Would love to see the day there are regular Hrubieszów-Zamość-Bełżec-Hrebenne-Horyniec-Lubaczów-Jarosław trains, too, that part's ridiculous currently (as Jon can attest)

6/

#HRJ #kolej #rail

Podlachia is pretty much in line with what was already there, in reality or in plans, but the *south*-east saw a notable rearrangement with the main Lublin-Kraków connection being rerouted from the current Radom-Kielce route via Tarnobrzeg and the manufacturing town of Mielec (known for planes and, in public transport circles, passenger info systems), a significant improvement from the network building perspective. The new bihourly line P20 would continue through Katowice onto the Sudety trunk and reach Jelenia Góra, with every other train running a section from Hrubieszów Miasto via Zamość and Biłgoraj, the route of Mielec's only current long-distance connection, the Hetman, which the previous plans merely expanded into a 2h line. One pair would be routed to Wrocław, a relation apparently more important than many realize (all relations between the big cities of the south seem to be much more important than anyone in Warsaw realizes) based on the outcry after the Hetman, originally routed across the south and all the way to Zielona Góra via Żary, was unceremoniously shortened to Kraków, subjecting people from the region to much stress over whether they would make the change.

Other changes in Subcarpathia include line 54 Warsaw-Sandomierz-Rzeszów-Przemyśl being upgraded to Express category and carrying a section for Krosno and Sanok with every other train, and a brand-new line U41 that would connect Rzeszów with Łódź via Stalowa Wola, the currently freight-only line via Staszów to Kielce (that's going to need some serious work to bring back up to passenger-carrying standards, but I'm confident we can do a reasonable job of it quickly), and the CMK. Subcarpathia is not too keen on the latter, it was raised as something of a 'nice-to-have' by the Holy Cross Voivodeship, but it does the advantage of already being electrified throughout, making it runnable, at least provisionally, with whatever old stock PKPIC has in store

5/

#HRJ #kolej #rail #Podkarpackie

cc @cycling_on_rails ^ you might enjoy this one ;)

Moving back to HRJ, there is one detail I don't think was included in the report - the government is finally promising timetable normalcy! The number of timetable periods is to be decreased step-by-step until only two remain, starting in Decmeber and June. Already next year, there are supposed to be 4 timetable periods instead of the usual 5: https://www.rynek-kolejowy.pl/wiadomosci/horyzontalny-rozklad-jazdy-takt-przewidywalnosc-i-latwe-przesiadki-153477.html

#kolej #rail #PKP #PLK #bahnbubble #Fahrplan2027 #timetable #Timetable2027

Sticking with the Tricity, the last of the new Impuls 2 EMUs for SKMT should be underway soon - the company apparently took the unorthodox step of deploying drivers to pick them up from Nowy Sącz across the country… by bicycle: https://www.rynek-kolejowy.pl/wiadomosci/newag-wkrotce-odbior-ostatnich-impulsow-dla-pkp-skm-trojmiasto-153499.html

#SKMT #Trójmiasto #kolej #rail #Newag

PKP PLK signed a contract for the construction of a fourth track between Pszczółki and Pruszcz Gdański on the main line to Gdańsk. The section was tripled before but the demands of serving two major ports, a growing agglomeration and increasing amounts of summer traffic necessitated this investment: https://www.rynek-kolejowy.pl/wiadomosci/pkp-plk-z-umowa-na-czwarty-tor-od-pszczolek-do-pruszcza-gdanskiego--153451.html

#PKP #PLK #kolej #Pomorskie #Trójmiasto #rail

In international connections, aside of the government's… optimistic vision regarding future improvements on the Czech side (https://mastodon.com.pl/@HaTetsu/116862093542138478), the Baltic Express is doing well and Poland would like the Czechs to add a fifth early/late pair between Prague and Wrocław: https://www.rynek-kolejowy.pl/wiadomosci/baltic-express-sukcesem-frekwencyjnym-bedzie-kolejna-para-kursow--153461.html

