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  Today’s winner at Headlines.

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  As I am yet again on a bus on a twelve lane motorway: What is the widest motorway in Europe?

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  The Belgian AM 08 really is the train with the most no fucks given interior in all of Europe. Lots of little annoyances that have no technical reason. Like, why are almost all the forward facing seats on one side of the train? Now they are all on the sun side where no one wants to sit.

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  Oh no! I guess I have to walk up there. Doesn’t look that bad. (Narrator: It was that bad.)

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  Here we go. Border number two back into country number one. Incidentally, this is the third time I walked across the Hungarian border. I once walked from Szentgotthárd to Mogersdorf in Austria. While there was a train, the connection was so terrible and so little happening in Szentgotthárd that I got bored and walked one stop.

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  @HaTetsu@mastodon.com.pl @kupfers@mastodon.social Sorry, I should have been more clear in the original post. But yeah, after my experience earlier this year, I consider PKP Intercity trains as “reservation de facto necessary.”

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  Random observation: Interrail doesn’t want your full passport number for the mobile pass any more, but only the last three characters.

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  Time to head to Vienna’s central station for a proper railway adventure. It’s a bit of a walk, but if you pick the right route, there may be a park.

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  Turns out DB’s travel planner can easily beat me in finding crazy routings. Does one need a visa for Ukraine?

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  For all your money laundering needs (coins only).

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  Have you heard this one: The Czech transport minister takes the train from Prague to Munich for a meeting about improvements to the train service between Prague and Munich. His train is first held up for an hour at the border in Furth and then gets cancelled altogether in Regensburg. He had planned with a two hour buffer but that wasn’t enough for the suggested detour via Nuremberg, so asks the Bavarians to send a car. Article in German: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/tschechischer-bahnm...

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  What on Earth is this?

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  When in Vienna, go visit the world’s longest* residential building. Turns out it is a bit of a walk from the 3rd district, but with it being overcast and a bit windy, it is quite a pleasant one. * German Wikipedia claims “longest,” while English Wikipedia is a bit more careful and only goes for “one of the longest.”

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  Travel Day! Today should have been a simple journey to Vienna for #IETF, but things keep going off the rails. Engineering works in Germany complicate things, but I found a nice, quick trip. Except that engineering works in the Netherlands made that impossible. A little reshuffle salvaged most of it. But now I see that DB moved ICE 211 to run five minutes earlier (not sure when that happened), so our connection in Mannheim is down to two minutes. To make that definitely not work, they also moved...

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  Having spent another day on trying to build a general NeTeX parser (the supposed standard format for exchanging timetable information), I would like to state that both XSD and NeTeX are completely insane and, due to their ridiculous complexity, absolutely unsuitable for building interoperable systems. As far as I can see, you can only build a parser for NeTeX files from a specific data source by looking at those files which make the whole standard and its 142,551 (!!) lines of XSD pointless. T...

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  Last chance? Maybe later? Yeah, right.

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  One thing that NS could improve for their bus replacement service is to make it more clear whether they want you to check out or not. Pretty much nobody did in Maarheeze, so I didn’t either – the bus still counts as NS, after all –, but then Boxtel had platform barriers. Luckily they treated me as a new check-in right away or I would have missed the train.

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  Today’s second day of the conference of the European Passenger Federation happens in the Statenzaal of the Government building in Maastricht. The Treaty of Maastricht was signed here in 1992, historic ground, this.

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  ProRail doing ProRail things: There are two trains arriving from Maastricht Randwyck at the same time. No, this is not a data error. No, this is not due to engineering works. They have two tracks, so they can run two trains. One continues to Kerkrade, one to Roermond.

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  🎶 Squeaky VIRM! Squeaky VIRM! Why are they not oiling you?

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  There are engineering works east of Eindhoven. I thought I avoid the bus by taking the Roermond to Nijmegen train. Turns out ai al not the only one and it is eighty minutes on a packed diesel tiddler. I managed one stop before I gave up. Back to Roermond, let’s try the bus.

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  Maybe they are paying for the font by the letter?

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  More railway curiosities in Denmark: The town of Nykøbing on the island of Mors in the northwest of Jutland had a railway station but no railway line. Trains were brought to the station by way of a railway ferry.

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  This is the fifth forum post I am reading somewhere about Italo wanting to start long distance services in Germany and everyone being psyched about it. I for one think this is bad. As a solely for profit operator, they will only operate the high yield routes. Those are already overcrowded – not necessarily the lines themselves but definitely the hub areas. Which will likely mean - because, yay! competition! – either DB Fernverkehr or local services will loose slots. And second, DB Fernverkehr...

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  I’ve just release version 0.2.0 of #Impromptu, the incremental travel planner. This version changes how itineraries are kept. They are now encoded in the fragment portion of the URL rather than kept in local storage. This means you can now just copy the URI, send it to someone, and they can paste into the location bar of their browser. As long as Transitous’ station and trip IDs are still the same, they will now see your itinerary. There are also some minor improvements related to date and tim...

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  I’m wondering if a railway company would have standing to sue for damages from the illegal German border checks. DB Fernverkehr probably wouldn’t try, given that they are owned by the German state, but maybe PKP Intercity would?

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  Sometime English isn’t up to the task. International Workers Day? Internationaler Kampftag der Arbeiterklasse! #VölkerHörtDieSignale

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  I decided the next #StillGoingHome video needs more maps. I couldn’t find any limited to what I wanted to show and that looked good, so I guess I have to make my own again.

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  Spending the national holiday by doing my taxes. Seems apt.

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  Ah, drat. Now half my Youtube recommendations are colour grading tutorials.