Loco

As promised by Emily and Verity’s podcast below, here is the next installment from Emily and Verity. First of all here’s the blog itself (I am teeth-grindingly jealous):

We’re in Lhasa at the moment. We’ve been here for three days but the computers are broken at our hostel and we’ve only just managed to find somwhere with internet access. Funnily enough though, we’re now in the biggest computer room we’ve ever seen, surrounded by gaming, skyping and msning Chinese and Tibetans, which is slightly surreal.

We tried to do a podcast on the train coming into Lhasa, which was absolutely incredible - the best views we’ve ever seen, and so variable - but there was basically no signal from the day we left Beijing, so we recorded something but when we came to publish it, went through a tunnel and lost the connection. The train itself wasn’t as good as the Russian trains because you couldn’t put the beds up in the daytime and there were six people to a compartment instead of the four we had got used to, (we’ve been a bit spoilt) but the journey was the best yet. We went past small Chinese hill-towns with red new year’s decorations around each door, frozen lakes in the middle of rocky mountains, terraced hills surrounding plains full of polytunnels, impressive snow-topped mountains, and flat, frozen marshes populated by thousands of Yaks and the odd Tibetan (over which we saw the sun rise; there’s only one time zone in China, apparently because the government couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of more, so in the west the sun rises at 8:30am). We couldn’t believe that every time we looked out of the window the view had drastically changed. This filled the time better than eating, which was lucky as we ran out of food on the first day of this forty-eight hour journey - whoops.

Have a look at this slideshow to see a selection of Emily and Verity’s photos.

My favourites are the recycled chairs used as skating devices (absolute genius) and the condensed cow’s breath on the ceiling of the stable (below). I double-dare someone to make an ice-lolly out of it and eat it.

Gabcast! Low carbon travel adventures #5

One of the major challenges facing Loco2 is persuading people that travelling by train should not be judged purely by the often hellish experiences endured on the UK rail network.

In December 2006 I returned back from travelling around Europe (and a bit of Russia) by train. After a brilliant trip, it was depressing enough having to move back in with my parents and start temping in an inane job in order to get back on my feet financially, but what made it worse is that within three weeks of starting to commute by train (a fifteen minute journey into Oxford) I had been delayed more than during four months of extensive train travel on the continent. It wasn’t even clear who to complain to: First Great Western? Network Rail? ATOC? The Government? Capitalism?

The ridiculous complexity of British train travel is pretty staggering, so when I started to read how other European countries run their networks I felt a glimmer of hope.

In Germany, the rail network is run by one semi-public company - Deutsche Bahn - and the simplicity of this arrangement leads to much more efficient operation than we see in the UK. Instead of different private companies running different parts of the network, DB are able to treat all customers the same and give straightforward offers to frequent travellers such as the BahnCard. There are three types available, and each of them applies to the whole national network, as well as giving discounts on travel outside Germany.

What is interesting about the approach Deutsche Bahn are taking is not just that it makes working out the financials of your day-to-day travel a lot more straightforward, but that they are starting to push the boundaries when it comes to utilising technology to promote a more logical approach to integrating different modes of transport.

Here’s an account from Philippe, who uses the Bahn 100 card:

The core product of course is local and long distance railway service (including high speed train service – up to 300 km/h) at a flat rate of approx. 800 US Dollars per month (1st Class) and half of that (400 US Dollars) for Coach Class service, meaning one can use all train services in Germany all the time for one flat rate per month. The product also includes free local public transportation in about 100 major German cities.

This means that in addition to the train system I can use the local buses, subways, metros and street cars for as much as I want. In addition there is a ‘CarSharing’ and a ‘BikeSharing’ product integrated in the service. I can get to a city by train and jump straight into a car at that train station (sometimes the car is parked right next to the train platform I arrive) with the swipe of my customer card on an hourly basis (actually it is even charged in 15 minute increments). I don’t have to fuel the car and I just return it where I got it. Much easier/ more economic and more convenient than renting a car for a day at my destination. I only do this if I have to – if no public transportation gets me to my final destination.

The same concept is available in major cities with bikes only here the bike can be dropped off anywhere in the city. I have not tried this option yet. The Service also includes business lounge access at all major railway stations. When I have to haul heavy things for personal use I also use the CarSharing option in my home town. I guess this is a tiny bit of a personal car still left in me.

As well as this, Deutsche Bahn offer a journey-planning tool for installation on your mobile. Here’s Philippe again:

Until recently I did all my travel planning in advance and it was a bit cumbersome at times to print out the schedules the evening before and if I changed plans I had to obtain new schedules. But this changed. I now use a Navigation System which is installed on my mobile telephone.

It basically works like a car navigation system but all routing is done by taking all possible means of public transportation into consideration. Small pedestrian walks are being included with a map and the route is constantly being updated based on current developments in the route. It really works like a car navigation system only that I can sit back relax, read a book or work on my laptop during the sections of my journey that I am on a train. The gain in time that I would otherwise waste on the road driving a car is tremendous.

Now before you accuse me of having some sort of underhand deal with Deutsche Bahn (if anyone from Deutsche Bahn is reading I am fully receptive to any such offer), the German rail system is far from perfect. First of all, there is a debate raging in Germany about whether or not Deutsche Bahn should be fully privatised, and it’s hard to make a judgement on how capable a private company would be at continuing to push for the right kinds of technical advances whilst keeping prices low and reliability high for the customer. If the UK is the best example Europe has of a fully privatised rail network then it’s not looking good.

