Cross-border train hassles hamper EU’s green ambitions
Self-anointed rail inspector exposes numerous issues
CZECH-GERMAN BORDER — The lanky man bent down to examine a rusted railroad track that cut across the empty square of a small, forgotten town, shaking his head at the weeds poking up.
“Disappointing,” was his verdict, the ruling perhaps influenced by the shuttered brick train station accumulating cobwebs in the German border town of Seifhennersdorf, not far from the Czech Republic.
By profession, Jon Worth is a university lecturer in political communications. By passion, he is the self-anointed inspector of Europe’s railroads. And he has tasked himself with addressing a dilemma: Why isn’t it easier to traverse European borders by rail?
No one asked him to undertake this mission, but his justification is clear. For Europe to live up to its ambitions to lead the globe to carbon neutrality, it needs to get people out of planes and cars.
On paper, Europe’s train system has a leg up on that of many parts of the world, including the United States. Yet its railways could almost be an allegory for the European Union itself. From the outside, the system seems boringly functional. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and you discover a tangle of bureaucracy, finger pointing, and the kicking of problematic cans down the road — or rails.
For the bloc aspiring to be the greenest of them all, international rail routes within the European Union leave something to be desired.
Bridges once spanning borders have lain in ruins since World War II. A multimillion-euro line between Paris and Barcelona, offering spectacular vistas, could be transporting trainloads of people every hour. Instead, it lies unused most of the day.
Traveling high-traffic commercial routes, such as Paris to London, can cost hundreds of euros more than flying. Want to ride the rails from Tallinn, Estonia, to Riga, Latvia? Good luck. The national railways refuse to coordinate train schedules.
And travel sites for international rail bookings — for instance, the equivalent of Kayak or Skyscanner used for airplane flights — somehow either fail to exist or are difficult to find.
To understand why — and to attract attention to the problem — Worth began a one-man grassroots campaign this summer that he calls the Cross Border Rail Project.
Using crowdfunding to buy a drone, a camera, and a gauge to measure trains’ air quality, he has traversed every EU border to determine where international rail systems work, where they don’t, and what could be done to fix them, then documented his findings. At each stop, he writes a postcard detailing his findings to the EU railways commissioner, offering his recommendations.
“One reaction I get is: ‘Are you this crazy?’” said Worth, as we clattered along in a glass compartment on the line to Prague from Berlin. “The other reaction is: ‘Actually, this is really interesting. Because we need to get more people on trains.’”
To Worth, comparing the present with the past is the best justification for his mission.
In the 1930s, it took around 2 hours and 45 minutes to reach Breslau from Berlin. Now, it takes more than 4 hours, he said. In the 1990s, a train from Bucharest reached Budapest in 12 hours. Now it takes at least 15 hours. The increased travel time, he said, is the result of decades of neglect and not prioritizing international lines.
At the bridge linking the Polish town of Zgorzelec to its German sister city of Görlitz, wires erected for electrifying the railway line abruptly stop where Germany begins.
Poland and Germany signed an agreement in 2003 to electrify their cross-border lines. But nearly 20 years later, Berlin has still not honored its part of the deal. The electric wiring on the Polish side has never been used; effectively, the electric poles were put up as a giant gesture of annoyance. To this day, only diesel trains can cross that border.
“They are basically saying: ‘Hey, Germany, we’ve electrified and you still bloody haven’t,” Worth said. “When are you going to get on it?’”