All the cross-border trains in Europe

For over two years, activist Jon Worth has documented the state of rail connections between different European countries by taking hundreds of trains in every corner of the continent. We interviewed him

Nearly 700 trains taken, and over 100,000 kilometres travelled: Jon Worth has taken the idea of thoroughly exploring the state of cross-border and international rail connections within Europe seriously. Worth is a British citizen based between Germany and France, a member of the German Green Party. He works in the communications sector, but is best known as an activist in favour of trains.
The #CrossBorderRail project was born in 2022 within the “Trains for Europe” campaign previously launched by Worth. Funded from below and supported by German NGO MitOst, the project consists of a long series of trips across Europe by Worth himself, who aims to board all cross-border trains and reach currently unused railway border crossings – he has now covered a good part of them. Worth produces extensive documentation of these dozens and dozens of days of exploration, especially on social media , and periodically organises meetings and publishes summary documents with reports and invitations addressed to the European Commission and/ or national governments.
Taking stock of the first part of his travels, Worth noted that “in many parts of Europe the railway infrastructure is already very good. It would be neither difficult nor expensive to increase international rail services for passengers. (...) There are many things that can be done without having to build new tracks”. In particular, Worth identified twenty cross-border connections that would be worth working on, including those between Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary and between Bulgaria, Romania and Greece.
We interviewed Worth to gather his impressions after over two years of travel across Europe.

What is the current general situation of cross-border rail passenger transport in Europe? Are there sharp differences between Western and Central-Eastern Europe?

In terms of quality of infrastructure, East-West differences are the main issue, yes. But when it comes to cross-border services, East-West is not the main determining factor. For example, at the borders between Germany and Poland or Slovakia and Hungary there has been an improvement of rail services on lousy infrastructure, while at the France-Spain or France-Belgium borders it is the opposite: the infrastructure there is excellent, but services are not improving.

The central issue then is the attitude of the national governments and of the national railway companies in the countries in question.

Do you think that cross-border rail connections have improved or worsened in recent years, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic?

Overall the quality of international rail is very slowly improving. International rail is worse than national rail services in pretty much every country, but we have seen small but steady increases in services, and some solid steps forward – like recently at the Slovenia-Austria border. It is especially in Central Europe that we have seen improvements in recent years, and more will come in December 2024.

To be sure, we have seen some steps backwards too, especially in South-East Europe where some services never returned after Covid-19. Channel Tunnel trains are also in a worse state now than before the pandemic.

What role do European funds, and in particular EU cohesion funds, play in this regard?

Sure, when it comes to the quality of rail infrastructure EU money makes a difference: for instance, Spain’s high-speed network would be a lot smaller were it not for EU investment. Interreg programmes also have their uses for small cross-border projects, like the new Trieste-Rijeka train, or the new fleet of trains for France-Germany regional services.

But the EU Court of Auditors is right : there is no proper and discernible plan as to where EU investments in rail are made. Overall the picture is a mess, since there is no coherent vision here from the European Commission.

The problem is basically that it is the single member states which come to the Commission with ideas for projects to fund. The Commission, by contrast, generally sees the situation at individual borders as something too small-scale for it to bother with. And even when it comes to transport policies that are supposedly EU-directed – like the development of the TEN-T network of international connections – the outcome is not much better. Why is the Commission not kicking member states to get TEN-T projects that the EU would co-finance actually built?

In recent decades, European countries have invested much more in road transport than in rail transport. Now things seem to be changing, but are countries and EU institutions doing enough?

It is not really a question about doing enough or not. Or at least not first of all. It is first of all understanding the nature of the problem. When I have presented the conclusions of the first chapter of my #CrossBorderRail project to the European Commission I have been told “Oh, we did not know it was so bad?” Well, why do you need some dude running a project to tell you this? Isn’t that your job?

Is the Commission doing all it can to make sure European railways are as good as they could be? Hell, no. The EU has set itself some lofty aims for high-speed rail and freight transport, but has no means to actually meet those aims. Meanwhile the railway industry lobbies very strongly against any change, basically hoping that the EU leaves them alone as far as possible.