Then there’s the local vs national issue of rail planning. At risk of sounding like even more of a geek than I already do, it’s worth comparing the German and Swiss rail networks. In Switzerland the equivalent network card to the Bahn 100 sells twice as much because of the fact that the Swiss have focused on linking smaller towns and villages instead of simply pushing for high-speed connections between large cities. This approach discourages increasing urbanisation, and emphasises a distributed perspective on travel (fewer busy transport hubs and concentrations of population). Also, the word on the street is that the Swiss literally have 100% of their trains running on time.

So how far away from all this are we in the UK?

Bloody miles. The Train Line has just announced that it will be introducing a ’smartcard’ for travel by 2009, based on ITSO technology. This will basically be like an Oyster card but for national train travel, and you should be able to top it up with similar ease. This sounds like a step in the right direction, but again I’m unsure of how easy it will be to cut through all the crap created by having loads of different companies with millions of different fares.

Much as I hate to say it, the Tories came up with one suggestion in their Quality of Life report that is incredibly sensible:

We therefore propose that the Rail Regulator should be given a remit to demand the simplification of rail ticket structure, and to insist upon the interoperability of rail tickets as well as integrated timetabling.

Given that it was Maggie the mad Thatcher and John Major who privatised the railways in the first place, I hope that the Tories can sort it out again.

Anyway, I’m starting to sound like a grumpy old man, so let’s get back to the original point: if you want to have a good train-based experience, go to mainland Europe. That is all.

Many thanks to Philippe for all of the research about German and Swiss railways. If you’d like to read a full account of his experience using the Bahn 100 card, read his comments on this great blog.

In today’s Guardian there were two things that caught my attention.

Firstly, there was an unbelievable centrefold picture of a railway station in China where the transport network is being severely disrupted by extreme weather, and I’ve subsequently found a video here. It’s crazy to think that some of these people only see their families in the countryside once a year because of the vast scale of industrial urbanisation. It’s understandable that tensions are running high.

My advice to Emily and Verity in Beijing is to stay put until it all calms down a bit. At least they’ll have time to explore the city properly and not feel guilty about staying in to read their books once in a while!

The second thing I came across was an article about new train routes in Spain. Apart from the fact that it’s great to see competition with domestic flights, it’s interesting to note the differences between the way UK rail has been privatised, and the contrast in Spain (I’m currently researching a more substantial blog on the subject of European transport in general). Note that despite having swivelling chairs and videos, the Spanish trains don’t have WiFi. My first reaction was that they should, but then I thought that actually it’s quite nice to get on a train and do some work without having access to emails or the internet.

Emily and Verity have now made it all the way to Beijing, and it appears that this blog is censored there. It must be all the anti-communist propaganda I suppose. Anyway, the upshot is that the girls can’t post themselves, and so they’ve asked me to post the next installment of their adventure for them…

Right, we were going to write separate blogs about the same themes to show our different perspectives of overland journeying, but some slightly more important strategic things have happened in the mean time, so we thought it might be better to tell you about those first.

At the moment we are a bit stuck. Stuck in Beijing, though, which is alright - there could be worse places. However, we have had to spend the first few days of our stay here trying to sort out a way to get to Lhasa, which means that we haven’t even seen the Great Wall yet. We’ve been sent round in circles from embassy, to hotel, to travel company, to train station and have sent many panicky emails to hostels all over China, attempting to find out what a Tibetan Travel Permit really is, whether you have to have one, or whether it exits at all.

On top of this, we are running to a deadline because we are here at the beginning of the Spring Break (Chinese New Year), a two-week national holiday when the transport industry is stretched beyond its means to accommodate the thousands of workers going home to see their families. We felt that even had we managed to get tickets, we would have been depriving someone of the only chance they have this year to be at home (in other words, stealing Christmas). We saw an example of this chaos the other night, when we tried to meet up with a fellow traveller at Beijing Railway Station, of all places. It was so crowded that you had to have a train ticket to even get inside the building and every ticket booth - of which there were about fifty - had its own ridiculously long queue.

Anyway, the Trans-Siberian railway was the most incredible experience. We would highly recommend it to anyone, especially in winter - we’re so glad we braved the cold. On top of avoiding the summer tourists, you also get the chance to experience some of these:

Top Five Things That Happen When It’s Really, Really Cold:

• It becomes a standard form of transport to skate along the pavements. (Maybe we should have tried to get to India like this?)
• Your snot freezes when you breathe in through your nose and it tingles, making you feel like you’re turning into an ice sculpture from the inside out.
• It becomes ‘necessary’ to have coffee breaks every half hour, just to warm up.
• Hot air condenses and freezes instantly outside, making strange furry icicles in cow sheds and next to air vents.
• Your ears go hard.

We’re actually missing life on the trains quite a lot, and we’re trying to think about why. For one thing, we met some lovely, genuine people (natives and foreigners), and had the time to have decent conversations with them. We enjoyed the peacefulness of not feeling we HAD to do anything, the result being that everything we did was a bonus. Here in Beijing we feel like we are missing out on the city if we stay in to read a book. (Having said that, being in a city where everyone is on holiday is a nice feeling.) On the trains you would glance up from your book and sometimes be greeted by a startling sunset, spot an enormous vulture-like bird, or see the same (comforting?) telegraph poles, trees, and snow that had been on a loop since Moscow.

Today we did manage to hire some bicycles and climbed to the top of a big hill (made from the earth dug up for the moat of the Forbidden City) to see a spectacular panoramic view of Beijing.

As I said to the girls when they emailed this latest entry to me, they are certainly having an adventure. Best of luck to them finding there way to Tibet…