TrainBlog by Marcel Marchon

This is a small collection of links to railroad related discussion forums where European rail topics are being discussed. Most of these have a fairly local focus, but usually, some discussion about “foreign” topics also takes place.

Switzerland/Schweiz/Suisse

• Bahnforum (de)
• bahnONLINE.ch (de)

Germany/Deutschland/Allemagne

• Drehstromloks.de (de)
• Drehscheibe Online (de)

Austria/Österreich/Autriche

• EBFÖ (de)

France/Frankreich

• Trains en voyage (fr)

Governor Schwarzenegger announced his budget proposal for fiscal year 2007-08 last week. Unfortunately, his proposal envisages to take money that is supposed to go towards public transportation funding and use that for school buses. I think this is a move in the wrong direction. Late last year, California voters approved a large bond measure that are supposed to pay for investments in California’s transportation infrastructure, yet here is the Governor taking money away from the fund that is supposed to cover the operating costs of that infrastructure. Isn’t that kind of contrary to what the voters asked for?

The biggest savings, $627 million, comes from using extra money in the state’s public transit account instead of money from the general fund to pay for busing students to school. The account has seen a windfall of tax revenue from higher gas and diesel prices.

But some argue that taking money away from public transit is going in the wrong direction.

“It’s ironic that in the same 24 hours the governor is being applauded for his commitment to reducing emissions caused by driving, he’s cutting public transportation,” said Carli Paine, transportation program director for the Transportation and Land Use Coalition.

[Quoted from Schwarzenegger’s balancing act of spending and cuts ]

San Francisco’s Third Street Light Rail Line - to be known as the ‘T’ line - opened for limited (free!) weekend service today. Regular all-week service will commence on April 7 of this year.

Service begins at 10 a.m. and continues until 7 p.m. For the first three months, the T-Third will operate only on weekends between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. Anyone who boards a train south of Fourth and King streets can ride the line for free until April 7, when full service is scheduled to start.

[Quoted from SAN FRANCISCO / Muni’s Third St. light-rail line finally rolling ]

The Third Street Light Rail Line runs southwards on Third Street from the current terminus at Fourth and Kind Streets (next to the Caltrain station) and terminates near the Bayshore Caltrain station. (at Bayshore Blvs. and Sunnydale Ave.) I think, originally there was supposed to be a station right next to the Caltrain station, but for some reason, this was not implemented.

The T line will continue northwards along the Embarcadero trackage and into the Market Street tunnel to its northern terminus at Castro station.

Effective April 7, 2007, the N-Judah line will stop serving the 4th & King station and now terminate at Embarcadero station. The J-Church line will provide peak hour only service to 4th & King.

Today, I ran across a reference to the “Railteam” alliance and thought “what the heck is that? Never heard that before”. So I did some research and was able to find the following information in a Eurostar press release:

The Railteam alliance will offer travellers high-speed, high-quality travel across European borders. As well as Eurostar, other members include:

• Deutsche Bahn - Germany
• NS and HSA - Netherlands
• ÖBB - Austria
• SBB - Switzerland
• SNCB - Belgium
• SNCF - France

The rapid development of high-speed lines across northern Europe, linking major cities, has created the opportunity for an alliance under the working title ‘Railteam’, which has a vision to provide travelers with:

• Seamless connections at stations
• Through ticketing and fares - one ticket/fare for a through journey
• Easy access to timetables, information, booking and train services
• Real time journey information
• Universal, high-quality standards of customer service and facilities, such as on-board internet access

[Quoted from Pan-European ‘Railteam’ alliance expands @ eurostar.com ]

(I wish we would see some of these “features” in the U.S. …)

Looks like the whole thing is modeled after the alliances that already exists between various airlines (e.g. Star Alliance, SkyTeam, OneWorld, etc.). It will be interesting to follow the developments in the future - after all, a couple of years down the road, international rail travel is supposed to be deregulated in Europe.

It appears that the “Railteam” alliance does not currently have a website - there is something at railteam.com, but it does not appear to be related.

Sorry to keep posting about these, but I think some of these links may actually be interesting - and if I just add them on the site, lots of people will never notice …

Today I found out that Rail Europe (main US distributor of European rail passes and tickets) actually has a blog - it is here: http://raileurope.typepad.com/info/. Obviously, they mostly write about travel-related stuff and mainly for European railways (i.e. new offers, new passes/tickets/fares, etc.).