On Tuesday this week I was on Eurostar 9161, the 1952 departure from Bruxelles Midi to London St Pancras, with stops in Lille Europe, Calais Fréthun and Ebbsfleet. Shortly after departure from Lille the train manager made an announcement, telling us that a control of tickets and identity papers would […]
All was going so well. Eurostar 9156 departed on time from St Pancras at 1904, and arrived at around 2057 (local time, as scheduled) at Calais Frethun. Then nothing. No departure. Silence. Then the announcement that “for service reasons” we were to wait 10 minutes at Calais. At 2108 a […]
I’ve just arrived home, having taken Eurostar 9133, the 1256 departure from Brussels Midi to London St Pancras. The security paranoia on the route is now so absurd it’s worth a blog entry. The first check at Gare du Midi is a ticket check, where the QR code on a […]
Loads of organisations and companies make their press photos available on Flickr – good. But other than look at the pictures, what is anyone supposed to actually do with them? This was the issue raised this morning when I pointed out that the attendees at today’s European Council are all […]
Back in 2002 I was doing a poorly paid internship at Institut für Europäische Politik in Berlin and my then boss (who subsequently has become a good friend) Bernd Hüttemann said to me on my very first day “Jon, there’s no point you making travel bookings for me, it’s just […]
On October 7th Eurostar announced a £700 million investment plan to purchase 10 new 16 car e320 trains from Siemens that will run from 2014, and from 2011 onwards upgrade the interiors of its existing 28 trainsets. Following that DB showed two ICE3 trainsets at St Pancras on 19th October, […]
Scandal! The new Stratford International station might well not have any international trains stopping there. Among others the Mayor of Newham and investors building a shopping centre at Stratford are up in arms, as reported by the Evening Standard. Actually it’s no scandal. It’s just sensible. And I say this […]
I have a reputation as a blogger that gets things done – I don’t just have opinions on things, I try to transform my thoughts into practical action. Campaigns such as Gender Balanced Commission and the Atheist Bus Campaign have grown from posts on this blog. So when @kattebel stated […]
Tragedy hit the Belgian railways today with the crash of two commuter trains at Buizingen. There’s nothing I can add to what has been written about that already – any loss of life is always devastating, and I just hope this crash was not caused by linguistic issues. But instead […]
Today the report into Eurostar’s December failings is published, and everything is resorting to normal form. The Guardian and BBC have straight and factual reports about what went wrong. There’s a new @eurostarcomms account on Twitter. Eurostar has published its response to the review, and has changed some things already. […]
In some weird transport / religion crossover an online magazine called Communicate Jesus has done a write-up on the Eurostar mess and has linked to my post about the issue. Seems they did not notice the Atheist Bus banner in my sidebar 🙂 Their article is entitled ‘Important lesson from […]
Eurostar has not been running for 3 days and has been roundly criticised for not informing passengers what’s going on. In that climate you would have thought that other train operators would have been especially attentive to customer service in the event of delays. Oh no, not even close. Sarkozy […]
