Somewhere between hell and hype(r-loop) – where our railway discussion ought to be

Another day, and another stream of railway news pops up in my social media feed.

On the hell side – unsurprisingly from Germany – comes news that the situation for passengers at München Hbf continues to worsen, while DB has closed the Hamburg-Berlin line for 4 months for works, something that is likely to be hell for commuters. Of course in both of these cases the building works causing the short term disruption are so as to improve things medium term – a better customer experience at München, and a more reliable service between Berlin and Hamburg.

On the hype side it’s apparently going to be possible to travel between Ljubljana and Beograd in 2 hours by 2028, for which I presume you will need the 1000km/h train in a sort of semi vacuum tube that has led to loads of gushing reactions all over Facebook. Of course neither of these things are going to happen – given the current plans for upgrades between Ljubljana and Beograd you could perhaps get the trip down to 6 hours there between now and the end of the decade. And the 1000km/h train, while possible in terms of the physics, is highly unlikely to happen in terms of the economics of it. Let me introduce you to Maglev trains if you don’t believe me.

But there are things you could do right away, with a little money and a little more political will, to make some useful and meaningful progress.

It is actually impossible to travel from Ljubljana to Beograd by passenger train at the moment, because although there is an electrified line between Tovarnik (Croatia) and Šíd (Serbia), no passenger trains use it. It is freight only.

The situation at the other border on the route – Slovenia to Croatia at Dobova – is only fractionally better. At least 4 passenger trains a day do cross there, but the hourly regional trains from Zagreb terminate at Harmica on the Croatian side, not at Dobova. Were these trains to go just those 3km further there would be an hourly connection Zagreb – Ljubljana, with a change in Dobova.

These are the sort of changes we need – pretty much universally across the EU. How do we achieve steady, incremental, solid and reasonable changes for passengers? Things that will cause neither horror nor euphoria, but actually work. I have a list of priority projects like this for cross border routes on my #CrossBorderRail project website here, but the same is true nationally as well. In our public debate at least we allow the amazing idea to crowd out the solid and workable, while at the same time complaining that everything is going to shit. The reality we need is in between – with good and solid policies and decent implementation.

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