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Way more interesting than this is the upcoming plan to liberalize rail transport across the entire EU. This should allow effectively anybody (meeting certain s

Way more interesting than this is the upcoming plan to liberalize rail transport across the entire EU. This should allow effectively anybody (meeting certain standards) to operate services on common infrastructure, introducing actual competition to the passenger rail market. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20160420IPR24132/agreement-on-opening-up-of-the-eu-passenger-railway-market http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20160420IPR2...

carlob 10y ago
See how well that went in the UK… We've had this in Italy for high speed trains for a while, and so far the only private competitor is close to bankruptcy.
kalleboo 10y ago
Are there any good studies on countries where this has already been done? Looking at the situation in Sweden where there has been rail liberalization, it seems like it mostly leads to underinvestment in the infrastructure because you can always just blame the passenger train companies... I haven't heard any happy stories from the UK either. I'm for it in principal (especially harmonization - any train border crossing in Europe can be a nightmare) but the incentives need to be engineered just right
- daenney 10y ago
  I go between Uppsala and Stockholm regularly (it's roughly 70km, so a 38m ride) with SJ and I have to say though, most of the time I do blame SJ. The amount of times my train gets cancelled because their locomotives crap out is far larger than whenever it's because of infrastructure related reasons. Considering their latest price hike I'm not very happy with them. MTR does provide a nice alternative to SJ though when you want to get to Göteborg, Malmö or Köpenhamn. For a country as big as Sweden though there's a notable lack of high-speed rail to anything north of Stockholm and there doesn't seem to be any interest or incentive to improve that situation.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    There are probably regional differences - most of my experience is in Skåne where ridership has increased a lot in the past 10 years but there has been little infrastructure investment in the chokepoints outside of the big Citytunneln project. The local train company (Skånetrafiken) has tried hard to work around the deficiencies by doing things like keeping spare trains on standby in case of delays but it doesn't help when there is ripped catenary or "signaling errors" due to lack of maintenance. The real problems seem to be on the national lines (SJ2000) where the lack of maintenance compounds with the lack of any redundancy to cause cascading delays
- Fnoord 10y ago
  Shifting the blame between the various railway companies also happened in The Netherlands. On top of that, swapping train between different corporations doesn't work in a user friendly way (you need to log out and in, or be considered a free rider) because nobody in IT has figured out to fairly calculate and share the profit fairly. Since the government doesn't stimulate or punish this behaviour there's no incentive of corporations to fix this. They've been saying since forever that they'd fix it.
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    In germany, the maintainenance/repair costs for rails and bridges are mostly paid by Deutsche Bahn according to some 50:50 key - but if a complete replacement is due, they get a much higher costpart taken over by the tax-payers. So they drive them into the dust and shrink the railways to death. Goes to show, that company's can be well-fare queens too. And of course, for the radicals that is just a proof that the market is not free enough. Okay, in free enough markets, those guys take the public hostage and demand money for their getaway. Privatizing the DB was a mistake. Public services, with large enough infrastructure decay in private hands. Look at the US. Look at Londons water supply. To be fair, state can screw up too, but not in this way. "Niemand hat die Absicht einen Flughafen zu bauen"
- gsnedders 10y ago
  As a counterpoint, freight is already deregulated, and that has been massively successful in much of the EU: especially for container traffic, the market is far more competitive with road than it was twenty years ago.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  I got shown a graph recently, when arguing for renationalisation of passenger train services in Scotland, that passenger use of the rail network started climbing significantly higher when the current franchise system came into play. Though the franchise system isn't "liberalisation" - it's just granting near-monopolies over certain routes in most cases. As a result, we have Virgin/Stagecoach providing the only reasonable routes from Scotland to London. And, of course, the network in England only ever seems to receive investment where it affects Londoners. But we tried to privatise the rail network itself once, and that went very, very badly.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    >use of the rail network started climbing significantly higher when the current franchise system came into play I know more people who have long train commutes these days than I used to. That's not a function of how much better run the network is though, it's a function of rising house prices (which has been going on since the 90s) driving people further and further out. With a nationalized rail system the same thing would have happened.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      Or did the privatised rail system allow people to more reasonably travel long distances for work, allowing people to move further out, allowing cities to grow and require more workers and thus raising house prices further out with increased demand? Personally, I'm not really in favour of the franchise system - a concession system a la London Overground would work better in many places (inc Scotland) IMO - but I don't think it's as simple as "the franchises are doing exactly what British Rail would've done".
      - crdoconnor 10y ago
        >Or did the privatised rail system allow people to more reasonably travel long distances for work, allowing people to move further out, allowing cities to grow and require more workers and thus raising house prices further out with increased demand? No. The increase in house prices was both staggering and coincidental with investors buying up properties an leaving them empty. >don't think it's as simple as "the franchises are doing exactly what British Rail would've done British Rail was neglected and lacking investment. This is part of the privatization handbook - intentionally underfund and then use that as a pretext for pushing privatization. I think if it was well funded we'd have a cheaper, better system.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Well, Poland may be a case study, and there the privatization of rail is an utter, ugly mess - and now you never even know who to complain to if someone screws up.
