Polish rail infrastructure as seen from the Warsaw-Berlin express

One reader of my Memory Lane musings noted that there may be a silver lining in my being grounded by my mishap in Petersburg so that I am returning home exclusively by bus and train, stopping to sniff the roses in Tallinn, then in Warsaw and now in Berlin. Indeed it is far more educational to look around at ground level than to glance down from 10,000 meters.

Today’s discovery was my 5 hour ride on the Warsaw-Berlin Express train that is operated by the Polish railways in cooperation with Deutsche Bahn. It has upended my thinking about Poland’s infrastructure investments, which was long influenced by my travel to the city of Kielce, midway between Warsaw and Krakow. In the 1980s, when I visited my mother-in-law there with a periodicity of once in several months, I suffered the 4 hour snail’s pace train ride. Travel time did not improve even early in the new millennium, when EU funds were used to purchase gleaming Siemens high speed trains, but no investments were made in the rails, which for large stretches were single track. Especially in light of the EU participation with rolling stock, the Polish situation looked very much like the classic definition of White Elephant projects, which amount to massive corruption and sidetracking of public funds into private pockets.

Whether there was massive corruption or not, the Poles were very, very slow to improve public transportation just as in the 1990s they were exceedingly slow with privatization of state owned enterprises while paying out very fancy fees to mostly American consultancies. At the end of the day, privatization was implemented. Now it seems that after some wasted decades, passenger rail services have all at once been elevated to the general European standards.

I was stunned to see that the Polish High Speed Train, with distinctive tapered nose locomotive, is a Polish train, not a German import. Inside it is not as sleek as what Siemens or Alsthom supply to French, German and other West European countries. But the speed is there; it runs on normal tracks and is not segregated from other traffic; it is quiet inside; there is no vibration or sway. To be sure, the Poles have an advantage in their introduction of such trains: the land is flat, very flat all the way from Warsaw to the German border so that the tracks run straight. There are no tricky turns, that complicated the life of Italy’s train engineers, for example.

I traveled first class, but since there was not a single obvious corporate business chap, only very modest looking passengers under the age of 30, the advantage of the first class premium was that we were at the head of the train and just in front of the dining car, which was a great benefit. I have not seen a dining car like this on any normal European intercity train in thirty years or more. French, Belgian, German intercity trains may dispense prepared sandwiches, potato chips, beer coffee, and not much else. This Polish dining car had an extensive menu of main courses prepared on the spot by a chef. Nearly all of the items were classic Polish cuisine, though for some reason the “Russian pierogi” (stuffed dumplings) were especially in demand. Forget pizza or Greek salads! And so I tucked into a fried pork chop with boiled potatoes and stewed cabbage that cost me…the zloty equivalent of 10 euros. All other dishes and beverages were similarly cheap, which explains why every one of the dozen tables was taken by diners, who very politely ate and left, making space for the next clients rather than diddling on their computer for an hour or more as happens in public spaces on Western trains.

There is not much to say about the countryside I glanced at en route. From Warsaw to Poznan, on both sides of the track the flat terrain was under cultivation. But that is not surprising given Poland’s status as an agricultural powerhouse of Europe. To the west of Poznan all the way to the German border, cultivated land gave way to birch and pine forests. The only noteworthy fact is that Poland has only partially bought into the EU’s Green ideology of sustainable energy. I did not see a single roof top solar panel (in Belgium every self-respecting house owner has bought in) and there were just a half dozen wind turbines visible along the entire route. On the other hand, most of the new buses that I saw on the streets of Warsaw proudly proclaim “I am 100% electric.” They crowd out the older natural gas powered buses which claim to be “pollution free.’

I have spoken above about the Polish TGV on the big intercity routes like Warsaw-Berlin or Warsaw-Krakow. But what about provincial towns like my favorite Kielce? Well, the latest timetables show that Warsaw-Kielce travel time is just 2 hours 10 minutes today. Fast and clearly indicating that the tracks have been vastly improved. But not as fast as the Intercity Expresses: Warsaw-Krakow is twice the distance and travel time is just 2 hours 30 minutes.

In summary, very belatedly but very comprehensively, Poland has invested heavily in public transportation, both at the level of intercity passenger trains and at the level of urban buses. Add to that the entirely new fleet of trams that I saw in Warsaw, all of them, incidentally, home produced: not as sexy as the trams in Brussels, but serviceable and presumably a lot cheaper to purchase and operate given that they are much lighter than ours.

Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

Warsaw: more memory lane musings

My walking tour today of streets that I knew very well from my many visits to Warsaw going back to the 1980s has yielded several impressions that I wish to share with the Community.

As I indicated yesterday, Warsaw clearly is a dynamic metropolis that is rising to new heights, physically and economically. In this condition, when new residential and commercial districts have been added outside the very center of the city and more are presently under construction, it is not surprising that commercial life has shifted from where it was just a few decades ago.

I began today’s walking tour at the Novotel Centrum hotel, which is situated at the intersection of two of the principal boulevards of downtown Warsaw, Aleje Jerozolimskie and Marszalkowska.

This high rise Novotel was where most all corporate visitors to Warsaw stayed when I came here regularly on behalf of ITT during the 1980s. It was new and seemed luxurious. It had an excellent ground floor main restaurant, where tables were covered in freshly starched white tablecloths and where the menu featured classics of Polish cuisine that were very ably prepared by the kitchen staff. It was also the work place of scores of prostitutes whose positions in the hotel were assured by their kierownik (manager) in cooperation with the hotel staff.

