Going to industry conferences is weird

RE: https://zirk.us/@ChrisMayLA6/116169449415217453 https://www.ft.com/content/77b399cc-46a4-4429-9e3d-271ded892e16 (£) absolutely brilliant. totally unforeseeable

RE: https://masto.ai/@bovine3dom/116064191409337815 hah i had forgotten that OSM painfully switched from CC-BY-SA to ODbL because CC (except CC0, maybe) are really bad licences for databases https://osmfoundation.org/w/images/7/79/Why_CC_BY_SA_is_Unsuitable.pdf anyway i am sure the EU forcing […]

I knew it was bad. But *this* bad? News about the Hungarian section of the Budapest - Beograd #CrossBorderRail line... https://telex.hu/g7/kozelet/2026/03/02/budapest-belgrad-muszaki-problemak-biztositoberendezes-vonatbefolyasolas-tehervonatok

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/fare-dodgers-targeted-as-train-ticket-refund-rules-are-tightened-87942/ hahaha renationalised railways delivering for passengers once again in the UK eye-wateringly expensive refundable flexible tickets are no longer going to be refundable 👍 when their […]

could do with some finessing but here's a first draft of train bedtimes for major cities* showing that actually Paris, "qui ne dort pas", gets some pretty decent beauty sleep i thought there would be some correlation within countries between population and bedtime […] [Original post on masto.ai]

Approximately 15 months after submittng FoI requests for the UK Railway's Barcoded Ticketing specifications, I've just managed to settle the appeal on the cases (on a Saturday of all days). So, presenting for your reading enjoyment, some PDFs that the Government really didn't want me to get […]

This forthcoming EU reform of railway ticketing is not just "make it easier to book", but "make it better and easier for both irregular and regular passengers to book, with the lowest possible costs to railway companies" Here's the recipe how to do that […] [Original post on gruene.social]

Also "bundle up multiple train tickets and still guarantee passenger rights" is GOOD ENOUGH for everyone It is SIMPLE ENOUGH for an occasional passenger who wants a simple booking procedure, and is sure they will not be left out of pocket Is FLEXIBLE ENOUGH for regular passengers, who might […]

I am tired of problem EXPLAINERS in railways Can we please find more PROBLEM SOLVERS? And sure, I fall into the trap of seeing problems everywhere as well sometimes, but Hamont 🇧🇪 - Weert 🇳🇱 is one of the easiest cross border railway problems to solve You need: ⚡️ 7km of track 🏗️ a platform […]

So today's regular rail newsletter for subscribers is about to go out... *** This week *** Analysis: Positive talk about the future of rail between Netherlands and Belgium Bullshit Meter: Bulgaria - North Macedonia Tunnel by 2028 #CrossBorderRail is back […] [Original post on gruene.social]

I just played #fahrtle daily #8! Aalen, DE ➡️ Doncaster, GB (930 km) ⏳🚆⏳🚆⏳🚆🚆🚆⏳🚆🐾 🎉 Finished in 18h 46m 30s! Can you beat me? https://compute.olie.science/fahrtle/?daily=1&d=Easy this was a walk in the park compared to yesterday i am pretty happy with the ghosts. i […] [Original post on masto.ai]

https://github.com/nvkelso/natural-earth-vector/issues/268#issuecomment-2256019603 this was the root cause of (as far as i could tell) my reverse geocoder point -> flag correctly working for every place i could think to try except France which got the white flag 🏳️ i had put in as a fallback […]

We, the illegals of France “The path to being a model minority that I—like countless others—have meticulously followed for decades can no longer protect us from becoming illegal, from getting an OQTF, from suddenly losing everything we have constructed.” […]

The European Commission will propose the SDBTR Regulation on rail ticketing this spring One crucial issue: do I need ONE TICKET for my trip, or is MORE THAN ONE OK, but with passenger rights? In this blog post I explain the issue 👇 […]

@stefanlindbohm Super interesting result out of Railfinder. Vidin - Budapest. Suggests to take the train in Craiova to Draganesti Olt, to catch the Night Train (which stops at Craiova). Actually a nice idea. You get on the Night Train at a more civilised time. Took […] [Original post on todon.eu]

RE: https://flipboard.com/@euronews/green-environment-2639krjtz/-/a-oUS8-43YT6St6SWEvE03jQ%3Aa%3A89340020-%2F0 > Therefore, CAP subsidies are no longer linked to what and how much farmers produce 🤯 surely that's a bad thing!? !? i hold the unpopular opinion that agricultural subsidies […]

I just played #fahrtle daily #4! Crewe, GB ➡️ Tours, FR (700 km) 🐾⏳🚆⏳🚆⏳🚆🚇⏳🚆⏳🚆🐾 🏁 2h 51m 34s faster than driving 🎉 Finished in 8h 49m 42s! Can you beat me? https://compute.olie.science/fahrtle/?daily=1&d=Easy easy one today. driving got absolutely trounced

https://www.reglomobile.fr/information-clients-A i think at this point i am getting hit by a serious data breach every single week regulators really out to be pushing back hard with "AND WHY THE HELL WERE YOU COLLECTING THIS DATA IN FIRST PLACE" email address, ok. but did you really need to […]

flow maps of best case timetabled railway line speed across the world with Vienna as the centre of the universe blue = quick red = slow interactive map to play with here […] [Original post on masto.ai]

roaming and charging standards are great but when is the EU going to ban emails that tell me i have a message that i need to read somewhere else

This week's newsletter is out https://jonInnotranssomebody-in-france-has-to-want-to-run-night-trains/ This week: Analysis: Lessons from an event at the Assemblée Nationale in Paris about night trains Bullshit Meter: Norway launches panoramic glass roof train Good week: Poland and Germany sign a […]