mschuster91 10y ago
Please not. The problem is that railway cars, track fees etc. are the same for all operators (buying/renting railway cars may actually be more expensive for smaller operators due to lack of volume), so the only way to save costs (and thus be able to operate at a lower price than incumbents) is saving on employees (aka wage dumping) or safety/maintenance. Neither is good for society.
- smhg 10y ago
  I was thinking about this for a second. Specifically about saving on employees. I guess it is safe to assume on-board jobs don't have a bright future. Those are up for automation. So maintenance staff remains? But can't that be a separate entity? Just like with cars? That might solve the safety issue too. One has a bad rep? You go to another. It's just that one public operator doesn't seem to work well either (lots of issues in countries with those too).
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    Track and signal maintenance is a separate, public entity in the UK ("Network Rail"), with trains owned by the banks, and leased to companies that run services, like Virgin (yes, that Virgin) or Southern. In the 1990s, the track and signals were maintained by Railtrack, a private company, but that caused several bad accidents. Since Network Rail took over, the British railway network has become one of the safest in the world -- I don't think a passenger on a train has been killed for a decade, and only a very small number (2?) of maintenance staff.
    - smhg 10y ago
      Yes, it sounds hard to create competition for track and signal maintenance. But the parent was talking about the companies that run the trains. I meant the maintenance those trains need (repairs/safety/cleaning/...). On that level competition might make more sense (like with cars). So they wouldn't do that in-house. Maybe it already works like this?
      - 10y ago
leadingthenet 10y ago
As someone living in the UK, I hope that never, ever, happens.
- TillE 10y ago
  I'd been reading about the mess of privatized rail in the UK for a while, but what really shocked me when I was traveling around Manchester were all the diesel trains. In Germany nearly everything is electric, especially in and around cities.
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    The biggest cause, historically, is the fact the railways were privatised when much of the rest of Europe was electrifying in the inter-war period and receiving little state money, and at the same time were struggling to make any money (a large part of that was the fact they had an obligation as a common carrier to accept any and all freight for a fixed price, from when they were the only way to quickly transport goods long-distances over land). By the time they were nationalised in the 1950s the railways were still in heavy decline and more or less up until the early 2000s all the planning was about a managed decline of the railways, hence the lack of investment, justified by the falling passenger and freight numbers year-on-year.
  - jimnotgym 10y ago
    As other posters have mentioned it is not that clear. Lots of people are using the problems with one rail franchise ('Southern' which is key when our media is so London centric) to justify their ideological opposition to private ownership. For me rail pre-privatisation was terrible. By the end of WW2 the railways were worn out and the the response was to close half of the network! Outside of London Underground, trains were in massive decline. this has been largely reversed. Virgin trains for example are by far the best on the network due to their significant investment in the best rolling stock and pushing for improved tracks. However there are massive problems in the way the franchises are awarded and where profits and subsidies go, but these are not problems of ownership. The government controls the infrastructure and awards the franchises....and regulates the ticket prices (which are a joke not least in their variability). However, now there is a huge increase in passenger numbers on UK rail. This is a success story. Yes bad operators should lose their franchise, but lets not punish the operators who are dong well!
specialist 10y ago
upcoming plan to liberalize rail transport neoliberalize, aka Freedom Markets™
johannes1234321 10y ago
Currently this is mostly the case in Germany. The rail network is accesible for anybody and the subsidary running this has to give all companies the same rates and treatment, whether it is another subsidary of the same corporation or a different private rail company. For cargo this works quite well. There are many small companies doing transports. This goes from small companies which own one engine which you can hire to pull the cars you hire somewhere else over the network to large companies which work all over Europe. There is tough competition between those companies. For regional services this works in a way where local administrations call for bids to run specific lines. This works okay'ish and the government-owned company looses more and more of the services (one could argue whether that's good ...) Some of these biding processes fail miserably, like the current round for the commuter trains (S-Bahn) at Nuremberg which went through different court cases already. For long distance this is complicated as for long distance it is really hard to be profitable unless you are part of a bigger network. The national company operates long-distance without (direct) subventions (well, details of finances are complicated ...) thus there is little requirement to cooperate with private long distance companies. One typical example: Those Locomore tickets are only valid on their trains and there are no combination tickets from regional to locomore trains. The passenger not living close by a station where that private line goes has to get two independent tickets and has the risk that the second ticket is useless when the first train is late and he can't make the connection. Also train operation costs are high (you need an engine, cars and then the fees for the tracks) For a cargo train you can arrange with a customer to make sure you've got a full train etc. with a passenger train you need more than 50%, maybe even more, of the seats to be taken for being profitable this is extremely hard with a single connection ... and for multiple connections investment becomes very big.