#CrossBorderRail #PKPIC #ČD #PKP #kolej #rail

A slightly outdated news drop before I continue my thread…

Although the first new Pesa Gama 3 bi-mode locomotive is to be delivered to PKP Intercity this autumn, the type won't see revenue service in 2027 - PKPIC is intending to stick to its guns and take it through a series of test drives first, arguing that they cannot afford teething problems of an all-new construction causing disruption for passengers even if it means things fall behind schedule further: https://www.rynek-kolejowy.pl/wiadomosci/pkp-intercity-nie-planuje-nowych-gam-do-rozkladu-jazdy-na-2027-r-153430.html

#Pesa #kolej #PKP #PKPIC #rail

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/116862122877241583

One of the biggest lies of hosted serivce providers: "if it happens to us, there's nothing anyone could have done about it"
Well, they're not immune to not caring, or personnel issues, or whatever. And the difference to your own stuff is, you don't get to decide how the problems get solved (unless you constitute a disproportionately large share of the provider's business, I guess). That's the tradeoff you make, and it can count for a lot in the right circumstances.
One of those truisms that feel obvious but are worth explicitly considering once in a while

I won't touch these tools for a lot of reasons but one of them is that you turn into the person you practice being, and I am absolutely not going to practice being somebody who talks to anyone the way you have to talk to chatbots to get anything out of them.

https://toot.cafe/@baldur/116860967516480109

A tak na marginesie, to nie jest ta czcionka z napisów na starych EN57 i podobnych? Jakoś tak znajomo wygląda

#HRJ #kolej

I'll be following up with some spotlights on domestic changes I find particularly noteworthy over the coming days, in what is hopefully a more sustainable and interesting manner than how I handled ZSK. There's still a lot of material for me to digest around this

4/

The bigger change is in the west, where the Baltic Express would be increased to bi-hourly, bound to a line from Warsaw into an hourly Wrocław-Prague connection and rerouted via Wałbrzych-Mieroszów-Meziměstí-Náchod, removing long-distance traffic from Kłodzko-Międzylesie… Or would it? Problem is, according to documentation, this was agreed in October, before the Babiš government took over and scaled back railway investment, resulting in work on upgrading the Czech-side route with electrification and speed increases, including the Vysokov chord, necessary to finally stop routing everything between Náchod and Jaroměř with a double switchback, apparently getting punted off further into the future. According to a puzzled SkyscraperCity user, the whole thing is off until at least 2040 now. There's a disturbing parallel to the expressway through the nearby Lubawka crossing where the Czechs only got around to starting construction of their bit around the time Poland's was finished.

Finally, on the German border, most of the new is a significant increase in planned traffic through Frankfurt (Oder) with the retention of slots on the existing Berlin-Warszawa-Express route in addition to new trains running over the new Warsaw-Poznań HSL, as well as… the extension of every other RE1 from Frankfurt to Rzepin. It seems from the report that despite repeated requests to guarantee at least 1.5 slots per hour for trains to Poland between Berlin and Frankfurt, the Germans aren't actually making any promises in that regard. Harnessing the RE1 might be a good way around that, but it depends on a whole bunch of things, like VBB arranging for double-decker regional trains that can run between Germany and Poland, which almost certainly means a new type approval, or timetables being set up such that you don't have to then stew in Rzepin for half an hour to board the train actually going where you want to.

3/

#CrossBorderRail #HRJ #kolej #rail

I don't want this thread to become quite the slog the the ZSK one felt to me, so let's start with the bit non-Poles will likely find the most interesting - #CrossBorderRail changes (relative to previous announcements)!

On the Lithuanian border there's no change to long-distance plans - still a bihourly train from Kraków via Warsaw, Białystok, Ełk, Suwałki - but on the regional map it's shown that the planners apparently intend for Warmia-Masuria to front any possible restoration of regional traffic towards Kaunas, and it doesn't look like there were any objections so far. Let's hope they will have learned how to do trains properly by then (see https://mastodon.com.pl/@HaTetsu/116720881964644481).

