
sort of…
Well, they they do nice pictures of the networks, so at least they are talking about that. So let’s let’s, let’s talk about that.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they’re. Talking about it, yeah, the so. I think there is definitely a bias towards big city connections and high speed trains for two reasons. First, that’s what the railway industry wants. Together with that it’s what the building industry wants, right. And then it reflects politicians own biases because they are mostly people and officials that travel between big cities. Second, doing works to improve an existing network takes a long time, it’s hard and it’s complicated, and often you don’t get much political credit for putting those things right. And so there is this bias towards big sexy projects rather than actually smaller scale longer term projects that actually put a lot of problems right on the ground. Now, actually I must say, although Poland is now thinking about building this kind of Grand Central airport project and connecting it all with high speed trains, Poland has actually done a lot of good work improving local lines. So actually if you look at all of the lines in southern Poland between Wrocław and Krakow, for example,via Katowice…
All of that has been done improving and speeding up existing lines. Instead of building new, and I think that’s actually a very, very good policy that Poland has pursued there. But yeah, generally speaking, I agree with that point. Now, what about night trains? The difficulty with night trains is the operational costs and the operational complexity are quite difficult because the train generally transports fewer passengers than a train with seats in it. And as a result of the track access charges being calculated by distance, it means running night trains in a profitable manner is quite difficult and so ultimately trying to then get night train operations to work in a way where they do not need a public subsidy for their operation. Is a problem that’s not yet been solved by the European Union. Now I think the European Union should look at the side of purchasing or building the trains and then the operational side could solve itself. But we’re not there yet.
But they do something about that, apart from publishing those wish lists, maps and everything?
Not really, not not. Mostly because European Union railway policy at the moment is still largely dominated by the wishes of the big railway companies and the big railway companies largely don’t like night trains because they are complicated to operate. They are almost by definition international, because they travel on such a long route that probably they will cross a border somewhere. And and they don’t fit into this kind of profit orientated high speed model. And so therefore the big companies, notably Deutsche Bahn and French SNCF, they have no interest in night trains at all. And so those they could do it but don’t want to. And the small operators particularly private ones like European Sleeper, the Netherlands startup for example, they want to, but they don’t have the financial means. So basically those that could don’t want to and those that want to can’t and that’s a bit the bind that we we are stuck in at the moment with regard to the future of night trains
OK, let’s go back to southwest Poland. As you mentioned, I can agree with you that Koleje Dolnośląskie is like regional, regional government owned train company in in southwest Poland. They are a big success story, although we have to say they have it relatively easy. Because the density of network at Lower Silesia is really high and most of these lines were still in passenger use at least till 20 years ago, and many of them still had some cargo operation, so it’s relatively easy to put back passenger trains on them. But still, if you live in the region, I guess it’s much important for you to have a train from, I don’t know, Lubawka to Marciszów than to know that there is a TGV train from Paris to Wrocław because you’ll probably never use the latter and the former. You can use to commute to your work, to school, and so on every day and every time in I’m in Lower Silesia. I’m travelling usually to my brother, who lives in Jelenia Góra which is like 120 kilometres southwest. And I’m surprised that in every of those like small hub stations that used to be just had abandoned branch lines, there are now some trains waiting for transfers. You know, there’s like rail buses from the 60s. Basically. They were now bought by some local Polish company and they run them on some very remote rural rural railway and we have also to remember that while these branch lines, they are not maybe like profitable on their own, they are acting as feeders for the main railway so
Of course, and also one thing that Poland has done extremely well is basically the newly built stations on those lines. They might not be very charming, but they’re built basically with a kit. So they have standard blocks for the platforms. They have standard blocks for the shelters where passengers wait, and so you can build a station on those lines where a very, very low cost and one of the problems that you often had in particularly in Germany when they wanted to reopen lines like that as everyone says the cost of building the stations is too high. Now Poland is the absolute masters of building, maybe not charming, but functional stations in those places for a very, very low cost.
Especially that let’s remember that the old station building is still sitting behind the fence, falling apart so they are not like renovating what it used to be. They just provide very basic infrastructure just to let the trains run, yeah.
Right. But it’s good enough and that’s the central point. You’ve got to get your basics right and that’s what Poland generally for its local transport is doing. Now ask yourself this sort of question. Imagine you live in a village with 700 people. Your family is there and your children are going to the Junior School in the village, but your job is in the local town right? Say, in Jelenia Góra.
