Moof! 🔜 OpenTransport2026

It occurs to me that a lot of people reading me here may not actually grasp how normal international trains are in this part of the world. Want to take a train from Mannheim to Karlsruhe? You can hop on the train to Zürich. Want to go from Berlin to Dresden? You should absolutely go on the train to Praha. Want to go on the train from Vienna to Salzburg? The train to Frankfurt is definitely a possibility. They’re just trains, and part of the route, and handled no differently than the national ones.

I grew up on an island with three train lines. I grew further up on an island that didn’t have a rail connection to the continent til 1994, and that you have to check in as if it were a flight to go there. I now live in a country where there are only 4 trains a day in each direction that go further than the town on the other side of the border… and even the low speed train is advertised as going to Port Bou. The Cerbère stop is only really mentioned if you look very very closely. To me, being able to get on a train to Amsterdam just to get to Hannover, is now normal, but I forget how revolutionary that concept is to those who live in the less connected parts of Europe. When people on fedi talk about #CrossBorderRail, it’s in the context that this sort of thing should become normal all over the place. There are other issues for sure, the border town workers have completely different priorities. But it’s definitely part of it.

On the rails again… After that little digression, I’m on yet another international train to Basel SBB in order to get to… Basel SBB. But I am also going to Basel SBB because it’s the easiest way to get to Weil am Rhein in Germany. It’s the wonders of the tri-country area. And I have an entire first class coach on this ICE 3 (403) all to myself… and @wendy@mendeddrum.org of course.

Having enjoyed a DB Chicken Tikka Masala, it occurs to me that what the Bordbistro needs to round off the menu is a warm chocolate fudge cake. I'll make do with some of the sweet snacks I bought in France on Saturday, instead.

…And we appear to be leaving Offenburg, 110 minutes late. The conductor is hopeful there will be no further delays.

Taking up the earlier thread about international train, whilst I'm waiting (there's an offshoot of this thread going on about why I'm waiting)… It occurs to me that this sort of international connectivity definitely fosters some competition between operators. I definitely wanted to go on an ICE between Paris and Mannheim last Saturday, rather than an earlier TGV. Similarly, I prefer the AVE over the InOui between Valence TGV and Barcelona. I have chosen specific trains because of the company that runs them before, sometimes prioritising that over the timetable. There are arguments about the right way to foster competition on the railways, and whether it should be allowed at all. There's an interesting difference between the collaboration between national operators that nearly all Germany-adjacent international trains have, as opposed to the distinctly different open access-style operations that Trenitalia and Renfe are doing in France. Which is better though?

Aaah, I’ve missed Heiko’s Growl… #DB

Or in modern gen-z speak: “There are 8.589934592 Gigabits in a Gibibyte” - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged. They have played us for absolute fools.

I am sat on this TGV on 4 seat table in first class, and I am sharing it only with my faithful companion @wendy@mendeddrum.org. I just snacked on a Laugencroissant, because the SNCF ones are terrible, if they even have them. I have done over 80,000km by train over the past couple of years. It is still magical to me that a vehicle the size of a (very thin) skyscraper laid on its side is capable of travelling at over 300km/h and we can just site here comfortably and watch the world go by out of the window. “It doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it works” - Sir Terry Pratchett

Like, seriously, you just know someone has put that into a spreadsheet, run through the IEEE floating point crap, and come out with an entirely untrue number. And that was before ai estimation

Like, seriously, if you’re going to do that, why not go all the way and redefine the byte as a decabit? How is this saner?

OH: My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio drop

Renfe has dropped a new Cercanías app, with a more modern UI. https://apps.apple.com/app/id953441960 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.renfe.renfecercanias (does require Play Protect) There’s a lot of rough edges that it doesn’t take long to find, but at least it does a lot of the basics in a relatively reasonable way. It shows next departures, route information, real time alerts, ticket prices, multi-train routes, and so on. It also allows you to buy tickets, though does not have Apple Pay (nor, I suspect Google Pay) integration. The live view of where all the trains are in the network is also a nice touch. I could go into the negatives, but in general I want to be happy that there is a new app that is at least a little more usable than the old one.

@wendy@mendeddrum.org …I really should take my own advice. Lyon Part Dieu is crammed full of people today. It’s sapping my good mood. I’ve taken refuge in the newly-opened Pignol in the lower section of Place Béraudier, and I shall emerge when Ma Gare SNCF tells me to go to (probably) track K. And I’m telling myself I should have changed in Valence TGV. Those of you looking to change trains to Barcelona: do what I say, not what I do. A much more expanded bit of advice here: https://cupoftea.social/@moof/116828521528732917

…And we're off. We left at +47. I doubt we're going to make that up. If nothing else, there was apparently some big delays this morning in the Girona area that affected the high speed line, so I suspect we’ll be picking up some more delay then.

