Party Vibe

presumably the idea behind this is (which is an impressive feat of engineering) to speed up freight trains but it they would to keep the other passenger train services running anyway as there are loads of folk across Europe and beyond (including Japanese, Chinese etc) who want to take on the slower train that goes up the mountain as they can get off at various points and take photos of trains, go wandering in the woods (along with the rest of the locals who are yodelling and singing to their cows whilst keeping Ahmed and his family at the tobacconist by the station happy as they can stock up on cheaper cigarettes and cigars :laugh_at:)

One thing that isn’t explained in detail (the Grauniads tech/science reporting is getting worse by the day) – maybe you have to go on to some hardcore trainspotters site to find out is exactly how they would shift containers from Rotterdam to Genoa at 250km/h and what locos woud be used; as the electric is different across Europe (25 000V 50Hz in some areas but 15 000v 16,67 Hz in others) surely a diesel would be slow and create pollution; and swapping the loco at any point (where the rest of the containers would have to be put in a sufficiently large siding) would surely also delay this process?

Considering how long the EU has been around and advances in technology it is amazingly difficult to catch an electric train that goes across national borders – you end up having to check info from 3 or more railway companies in different languages only to find there is a limited number of trains that must be booked in advance – and middle aged German train spotters and bird watchers with plenty of spare time have bagged all the seats anyway. Even then you sometimes would having to wait at some random border whilst the loco is switched over to one that is the right kind or have to take a 100km diversion.

Also bringing along bicycles (which is not unreasonable when travelling in Europe) is often subject to yet more restrictions. There are other complications to do with signals, the size of trains and carriages etc which complicate things further – it has got worse than when the railways were all nationalised in Europe in 1980s (even pre EU) when you could get a ticket from England that was valid for most of the continent.

the UK and NL railway systems are now as bad as each other; consider that at one point they weren’t even sure if the Flying Scotsman was safe to use the same route it had taken centuries ago and were going to restrict it because initially the Network Rail engineers didn’t want to do weekend overtime.

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