And then someone from your son’s school phones you up and says, hey, your son has fallen ill in school. Can you come and pick him up because he’s sick. Right now, how long would you wait for the next train back to the village? You might wait up to one hour, but probably not longer. Now Poland, and particularly Lower Silesia, got that exactly right. They basically say if we have a line open, it has to have a regular train, it’s got to run maybe not every hour, but about minimum every two hours. You have the situation in many parts of Europe and particularly in Western Europe, France and in Spain where you have some lines where you have only three or four trains in the entire day. And that basically means that a family, for example, could never rely on the train. They would basically always say, hey, well, sorry, we can’t wait half a day for the next one, we’ll buy a car instead. So it’s really important, not necessarily the speed of your local train, but how reliable it is and how often then it will run. And that also is very, very important also in border regions. And so we’ve seen the situation, particularly the Poland, Germany border close to Szczecin, where it is now cheaper to live on the German side of the border and work on the Polish side of the border. Now, if you want to persuade those people to go to work in the city by train you need to also run the international train once per hour. You can’t be having five international trains a day, only it has to be once an hour. Like any good regional service. And so you’ve got to think of international rail not as a “nice to have” but as a “must have”, if you want to get those people out of their cars and in many border regions, the France, Germany border around Freiburg, we see it there. There is the border, Germany to Czechia, south of Dresden. It’s very important there. The Austria Germany border Freilassing into Salzburg. These border regions have become so integrated that people cross the border every single day. Their cross-border commuters, and we need to provide good cross-border railway services to allow those people to cross the border with a train, not just with car.
I think we’ve noticed that only when COVID happened and they closed the borders and we’ve seen how much difficulty is it cost to to those cross-border commuters, but also like when it comes to this like corner like Southwest corner of Poland with Germany and with Czech Republic. This is called Euroregion Neisse-Nisa-Nysa . And I remember there were some like common tickets even I think before we joined European Union to promote this cross-border travels. Now I think last time I wrote on the Koleje Dolnośląskie train, there was some posters offering you like all day ticket for all the buses and trains in the region across the three nations, which is brilliant and which is as it should be, basically.
Absolutely. And it’s a super nice little route. So there’s now one version of that train It starts in Germany, Seifhennensdorf, goes into Czechia to Varnsdorf. It goes back into Germany to Zittau it then transits a part of Poland for 2 kilometres, but doesn’t stop there, and it ends up back in Czechia. So within one hour you go Germany, Czechia, Germany, Poland, Czechia, it is super cool. I really love it.
Yeah, but we will come back to this project of yours, but I wanted to to speak something about what you said about this reliability of the service. And just to give you an example, I used to live in Cambuslang, which is on the outskirts of Glasgow. And whenever I wanted to go to the town without taking my car, which is like only to Glasgow City centre you can travel without the car because otherwise the transport is terrible. I remember I had to check when the train will be. I had to plan and even though I lived like 4 minutes walk from the train station just before I was leaving for the train, I was still checking on my mobile to see if the train is not delayed or cancelled.
Now I live on the like outskirts of Helsinki and I I don’t check trains or buses at all and it’s that if I see the bus on the bus stop, I don’t run for it because I can’t be arsed because I know the next bus will be like 4 minutes or something. So this is what reliable and regular transport gives to you. You don’t have to stress at all. This is why it’s so, so important.
Absolutely. I was in a tiny village of 400 people outside of Berlin in Brandenburg, together with a friend on the weekend. And we had not planned our route back and the friend said to me “Did you look at the timetable for the route back?” And I said no, I didn’t look at the timetable for the route back, but there will be a train. It’ll be fine. And of course, we were right. Whereas every time when I’m in France, we’re like, oh, shit, how the hell are we going to plan this? Because there’s going to be a gap of three hours in the timetable, right? Like reliable public transport with a good timetable that you can rely on is very, very important.
And it can be life changing. There’s even a song of the Polish band Skaldowie which is called the Dojeżdżam – I commute – and that’s a song when like the it’s it’s sunk from the point of view of a high school student who cannot participate in any after school activities. Cultural. Like events or even go out with the friends because he always have to run for the train because it’s last train for a day and he cannot stay longer. And this song is 50 years old, but there are still people in the smaller villages that are suffering in that way because they cannot have reliable public transport, especially in Poland, when the public buses outside of the biggest cities are basically non-existent.
