Trains / Rail

Trains in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Photo by Kyle Field | CleanTechnica.

Flawed Booking Systems Are Preventing Passengers from Travelling by Rail — T&E Analysis

The new EU Single Ticketing legislative package could finally make booking connecting trains between major hubs convenient. Europe’s rail renaissance will never reach its full potential unless passengers are able to book connecting and international trains in a few clicks. That’s the conclusion of new research by T&E which finds that … [continued]

Chatgpt generated panoramic editorial image of a procurement and policy failure

Romania’s Hydrogen Train Deal Reveals a Governance Failure, Not a Technology Win

Romania’s award of a contract for 12 hydrogen trains to Siemens Mobility looks, at first glance, like a late but determined embrace of cleaner regional rail. Read more closely, it looks like something else. It looks like a governance failure made visible. The contract was awarded only after repeated failed … [continued]

Chatgpt generated editorial image of future competition between high-speed rail, highways, and short-haul aviation in Canada.

Canada Wants High-Speed Rail. Megaproject Reality Wants a Word.

Canada’s revived high-speed rail (HSR) proposal deserves a serious hearing. It also deserves an outside-view assessment grounded in the history of rail megaprojects, not just the aspirations of sponsors and advocates. The current Alto proposal for a high-speed line between Toronto and Québec City is the most concrete Canadian version … [continued]

Chatgpt generated realistic landscape industrial strategy image of a boardroom table covered with rail diagrams, cost models, battery packs, fuel cell schematics

Cummins, Alstom, and the Long Tail of Hydrogen Mistakes

Both Cummins and Alstom lost with hydrogen, but they lost in different ways, and that difference matters. Cummins spread capital and management attention across a broad set of hydrogen pathways, including fuel cells and electrolyzers, then ran into the market reality that hydrogen demand for energy applications was weaker, slower, … [continued]

South African and Northwest Airlines 747s. Johannesburg, South Africa and NYC. May 29, 2000. Photo by Fritz Hasler.

Evolution of Travel Over the Last 100 Years, + An Adventure in France in 2026

When my father left Utah to go as a Mormon missionary to Austria in 1927, he traveled from Utah County, Utah, by coal-burning steam train in 2 or 3 days to Chicago. There he boarded a Great Lakes steamer traveling through Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario, … [continued]

The Hybrid Electric Train passing by the Calamba station just last weekend, March 1. (Photo by author)

The Hybrid Electric Train: The Train The Philippines Built & The Industry That Never Followed

I was there in June of 2016 when a five-coach train rolled into Tutuban Station and was presented to officials and the media. Developed by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) through its Metals Industry Research and Development Center (MIRDC), the Hybrid Electric Train (HET) was introduced as the … [continued]

From left to right: Fely Lukwaka Samuna, Director of Exposure Sarl; Nguyen Hoang Phuong, CEO of Vingroup Africa; Fiston Lukwebo Musengo, Provincial Minister for Public–Private Partnerships, Trade and Industry; and Jésus-Noël Sheke Wa Domene, Provincial Minister for Planning, Budget, Transport and Urban Mobility, at the signing ceremony. (Vingroup photo)

Vingroup Signs Strategic Agreements for Green Mobility in Uzbekistan & Kinshasa

Vingroup announced separate strategic agreements in late December to develop urban infrastructure and green public transport networks in Uzbekistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Vietnamese conglomerate signed a trilateral Memorandum of Understanding with the City of Kinshasa and Exposure SARL on Dec. 29 to modernize the African capital’s … [continued]

Google Gemini generated this infographic titled “Where Hydrogen Was Supposed to Win, and Didn’t,” contrasting conceptual hydrogen promises with the operational reality of battery-electric solutions in heavy transport

Hydrogen for Transportation Didn’t Fail Just Once in 2025. It Failed Everywhere.

This year marked the point where hydrogen transportation stopped being a future tense conversation and became an accounting exercise. Across light duty vehicles, buses, trucks, trains, mining equipment, refueling infrastructure, and even aviation, withdrawals outpaced commitments. These were not isolated pilots failing at the margins. They were coordinated retreats spread … [continued]

A conceptual image of the VinSpeed High Speed Train. (Image from VinGroup.)

High-Speed Train Coming to Vietnam Soon

VinSpeed High-Speed Railway Investment and Development Joint Stock Company, a unit of Vietnam’s Vingroup conglomerate, has signed a strategic cooperation and technology transfer agreement with Siemens Mobility GmbH to advance high-speed rail development in Vietnam. The accord, agreed in Hanoi on December 17, establishes a framework for technology transfer, design … [continued]