Notices by Oliver Blanthorn (bovine3dom@masto.ai)

new map for you all: "how big can trains be?" across europe using declared loading gauges from the ERA RINF. purple = big trains, red = small trains, green = somewhere in between.

https://compute.olie.science/expo/?data=loading_gauge/2026-03-18#x=8.0973&y=48.8056&z=5.0605

thanks go to @kaat0 for helping with the data. all mistakes are my own :)

@jon hah just saw that you tooted about this on bluesky

shame you couldn't get "AJC my arse" in as a quote to the article

@jon incidentally i spotted yesterday that @seatsixtyone has this map of interrail reservation requirements which doubles up handily as a guide to which railways really would rather that you weren't there, interrail or not

Times journalist falls through the cracks in the AJC

> Here is where cross-border travel is less fun — despite its staff having caused the delay [the Italian train was hauled by an SNCF locomotive], SNCF wouldn’t reroute me because this was an Italian train. The upshot: about £750 on new trains, a hotel and a 6am taxi to make my ferry.

Looks like she got to the "not at all clear what happens here" part of @jon 's flowchart https://jonworth.eu/railpassengerrights/

https://www.thetimes.com/article/9951c787-b8ba-4258-bef9-8372859982d4

@LachAnonym i love fedilab loads but the settings are bad by default imo and really confusingly named

maybe something in my settings fixes it because i don't have your problems at all

"fetch missing messages" is probably the most promising

@stefanlindbohm

@LachAnonym i just realised this is misinformation, it's the crosshair icon to the left of it that loads remote conversations, not the eye 🫣

@LachAnonym also worth noting that the weird eye button in the top right forces the thread to get loaded from the remote instance which helps on big threads

"remotely load conversations" does the same thing but for me it slows down loading threads enough that i don't want to turn it on for everything

@LachAnonym weird, maybe @apps can help :) ?

i would give you my settings export but it looks like it includes stuff to do with my masto account

some good news - in the centre of London, cyclists are on track to outnumber motor vehicles (cars, buses, lorries) within a couple of years

anecdotally it has got a much more pleasant place to walk around in the last decade

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/22/london-has-become-a-cycling-city (£)

@ryanc we ran into this in Tridactyl a few months ago when a user was trying to search for "538" https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/issues/5081

@apps Fedilab's "search cache" function is absolutely fantastic for finding toots that I know I've seen within the last few days

thank you for all your work on it ♥️

People like to complain about British train tickets because they're complicated, but they do also work in ways that continental Europe could learn from:

1. I went to Trip.com and put in my origin and destination
2. It came back with a huge array of prices, times and routes. I picked the one that suited me best (the cheapest)
3. I went to the station to collect my four physical tickets, far cheaper than one physical ticket - Trip.com found the best combination

1/

8. I'll get 50% back on the face value of the physical tickets wired to my bank account in the next few days
9. So rather than £30 the 200km straight line journey will have cost me £15

I think the key points are:

1. Encourage split tickets, don't make them illegal (SNCF!)
2. Free market for ticket sellers
3. Journeys are protected, not individual tickets
4. When stuff goes wrong, everyone has to help, no matter whose "fault" it is

4/

4. I did my journey which was three trains from two different companies, and a ferry from a third
5. The final train was 33 minutes late, which meant I was due compensation
6. Because in the UK, journeys are protected, not tickets, the compensation was due on the whole trip and not just the last physical ticket
7. To get compensation, I filled in a form on the final train company's website and sent them photos of the tickets

2/

How expensive would it really be to bribe the Italians to get out of bed 20 minutes later and to get them to accept French tickets?

And what would it take for the local paper to notice that this supposedly closed dead railway has eight mysterious ghost trains going up and down it every day

More frustrating reporting on #CrossBorderRail on the Nice -> Cuneo line.

Nice -> Breil is closed due to track work, SNCF runs replacement buses between them but no trains between Breil and Tende. SNCF won't run trains again for a year.

Shop owners understandably frustrated, some talking of closing.

But what the article doesn't tell you is that Trenitalia runs four (almost empty) trains a day in each direction along the line. You just can't buy tickets for them

https://www.nicematin.com/vie-locale/lull-ceramique-contrainte-de-fermer-boutique-959892

@jon

@mario fwiw I like https://nightride.com/en for getting an idea of the prices more than ÖBB's own site, it's not perfect but you can get a feeling for when is cheap and when is expensive
@pmdj