Soup of the Day

From billets and snelle treinen to großartige Städte and gamme della montagna

From tickets and fast trains to grand cities and mountain ranges, the unofficial name for the massive project Siân and I are going to undertake this summer. If you have not been keeping up with this blog over the last few weeks, then this will all be very new.

In July 2007, we are going to investigate the ease and comfort in which people can travel around western and central Europe without the use of a personal car or planes. Why would we do such a thing? Simply because the amount of carbon a single flight to europe would generate is more than our flat generates in a whole year.

I believe that you can get abroad without flying, particularly to the popular European tourist spots, so to prove it is possible, we are going to visit most of major attractions. The journey is currently being plotted as there are a lot of unknown variables at present, but we know for sure that we will be seeing Lille, Brussels, Amsterdam, Köln, Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague, Munich, Vienna, Rome, Milan, Turin, Zurich, Nice, Bordeaux and Paris.

Along the way we will be stopping to see other things of interest and to meet (and interview) people with something to say on getting around Europe by train, which leads on neatly to the other big task for this project. All along the journey we will be filming the whole trip, ups and downs, creating a log of the journey that will eventually prove that it is possible to do Europe without stepping foot on an aeroplane.

There are a number of people that I have contacted to try and set up interviews, talking especially about the European network of high speed lines (ligne à grande vitesse (F), hoge snelheidslijn (NL), Hochgeschwindigkeitsbahnlinie (D), riga ad alta velocità (I)). The organisations and groups I have contacted include, London and Continental Railways (LCR) who are responsible for the only high speed line in the UK, HS1; SNCF, the French national train operator; RFF, the French national network operator; Thalys who run high speed TGV’s to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Köln; Die Bahn (DB) who are responsible for Germany’s railways; Eurostar, who run high speed trains from London, Paris and Brussels; and finally Alan James who is spearheading the UK Ultraspeed campaign. Needless to say, no one has responded yet, but we have several months to go.

So what are the goals for this journey? There are a number of things that I want to explore with this journey, the core interests are listed below.

1. Practicality. We are going to a lot of destinations, but most people would be going to just one or two. How practicle is it to get to and from your holiday spot using trains rather than the alternatives.
2. Environment. What is the environmental cost of travelling by train when compared with the competition.
3. Interoperability. How easy is it to get from one system to another, what sort of time do you have to spend waiting for connecting services and if you do, what can you do to kill the time.
4. Financial. Analysis of the financial cost of using the train when compared to the alternatives.

This list is by no means final, but it certainly will form the main themes of the investigation. Hopefully with the help of a few interviews it will be possible to bolster this project with some really good insight from industry professionals.

As the whole journey is being filmed, the finished documentry will be placed online for viewing at some point after the trip. This exercise is not-for-profit as I feel this project is in the public interest, so wherever you find it you’ll be able to watch it for free.

Finally a dedicated web site is currently under production for this project where I hope to place all the interviews, video footage, pictures and the all important blog for this project that still has no name. If you have a good idea for a name, please add it to this posting using the comment form below. More will follow soon.