Czech-German border — The skinny man crouched down to examine the rusty railroad tracks across the empty square of a small forgotten town and shook his head at the weeds that emerged.
His verdict was “disappointing”, and may have been influenced by the closing of a brick railway station and the accumulation of cobwebs in the German border town of Seifenersdorf, not far from the Czech Republic.
By profession, John Worth is a college lecturer in political communications. By passion he is a self-inspector of European railways. And he set himself a dilemma to deal with: Why wouldn’t it be easier to cross European borders by train?
No one asked him to undertake this task, but his justification is clear. For Europe to realize its ambition to lead the planet to carbon neutrality, it needs to keep people away from planes and cars.
On paper, the European rail system dominates in many parts of the world, including the United States. But that railroad could be an allegory for the European Union itself. From the outside, the system looks boring. But scratch under the surface and you’ll find yourself in a tangle of bureaucracies, pointing and kicking problematic cans onto roads and rails.
With the EU striving to be the greenest, international rail lines within the EU still have shortcomings.
The bridge that once crossed the border has been in ruins since World War II. A multi-million-euro line between Paris and Barcelona that offers spectacular scenery could carry a ton of trains every hour. Instead, he is hardly used for a day.
Traveling on busy commercial routes like Paris to London can cost hundreds of euros more than flying. Want to take a train from Tallinn, Estonia to Riga, Latvia? Good luck. The Japanese National Railways refused to adjust the train schedule.
Also, international rail booking travel sites (e.g. the equivalent of Kayak or Skyscanner used for plane flights) are somehow non-existent or difficult to find.
To understand why and draw attention to the problem, Worth launched a one-man grassroots movement this summer called Transnational Rail Projects.
Crowdfunding to buy drones, cameras and air quality gauges on trains to cross all EU borders to fix where the international rail system works and where it doesn’t determined and documented what could be done to his discovery. At each stop, he writes a postcard detailing his findings to his EU Rail Commission and presents recommendations.
He said he had not received a reply yet.
Worth said, clattering in the glass compartment of a train from Berlin to Prague. “Another one of his responses was, ‘Actually, this is really interesting because we need to put more people on the train.'”
Mr Worth first came to my attention when I was trying to plan my trip.
As an American, I once scoffed at the complaints some Europeans leveled against their rail system.
Then I tried to book a trip from Paris to northern Spain. I ended up all the way down in Madrid before catching the train back to the French border.
that’s when i discovered Mr Worth Twitter, he often responds to pleas from outraged travelers. The most common request is advice on how to get to Portugal, which is notoriously difficult for outsiders to figure out train schedules.
“Lisbon should be one of Europe’s 100 climate-neutral cities by 2030,” he said. “But how to get to Lisbon by train? It’s almost impossible. You don’t have to be an expert to book a train.”
I recently joined the final leg of his journey across the borders of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.
On board, I met fellow passenger Sebastian Kaiser, who recognized Mr. Worth on Twitter. Kaiser, too, was trying to stick to traveling exclusively by train in Europe. But this day was tough, he said — not only because of the logistics, but because of the crowds of drunken young tourists heading to the Czech capital.
“This route is always tricky,” he said. “And it’s usually smellier.”
In the small but passionate world of European railroad geeks, Mr. Worth is one of their semi-famous figures. (A popular railway enthusiast who helps travelers on their journey is Mark He Smith of England. Through his website Seat61.com.) During his travels, strangers who knew of Mr. Worth’s projects contacted him, and sometimes joined him, to share ideas on how to improve the railways and to find the most beautiful route from the Alps to the Baltic Sea. The sea.
Sometimes you can feel the effects of World War II on rail travel. On the way back to Berlin from the Polish border, one train was canceled after an unexploded ordnance was found at a Berlin station. WWII duds are still a fairly common travel disruption in Germany.
But our journey also revealed another kind of problem: railroad theft. The train had to be rerouted at the German-Polish border because thieves stripped the copper wire from the train’s signal cable. Deutsche Bahn, the German state-owned railway, said repairs would take him three months.
I sometimes wondered if Mr. Worth’s standards were too strict. After all, you can reach most of Europe by train.
But for Mr. Worth, comparing the present with the past is the best justification for his mission.
In the 1930s, it took about 2 hours and 45 minutes from Berlin to Breslau. He said it now takes more than four hours. In the 1990s, a train from Bucharest brought him to Budapest in 12 hours. It currently takes at least 15 hours. He said the increase in travel times was the result of decades of neglect and deprioritization of international flights.
At the German-Czech border, Worth hops on a folding bike so he can photograph two small lines connecting a rural Czech town and a German village. Connections like this are important, he argues, to encourage people to return to trains.
“Cross-border travel is not only from Brussels to Luxembourg,” he said. “These are places where border crossings are routine.”
The final leg of the journey revealed a striking example of cross-border modernization failure. At the bridge connecting the Polish town of Zgorzelec with its German sister city of Görlitz, the wires installed to electrify the railway line suddenly stop at the German starting point.
Poland and Germany signed an agreement in 2003 to electrify cross-border transmission lines. But nearly two decades later, Berlin still fails to honor some of the pacts. The electrical wiring on the Polish side has never been used. In effect, the telephone pole was erected as a giant gesture of nuisance. To date, only diesel railcars can cross this border.
“They’re basically saying, ‘Hey, Germany, we went electrified and you haven’t yet,'” he said. “When are you getting on?”