Blog

by Rafael F. Font

Some days ago I spoke at a project management conference in Brussels. If had travelled by plane, it would have taken me 6 hours, door-to-door. I travelled by train instead. It took 15.

The conference, "Public Project Management: success and failure in public projects", was the annual event of the PM² group. This organisation promotes the PM² methodology, in which I'm certified. I talked about The European Perspective on Megaprojects, including trains, football stadiums, nuclear power plants, and IT projects.

My travel plan included five trains: a Regional service from Parma to Milan; crossing the border to Switzerland on a Eurocity to Brig first, and an Intercity to Basel later; having lunch in Basel before getting on a regional train to Strasbourg, to jump on my fifth and last service, a TGV to Brussels.

I made it!

Here I introduced the first concept about project management: EGAP ("everything goes according to plan"). It's the blind belief that anything we do will turn out as planned. Instead, life has a rollercoaster prepared for us. Looking at my travel plan, I was thinking, "what is going to go wrong?".

Crossing Europe by train is a project

First, there are strong dependencies. Missing one connection puts the rest of the trip in jeopardy. You then need to quickly look for alternatives to still reach your destination, even if a bit later.

Consider the budget. Do you prefer a more expensive, high-speed train, to a slower, more affordable regional one? Depending on which route you take, the difference for a given trip could go well over €100.

Plan for contingencies. For train travellers, this means allowing enough time between one trip and the next one, to accommodate potential delays. A comfortable buffer is around 45 minutes.

There are different service providers involved. Often, they don't talk with each other. For this trip, I bought tickets from three different companies.

Finally, all this is done in a multicultural environment, crossing 4 different countries.

 

 

How to increase the amount of people travelling by train in Europe

In my newsletter, The European Perspective, I've written about how it is to reach Brussels from 5 different origins in less than a day and a half (from Seville, Bari, Bucharest, Stockholm, and Edinburgh).

This helped me to introduce another concept: the limiting factor. Sometimes we want to increase the performance of a given system, and we need to look at the bottlenecks. We might find an inefficient process which reduces the overall output.

In train travel, price is usually blamed: reduce it, and more people will use it. This is consistent with one of the reasons why night trains stopped being popular in the 90s: cheap flights.

However, after talking with several experts, I found out other, more pressing problems.

There are bad connections. You arrive at your intermediate station on time, but the connecting service left half an hour before.

There is no end-to-end ticketing. Ideally, you should be able to buy a ticket between two European capitals in one place. In reality, the ticketing system is fragmented. This also means that if some train is delayed, the other companies won't reimburse you for the missed connections.

There are interoperability issues. Crossing the border usually means changing electrification or signalling system.

There is a lack of night routes. This one is crucial, because it would be so much better to advance 1,000 kilometres during the night, sleeping comfortably, than having to spend a whole day travelling.

Several companies today want to start or extend night routes. They are constrained by the lack of rolling stock. The Austrian ÖBB has just received from Siemens their new generation of night trains. The start-up European Sleeper links Brussels and Berlin since 2023, but their only night train is from the 70s. Another new player, Midnight Trains, wants to connect Paris to Milan and Venice, but they still haven't found who will build their hotels on wheels.

Therefore, what needs to be done to increase train travel in Europe is to build more trains. Especially, night trains. And hopefully, connecting also with Portugal. Before the pandemic, two services connected Lisbon with Madrid and with Hendaye, but these lines weren't restarted.

The Eurocity from Milan to Geneva borders Lake Maggiore. In the picture, the San Quirico hill

and the La Rocca castle in Angera, Lombardy.

 

Just travel by train

I took 5 trains in a 15-hour trip. After having done it, the route seems relatively straightforward. However, I can't really recommend this trip to people with less time available (or who are not project managers). If we really want to divert passengers from the plane, we need a night train.

But something happens when I talk about it. People come to me to share their train trip plans. They see it's possible and want to try too. It reminds me of a couple of friends, Lena and Marc, who are regular train travellers between Stockholm, Brussels and Barcelona, with their 2 kids. In the same way that I'm inspired by them, I hope other people will also feel inspired by my trip.

My final recommendation is that if you want to increase train travel, just do it yourself, and let everyone know about it.

The author after disembarking from his last train of the return trip, the high-speed service Milan-Parma.