Right, of course. But but look at it this way. Right now I get that point and Poland is not paradise in that regard. But that ethos, that thinking about regular timetables is still there in Poland. It is definitely there in Czechia. It is there in Slovakia. It’s definitely there in Germany. The Swiss are the masters at it. Austria it’s there. Slovenia. It’s getting there steadily, Hungary. Give or take. It’s still pretty much there.
Many other railways in Western Europe, or particularly France, UK to some extent, Ireland, Spain, have reduced taking the train to something that you don’t do every day. It is only something for the long distance and that is a fatal error that is wrong. It should be possible to live a self-directed life without needing a car and but not all of Europe is that. Not only is it not possible, but that does not feature as a political priority.
Which brings us back to the beginning of the conversation. But now let’s talk about your project. Because you mentioned that already you did this project when you travelled by train across like all the borders, but are those like all the border crossings or just you are not there yet?
I’m not there yet. I started two years ago where in one journey I crossed all of the internal borders of the EU that you can cross by train. So basically meaning any pair of countries I crossed on at least one line there, right? But to give an example, there’s something like 14 lines between Germany and Czechia, so I didn’t go to all of them. I went to one because I wanted an overview of is it good, bad or indifferent in any of these places. Why did I do that? It was because I discovered that back seven years ago, the European Parliament had been investigating this problem and wondering why it was so hard to cross borders in border regions. And so I thought, OK, well. Let’s travel to these places and try and find out what works and what doesn’t work in different parts of Europe . You could learn that it’s going really well here. It’s going less well there. How would you improve it? And so that’s where it all started. And then then since then, I basically been filling in the gaps. So I went to 95 borders in 2022 and now my number at the time of this podcast when we’re recording it at 268 borders. I have made the definitive map of Europe’s railway borders, current and former dismantled lines and you end up with a total of something like 450 border lines, but at least 100 of those will never return because basically they were abandoned back decades ago due to war. Or due to redrawing borders at the end of a conflict and they will never return. So ultimately in the EU there are something like 200 to 230 interesting railway borders adding non EU Europe and external borders with the European Union and you hit something in the low three hundreds of interesting borders and by the end of next year I will have covered all of the interesting ones.
But let’s mention that you go also to the places where you cannot cross by trains, either because as you mentioned, there are no longer railways in there. But also I remember for example you were in Tornio, which is at the top of the Baltic Sea, and there are some train tracks from Finland to Sweden, but there is no passenger trains. Will that be even feasible? It’s not exactly the…
Yes. That one is financially a bit problematic. But Tornio Haparanda it’s a wonderful place. I can highly recommend going there. I got there on a nice sunny day, so that that made it that made it better at that moment. It’s only freight across the border there now, but the regions of northern Finland fully intend to fix that, they just haven’t found the necessary public subsidy to run the trains. But basically they will extend trains from Rovaniemi and Oulu as far as Haparanda on the Swedish side, it might happen already in December of this year or it might take until some point next year because they needed to put up the electrification masts on the line, they will eventually do it.
Also, there are different track gauges in Sweden.
There are but what will simply happen is you’ll change trains and Haparanda. You’ll change off the Finnish broad gauge train and across the platform, and there’ll be a Swedish standard gauge train waiting for you. So no high tech, swanky multi gauge train solutions. Just a very simple solution. You change from 1 train to another but in the same station. At the moment there’s 5 kilometres missing to cross there. And indeed, there’s not even a bus. Actually, most days you actually have to walk the five kilometres from Tornio to Happaranta at the moment. But it will at least mean it will be organised so as you can travel through there, it’s a very important point. I don’t care if you have to change trains if it’s done in a good way, right? You need a timetable which is actually workable.
Basically from my from my project there are four types of problems which you encounter at borders.
The first is: There used to be a line and it fell into disrepair for some reason. Could you rebuild it now? These are often really expensive and very hard to fix, so I haven’t really found very many of those where you could really do much with with. With those circumstances I have only a handful.
The second is there are tracks, but there are no passenger trains running there, so that’s like the Tornio Haparanda problem. How hard would it be to extend the train across the border? There is, for example, the Germany Poland border from Węgliniec, North of Görlitz to Horka on the German side there is a track there, but it’s only used by goods trains. Could you for example also run passenger trains there? So that’s the second problem.
The third problem is and we talked a bit about it earlier. There are trains, but you can’t get a good ticket for those trains, right? So that’s the case at Forst (Lausitz). It’s it’s the case that many of the France – Spain borders, for example.
