‼️ Important: today, 1 day before departure, #CrossBorderRail the finale is 65% funded. This means my costs are covered, but the time I invest is unpaid. Further donations would hence be very welcome – donate here ‼️

Tomorrow – 6th June 2025 – the last big tour of my #CrossBorderRail project will start. The 2025 Finale I am calling it. All of the background can be found here, and it is going to be more than 140 trains (covering 25000km), more than 1200km by bike, and at least 80 new borders investigated. And – as ever! – online coverage of the project is a big part of it. And from an ethical point of view I am doing my best to prioritise federated and open source digital tools.

If you are reading this text via my Newsletter, then there will be no daily email about the project from now on! I do not want to bombard my subscribers with email, so to follow the project please use one of the tools below!

As with previous tours, Mastodon (follow me there: @jon@gruene.social) is going to be the main tool I will be using throughout. There will be a thread for each day of the project, and it will be a high quantity of posts. The reasons are threefold. First, my railway and sustainability community there is the strongest. Second, Ivory on iOS and MacOS is a joy to use and makes posting when on the go a breeze. Third, aggregating and cross posting from Mastodon works easily.

The strategy on Bluesky is twofold. Most of the followers of my main account there @jonworth.eu are not public transport people, so on that account there will only be a post at the start of each day, and once in a while other sporadic odds and ends. Anyone on Bluesky who wants everything from the project should follow the account where content is auto-cross-posted from Mastodon – @jon.gruene.social.ap.brid.gy. However if you want to reply to me from Bluesky, you have to follow the Bridgy Fed @ap.brid.gy‬ account as well so the reply comes to me on Mastodon.

For the first time I am going to make a daily post on LinkedIn (my account there: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonworth/), mostly because many railway industry people use that network very intensively.

On Peertube (follow me there: https://peertube.netzbegruenung.de/@jon) there will be a live video at the start and end of each day of the project. The start video will explain what the day will entail, the end video will give my preliminary conclusions about what I discovered. Once in a while there might be an extra live stream from an event somewhere as well.

Each day on the #CrossBorderRail website there will be a Live Blog (those are all posted in the category Live Blog), and this will draw together the content posted across the other platforms.

I will do my best to post photos on Flickr (follow me there: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonworth-eu/) as I go, but from the experience in previous tours, this is normally the one I manage to do least systematically!

If you want to syndicate the content in some way, there are RSS feeds for all components: this website in total, this website Live Blogs only, Mastodon, Peertube.

Accurate mapping and documentation of my journey is important, and this year is no different. The entire route is mapped as accurately as possible on uMap – the zoomable map is here, and there is a separate layer for each day of the project. The rail routes are made using Pierre Beyssac’s excellent train routing tool. Due to my effort to not rely on Komoot for bike mapping this year, bike routes are now also properly shown on uMap. And if my plans change (disruption is highly likely!) I will try to re-map as well.

The full and detailed schedule of the project is on Nextcloud here – see PLANNED.xlsx, CentralEuropeFinale tab.

And if you want to follow the project offline?

There are a load of events throughout the project – the full list is here. Come along!

Am I passing where you’re based? I’m happy to say hello over a coffee or a beer! This is especially the case in Hungary, Romania and Moldova later in my project. And if you would like to join me for a leg or two of the trip somewhere that’s possible too! Send me a message about these.