Today the Novotel exists primarily to serve business conferences, which seem to go on daily. Its hundreds of rooms can accommodate all participants. Then there is the occasional tourist family who don’t know any better and find themselves in a mass environment. Room prices vary widely according to the conferences and occupancy pressure.

My walk from the Novotel down the Aleje Jerozelimskie indicated very quickly that this commerical hub of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s has lost its feathers.. I saw vacant store fronts, factory outlet shops where there had once been prime retailing and other signs of of distress on the boulevard.

The Nowy Sviat (New World) Street that begins at an intersection with the Aleje Jerozolimskie several hundred meters in the direction of the Vistula River also has changed. From this intersection, Nowy Swiat ends in the Old Town perhaps a kilometer away. This street once was home to very good bookstores and some luxury goods shops. Today the first 500 meters are lined with eateries of a cheap variety offering pizza or kebabs and the like. Thereafter the street becomes more conservative as it approaches the university, still more proper as it continues to the edge of the Old Town, where the royal palace was reconstructed in the ‘90s and start of the new millennium.

In the 1990s, Polish cuisine almost disappeared from Warsaw. The more pretentious restaurants were offering a new, European cuisine such as Nordic salmon steaks and other frozen imported main dishes. Today, that tradition of foreign-good, local-bad continues in an updated manner, with the restaurant in the aforementioned Novotel Centrum serving a variety of salads and other non-Polish dishes. When I was a visitor here regularly, they had terrific herring for a starter that begged for vodka, followed by Polish pike-perch in white wine sauce, to nane just a couple of real Polish dishes. Only one holdover from the 1980s remains on the Novotel menu: beef tartare. Polish beef tartare is in a class by itself. It is not the typical raw hamburger meat that we know in Belgium or France. Rather, to the ground meat they add a raw egg yolk, pickles and onions. When mixed together you get an interesting dish that goes perfectly with a shot glass of Zubrowka vodka. I was glad to see that at least this one truly Polish tradition survives in today’s internationalized Novotel menu.

We were patient in our walk down Nowy Swiat and stopped only when we spotted two side by side restaurants offering ‘traditional Polish food.’ And we dined splendidly. I had the first Zurek soup in 20 years and it brought back fond memories. Zurek is based on fermented rye bread with a lot of other ingredients. In this restaurant it was served with a side dish of fried pork sausage and a slice of bread with gussied up half boiled egg. My wife and I shareda Schweinshaxe with stewed cabbage that any of my former fellow employees in UPS Deutschland would have raved about, all the more so if they knew the very modest price.

Speaking of prices: it would seem from my brief sampling that Polish restaurants today cost a fraction of what we pay in Belgium. They also appear to be below what I was paying in restaurants in St Petersburg. Yes, strange as it may sound, Polish zloty meals appear to be cheaper than Russian rouble meals of similar quality even given the depressed exchange rate of the rouble today. Perhaps for reasons such as this, Poles seem to be in no rush to join the Eurozone, which would surely entail a leveling up of prices.

It was a delight to reach the University mid-way down the Nowy Swiat street. You pass the impressive monument to Copernicus just a couple hundred meters short of the university gates. And across the street at this point is the Holy Cross Church where, at his last request, Chopin’s heart, secretly removed from his body before it was buried, was entombed in a pillar of the church. A sign directs you to the pillar where it attracts visitors including me. The rest of Chopin lies in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where he died. In the same church there is a splendid marble monument to Pope Jean Paul II commemorating his visit in 1979.

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As I knew well from my past stays in Warsaw, Chopin is very much alive in the city, without respect to where his body parts may be. There are daily one hour Chopin concerts given at the Frydyrek Concert Hall situated just outside the limits of the Old Town. We bought our tickets online and joined about 50 others for an elegant performance by a Polish professor in his 50s, a graduate of the Chopin University (Warsaw) and holder of many awards. The force of Chopin was with us and was complemented by a glass of sparkling wine served during the intermission.

From there we strolled to the Old Town main square a few minutes away. Of course, this part of the city is all Disneyland because what you see was all rebuilt from ashes after the war, just as the royal palace was.

Our return to our hotel provided a ‘bis’ to my remarks yesterday about Polish taxi drives preying on tourists. When we arrived at our hotel, the driver did not go to the entrance but parked in the street a hundred meters away. He refused my cash, saying he accepts payment only by credit card and then tapped a sum into his card machine and asked that I apply my card without seeing what I was paying. I insisted and it turned out that he was about to charge the equivalent of 100 euros for what would normally be a 12 euro ride. I protested and then he reduced the sum to the equivalent of 40 euros. I handed him zlotys worth 12 euros and we left without a fight. I relate this story as a warning to those among you who may fancy a vacation in delightful, dynamic Poland.

And lest I sound too complimentary about the vibrancy of the country and the extent of new construction, it also bears mention that during taxi rides today I saw several side streets down town that remain in the same wrecked condition as at the end of WWII. I was tipped off to this by our hotel receptionist. Moreover, poverty is visible if you are alert to the beggars recovering plastic drinks bottles and metal cans from the waste bins on the streets. That is a sight that you won’t see in Petersburg today. Moral of the story: not all boats have risen with the tide of prosperity.

My final word on Poland from this stay-over confirms what I knew in the past: most people are very pleasant, the cuisine is exceptionally good, there are a lot of scoundrels about. To this I add a thought which long preceded this visit and will be with me long after I leave:: the Polish political class is mad, mad, mad and has been so for the past 400 years ever since their troops and candidate for tsar held Moscow. There was a good reason why Poland disappeared from the map of Europe from the 1780s to 1917. People like prime minister Donald Tusk seem to want another go at the disappearance act.

Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026