And the fourth category is there are good train services, but there is some kind of timetable problem. The so there are trains, but for example, the train arrives at the border station, but you have to wait hours until the train departs on the other side.
Let’s let’s say hello now to the Baltic states
Yeah, right. For Tallinn to Riga, for example, you would get stuck at Valga with exactly that type of problem. Or there is a similar problem going through the Alps, although the track to block their landslide at the moment. But if you wanted to go from Lyon through to Torino, for example on regional trains, you face the same problem there.
So basically missing tracks, missing services, bad timetables, or bad ticketing. Those are the four different problems that you basically facing in border regions and I’m steadily working this through border by border to say this is what you would need to do to fix the problem in a given place.
So what are the stupidest things you’ve seen?
The one that sticks most in my mind is a village. I think I’ve made this village famous by now. The village Turmantas of 286 people on the border of Lithuania to Latvia.
So Turmantas, as it’s just two kilometres from the border, it has five trains a day to and from Vilnius but 20 kilometres after the border, is the second city of Latvia, Daugavpils (Dyneburg). And there is a train line. But due to a dispute about the cost of a few litres of diesel fuel, the trains that used to run Vilnius-Turmantas- Daugavpils now don’t cross the border and they turn round in Turmantas. Now when I was there on my bicycle crossing this border on a dirt road, I saw passengers coming on a bus on the dirt road to the last village in Latvia and crossing the border on foot to take the train on the Lithuanian side. Right like this is a matter of a few litres of diesel fuel each day the train is there. The track is there, there is no technical problem and you could connect the second city of Latvia to the capital city of Lithuania with no problem at all, and it would be absolutely fine like that is just an insane circumstance that makes me mad.
And I can risk a guess that a bus driving on the dirt road is probably using more diesel fuel than a train riding on the flat metal rails.
That could well be. Yeah. So that’s perhaps the craziest circumstance that that I encountered. There there is a big problem between Romania and Bulgaria, despite the fact that the European Commissioner for Transport, the outgoing one, is is from Romania, there have still not managed to get this in check. There are three very desolate railway lines, one from Craiova towards Vidin on the Bulgarian side and two which go to Ruse, basically south of Bucharest. And they are in a horrible, decrepit state and that makes getting to Bulgaria by train very, very difficult. The situation in Greece is very, very sad. There are 5 international railway lines from Greece, 2 to North Macedonia 2 to Bulgaria and one to Turkey. Only two of the five are active and those two do not have passenger trains, so that’s a sad and ridiculous circumstance. So yeah, these are all of the types of circumstances that make you make you disappointed. There is lot’s to do.
Yeah, to do OK. And what would be like a success story? So we already mentioned this on this Euronysa region, which is Poland, Czech and Germany…
Right. So the the nicest success story that I’ve managed to or two, I’ve managed to kind of help along with. I can’t take full responsibility for these, but like, like stories I followed.
One is the In the on the edge of that or the Nysa region is the town Seifhennensdorf. Now this is a strange situation. The town is in Germany, but you can only get to the rest of Germany by crossing 4 kilometres of Czechia. And as a result of a dispute between the network operator in Czechia and the network operator in Germany, and there are very dangerous level crossing on the road at the entrance to Seifhennersdorf, the trains were replaced by buses for eight years . Anyway, I went to Seifhennersdorf It’s a quite poor town in Saxon, heavily votes for the populist right. But I went to the street party basically for the launch of the new train connection, because finally, after eight years they reactivated the railway line and it was brilliant because everyone was having a big party about it. Now that’s actually what the train meant to people in a town like that. And it was a really, really great thing to see. So that was one.
And the second is a little success story at the border of France to Spain at the Atlantic Coast, between the towns of Hendaye and Irun there there has always been a good train, but it’s run by the Basque government and they never uploaded the timetables for the trains to the international timetable databases. So the train ran, but you needed specialist knowledge to even know when it would go. So now finally, after having worked this through with lots of different little actors for a long time I finally got the data on that train called Euskotren to to be in, in the international timetable databases so that one has actually finally got fixed.
But overall the places I really like are the places where it’s the international train runs really really often. So for example the Öresund bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö in Sweden, The train runs there every 20 minutes, all day through, and that means you don’t have to think about it. You just go to the railway station and it will be maximum 20 minutes until the next train is going. And that is basically built a whole region there. There are people that live in Malmö and work in Copenhagen. There are people who connect to Copenhagen Airport – from the Swedish side you fly from the Copenhagen. It’s really brought a whole region together, so that long predates my work on railways. But that’s a really nice case where if you build a good international railway connection, it makes a transformative change to a region. And that’s a really good case.
