Introducing the Rail Story Bullshit Meter

Sometimes ideas are borne from frustration.

After reading for the umpteenth time on LinkedIn that Portugal will relaunch night trains to Spain in 2025 (it likely won’t), I snapped.

I have hence come up with a simple system to call out bullshit stories about railways – the Rail Story Bullshit Meter.

Stories I encounter will be scored on a four point scale:
Bullshit – I can see no way it can happen
Good idea, don’t believe it – it could happen, but there are major hurdles to overcome
Should happen – more or less everything is in place to make it happen, but something might prevent it still
Will happen – everything is ready. Go ahead and book a ticket for it!

LinkedIn in particular seems susceptible to this, but I will also post these responses on Mastodon and Bluesky as well, and here in a kind of archive. I will post a bit of background here too.

I am not going to try to do retrospective calling out of bullshit – I cannot go back to stories from 2022 that promised a 2024 launch and assess why it did not happen. And other than Channel Tunnel issues I am going to avoid UK rail issues. But beyond that do send me bullshit you have spotted that you would like me to assess!

So here are the assessments so far – in no particular order!

Here’s the news story. This one is obvious at one level – Amsterdam-Paris is ripe for a rival. But trying to do this by January 2027 (so timetable change December 2026) looks like a hell of a long shot to me. But given Qbuzz is owned by Trenitalia, and Trenitalia is buying more Frecciarossa 1000 trains this could happen eventually.

Here’s the story. This one is also eminently do-able, but we do not know who would do it and, importantly, how and when. There are either old Talgo trains, or some Arco couchettes that CP acquired from Renfe that could be used for the service, but how much time and money would be needed to fix these up is unknown. So 2025, forget it. Later in the decade perhaps.

If anyone believed this you better stop reading right now.

Flixtrain has two paths a day each way between Berlin and Warszawa from December 2025 – outlined here. The problem is it needs carriages that can accept 3kV dc current head end power, and at the moment it does not have any of those in its fleet. Until it either leases or buys some I cannot believe this will happen. It would not be hard to do, but I do not believe it yet.

A landslide has blocked the track France – Italy high speed services use, and what was meant to be a closure of a few months has dragged on beyond 18 months. It is of course impossible to be sure that everything is now OK, but finally Trenitalia has announced a date for the resumption of services. Having been unable to make this announcement until now, I think we can conclude it will happen this time – barring some last minute mishap.

We have a bunch of news stories (like this one) with a concrete date – 8 February. It’s 3km of track with no significant engineering headaches. Trains exist, an operator exists, Gorizia and Nova Gorica are European Capital of Culture. This one is going to happen.

Sorry Elmer van Buuren and European Sleeper, but I do not believe this one. And the only real fault is having announced this idea before realising there are two problems with it
1) France
and
2) Spain
European Sleeper has even itself understood this route would be a pain, and is running seasonal trains from Netherlands to Italy via Germany and Austria instead, because that is more eminently doable than trying to run anything through France, before we even come to the complexity of the high speed line from Perpignan to Barcelona.

Here’s the story. There is something afoot with regard to a company trying to rival Eurostar – Virgin Trains is apparently ready to sign a contract “this quarter”. But until they do I do not believe this will happen.

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