The railway line from Thessaloniki (Greece) to Bitola (North Macedonia) via Florina has a long history. It was completed in 1894, before the Balkan Wars in 1913 resulted in the final 17km ending up in Yugoslavia. Trains continued to run on the cross border section until 1987, and then ceased, […]
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The research phase of #CrossBorderRail 2024 is done, so now it is time to start to assess what I learned. The first conclusions will be presented in a public webinar at 19:00 CEST on 9th July. The webinar has now concluded, and you can view it here: The slides that […]
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There is was. The sign in the middle of nowhere: Kaisma. The village of 119 inhabitants that is to get a Rail Baltica station. The village – if you can call it that – was a little further on. A cluster of houses and a bus stop. And then even […]
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Jump to: Text updates | Summary videos | Latest photos | Today’s background | Today’s route The best way to follow #CrossBorderRail as the trip develops is on social mediaThere are always posts on Mastodon (@jon@gruene.social & #CrossBorderRail) Today’s live text updates This day of live coverage is […]
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I spent yesterday at the France-Germany border – I started in Freiburg, cycled to the human chain protest at Breisach, and cycled onwards to Colmar in France. The Association Trans Rhin Rail has been working for twelve years to try to re-open the cross border section of the Freiburg-Colmar line. […]
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On 14 June 2022, on a crisp summer morning, I was the only passenger on an international train from Mons to Aulnoye-Aymeries, and would go on from there to the EU Agency for Railways in Valenciennes – the official start of the #CrossBorderRail project. Josef Doppelbauer, the boss of the […]
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It’s quite rare that anyone organises a kind of protest for the re-opening of an international railway line, but that is exactly what is happening on Sunday 14 April at Breisach-Volgelsheim, the part of the Freiburg-Colmar cross border railway line that is missing. You can find out all about the […]
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During my #CrossBorderRail projects in 2022 and 2023 I sent postcards throughout the trips. In 2022 European Commissioner for Transport Adina Vălean even received a postcard from me every single day of the project! For #CrossBorderRail 2024 I am going to be repeating the postcards, with a slightly different format. […]
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The motivation for the whole #CrossBorderRail project was to assess why there had been such meagre progress fixing the 15 missing links Michael Cramer had proposed in his 2015 report. Only 1 of the 15 from Cramer’s list – Selb-Plößberg (Germany) to Aš (Czechia) – has so far been fixed. […]
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My 2023 projects might not have had the one-off “wow, some dude is crossing all of Europe’s borders in one go!” effect that 2022 had, but looking back the past 12 months have both been a lot of fun and has been politically interesting too. After the 83* borders crossed […]
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