I have a reputation as a blogger that gets things done – I don’t just have opinions on things, I try to transform my thoughts into practical action. Campaigns such as Gender Balanced Commission and the Atheist Bus Campaign have grown from posts on this blog.

So when @kattebel stated in a tweet that it was time for a campaign to do with Europe’s railways it got me thinking… for essentially I have been doing plenty of ranting about the state of train travel, but have not turned any of this into practical action. I also know quite a bit about railways, which should help.

But what should I actually do?

That’s where it gets really complex. No immediate, one-off, amusing or populist web initiative springs to mind here. For this is much more difficult. There needs to be a coherent voice for Europe’s rail passengers, an organisation that can stand up for passengers on international routes when things go wrong, and can advocate pro-passenger policies. There is the need for an organisation that can make the case for cross-border passenger transport from a citizen perspective and – importantly – not from the perspective of the rail companies (who want to defend their market positions) or from the trade unions or member state governments (who want to defend the numbers of people employed on the railways). The failure of Railteam is surely enough to demonstrate that company led approaches don’t work – a single booking system would aid passengers, but who actually argued for that forcefully?

I’ve done a little research about the organisations in the sector, and have come across the European Passengers’ Federation. Problem is that it’s not a federation of passengers, but a federation of national organisations. It seems to have one employee based in Gent, and the organisation has a completely uninformative website. The German organisation ProBahn might be a model to follow – you can become an individual member of the organisation, but once more its website is quite horrid. Best seems to be the Allianz pro Schiene whose website is comprehensive and informative, and even has a good page on Europe-wide travel, but this is essentially a German organisation.

Do I have the energy, as a simple rail passenger with a blog, to get myself involved in any of this?

[UPDATE]
One very rough idea… some system to aggregate Tweets about the state of the railways, on the rough outline of NBC’s Winter Olympics tracker? Size of the blocks shows more or less where the issues are?

[UPDATE 2]
A few more ideas via Twitter – to do EU versions of BahnTweets, and the delay system from das Bahnblog, maybe mapping all of it in the same way as #uksnow Map? In the meantime I have registered railrights.eu to use as the domain name for whatever this project becomes… In the meantime I’ve also checked BEUC’s page about rail travel rights – no update since November 2006! A friend has also suggested that I network together as many people I can find that use BahnCard 100s.

But instead I would like to focus on what the railway companies are doing in response to the crash, for the whole of the Brussels-Hal main line (which includes connections to between Brussels and both Paris and London) is blocked at least for the whole of Tuesday 15th February.

Eurostar has been quick off the mark explaining to passengers what they should do. It’s a bit of a mess – taking a train via Gent and Lille Flandres – but it would give you a route to get to London.

So what about Thalys, operator of about 25 daily services between Brussels and Paris. Absolutely nothing. They announce on their website (see screenshot to the left) that all services are simply suspended. So a good friend of mine in Brussels is going to miss her mother’s birthday in Paris tomorrow as a result, and surely many thousands of other people – who for reasons personal and professional – need to get themselves from Paris to Brussels and vice versa.

Because of one tragedy on the Belgian network this is no reason to mess everyone else’s life up!

So, as Thalys isn’t doing anything at all, what could they do? There is a branch off the Hal-Lille High Speed Line not too far from Tournai (on Google Maps here) that’s used for the daily Paris-Mons-Charleroi-Namur Thalys service. Thalys trainsets are able to operate across the entire Belgian network as far as I am aware, and at speeds of up to 160km/h on regular lines. Thalys could very easily direct all its services off the High Speed Line close to Tournai and route the trains on the regular route used by Charleroi-Brussels services, via Nivelles. The journey time on that route would be something around 2 hours, perhaps 2 hours 15 minutes. Thalys could easily operate every other train and have enough trainsets to cover the extra journey time.

Another alternative would be for all Thalys trains to terminate in Hal, as the rail accident was actually at Buizingen, a good few kilometres north of Hal. Hal station has half a dozen platforms – surely enough for a few Thalys trains to terminate? Yet another alternative would be for Thalys trains to terminate at Kortrijk instead, and from there passengers would take a Belgian internal IC train via Gent.

So why do they not get on and do it? Is Thalys just so damned smug in its market position, with its monopoly on Paris-Brussels rail services, that it just does not think it needs to do anything? It’s pretty damned lousy.

