When will Europe get the trains it deserves?
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you’ve ever wondered where all the affordable night trains are, or struggled to book tickets for an international journey, or spent hours of your one wild and precious life petitioning for compensation for a significantly delayed trip (*takes deep breath, collects self*)... let us introduce you to Jon Worth. This prolific train watcher and commentator is behind a new European Rail Passengers’ Union that is pushing for easier cross-border transit and may even help to resolve some people’s personal cross-border nightmares. Jon thinks Europe’s train travellers deserve better, and we tend to agree.
Find out about the European Rail Passengers' Union here. Subscribe to his newsletter here, and check out his posts on Mastodon here.
Also in this week’s episode: the latest in all those big moves to get European youth off of social media, and an Olympics opening ceremony broadcast debacle for the ages. And some crime-fighting llamas. This week’s Inspiration Station recommendations are Rosalía making a tortilla de patatas and the Spanish TV series Los Años Nuevos.
Resources for this episode:
- “'I feel free': Australia's social media ban, one month on” – BBC, 9 January 2026
- “Children should be at least 16 to access social media, say MEPs” – European Parliament, 26 November 2025
- “France: TikTok still steering vulnerable children and young people towards depressive and suicidal content” – Amnesty International, 20 October 2025
- Winter Olympics chaos at Italian broadcaster RAI (in Italian)
- Mariah Carey’s performance at the opening ceremony in Milan
- “Herd of crime-fighting llamas ‘make citizen’s arrest’ of man fleeing police” – @itvnews, 11 February 2026
Talk of social media bans getting you down? Keep the screen time going with our newsletter, GOOD WEEK BAD WEEK. We recommend it for anyone over the age of 16 looking to level up their scrolling. Subscribe here; it’s good for you!
This podcast was brought to you in cooperation with Euranet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news. But it’s contributions from listeners that truly make it all possible—we could not continue to make the show without you! If you like what we do, you can chip in to help us cover our production costs at patreon.com/europeanspodcast (in many different currencies), or you can gift a donation to a superfan. We'd also love it if you could tell two friends about this podcast. We think two feels like a reasonable number.
Produced by Katz Laszlo and Wojciech Oleksiak
Mixing and mastering by Wojciech Oleksiak
Music by Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast has been produced in cooperation with Uranet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news. |
| 0:11.4 | But this podcast would not be possible without the incredibly generous support of our amazing listeners who donate a little bit each month at patreon.com forward slash Europeans podcast. Welcome back to the Europeans, the podcast about a continent where it is currently really, really cold. |
| 0:52.5 | So we'll do our best to warm you up. This is Katie in Paris, |
| 0:56.9 | and over there in Amsterdam, it is my good friend Dominic Kramer. Hoi. |
| 1:01.3 | Hi, hoi. It's been so cold here. I feel like I haven't been able to warm up for days. |
| 1:08.6 | I've got a big furry sock that I've been putting in my microwave. Sounds really weird. It's not really a sock. Recommend, sort of furry beanbag thing. I'm just wearing it around the house. It's a bit like having a cat on my feet. Oh, I've also got some microwaveable beanbags, which are the only thing that warm up my feet at night. But anyway, I feel bad complaining about it considering how cold it is in some other parts of the continent. |
| 1:31.4 | We heard via our Estonian colleagues at Uranet Plus, this radio consortium we're part of, |
| 1:37.4 | that a bit of the Baltic Sea between two islands has frozen over and is now being used as a road. |
| 1:44.6 | That is wild. The sea has literally frozen over. |
| 1:48.6 | Yeah, and it's not just a short stretch. It's 20 kilometres. |
| 1:52.0 | Wow. |
| 1:52.5 | And apparently, like, people just started spontaneously driving across it, |
| 1:56.4 | partly because it was hard for the ferries to get through because it was so frozen. |
| 2:00.7 | And the authorities have decided to open up the ice road officially, because it was happening anyway. |
| 2:07.6 | And one of the most terrifying facts I heard about this is that people have to keep their seat belts off |
| 2:13.6 | whilst driving across just in case they have to make an emergency exit. |
| 2:16.6 | Oh, God! That does not sound like a relaxing drive at all. |
| 2:20.8 | Right. Anyway, how are you, Katie? |
| 2:23.2 | I'm good, yeah. It's not that cold here in Paris, but it's still pretty cold. |
| 2:27.7 | So I have been staying inside watching the Winter Olympics. Have you been watching? |
| 2:32.5 | Oh, no, I actually haven't at all, apart from the opening ceremony. |
| 2:36.3 | It's been so good this year. And this is probably going to get me cancelled. |
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