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Missing Rail Links
Some words about it
The aim of the project is to identify missing and problematic links in regional cross border rail connections outside of the Trans European Transport Network (TEN-T) and represent the findings in the form of a map.
The scope of the project was to focus on the EU 27 borders.
More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain the European railway network is still a patchwork, where gaps exist exactly at country borders. The wounds created by World War II and the Cold War have not been healed even though the EU has invested billions of Euros in infrastructure projects under the umbrella of the Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T).
This failure is not due to a lack of money, but due to a wrong prioritization. Extremely expensive large-scale projects, such as the Brenner Base Tunnel, the Fehmarn-Belt Fixed Link or the Lyon-Turin tunnel, commit financial resources for decades to come. Yet, they do not boost the development of environmentally-friendly railways but only serve the interests of the construction industry.
We as Greens make a strong counterproposal to this aberration. We suggest targeted investments in regional cross-border connections, following the motto: "Small but powerful"! We have analysed more than 250 cross-border connections in the EU, focusing on the regional lines outside the major long-distance railway lines. These regional lines are often less prestigious, but offer a great potential for bringing Europeans together across borders, cost less and protect the environment.
Very often just a few kilometers of rail-infrastructure or the bilateral coordination of railway operations is absent.
The project was desk-based using freely available data sources. The idea was not to recreate the wheel but to gather information from a wide range of sources, primarily internet based.
A database was created in order to list all cross border rail connections in Europe and describe the status of the crossings using a set of criteria. A classification system was devised to group the remaining connections to identify missing (closed/abandoned) and problematic links (line open but issues have been identified).
In total, 346 cross border rail connections were identified, 126 of which were excluded from the scope of the study as they are part of the Comprehensive TEN-T network.
Types of information gathered
- ID Number
- Names of closest broder stations each side the border
- Is the connection in TENT or not
- Link category
- What is/was the purpose of the track
- Number of trains using crossing a day
- Web links
The idea of the map is to open it up to the public and for interested persons to share their ideas about the different connections. It is not expected that the map will be 100% accurate and it is important that through collaboration, this project will move forward in an interactive manner.
Useful Pages and Sources
The map presented in this project takes into account a lot of information available from these sources. We would like to thank those behind the following websites for their hard work in monitoring all this information and hope that this map can help foster collaboration amongst each other.
- The Enthusiast’s Guide to Travelling the Railways in Europe
- The European Passenger Federation