[UPDATE]
A regular blog reader who is a Thalys regular traveller has just mailed me the Thalys news e-mail about the service disruption – 48 hours after the Buizingen accident they just state that traffic is fortement pertubé. Great, thanks folks. Very handy, and very timely. Click here to view a screenshot of the Thalys mail.

Eurostar trains at St Pancras - adapted from CC / Flickr image

Today the report into Eurostar’s December failings is published, and everything is resorting to normal form.

The Guardian and BBC have straight and factual reports about what went wrong. There’s a new @eurostarcomms account on Twitter. Eurostar has published its response to the review, and has changed some things already. No-one is calling for Richard Brown’s head. Clearly Bell Pottinger’s PR is working. By the end of the day the whole thing will be forgotten in the media. Job done.

Only actually things are not yet right. Yesterday Eurostar had problems once more – snow in Belgium, and a points failure followed by a signal failure on the UK High Speed line. A basic statement warning of delays was displayed on the Eurostar website, yet on the screens at St Pancras outside the check in gates there was no information about the delays whatsoever. Check in was closed for 15 minutes due to overcrowding inside the terminal, and then, once inside it was explained what delays were to be faced. Some kind of live train information on Eurostar.com (or an iPhone app?) would be the logical next step.

Yet how many of the journalists that will follow Richard Brown’s words of contrition to the letter today bothered to head down to St Pancras yesterday and look at how things were? How many will ask fundamental questions about whether Eurostar’s market position is the right one? Whether competition on the line might improve matters? Few, very few. Indeed probably only Christian Wolmar will pen anything really worth reading.

Eurostar will repair their trains a bit, will invest a bit in some more rescue locomotives, will make some changes to their procedures… and then everything will be OK until the trains break down again in 3 years due to the wrong kind of leaves / rain / fog / ice / snow once more, and I’ll be stuck in a terminal somewhere bemoaning the situation on Twitter.

DB Mobil January 2010

In the January edition of ‘Mobil’, the magazine of Deutsche Bahn there’s a picture of Guillaume Pépy (head of SNCF), Rüdiger Grübe (chair of the board of Deutsche Bahn) and Yoshio Ishida (president of UIC) beaming at Gare du Midi, Bruxelles, in front of the Climate Express, a special day long train organised in December to transport climate conscious politicians to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

The train was even organised by Deutsche Bahn Charter and wow, what a wonderful bit of publicity for the railways! Look at how green everyone can be by taking the train!

Stop. Just stop. The shameful double standards here are laughable, and not least because Ishida works for East Japan Railway Company and probably flew to Brussels to be in the picture…

No, the real shame is that this special is about the only genuinely long distance service to leave from Brussels. Try getting to Copenhagen on a regular service and it needs a change in Köln and in Hamburg, and a boat from Puttgarden to Rødby.

Longer journeys are better overnight, but apart from an irregular ski train for a few months a year there are no night trains from Belgium at all – nothing since the very same Deutsche Bahn stopped running the Paris – Berlin / Hamburg train through Belgium in December 2008. The reason then was a dispute between DB and the Belgian SNCB about rates for access to the Belgian network, a dispute that does not look like it has been resolved.

Try the daytime trains and it’s a little better, at least just into Germany. Here there are at least some services – 8 Thalys services a day from Paris Nord to Köln via Bruxelles Midi, and 3 ICE services from Bruxelles Midi to Frankfurt/Main Hbf via Köln. Apart from 30km or so between Aachen and Düren the high speed line between Bruxelles and Köln is now more or less complete.

So it’s all fine? Of course not.

The Thalys PBKA railsets, essentially TGVs designed by Alstom, are allowed to operate at 300km/h in Belgium, but only 200km/h in Germany, and have no clearance at all for the Köln-Frankfurt HSL. For the Siemens made ICE3s it’s the inverse – max 250km/h in Belgium (SNCB cites the danger of flying ballast and downforce), 250km/h on Köln-Aachen and 300km/h on Köln-Frankfurt. Seriously, what the hell is all of that about?

OK, when things work the service is reasonable, but how much government money has been invested in those lines which no train can used to maximum speed along its whole length?