Yeah, because that’s I think it’s another aspect because sometimes we can discuss, OK, is that really like sensible to send this train on this like mountain route and so on. But actually we have to remember that those connections also help build communities I can see, for example.
Well, well, I’m. I’m no longer living there, but I speak with my friends and I see where my friends are going. Hiking to the hills, for example. So they all used to hike on the policy sites only and no, because there’s so many of cross-border trains to Czech Republic, they start to explore the Czech side as well, which is good for tourists. And when I’m in the Jelenia Góra I can see like Czech tourists which was not too popular in the past when I used to live closer and be regular there. So there is also this cultural aspect and like international exchange aspect and tourism accent and…
A really a really good train is used by all kinds of people, young old families, hikers, tourists, mountain bikers, commuters, any type of person in the society, and that’s what you see in some regions of Poland. That’s what you see in Czech. Yeah, that’s what you see in Austria. That’s a healthy railway system. When you have that mix.
So actually before I go to the last topic, I wanted to give you some funny digression which has no relation, but I just found it funny when you spoke about this Basque train that has no timetable. So I was once in Isle of Barra in Scottish outer Hebrides, Well I was there several times, but I was once only as a tourist and there are bus stops there, but there are no timetables on the bus stops. And it’s funny because when there’s a bus stop and you like stand and don’t know what to expect and there are some people in the house nearby, so you come to these people and you ask, excuse me. Do you know where when the bus will come and the people that happened to me at least three times and people say oh, I don’t know, nobody knows where the buses comes. Don’t worry, I get my car and I will drive you whenever you need. So that’s another way to build a community in relations with tourists, I guess. But, but that was a digression. And now let’s go to this. That will be a bit because we will publish this podcast a bit later to compared to when we recorded it. But you mentioned before we went recording that there are some changes in the politics and we can expect a new Commissioner to do with the trains. So what’s that with matter for the trains and for European network.
Right. So every five years we have a new team of European Commissioners and out of that team of 27 Commissioners, 1 gets the portfolio of transport policy. So we’ve had for the last five years, Adina Vallian, a Conservative politician from Romania who has been responsible for European transport. I would say that Adina Valean has nothing against railways. I would not allege a bias or something, but she has not been an effective politician. She has not been willing to make the necessary changes at the European Union level to facilitate cross-border railway routes.
Now, at the time of us recording this podcast, we don’t know who her successor as European Commissioner for Transport is going to be, but we do know one thing. We know the future President of the European Commission is going to be like the outgoing President, Ursula von der Leyen, the German politician. And we know that in her political priorities for the next 5 years, Ursula von der Leyen has a political commitment to fix European cross-border passenger rail ticketing. It is stated in her political priorities. This basically means the idea that you should be able to book in one transaction, a train ticket from any town to any other town in the European Union, providing there’s a railway station in those two places and if something goes wrong, still not be left stranded somewhere. So basically meaning you would have passenger rights is a stated political priority for the next European Commission to fix. And so I have a little bit of optimism that at least if not, it won’t become cheaper to book trains here at wide. But it will at least become easier, and that might at least persuade a few more people to take the train. Now: at the moment we don’t know who a future European Commissioner for Transport is going to be. There are a couple of countries that are rumoured to want that portfolio. They are Finland and Greece at the moment, neither two countries that are so central to Europe’s railways, but at least there is a good functioning railway Network in Finland, so that would be my hope that it would be the Finnish nominee that would manage to get that portfolio, but that person would have an immediate opportunity would be for fixing railway ticketing. And it is the European Commission that has the right of legislative initiative. It is them that would put forward a future law to improve European railway ticketing and so therefore I’m a little bit hopeful that in the next couple of years we might actually finally get that then finally fixed.
OK, so let’s hope that will be just the first step to fix the European railways, because I have to say, after moving to Helsinki, I just can’t wait for this Rail Baltica to be finished because I hate flying as like I like flying a plane. But I hate travelling by by by airlines. So I drive there regularly and I’ve seen how flicks buses are driving there and I thought to myself, I will never get on one of those buses because those guys are crazy. So driving is nice, but I would rather sit comfortable in the train and take the views.
