The British disease is spreading

It’s heartening to know that it’s not just the Brits who can be crippled by some wintry weather in, well winter.

Normally I would have thought that snow is so common in Germany that they would have the infrastructure in place to be able to deal with even relatively heavy snowfall.

So it was somewhat surprising to see that Dusseldorf Airport had been closed for the whole of the day, and when I got to Nuremberg, that most of the trains were running with delays in excess of 30 minutes, in some cases up to two hours late (yes, that’s right, a German train running spectacularly late!)

Of course, the UK grinds to a halt when there is 2.4mm of snow, it was almost 24cm of snow that had fallen on Dusseldorf.

It must be a bank holiday weekend

My journey from the hotel to the station this morning took longer than it should have done.

The reason, would lead me to conclude that Ireland looks to the UK for inspiration on ways to deal with its public transport.

On a bank holiday weekend you could:
a. provide a full service for the population on the move
b. shut down chunks of it to make it difficult

Needles to say in the UK we always choose option B, because nobody ever wants to travel on a Bank Holiday weekend.

I didn’t think that Ireland would have done the same, but I was wrong. For the whole of the bank holiday weekend there are no trams from Connolly station (the one where trains to Sligo, Belfast and the local trains all stop at) or Busaras (the most important bus station in the country), instead they start a further stop down the line with a good five to ten minute walk, and no signage.

Admittedly they are installing a whole new extension over the weekend putting in a complex junction to enable the new extension to work, compare this with my home town where the whole of the central section of the tram network has been out of action for nearly a fortnight whilst they get round to finally fixing some traffic lights which they first installed three years ago.

On this basis it would look like the Irish still have much to learn on the annoying bank holiday weekend travellers front, but a good start nether-the-less, particularly liked the lack of on street signage, I knew where I was going, but I ended up with a train of Japanese tourists as they didn’t