Welcome to the #CrossBorderRail Mystery Trains Days Thread
Today: Berlin - Karlsruhe - Wörth/Rhein - Lauterbourg - Strasbourg - Haguenau
Tomorrow: Haguenau - Reichshoffen - Strasbourg - Offenburg - Freiburg (Breisgau) - Berlin
Crossing these borders:
Berg (Pfalz) 🇩🇪 - Lauterbourg 🇫🇷
Kehl 🇩🇪 - Krimmeri-Meinau 🇫🇷
But that's not the point of this trip... I am instead going looking for cross border trains, not checking infrastructure
Here’s today’s intro video
Why am I going to Lauterbourg and Reichshoffen?
#CrossBorderRail 2024 Mystery Trains Days
Train 1/10
ICE 73
07:23 Berlin Hbf
13:09 Karlsruhe Hbf
705.8km
122km/h
DB Fernverkehr
Train type: ICE 4 long version
⚡️
🚲: ✅ (needs reservation)
🦽: ✅ (lift on board and stations have backup ramps)
🛜: ✅
🍽️: ✅
🧳: 🙂
🧽: 😐 (clean outside, but wasn’t cleaned overnight inside)
I think DB fetched a different train out of the depot this morning as it hasn’t been cleaned
That also means reservation signs seem to be wrong (I took what looked like a free seat, but it was reserved)
Pro tip if travelling without a reservation: use Comfort Check In in DB Navigator. It won’t let you check in if a seat is actually reserved
Euractiv tries to explain why rail ticketing is in von der Leyen’s political priorities https://www.euractiv.com/section/railways/news/von-der-leyens-second-attempt-at-single-ticket-rail-travel/?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content
And I have Gell-Mann Amnesia https://themindcollection.com/gell-mann-amnesia-effect/
I’m going to have to write an explainer
It’s obvious to many people what’s broken - EU wide train ticket booking doesn’t work as well as it should
But where it’s better or worse, why this is the case, why the industry alone will not fix this, and what to do about it are all poorly understood
This is WHY the Commission should act https://jonworth.eu/note-to-the-new-eu-transport-commissioner-fixing-cross-border-rail-ticketing-will-help-millions-of-europeans-and-can-secure-your-legacy/
Dear 2024 nominee for European Commissioner for Transport, Congratulations on your nomination. Being Transport Commissioner is a massive challenge, and an enormous privilege. As pretty much all of us living in the EU use some sort of transport every day, what you do is going to have an impact on […]
And in spring I wrote a detailed and long report about European rail ticketing - that has a bunch of case studies about what needs fixing https://jonworth.eu/a-report-for-jakop-dalunde-mep-and-a-follow-up-event-about-rail-and-multimodal-ticketing-in-the-eu/
The political context has changed a bit since then, but the practical issues remain the same
I was commissioned by Jakop Dalunde, MEP from Miljöpartiet de gröna (Greens/EFA), to write a report about the ongoing challenges to fix multimodal and especially railway ticketing problems EU-wide. The report - entitled "Simplifying European Ticketing – A chance for a green transformation of public and multimodal transport in the
Back to today's project... going to find the cross border Régiolis trains parked up rusting
Rheinland Pfalz now only sees the new contract for operations in place from December 2027! 😡 https://www.zoepnv-sued.de/projekte/grand-est (right at the bottom)
That's a full 3 years later than planned, and means the trains will only run 8 years after being ordered, and 6 years after the first one was delivered. FFS
Ok, the approval of these cross border Régiolis trains
They're notionally class Z85500, can also be known as Régiolis and Coradia Polyvalent, built by an Alstom works that got taken over by CAF
But I find no approval of them in the ERA ERATV database: https://eratv.era.europa.eu/Eratv/Search
Someone who knows this better than me - @partim maybe? - is there something I am missing to find an approval?
Or could EBA still approve these for Germany?
Jon Worth
Martin Hoffmann
utzer 