We spent a while sat just North of the Tunél de Perthus on a viaduct of some sort, and on the right hand track. And we're back in Spain, carrying about 54 minutes of delay.

I made it onto the AVE, which was on Track K as expected. It seems there were issues on the platform with people hopping onto the train without tickets. There was a certain amount of chasing down of people by the train staff. This is unusual, but it seems to have happened at least once more when I took this train recently. We've made it as far as Narbonne. And this is where things became a little weirder. A member of the train staff made an obviously unscripted announcement in three languages. Each repetition was different, but the gist of it was that we had to check we had all our belongings with us either before we left the train, or before the doors closed. A little while later there was a separate announcement about the doors closing, and it wasn't the usual “attention a fermeture automatique des portes" one.

Until then, the most transited air corridor in the world was the Madrid-Barcelona air corridor. At 1 hour between Barcelona-El Prat airport and Madrid-Barajas airport, and linking Spain’s capital with its second city, demand was such that Iberia created a product called the “Puente Aéreo” or Air Shuttle. This service had a frequency of every 30 minutes, or even every 15 at peak times. Part of it is on dedicated planes, and part of it is on dedicated seating on planes that would call at both airports before flying on to their final destination. The beauty of this service is that you don’t have to book yourself onto a particular plane. You have a fixed-price ticket, available at a discount as a carnet of ten, and you just turn up at the dedicated terminal in each airport where you will be allocated a seat on the next available plane. It’s everything that @quixoticgeek@social.v.st wants out of train ticketing, except the fact it’s not on trains.

…And then we just sat here. We’ve sat here for about half an hour now. This seems to be unrelated, and something to do with people on the track, as the trains next to us are also stopped. And eventually, after all the rigmarole and insistence on the doors being closed, they've been opened again, so people can walk on the platform. There's no indication of when we’re going to start again …as I typed that, we just had an announcement on the platform that we should get back onto the train, as traffic is about to recommence.

What I cannot decide is whether the requirement in the ministerial order was put in due to incompetence or malice.

OH: Vallès Renfe, o Vallès FGC?

RE: https://mastodon.uno/@miniBill/117031882482597212 Three things: ⁃ Password management is a pain, as it involves manually editing .htaccess files ⁃ As a result, you end up giving one password out to the group of people, which makes for other social issues down the line if you just want to give temporary access ⁃ This will be used on iOS devices, and Safari's handling of basic auth doesn't save your username and password in the keychain, which means you have to type them in every time the session expires, which is normally at the worst possible moment. No, the apple password manager doesn't work either. Yes, that last thing is an Apple problem, but I have a better chance of plugging something compatible in than getting them to change the OS any time soon.

The importance of this treaty, and the permanence that removal of the border fence symbolises, cannot be overstated. For the locals it means an end to unpredictable, potentially hours-long border queues that Spain would whimsically enforce to a more or less exhaustive extent for political theatre purposes. It also means a reduction in crime related to cross-border contraband, because, well, the physical border isn’t there any more. One of the more interesting aspects of this agreement has to do with going through Joshua Hassan Gibraltar International Airport. When the new terminal was originally built in the late 2000s there had been a provision made in the plans for an exit directly into Spain. It was never completed, due to a change of Spanish government. (2/3)

No spoilers here… but if you haven’t seen it yet, the latest episode of Game Changer - Count the Rice - is one of the best yet. Make time to watch it, and you will also want to watch the behind the scenes afterwards.

I know I should sleep, but the foxes in my head go.. ”Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!” What the fox say?

RE: https://chaos.social/@pseyfert/116964019150721738 I can’t say I've found them to be particularly terrible. Whilst not the most modern and airy, they get the job done, don't stink the train out, and are generally clean. I’ve seen a lot worse on other trains, even premium ones.

Hey Apple… I think you picked exactly the wrong icon for productivity in the App Store

When did the Renfe on-board announcement tone lose a note? And when did the English voice go northern?

TIL that back in 2005 the tourist boards of the various cities that have AVE stations got together with the national tourist board and created an initiative called “Ciudades AVE” which, amongst other things, has published the website https://spainbytrain.org So if you want to find out where you can go and what you can see using Spanish high speed trains, that’s a starting point.

I am currently preparing a statically generated website. The site itself will be public, but i would like to have a preview version of that site to share with a few friends who are going to be nitpicking it for me. I’d like to put that behind an auth wall, preferably something a little less basic than basic auth. Is there something lightweight that I can use? I’m serving from caddy, proxied via traefik. I am happy to run something on docker, or if there’s a European-run service I can plug into, that’s also fine.

