Pages tagged: borders

We were travelling to Świnoujście for no other reason than curiosity. Perhaps because of growing up on an island myself, land borders have always fascinated me. The excitement of early Interrail trips was as much the novelty of being able to take the train to another country as it was what I found when I got there.

It's going to take a long time for Europe's long-distance international train services to get back to normal, but many local trains across frontiers are already running again.

We take a look at Europe's fragmenting network of international rail links as passengers stay at home during the Coronavirus pandemic. Rail operators in western Europe have responded a little more slowly to the growing threat than those further east.

There’s much ado with cross-border train services in Europe these days. Apart from the well-documented revival of interest in night trains, there are also developments with daytime trains. We look at some of the latter in this post.

Italian rail operator Trenitalia is busy finalising details with its Slovenian partner for a new direct train service linking Ljubljana to Trieste which is most likely to start on 9 June 2018.

Did you know that Interrail or Eurail one-country passes can sometimes be used to travel across the border into neighbouring countries? So a Swedish pass can be used for travel to Oslo, Copenhagen, Berlin and even on a bus route into Finland.

It has been a while since Austrian railway carriages were last seen in Trieste. But the former Habsburg port may well secure a direct rail link with Austria in summer 2018.

An announcement by German media regarding the arrival of Polish trains in Görlitz station gave hope that the erstwhile cross-border rail connection over the Neisse viaduct will be reopened in September 2015. It turns out this is not the case.

Local train services across the border between Germany and Poland have often been patchy. So it’s very good news that the local train service between Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and Poznan is being restored from later this week.

With rail operators now entering the bus business, let’s take a look at how long-distance coach travel stacks up against the train on a key route in Germany.

SNCF quietly expanded its TGV network today with the introduction of a seventh cross-border TGV service from France to Germany. The new service connects the university city of Freiburg im Breisgau in south-west Germany with Paris.

Nicky Gardner unravels some of the background to today’s announcement that a rail company will launch an express InterCity bus service across the German-Polish border.

The Belgian Railway authorities this afternoon announced the return of old-style InterCity services from Brussels to stations in the Netherlands. This is to provide some kind of replacement for the short-lived FYRA service, introduced in December 2012 and then withdrawn last month.

When is a train not a train? Take a peek at page 685 of the 2011 edition of Europe by Rail and you'll see what we mean. There are some places in Europe where a rail operator offers transport by bus rather than by train. Such bus links are fully integrated into the railway tariff system and rail passes are accepted.

You could easily miss Elton. The train from Dublin to Cork speeds past Elton. You hardly catch a glimpse of the cluster of houses that make up this little Irish village. When the grandly titled Great Southern and Western Railway built a line through the district in 1849, they judged Knocklong, just a couple of minutes up the line from Elton, as deserving of a station. So Elton, a little smaller than Knocklong, lost out.