European Rail Passengers Union: lobbying for passengers, cross border

It has been something in the back of my mind for more than a decade: how could railway passengers be better represented to campaign for improvements in international rail? Here’s a piece I wrote in 2014 about the topic. And the issue very much came to a head in 2021 when Mons – Aulnoye-Aymeries closed, when no one other than me and a few friends did anything to protest. The problem, essentially, is there is no organisation working uniquely on the cross-border rail problems.

Yes, there is the European Passengers’ Federation, but they are an umbrella of national organisations. There is no way you can join EPF directly. Back on Track is something you can join wherever you are, but their focus is night trains, not cross border passenger rail in general.

And purely personally I am pretty much at the limit of what I can do a one person campaign – keeping this site, #CrossBorderRail and #CrossChannelRail going is about as much as I can do. I need to scale up this rail advocacy work, and this is especially important now as a reform of railway ticketing in the EU is going to be proposed by the European Commission in early 2026. And passengers need to be heard in the discussion around that.

So a few activists (Patrick, Martin, Jedidijah and I so far) of have started to plan, and today we are ready for a soft launch of the idea of a European Rail Passengers Union – and it even has a provisional website.

The idea is to create a minimum framework of an organisation that you can join wherever you are – there will be no national associations or groups. The work will be done Europe-wide, addressing cross border rail issues that are entrenched and problematic (ticketing issues, passenger rights issues, absence of services) and ad hoc (if a line is in danger of closure, we’ll organise activities to protest about it). The aim will be to raise a little bit of money through donations and membership fees that will allow us to do some lobbying work in Brussels as well.

We have no intention of treading on anyone’s toes here – we would even like to make our organisation a member of EPF, and we are happy to leave the night train work to Back on Track.

Within my networks online there are thousands of people who are repeatedly annoyed that international rail in Europe does not work better. People who would take the train more, and fly and drive less, if the train option was easier, more reliable, cheaper. This organisation is for all of you.

So please let me know what you think! And please do sign up at ERPU.eu – either to be informed about what we are doing or to lend a hand building up the organisation!