Right. So that’s that’s what to me would be a secondary priority. Once we fix the ticketing one, that’s the kind of lowest hanging fruit to fix. Basically, the European Union has its so-called trans European networks corridors. They are Europe wide railway corridors where national governments can get European Union money to rebuild their railway lines, or indeed build once from scratch and so that Rail Baltica route so Tallinn, Riga, Kaunas, Warszawa is one of those routes. The problem is, is that those three countries, notably Latvia, are delayed with the implementation of the project and the finances are running short. So Rail Baltica will get built, but whether it will actually get done by the end of this decade, that’s going to be quite a tight timetable. But eventually you will get your train from near to Helsinki, a boat first and then a train to be able to, finally, get to Poland.
Yeah. Although it’s also interesting when you look at what the countries are doing. And I’ve noticed I think I may be wrong, but I think Estonia is taking this like Polish approach so to speak, because you mentioned that before. So they are building the basic infrastructure like the trains platforms and so on. So the trains can run as soon as possible, while in Latvia for example, they build this posh train stations by famous architects but you know, the train station is useless when the tracks are not leading to it so…
Every time there is a new government and and political instability is a major problem in Latvia. They then stop the building work. So they need to then restart them again. And so honestly Latvia is at the moment is the weak link in the entire Rail Baltica project. I did have my fears about the Polish aspect of the project for a while, but actually the building works are coming along quite well.
I think it’s ready?
No, it’s not ready yet. There’s a backup at the moment, right. There’s a single track diesel line from the border station Mockava, which is just on the Lithuanian side of the border. So you can run something. But what Poland is doing is instead of building a whole new line, is they they are really rebuilding and reactivating a line from Suwalki to Elk and then from there to Białystok. And so that part there is an old line that currently exists, but they’re basically rebuilding and reconstructing for 200 kilometres an hour, a parallel line. So at the moment the old line is still operational, but the new one is, or the renovated one is not yet finished, but Poland will have that done long before Latvia has completed its stations, so no fear there.
Yeah, but what I meant is that it’s it’s ready as if in the trains can already run on it. So because as I said, I would rather have a train that travels 120 kilometres per hour than not having a bullet train.
Honestly, it’s more like 50 kilometres now at the moment but but yeah. There is at least one train per day with a guaranteed connection in Mockava at the border station to go from Warszawa to Vilnius. So that’s at least progress, and also the new train from Vilnius to Riga is actually a modern, comfortable train. A very good train. Unfortunately, only once per day, so at least I feel that at least Lithuania has kind of turned the corner. They realise there’s an immense potential in their railway network and things are really looking up and it’s the same in Estonia as well. It’s still problematic in Latvia, though unfortunately that’s definitely the weakest link.
OK, so to end on the lighter root you’ve been in almost or over 200 border crossings, so you’ve been on some nice lines. So tell me if you are a railway fan and want to take some really scenic route across the border. Which one was your favourite?
So I really love the one at the border at Bayerisch Eisenstein, so this is a tiny tiny border station between Bavaria and Czechia, so it’s basically northeast from Munich. And wonderful rolling hills, wooden forests, tiny little train and this enormous border station where the border goes right through the middle of the station building, like literally through the building. And it’s this wonderful, charming spot it has tiny village with wonderful forests. Nice place to sit and have a a coffee or a beer under a tree and with a really good railway service. So I really love that one. So if you ever have the opportunity to go to Bayerisch Eisenstein , I can highly recommend it. And another one which is just stunning. Although the trains only work on the Spanish side at the moment, is the France Spain border at Canfranc in the middle of the Pyrenees, which has this majestic huge railway station. But unfortunately the trains don’t work on the French side at the moment, but they might do by the end of the decade, so that’s another one which is just an amazing and incredible place. So yeah, those are my two, which are the kind of favourite scenic places to go.
One more question on technicality. Do you use like Eurrail cards or something or you just? Yeah, so that’s that’s worth it if you travel a lot, yeah.