Then try it when things go wrong – as they have quite a lot recently – and things get even more laughable. I turned up at Gare du Midi to take the 0725 ICE to Köln on Saturday 16^th January. I get to the station and I’m told the train is cancelled. No ICEs to Belgium at all for the first two weeks of January due to bad weather the guy informs me at the ticket office, although by 16th January most snow had gone in Belgium. “Deutsche Bahn doesn’t have enough trainsets at the moment, so they are keeping the ICEs in Germany” he told me – not sure if this is the true reason but it’s illustrative that a SNCB employee even says it. If this is true, is it profit driven – DB makes more cash from domestic services – or it’s that they are more fearful of reputation damage of FAZ or Süddeutsche has a go at them than if Le Soir does? Interesting and annoying in any case.

Anyway, what else can I do I ask the guy? “Well you should have checked your train was running before you left home” he says, typical Belgian approach to customer service. Hold on, I booked via the net, DB has my e-mail address, has known for 10 days my train will not run… yet no communication. Eurostar revisited.

So then what? You’re lucky the guy tells me, there’s a Thalys in half an hour, and this time you will be allowed to board it. This time I’ll be allowed to board it? Yes, there are some free seats he tells me, normally you would have to take an IC to Liège, a regional train to Aachen, and then a regional train to Köln. What a prospect!

Yet Thalys and DB are both members of Railteam, a get-together of 6 high speed rail companies that are supposed to together promote high speed rail. DB cannot get its act together to organise a replacement train, even from Aachen (powered at 3kv DC, so open to Belgian locomotives – why not redirect a 200km/h Eupen bound IC train with Class 13 locomotive to Aachen..?), and Thalys is refusing to take DB passengers as a matter of course. Seriously, what is the point of Railteam then? Strikes me it’s more like Railmutiny. Compare that with DB’s approach to replacement trains in Germany – 200km/h ICs replace ICEs – and it all looks highly negligent.

To cap it all there was a major signalling problem at Aachen on the day I travelled, so the Thalys only managed to get to Welkenraedt and from there someone (DB? SNCB? Thalys?) managed to hire a couple of city buses to take us on towards Köln. Of course it took 30 minutes before the buses left, we were all on foot for 80km or so in a city bus on the German autobahn, and the promised destination – Köln – was not Köln, but Horrem, a suburb with a S-Bahn station.

Rather unsurprisingly the Thalys employees had scarpered off the buses faster than their trains can run, so I actually was the one who directed passengers to the trains – as a responsible trilingual rail nerd I worked out fastest which RegionalExpress would get us swiftly to Köln…

Yet again this is Eurostar revisited – if there is a problem, what are the procedures? No-one seemed to know, and for sure no-one wanted to inform the passengers what was going on or take responsibility for anything. They had even told us to get off the Thalys at Liège, only to then tell us to get back on again and go as far as Welkenraedt.

I suspect there’s even more to this whole saga than the rudimentary stuff I can determine here through persistence and logical thinking, and somehow it strikes me that the whole liberalisation of European railways into the next decade is going to inevitably just lead to a big scrap between SNCF and DB, just as airline liberalisation has forced consolidation of the airlines. Is not as if passengers were served especially well by the old monopolies when it came to international travel but we have some way to go until a new, and hopefully better, equilibrium is established.

Last but not least, the Community of European Railways (CER) is looking for a communications officer for its Brussels Office. Shall I make an application?

Airport security - CC / Flickr

The British are used to star ratings for all kinds of stuff, and I don’t mean just on Amazon or TripAdvisor. Local councils are awarded star ratings for their performance, stats are given about doctors’ surgeries, and schools are rated in all kinds of ways. The population behaves according to compare and contrast, that health, council services or education are not absolutes.

So why therefore does the UK government talk as if airport security is an absolute?

It could of course be to do with the fact that the very distant notion of dying in a plane downed by a terrorist is a scary one, but security too is relative, surely evidenced by the fact that BAA has announced that full body scanners will be rolled out gradually, starting with Heathrow (7th paragraph here), the UK airport with the highest number of transatlantic flights.

So how about security star ratings for airports? A standard level of security guaranteed, but beyond that airports that offer additional levels for an additional cost to the airlines that chose to use a particular terminal or airport? “We’re London’s safest airport, we have full body scanners” on LHR adverts in the future? The idea came to me in discussions on a previous post.

