Already on the 2nd train of the day: TGV Montbard - Paris. All being well I’ll be in Denmark tonight… but that feels a long way off just now! #EGPCongress#crossborderrail
Across Paris RER Gare de Lyon to Gare du Nord, walk to Gare de l’Est (faster than changing into a Métro to Est) and it’s onto the TGV to Mannheim. So far so good, but I banked on this bit working 🙂 #EGPCongress#CrossBorderRail
Franco-German train service. Very French prices! And no, it’s too early (and expensive) for #beerontrains 😉
A very grey Forbach 🇫🇷 - about to cross the first border of the day to Saarbrücken 🇩🇪 #EGPCongress
+5 currently, delayed by a works train ahead of us. Not nervous yet 🙂 #CrossBorderRail
German Bundespolizei controlling passports of all passengers between Forbach 🇫🇷 and Saarbrücken 🇩🇪. And Germany has no #Schengen suspension… but I can’t today prove the controls are systematic. Anyone else en route to #EGPCongress faced the same? (Denmark DOES have a suspension)
And in the end I just ought to give up on this one. No one gives a 💩 about the future of #Schengen at internal borders. @YlvaJohansson doesn’t care. Macron the ‘great European’ is a hypocrite, keeps controls going. Even pretty much all MEPs don’t care either.
This stuff *ought* to matter - making crossing borders easy, and without controls. Being able to take reliable trains across borders too. The EU should be about this practical stuff. But for political decision makers it’s not. #CrossBorderRail#EGPCongress
Take me to Neumünster!
This ICE will at least get me close-ish to 🇩🇰. But with the bottlenecks of the Riedbahn, Frankfurt Hbf and Hamburg Hbf ahead… fingers crossed! #CrossBorderRail#EGPCongress
A typical day on DB ICEs. A bunch of small things go wrong - trespassers on track means 10 min delay. Train doesn’t get right path into Frankfurt (Main) - adds 5 more mins. Stuck behind a stopping train approaching Hamburg… so 10 min more. So I’ll miss connection in Neumünster.
It’s #beerontrains time of day. RE Neumünster - Flensburg. Looks like I’m going to get to København H tonight… barring any unexpected mishaps in the next hour! #egpcongress
Never have I been so happy to see a Danish train! Connection onwards to Fredericia was waiting in Flensburg
The train manager informs us the toilets are only open from Padborg 🇩🇰 though 🤯 #EGPcongress
Under the lights at Tinglev some IC4 trains stand unused, gathering graffiti. Testimony to Denmark’s botched railway policy in the late 1990s/early 2000s
Høje Taastrup, edge of København. 15 min to go.
Can you do Bourgogne (Nuits sous Ravières) to København in a day? Yes
Would I recommend it? No
A tiring and tricky journey, that could have gone wrong and numerous points, but thankfully didn’t!
18 hours 45 mins. 8 trains today. Oh for a night train between France and Denmark instead!
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Jeez. It could take until 2025 until TGVs are approved for the line.
And the whole effing point of Stuttgart21 - of which this line is a part - was to create a Paris-München high speed corridor!
Really, how can everyone mess up *so badly*?
And to those going “yeah but there are few TGVs anyway” true, but so it goes on and on. International services are the lowest priority - even when *they were the stated rationale for building the line*
I am not that much of a fan of building high speed lines, but the one I sketch in green on the map here - I call it LGV France-Allemagne - would make a lot of sense
The central problem: there is no reasonable rail line at the moment between northern Alsace and Germany - the Wörth-Lauterbourg and Wissembourg lines are slow, and part of the Rastatt-Roeschwoog line is missing (re-instating the bridge would be complex)
It is a flat rate public transport ticket – for 49 Euro you can travel on all local and regional buses, trams, metros, S-Bahn and regional trains for 1 calendar month in the whole of Germany.
Is 49 Euro for this a good deal?
Yes. A monthly public transport ticket for some individual cities has until now cost more than 100 Euro. So this reduces the costs for regular commuters pretty much everywhere.