Trains of Thought (#TågFärjetur part 1)

Day 1 (Friday 18 October):
10.47 Liverpool Lime Street to London Euston

Some appropriate music to accompany this blog post:

Europe’s high-speed rail network is a thing of beauty. Trains zip passengers across the continent and through multiple countries in mere hours, with no tacky duty-free shops or requirement to decant your shampoo into tiny bottles.

It’s a network I have taken advantage of multiple times in the past – a trip to Amsterdam with my friend Ian, a sleeper train from Berlin to Paris, zooming across Germany on the sexy InterCityExpress. I was “flight shaming” before Greta Thunberg made it cool.

My last Euro train trip was in 2016. That was far too long ago, and in the summer of 2019, I started to feel the railway itch again. I often found myself at idle moments with multiple browser tabs open on the Eurostar, Deutsche Bahn and Man in Seat Sixty One websites, looking for inspiration for my next trip.

Then, online chatter revealed that one celebrated European railway route was to undergo major changes. The Hamburg to Copenhagen EuroCity service, one of the few remaining lines in the world where the entire train is loaded onto a ferry to cross a body of water, was being rerouted to avoid that messy procedure. After December the opportunity to enjoy this unusual train journey would be gone forever. Naturally, a ride on this train quickly became the centrepiece of the plan.

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The Trains in May Are Mainly Now Explained

Last year (at least six or seven blog posts ago) a massive timetable shakeup was announced on train services across the north of England, promising faster journeys, new connection opportunities and an all-round better experience.

To say the changeover didn’t go smoothly would be an understatement.

Passengers endured weeks of disruption before an emergency timetable was introduced, drastically thinning out the service on some lines. It was months before things got back to some semblance of normality, and the lasting damage to the railway’s reputation (and Northern in particular) will take some time to recover.

Now, one year later, the train companies are gearing up to try again, with a new timetable due to start on Sunday 19th May. It’s not the “big bang” of May 2018, but perhaps that’s just as well.

Sadly, for passengers travelling out of Lime Street, a lot of the promised improvements have been deferred yet again. But there are some big changes going ahead, so let’s look at what’s happening. As always, I focus on the Liverpool area, because… that’s where I live, and it’s boss.

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