With the new Schengen-compliant Gibraltar, part of Schenghen without being fully there, so some of those plans have been dusted off. There is a new, temporary, structure on the Spanish side of the border that is attached to the building, pending a more laborious construction project in the years to come. This allows Spanish authorities to perform Schenghen area immigration and customs checks without being on Gibraltarian territory. Gibraltar’s head of Government, Chief Minister Fabian Picardo, has just published a fascinating video explaining the new procedures at Gibraltar airport. It covered the steps people will go through, and how some of it is in Spain and some in Gibraltar. If you thought the Eurostar border checks were weird, then this is a somewhat more geopolitically complicated version of that. Have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX548Ql_s08&feature=youtu.be (3/3)

Queridos Fedimadrileños, voy a pasar con unos amigos por vuestra ciudad la semana que viene para hacer cambio entre las estaciones de Atocha-Almudena Grandes y Chamartín-Clara Campoamor. También tenemos planteado pasar por el Museo Nacional de Arqueología al lado de la estación de Recoletos. ¿Alguien puede recomendar un bar o restaurante de Menú cerca de alguna de esas estaciones, que tenga opción vegetariana en condiciones?

I have made it to Weil am Rhein, which, it turns out, is a stop for this train. Now I’m trying to work out if Weil am Rhein Grenze is a stop in Germany or Switzerland. The fun of #CrossBorderRail

The Siemens Velaro-E is one of Renfe’s nicer long distance trains. Other than the much maligned (for good reason) S106, all of Renfe’s multiple unit long distance trains are pretty comfortable, but this one definitely This train is basically an ICE 3 (407), but with a Renfe interior, modified for the Spanish climate, where 45-50° temperatures are not unheard of, and an acceleration and speed boost up to 350 km/h, even if we go no higher that 310 on this line. That being said, the customer experience is definitely not up to DB standards, especially not in the on-board dining experience, which has no sit down are and the food is mostly limited to sandwiches and snacks. And for some reason, baton-wielding security guards walking up and down the carriage. And that's without the absolutely crazy security and "check-in" system that is the spanish high speed station experiece. Today with added Identity checks.

OH: “Honey should be vegan, because bees are the only unionised animal”

Long-time followers of this account will know that I play #JetLagTheGame Hide + Seek with @darkphoenix@not.an.evilcyberhacker.net and @quixoticgeek@social.v.st. Most recently we played a long game in Germany early last month. Whenever we do play, we tend to livetoot it (ish) and we get asked questions about our house cards and our house rules, especially as we mention both during our coverage. People have asked us to publish our rules, and as the designated rule keeper, I keep saying to people “I will when it’s ready”. And now it’s finally ready. Fediverse, I present to you our house rules: https://jltg.eu More than just a collection of clarifications, and our own special rules, we decided to just rewrite the entire rule book, as the official rule book has a lot of random things all over the place in an order that doesn’t really make sense for reference. We invite your commments, banter, and wholesome criticism. And please do play with our rules if you wish!

Self-OH: There are Willy-Brandt-Platzen all over Germany. Many are, like, the main square of the town or city. They’re all generally pretty nice, though some are much more monumental than others, as if they wanted this square to be a source of pride. It’s almost like all of Germany’s town planners got together and decided to wave a Willy-waving competition.

The thing about the air shuttle is that whilst it’s a one hour flight, the door-to-door time is closer to 3.5 hours. Neither airport is anywhere near their city centres. Barcelona is a 30-60 min drive from its airport, and Madrid is a 45-90 min drive from its airport. Add to that the time it takes to get past security, and you’re looking at more time on the ground than in the air. And neither had particularly good public transport connections. The Madrid-Barcelona high speed trains, on the other hand, go from Barcelona-Sants to Madrid-Puerta de Atocha stations, which are in the town centres, and they can take as little as 2.5 hours on the non-stop service, or 3 hours when with a few stops in between. And trains are much more comfortable. Plus, in the era of the Blackberry, even the spotty coverage on the train was much better for a business ego than the 1 hour blackout on the plane. Let’s not forget the WiFi either. The demand for the air shuttle halved in about a year.

Whilst I haven’t been on this part of this line much over the past couple of years, it’s not unfamiliar to me. It was opened in stages, starting on Madrid-Lleida in 2003, reaching Barcelona in 2008, and the French border in 2013. It is known, in typical unimaginative Spanish style, as the Madrid-Zaragoza-Barcelona-French border line, or simply as line 050. And when it reached Barcelona in 2008, it caused a revolution in national travel.

The air shuttle service still exists. But it’s a shadow of its former self. The “hop on the next available plane” ticketing still has a convenience factor over its rail equivalents. Parking is much easier in both airports, something that the denizens of the more affluent surrounding towns appreciate, given how poorly connected they are by public transport. Whilst there is some flexibility in the train services, they are mostly of the “book a seat on a specific train, and we might let you change it on the day if we have space” variety. This is much less appealing, especially as the ticket office queues are notoriously slow in the station. I’ve been in one of them for 75 minutes in Sants. But for most businesspeople I’ve talked to in Madrid or Barcelona, the AVE, and more recently the Iryo, are the only way to get between the two cities. And the low cost Ouigo services (and formerly the Avlo ones) also fill a much-needed gap in the market.