And before anyone has a go at me for this: think of all the places you’ve flown from where security checks have been really quite poor. And I bet you still flew. Probably with a laptop in your hand luggage as well.

Plane at Berlin Tegel - CC / Flickr

There has been masses of discussion in the last few days in the UK media about airport security in light of a failed attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner. The UK and US have been jumping to come up with more technological solutions to the problems of airport security. The US has tightened controls for travellers from certain countries and the UK promises full body scanners.

To be quite frank I am unimpressed. Technological security is not an absolute – if the focus is on scanning the body, then flaws will be found in other places in the security of airports. Plus in the UK security procedures are slow and cumbersome as it is, let alone with the addition of more complex technology. Half the people operating the tech at UK airports give the impression that they don’t have a clue how to operate it anyway!

I’m also fascinated by this story of how security operates at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. The Israelis are well aware of threats to security and – notably – most of the security at Tel Aviv is due to personal interaction between security personnel and passengers, and not technological solutions. Could London Heathrow possibly find people it could recruit to make a system like that work? I’ve never flown through Ben Gurion so can’t vouch for it but it gets my vote for the best overall approach to security if it’s true.

All of this has led me to reflect on overall airport design, something I always think about when I’m hanging around waiting for planes to depart or for idiots in front of me at security to realise they have coins in my pocket… so here’s my very subjective guide to how to build the perfect airport! Apart from Ben Gurion all of this comes from my personal experience.

• Security checks at London City Airport – loads of space, plenty of tables and boxes for coats, laptops etc., and clear signs. A knowledgeable business clientele knows how to play the game and everyone gets through to the gates very swiftly.
• The modern art of Oslo Gardermoen.
• The overall ambiance of Stockholm Arlanda.
• The general efficiency of Munich Franz Josef Strauss.
• The onward connections of Frankfurt International – excellent rail and road connections from beside the airport.
• The architecture of London Heathrow Terminal 5.
• The short walks to the gates at Berlin Tegel Terminal A – why don’t more airports go for hexagons?
• The view out of the window when landing at Naples Airport – Vesuvius!

I wanted to include an airport with good and clear signs to get you to the gates easily but cannot actually manage to think of one! Any ideas…?

I like new years. It’s a time to look forward. The days even start to get longer in January, and winter sports are always fun. But I digress. 2010 is going to be a year of some major changes for me, and for this blog too.

Essentially it’s all summed up by the image above.

I have a decision to make on how much time to spend in London (best business), Berlin (best quality of life) and Brussels (compromise between the two). Beyond that how much time do I spend on the professional training aspect of my work, explaining to people how the EU works and how to lobby it, versus the website design and the development of techPolitics LLP?

For sure I cannot keep on doing all I have been doing; I’ll go crazy if I do. But what has to give?

I also need to spend more time in the same place meaning ideally at least 7 uninterrupted days a month in Brussels if I can. I also want to improve my diving and skate an inline skate marathon in 1 hour 20 sometime over the next 12 months. There’s also the small matter of a UK general election and what campaigning role I can manage to play.

On the blog front I need to better divide up the topics that interest me – I already have Euroblog and Sportblog, but a division between politics and technology is also in order. I also should spend some more time on some more considered pieces for Left Foot Forward, Social Europe Journal and others. And all of that will necessitate some changes to this blog over the next 12 months, although it’s not top of my to-do list just yet.

Plus who knows what might await in 2010… 2009 started with atheist buses on the streets of London, and ended with a campaign for a Gender Balanced Commission. In short 2010 obliges me to make some choices but there will be plenty of fun things too, and as ever I’ll do my best to cover most of it on the blog here.

Photo credits: Brussels CC / Flickr, London CC / Flickr, Berlin CC / Flickr, EU flag CC / Flickr, Macbook keyboard CC / Flickr

Spotted recently at St Pancras - mockup on the basis of an original CC / Flickr image

In some weird transport / religion crossover an online magazine called Communicate Jesus has done a write-up on the Eurostar mess and has linked to my post about the issue. Seems they did not notice the Atheist Bus banner in my sidebar Their article is entitled ‘Important lesson from Eurostar’ and the article is categorised ‘for Churches, for Pastors’. The idea of a sermon about Eurostar is a rather odd thought, or maybe they hope that some divine intervention will stop Eurostar breaking down in the future?