Eastern Slovakia, I've already covered in news reposting. I'm not sure where they got the notion that Slovakia would run hourly trains across the border to Łupków but, well, it's up Subcarpathia to make it happen. The new map also has the promised 4h line to Budapest via Muszyna and Košice, although it looks like the plan is to eventually shorten those trains to Kraków and have people change to faster ones there, or else non-systematically link them to other lines. This would replace the present service via Břeclav entirely, although I imagine connections with changes to the Metropolitan ought to remain possible.

The map now includes stopping patterns in western Slovakia and Moravia - instead of throwaway "well, fast trains every 4h to Vienna and Budapest" lines, there's a whole hourly service to Vienna alternating between running the existing route via Otrokovice (those alternating between Wrocław and Kraków) and a to-be-straightened-out route via Brno (from Warsaw). Bratislava is expected to be handled by breaking away a couple of the latter trains, as well as previously proposed connections via Žilina - those are meant to be a panacea for capacity limits on the traditional Moravia route.

Another new possibility raised is the possible diversion of a few pairs running through Chałupki to Košice.

cc @jon

2/

#HRJ #kolej #rail

Polentakt hype intensifies

Two weeks after the reveal of the current government's long-term plan for railways (see #ZSKPolska for more on that one), last Monday saw the reveal of a new, more fleshed-out iteration of the Horyzontalny Rozkład Jazdy (Horizon Timetable), the short-term plan for an integrated passenger railway network to be achieved by 2035.

It brings major changes to integrate ideas developed since the last iteration of 2024, with a new set of lilac supplemental rychlík lines that seem to mostly correspond to the planned network of hybrid electric/Diesel (ESD162 and Gama 3.0) routes. It also marks the return of the Regional Express concept (which in the HRJ context means not the usual German kind, but rather regional HSR trains - more like BaWü's RE200) and, most importantly of all, the first nationwide regional rail plan, built in collaboration with all voivodeships. Of course, it's up to the latter how much of it actually gets implemented and the result does look a bit crayon-y (and the horizon is tentatively marked as 2030-2040). I think this is fine - this first attempt is clearly more intended to get an idea of goals, non-goals and what size of offer should be possible to provide.

…Which is sort of the main issue - they identified a whole bunch of bottlenecks that may require compromising on major parts of the plan (there's no way to redo *all* the urban nodes and poorly thought-out modernizations in 9 years) and designated them priority targets for in-depth studies using another addition to the Port Polska/CPK stable of modelling tools, the track-by-track, block-by-block Kolejowy Model Mikrosymulacyjny (Microsimulation Railway Model). It's also anyone's guess where the trains are going to come from for some of it.

(They also removed the "KDP" (HSR) line designations and merged them into Ex. Guess they realized it doesn't make that much sense to distinguish them while most of them run on souped-up conventional lines for large parts of their routes)

1/

#HRJ #kolej #rail

There's quite a bunch of people who'll tell you that Germans are genetically wired to look down on Poles forever, but if that were the case, would they put so much money and time into building a whole-ass S-Bahn to smooth things over whenever our trains get diverted to Gesundbrunnen? /hj?

#rail #bahnbubble

https://www.sncf-voyageurs.com/fr/presse/sncf-voyageurs-accompagne-les-vacanciers-tout-au-long-de-lete-avec-tgv-inoui-ouigo-et-intercites/ OuiGo (:blobcat_oh_no:) joins Interrail !

You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.

I now travel with a portable CO2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143.

That number matters more than it looks. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO2. At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure.

Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here. https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/

it's been 3 years since the test train with broad loading gauge Ukrainian coaches arrived in Warsaw as part of certification to allow PKP IC and UZ to run more trains between Warsaw and Kyiv

absolutely nothing happened about it since

there still is only one pair of trains per day and tickets for it still sell in a blink because UZ physically doesn't have more rolling stock to satisfy the demand

Semi-mad sleeper routes of 1960s PKP:
(Summer holidays: Kielce-Herby Nowe-Karsznice-)Łódź Kaliska-Płock-Brodnica-Nowe Miasto Lubawskie-Iława Główna-Gdynia Główna

#kolej #PKP #history