I’m writing on a grey Tuesday morning in Novi Grad at the north western corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and yesterday evening was one of those magical but melancholy moments in this #CrossBorderRail project. I’d crossed Republika Srpska throughout the day, on worn but charming trains, and then hopped on […]
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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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Sunday 26 May, at about 6am, I will hop on the faithful Birdy folding bike and cycle from Ravières to Montbard – the first of about 125 stages of #CrossBorderRail. Over the 5 weeks that follow I will travel more than 13000km, and investigate 35 new railway borders, most of […]
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6 hours by bus, or 6 hours 45 minutes by train? I’d take the train every time. More space, more comfort, freedom to move around. But were my route Zagreb to Beograd – two of the most significant cities in South East Europe – then I would be out of […]
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A key message in all of my #CrossBorderRail work has been that some problems ought to be really easy to solve. The really, really, really easy ones ought to be the places where trains run, and even run with decent timetables, but there are data sharing problems – meaning the […]
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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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Previously in Yugoslavia, and today in Serbia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina these locomotives are known as class 441. In Croatia they are class 1141. In Romania class 43 and 46. They are operated by Srbija Voz, TENT, MŽ, ŽFBH, ŽRS, HŽ, CFR and some private freight operators too. […]
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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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As was the case in 2022 and 2023, I will be organising and attending a variety of events throughout #CrossBorderRail in 2024. Although the 6 non-EU countries in South East Europe are my focus for 2024, I am nevertheless making a rather large diversion to Tallinn at the start of […]
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