RE: https://masto.ai/@bovine3dom/116057908164467046 ooh actually this would make a really cool flow diagram i could define the velocities as always being towards Paris would have to think about what to do about flows that cross though 🤔

Damn this exceptionalism in France “"C'est unique au monde, nous sommes les seuls à pouvoir le faire": comment la SNCF prolonge la vie de ses TGV afin de répondre au besoin croissant de trains” Errr EVERY railway does this to some extent! […]

I want to cry 😭

Honestly that’s one of the worst events I’ve attended. Dreadful. I’ve got no hope whatsoever there’s going to be any solution for anything. They all know, deep down, SNCF Voyageurs is letting them down in Aurillac and Briançon. But they don’t dare say it. Because they’d be biting the […]

I want to make a video series about trains. The idea is we take the directors from national railways, and set them each a challenge. - SNCF, they have to get to a board meeting in a very small town at 10am, and another in a different town at 1400. They have to use trains, they can't use hotels […]

profoundly bizarre that the raspberry pi company has doubled in valuation because of AI openclaw hype doing your own stuff is great hosting your own stuff is great ... but "streaming text from a gpu farm" is not really doing or hosting your own stuff? apparently this is after a few weeks […]

Back in my day, when they closed tram stops it was uphill both ways

today in "we're bad at computers and here's what that means for you" GWR are changing their booking system overnight on 24th Feb and so any tickets bought before 24th Feb (say, 23:59 23rd Feb) will no longer be accessible through their app great job guys. why […] [Original post on masto.ai]

RE: https://gruene.social/@jon/116090743427995897 great thread but this is the best bit lots of people want to take our trains -> run a kind of lottery system so fewer people take the trains and more people drive i know people hate evil capitalism here but this is the kind of absurdity that […]

Before I speak at an event about night trains tomorrow in Paris, I wanted to understand the Siemens Vectron not approved in France issue Vectron *exists since 2010* and *is approved in 20 countries*, but NOT FRANCE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectron_(locomotive)#Homologation_overview In […]

i have a bit of a dilemma with fahrtle and i would appreciate some ideas initially i ran a fantasy timetable where i picked the best day per data source with the most departures. that worked well but it missed <daily services. players were understandably frustrated […] [Original post on masto.ai]

i guess the benefit to using some "high performance" data transformation code written in python is that i know it isn't going to hog all the resources on the server because obviously it's single threaded corollary: i stuck it on the server because i thought maybe 32GB of RAM on my desktop […]

ah yes the public service broadcaster giving you tips on how to cope with the paralysing fear of having zero long-term security or freedom in the place where you live by making sure that the bed that takes up 90% of your living area has colourful bedding. and picking some nice lamps this surely […]

What? €20 for an Interrail reservation on a knackered Corail IC from Nevers to Paris? Are they joking?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glynmoody/116075545204565409 great idea. block the good guys and force everyone to use dodgy sites like Anna's Archive and archive.is¹ ... or have the budgets and technology of AI companies 1: whose webmaster is, as far as i know, still today roping in every […]

some wild routes in the transitous data. three entire days on a train (so arrive on the fourth day after your departure)

This is perhaps one of the worst designed objects I have the displeasure of interacting with on a regular basis. It's a symphony of bad design choices. A vile hateful piece of equipment that makes my day a little bit worse every time I use one. What is it? It's […] [Original post on social.v.st]

> Local lobbying groups have long hoped for more trains which take less than three hours to run between Plymouth and London. [... T]he average time is currently three hours and 15 minutes. By comparison, trains between Paris and Marseille in France cover double that distance in the same time […]

New off-label use: packing zip archives with pandoc: pandoc --extract-media=archive.zip <<EOF ! ! EOF #pandoc #offLabel

Fascinating in-depth article about Tracey Emin and her life. Well worth a read https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/feb/14/tracey-emin-interview-tate-modern-regrets-smoking?CMP=share_btn_url #artist

love debugging jobs that take four hours to fail. truly my favourite thing

I've reached my destination, Kho Pha-ngan ✊🏽🌈 ! #fossrailepilogue #kohphangan

the US tech-bro ultra far right have released some cool open data. even available as parquet. and they do my favourite joke where they use the flag of liberia 🇱🇷 instead of the us flag 🇺🇸 https://opendata.hhs.gov/datasets/medicaid-provider-spending/ the website is really nice and works totally […]

because i am a stubborn idiot i spent today and a bit of last night hacking together scrapers for stena line and dfds timetables https://github.com/bovine3dom/gtfs_scrapers have at the data https://github.com/bovine3dom/gtfs_scrapers/tree/master/release CC-BY-NC-ND-SA-FIRSTBORN licensed 1/2

@patrick Since Mastodon limits me to four pictures, I’ve gone through my shortlist and picked out four I particularly liked. I’ve tried to keep them train-themed, but the landscapes are what are fascinating to me. Hopefully they will convince you to come to the Alps sometime.

Dear European leaders! Here's a little idea for your competitiveness agenda It boosts: - manufacturing jobs - construction jobs - public and private sector and - it promotes green mobility WIN 🎉 Just a few national interests to overcome! […]

it didn't occur to me before but i can totally make maps of best-case timetabled railway speeds from all the @transitous data i have and it only took like 5 seconds […] [Original post on masto.ai]

RE: https://lingo.lol/@amyfou/116055641451588215 wow, this guy has some very cool projects. what a great way to get people thinking about design https://rybakov.com/teaching/object.space.body/