Except that in those times when about all INTern. ticketing was done that way, there was NO ´protection´ or money back of whatever kind of real assistance. But that was before these global price Hi-speed lines started to improve rail travel.
It was in fact the cumbersome need for extra ticketing and mandatory REServations that were only able to blossom once the internet came in full force that EU was in the end forced to impose such rules. Of course with bitter resistance from about any burocratic state-railway.
The fairly blunt answer when one missed trainconnections or other mishaps was just: next train will leave at .....
(and then you had to find small local coins and a working fone box to inform your ´dear ones´ that it would be .... hrs later!)
In fact, reservations were a doddle decades back when the internet as we know it didn't exist. I remember 40 or more years ago being in a little two-horse Italian hill town on a branch line with a handful of trains a day, and popping into the local station in the evening to book a reservation on a train several countries away a few days later (I already had the relevant ticket). It cost coppers, and took just a couple of minutes for the reservation to be made and the piece of paper to be printed out for me.
The EU simply needs to legislate to mandate UK style split ticket passenger rights throughout the community. They won't, though, as SNCF is too influential on the French Government, who would veto it.
Absolutely - an agreed international system of a right to rebooking when a valid connection is missed would get over a lot of the hassle of cross-border travel now - though it would still leave the hassle of
buying the tickets in the first place: that needs to be seamless too.
I suppose there's already "HOTNAT*" for the high speed services, but it really needs to be blanket across everything and include additional assistance like hotel accommodation if stuck overnight e.g. because the next compulsory reservation service is full, just as is the right of an air passenger.
* Hop On The Next Available Train.
At present, this does seem to be secure on a
through ticket, at least. My last pre-pandemic trip was Hamburg-London one Friday afternoon, with the whole journey on one DB-issued ticket. One of the two German trains to get me to Cologne was late, meaning I just missed my connection to Brussels; and the next one wouldn't arrive in time for the last Eurostar to London. The inquiry desk didn't bat an eyelid - they just gave me a taxi to a nice local hotel for the night, with bed and breakfast paid by them, and told me to come back at my leisure the next morning (again with them paying for the taxi). When I did they said that Belgian engineering work meant there were no Brussels-London trains that day; so they put lots of rubber stamps and scribbles on my ticket, endorsing it to route me via Paris instead. So I had a free trip to Paris (where I had a pleasant meal break in a country I hadn't been expecting to visit that time) and got the Eurostar back home from there without any problem with the Eurostar check-in. I was 20 or so hours late back in London, but really no complaints. None of the staff from the various rail undertakings I dealt with made a fuss, and at no stage did I think I might be left stranded. Really an object lesson in how the system ought to operate. So let's hope that the discussions referred to either give an equivalent right for journeys using more than one ticket, and/or ensure that multi-leg journeys can be booked with a through ticket.
