As part of something else I'm working on, I discovered you could - by my estimations - run a Tallinn-Riga-Kaunas/Vilnius train with a timetable of about 10 hours on current infrastructure
Would route as highlighted in red
Sure, 10 hours is not great, but that's how long the bus also takes for this route!
Plus it would serve
🇪🇪 Tallinn (1st city), Tartu (2nd city)
🇱🇻 Riga (1st city), Jelgava (4th city)
🇱🇹 Vilnius (1st city), Kaunas (2nd city), Šiauliai (4th city)
You would have to reverse the train once - in Kaunas
The downside, environmentally, is you would have to use a diesel locomotive - a TEP70
But GoRail 🇪🇪 has 4 of these locomotives, and 🇱🇻 more than 10, all out of use currently because night trains from the Baltic States to Russia are suspended...
So why not think about using these for another purpose?
You could call it a kind of pre- @RailBaltica service. There are no technical problems - these locomotives can be used on the 1520mm gauge networks in all 3 countries
It'd need a bit of political and business will though...
/ends
P.S. For clarity - services from Kaliningrad through Lithuania and Belarus to Russia *are* running, but I cannot work out what motive power this uses through Lithuania. Anyway the point stands - there is enough rolling stock available to do this!
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Essentially, on reflection, it strikes me as implausible that there cannot be something new when the report comes out - either *in* the report, or through some further leak
And version 1.0.0 of the diagram did not cover that adequately
Diagram re-worked on that
Some additional thinking about how the 54 MPs might be composed helped here too
As ever: thoughtful feedback is *so very welcome* - it helps these diagrams improve!
After @alexwickham tweeted out a basic Johnson diagram earlier, it seemed like a good opportunity to apply some Brexit Diagram logic to this problem...
Headline numbers:
Chances 54 letters reached early Feb
50%
Chances leadership election starts early Feb
37%
Chances Johnson stays on a bit longer - at least until the Met Police concludes its investigation
63%
And yes, as every, diagrams like this cannot tell you everything. I cannot begin to predict what the Met Police will say, or when it will conclude
"Today we will be stopping in Torhout, Izegem, Ingelmunster and Gent St Pieters!"
(Something has gone totally wrong with the way @DB_Bahn lists Belgian trains in its timetable today. I found the problem when booking earlier, and then @trassenfinder found the regional train listed as a ICE! Fingers crossed this is fixed soon!)
We've also meanwhile discovered a new Kortrijk-Leuven ICE line. Gent and Leuven are really the beneficiaries of this new timetable (error)!
Who are the best public intellectuals in the area of greening our transport systems in Europe?
Please tweet me your best names, and I will explain why I need them in the thread
The question comes from a demoralising conversation I had today with an EU official about the best means to decarbonise transport
The official in question is a clever person, but had no intellectual framework into which he could fit policy decisions
It strikes me that on energy transition there are some people like @MLiebreich who play this role. In the way we green our cities there are people like @BrentToderian or @_dmoser. At a national level @kkklawitter is doing excellent work, but with focus on Germany
Answer: it's from 30.3.2021 *or newer*, but not necessarily now
So you *can* say "You can see Brexit related truck queues from space"
You cannot say "The truck queues this week at Dover have started to show up on Google!" because the queue shown is probably some earlier one, not the one this week
Also I had a quick look for any particular disruption around 30.3.2021 and can find nothing except an accident (that would have not caused queues with this pattern). So when this queue happened: no idea. I don't think it can be worked out.