carlob 10y ago

See how well that went in the UK… We've had this in Italy for high speed trains for a while, and so far the only private competitor is close to bankruptcy.

kalleboo 10y ago

Are there any good studies on countries where this has already been done? Looking at the situation in Sweden where there has been rail liberalization, it seems like it mostly leads to underinvestment in the infrastructure because you can always just blame the passenger train companies... I haven't heard any happy stories from the UK either. I'm for it in principal (especially harmonization - any train border crossing in Europe can be a nightmare) but the incentives need to be engineered just right

daenney 10y ago
I go between Uppsala and Stockholm regularly (it's roughly 70km, so a 38m ride) with SJ and I have to say though, most of the time I do blame SJ. The amount of times my train gets cancelled because their locomotives crap out is far larger than whenever it's because of infrastructure related reasons. Considering their latest price hike I'm not very happy with them. MTR does provide a nice alternative to SJ though when you want to get to Göteborg, Malmö or Köpenhamn. For a country as big as Sweden though there's a notable lack of high-speed rail to anything north of Stockholm and there doesn't seem to be any interest or incentive to improve that situation.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  There are probably regional differences - most of my experience is in Skåne where ridership has increased a lot in the past 10 years but there has been little infrastructure investment in the chokepoints outside of the big Citytunneln project. The local train company (Skånetrafiken) has tried hard to work around the deficiencies by doing things like keeping spare trains on standby in case of delays but it doesn't help when there is ripped catenary or "signaling errors" due to lack of maintenance. The real problems seem to be on the national lines (SJ2000) where the lack of maintenance compounds with the lack of any redundancy to cause cascading delays
Fnoord 10y ago
Shifting the blame between the various railway companies also happened in The Netherlands. On top of that, swapping train between different corporations doesn't work in a user friendly way (you need to log out and in, or be considered a free rider) because nobody in IT has figured out to fairly calculate and share the profit fairly. Since the government doesn't stimulate or punish this behaviour there's no incentive of corporations to fix this. They've been saying since forever that they'd fix it.
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  In germany, the maintainenance/repair costs for rails and bridges are mostly paid by Deutsche Bahn according to some 50:50 key - but if a complete replacement is due, they get a much higher costpart taken over by the tax-payers. So they drive them into the dust and shrink the railways to death. Goes to show, that company's can be well-fare queens too. And of course, for the radicals that is just a proof that the market is not free enough. Okay, in free enough markets, those guys take the public hostage and demand money for their getaway. Privatizing the DB was a mistake. Public services, with large enough infrastructure decay in private hands. Look at the US. Look at Londons water supply. To be fair, state can screw up too, but not in this way. "Niemand hat die Absicht einen Flughafen zu bauen"
gsnedders 10y ago
As a counterpoint, freight is already deregulated, and that has been massively successful in much of the EU: especially for container traffic, the market is far more competitive with road than it was twenty years ago.
vertex-four 10y ago
I got shown a graph recently, when arguing for renationalisation of passenger train services in Scotland, that passenger use of the rail network started climbing significantly higher when the current franchise system came into play. Though the franchise system isn't "liberalisation" - it's just granting near-monopolies over certain routes in most cases. As a result, we have Virgin/Stagecoach providing the only reasonable routes from Scotland to London. And, of course, the network in England only ever seems to receive investment where it affects Londoners. But we tried to privatise the rail network itself once, and that went very, very badly.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  >use of the rail network started climbing significantly higher when the current franchise system came into play I know more people who have long train commutes these days than I used to. That's not a function of how much better run the network is though, it's a function of rising house prices (which has been going on since the 90s) driving people further and further out. With a nationalized rail system the same thing would have happened.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Or did the privatised rail system allow people to more reasonably travel long distances for work, allowing people to move further out, allowing cities to grow and require more workers and thus raising house prices further out with increased demand? Personally, I'm not really in favour of the franchise system - a concession system a la London Overground would work better in many places (inc Scotland) IMO - but I don't think it's as simple as "the franchises are doing exactly what British Rail would've done".
    - crdoconnor 10y ago
      >Or did the privatised rail system allow people to more reasonably travel long distances for work, allowing people to move further out, allowing cities to grow and require more workers and thus raising house prices further out with increased demand? No. The increase in house prices was both staggering and coincidental with investors buying up properties an leaving them empty. >don't think it's as simple as "the franchises are doing exactly what British Rail would've done British Rail was neglected and lacking investment. This is part of the privatization handbook - intentionally underfund and then use that as a pretext for pushing privatization. I think if it was well funded we'd have a cheaper, better system.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Well, Poland may be a case study, and there the privatization of rail is an utter, ugly mess - and now you never even know who to complain to if someone screws up.

