ABOUT

This is a site about the books and other writing by James Rodgers, author of Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia From Lenin to Putin (new edition 2023; first published July 2020); Headlines from the Holy Land (2015 and 2017); No Road Home: Fighting for Land and Faith in Gaza (2013); Reporting Conflict (2012). My work looks at how stories of international affairs, especially armed conflict, are told to the world.

BIOGRAPHY

I am an author and journalist. During two decades of covering international news, I reported on the end of the Soviet Union; the wars in Chechnya; the coming to power of Vladimir Putin; 9/11; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the 2003 war in Iraq; Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008. I completed correspondent postings for the BBC in Moscow, Brussels, and Gaza. I now teach in the Journalism Department at City, University of London.

To Germany by train: a journey through European history

Posted On May 18, 2024

A railway bridge over the Rhine in Mannheim, Germany © James Rodgers

For this week’s New European, I wrote about travelling from London to Germany by train, and about the railways’ history in European culture, commerce, and conflict.

TIRED OF DELAYS and of all those onerous, if necessary, security scans, I decided recently to skip Heathrow and Frankfurt airports and make my trip to Mannheim in western Germany by train. It was a pleasure from start to finish: a chance to read, and watch the passing towns, farms, and forests, instead of jostling with airport crowds and forking out a small fortune for a “meal deal” in the departure zone.

I went from St Pancras station to Paris, and after a change from Gare du Nord to Gare de l’Est, onwards to Mannheim: that leg of the journey took a little over three hours on the high-speed TGV. As someone who frequently travels by train between London and Manchester, I do realise that trains are subject to delay – but I still cannot remember the last time I took a flight in Europe that wasn’t late.

Air travel has distorted our sense of distance like no other mode of transport because, aside from the animated map on the video screen in the cabin, it is only at the beginning and end of the journey that you get any sense of where you really are. 

There was a time when trains were the shocking, rapid, new.

You can read the rest of the article here .

Outside the Gare de l’Est, Paris. February 28, 2024.

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