Once in a while someone gives you an idea so simple you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. “Jon, did you ever think of making a board game to explain the problems with international rail in Europe?” the producer of a documentary I am working on asked me […]
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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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The #CrossBorderRail finale for 2023 starts on 17th October. I am heading first from Berlin to Slovenia, from there to Karlsruhe for the BAG Mobilität & Verkehr of the German Grüne, and then head to Spain and Portugal (to speak at the Interreg annual event in Santiago de Compostela). There […]
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This one has been long in the planning, and we’ve now only finally got everything together a week ahead, but I am happy to announce the #CrossBorderRail event at the Slovenian Railway Museum, Ljubljana, on Wednesday 18 October from 17:00 CEST (map). The event is organised together with the British […]
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My latest #CrossBorderRail project starts on Wednesday 30th August – you can find out all about the project in the background page here. In the subsequent two months there are going to be at least 27 “travel days”. Each travel day will have: A live blog on this website (you […]
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It was one of the weirder experiences of my #CrossBorderRail project last year. I had arrived in Belfort in eastern France from Besançon, and needed to get to Delémont in Switzerland. There is a line between the two, but Swiss trains mostly depart from the TGV station that is 10km […]
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Zur deutschen Version des Artikels | Aller à la version française de l’article | Go to the English version of the article Es gibt eine französische Großstadt mit 300 000 Einwohnern in der Stadt selbst (und 800 000 im Stadtgebiet), die europäische und internationale Institutionen beherbergt und nur 8,1 Bahnkilometer […]
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At opposite ends of Germany there are two cross border railways where tickets for the trains are wonderfully simple – from Gronau (Nordrhein-Westfalen) to Enschede (Netherlands), and from Freilassing (Bayern) to Salzburg (Austria). At two other borders – Kehl (Baden-Württemberg) to Strasbourg (France), and Forst Lausitz (Brandenburg) to Żary (Poland) […]
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In December 2014 I went to a funeral for a train – the EuroCity “Wavel” train between Berlin and Wrocław was axed, and then MEP Michael Cramer organised a small ceremony to mark its passing. But in 2016 Wrocław was European Capital of Culture, but there was no convenient way […]
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In the past twelve months I have: Investigated 131 cross border railways in Europe Travelled 62716 km on 425 trains Cycled 1662 km in 62 different places Travelled 2191 km on 20 buses I’ve now updated my “All the borders” #CrossBorderRail map as well, to reflect all of that. Pink […]
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