Yes all my projects are done using Interrail which is the name for the passes. If you live in the EU Interrail is the name, and Eurail is the name of basically an equivalent product for people who live outside of Europe. If you are travelling anything more than a return trip, right, you’re making like three days of train travels in a month, and you’re going a long distance, it will almost certainly be cheaper to do it with an Interrail pass than it will to buy regular tickets. So for example you can do if I were doing a Berlin to Glasgow and back it would be cheaper to do that with an Interrail pass than it would to be to do it with regular tickets. And so that’s how I managed to keep my costs down and indeed Interrail has this reputation as a student product, but anyone can use it. It just costs a bit more if you’re over 26, and you can also take children with you. I think up until the age of 13 they can go for free and so that is the way that if you’re doing kind of a tour by train, you can really, really reduce your costs. So yeah, certainly if you want to do a kind of tourism by rail I’m just using Interrail tickets all the time.
OK. And actually there’s one thing I forgot to ask, so sorry for like dropping that at the end of the podcast but are the ferries interconnected with railways? Does anybody actually work towards that? So say I can take a ferry and then take the train. I’m not talking about like ferries on trains as in Puttgarten or whatever. I’m talking like comfortable way. Say I’m going to Helsinki. I’m taking the ferry to Travemünde and then I got a train somehow connected to the ferry terminal, even by bus that I can… Is that a thing?
Sort of. It used to be much better off than when there used to be dedicated train services to ferry terminals. So for example, you can take the train to the ferry at the ferry terminal at Harwich in eastern England and take a ferry from there to Hoek van Holland in the Netherlands and it works in a combined ticket. You can also do the same across the Irish Sea between Holyhead and Dublin, where the train takes you to Holyhead, basically the whole way to the ferry port on the UK side. There’s a good example for you there in Finland because there is a there is a train station at the ferry terminal in Turku and that’s then the fastest way using a train plus ferry to get to Stockholm. You take the train from Helsinki to Turku port station and then you have to walk like 100 metres to get onto the ferry.
The problem is often that you don’t have passenger rights, basically meaning if the train gets delayed and you miss the ferry or the ferry gets delayed and you miss the train, you can get left stranded. So in a few places in Europe it works in a few other places you get left in the middle of nowhere. So I’ve taken a ferry to Malmö for example, from Travemünde. The Malmö Ferry port is kilometres and kilometres outside of Malmö, so a really long cycle route to even get out of the ferry terminal. So it depends on the route, but in a few places in Europe, yes it works, but it’s far from universal.
So when we are talking about this like passenger rights for the railways, we should also include ferries and other modes of transport.
Exactly. You should also find a way of including buses in it if my journey includes a bus or train and a ferry, I should be just as well covered as if my journey contains 2 trains, right? Because ultimately also for like if I want to make a journey also which involves flights? So imagine a route, say Brussels in Belgium to Graz in AustriaThere is no flight from Brussels to Graz. They you would fly from Brussels to Munich and fly from Munich to Graz. Actually the more environmentally friendly option is fly from Brussels to Vienna and take a train from Vienna to Graz. Now the problem is is you can’t actually book that in one transaction and even if you did, you would be in danger of being left stranded because you wouldn’t have any passenger rights. Now if the European Union were serious about that type of thing it should also be making sure of getting connecting flight passengers onto trains or onto buses as well, if you wanted to. For the short connecting leg, you should replace the short connecting flights with trains or buses instead, but at the moment we don’t have a proper legal framework for that in the European Union either, unfortunately.
So that will be something to think for, that new transport Commissioner, yeah.
For the new European Commission for Transport. Yes, one step at a time. Let’s fix railway ticketing first and then we move to multimodal tickets.
OK, so keep up the good work if you want to follow Jon. He got the blog and he’s very active in Mastodon as well. So we put the links to your social media. And do you want to add something at the end? Maybe I missed something. Maybe I should ask something. Is there anything?
No, I think I think we covered all the main topics, but basically: if you’re struggling to take a train, ask online. The railway companies don’t always know all of the answers to those questions, but somewhere some crazy committed traveller will know the answer. So we as a community of people who are trying to do this, we are hacking our way around the system. Contact me via social media and if I can’t answer, I will know someone who can and will help you book your Europe wide railway tickets. So for now don’t be disheartened by it. We’ll find a way of helping you get to your destination one way or another.
OK, then. Thank you very much and I wish you many safe railway journeys as much as as I wish it to everyone else, so we can be finally able to do it without so much hassle, as you sometimes have to suffer for us.
Thank you very much again – our guest was Jon Worth, a guy who likes trains.
You’ll find Jon’s Mastodon profile here
Here is his personal website, mostly dedicated to train stuff
This is the website of the #CrossBorderRail project
And this is campaign to make night trains great again:
We used fragment of a song by Skaldowie, here is the link to the whole tune
