Railway work: what I am doing has some ethical purpose, but is anyone listening?

This summer will be my last big #CrossBorderRail tour – 80 more borders, mostly in Central Europe. There simply are not too many more borders to visit.

And as the project on the ground winds down, I have started to wonder who might benefit from the lessons I have learned from this work, and I pitched the idea to present my conclusions at a big railway industry conference in November. As anyone who has heard me present can confirm, I am not bad at it, and I have amazing visuals from the project too.

But here is the main part of the response:

At [this event] we only have presentations from operators and infrastructure managers (who speak for free) and sponsors who of course pay for their speaking slots. We unfortunately cannot offer a presentation slot to an independent. However, we do often have independents involved as moderators on panels – if this would be of interest for you I’d be more than happy to discuss to see which topics would overlap? This would allow you to be on stage and bring in some of the work you’ve been doing to steer the discussion. There would of course be no cost for this.

A closed shop, basically.

So what about using the experience in another way – feeding ideas into research work? I was approached by a company bidding for an EU funded tender researching cross border railways, but they chose to not proceed:

Unfortunately, I have to turn you down for a cooperation in the tender – we have already formed a consortium in the last few weeks and the limited budget does not allow for the inclusion of further partners. Nevertheless, we would be happy to exchange ideas with you in the event that we are awarded the contract for the project. We will then contact you!

So we will not pay you, but we would be happy to have your input for free. Thanks!

This I told them in an email was not a really reasonable way to proceed, and the response:

my colleagues and I are aware that you are ‘the’ expert in cross-border rail transport in Europe, thanks to your extensive travelling and research on the ground. On the other hand, we unfortunately considered having an activist on board to be a potential risk.

So the industry does not want it. Consultants might vaguely want it in terms of content, but I am a risk as I am too much an activist, and they definitely won’t pay.

And politically I am not sure I am getting anywhere either – not least as high speed rail is the talk of the town in Brussels just now.

So where does that leave me?

By the time I am done with #CrossBorderRail I will have been to more than 350 railway borders, will have knowledge and experience of this topic like no one else and – importantly – I also know how you could turn all of this into workable policy change both at EU level, and nationally or regionally. Having seen the change that fixing cross border railways can bring to a place (Seifhennersdorf!) I know there is a purpose to this work. But at the moment I feel like I am shouting into a void, and that is not a pleasant place to be.

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