I’m lucky enough to have received an invite to The Apeldoorn Conference on UK-Netherlands dialogue, taking place 6-8 March in Rotterdam. An easy and high speed train journey – perfect!
The route is Eurostar to Bruxelles Midi, then Thalys on the new HSL-Zuid to Rotterdam Centraal. Total journey time is just over 4 hours, making it comparable to the plane from London to Schipol and then the train to Rotterdam. It’s a journey that anyone should be willing to contemplate.
So how do you book?
I need to get to Billund in Denmark for work in December, and as I’m trying to be green this year I’m going to take the train. I’m in Brussels the day before, so will leave from there, and I need to get to Vejle, the town closest to Billund that has a mainline railway. I have a whole day, a Thursday, in which to make my journey.
So then, how do I do it?
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?
Tragedy hit the Belgian railways today with the crash of two commuter trains at Buizingen. There’s nothing I can add to what has been written about that already – any loss of life is always devastating, and I just hope this crash was not caused by linguistic issues.
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.