mschuster91 10y ago

Please not. The problem is that railway cars, track fees etc. are the same for all operators (buying/renting railway cars may actually be more expensive for smaller operators due to lack of volume), so the only way to save costs (and thus be able to operate at a lower price than incumbents) is saving on employees (aka wage dumping) or safety/maintenance. Neither is good for society.

smhg 10y ago
I was thinking about this for a second. Specifically about saving on employees. I guess it is safe to assume on-board jobs don't have a bright future. Those are up for automation. So maintenance staff remains? But can't that be a separate entity? Just like with cars? That might solve the safety issue too. One has a bad rep? You go to another. It's just that one public operator doesn't seem to work well either (lots of issues in countries with those too).
- Symbiote 10y ago
  Track and signal maintenance is a separate, public entity in the UK ("Network Rail"), with trains owned by the banks, and leased to companies that run services, like Virgin (yes, that Virgin) or Southern. In the 1990s, the track and signals were maintained by Railtrack, a private company, but that caused several bad accidents. Since Network Rail took over, the British railway network has become one of the safest in the world -- I don't think a passenger on a train has been killed for a decade, and only a very small number (2?) of maintenance staff.
  - smhg 10y ago
    Yes, it sounds hard to create competition for track and signal maintenance. But the parent was talking about the companies that run the trains. I meant the maintenance those trains need (repairs/safety/cleaning/...). On that level competition might make more sense (like with cars). So they wouldn't do that in-house. Maybe it already works like this?
    - 10y ago

leadingthenet 10y ago

As someone living in the UK, I hope that never, ever, happens.

TillE 10y ago
I'd been reading about the mess of privatized rail in the UK for a while, but what really shocked me when I was traveling around Manchester were all the diesel trains. In Germany nearly everything is electric, especially in and around cities.
- gsnedders 10y ago
  The biggest cause, historically, is the fact the railways were privatised when much of the rest of Europe was electrifying in the inter-war period and receiving little state money, and at the same time were struggling to make any money (a large part of that was the fact they had an obligation as a common carrier to accept any and all freight for a fixed price, from when they were the only way to quickly transport goods long-distances over land). By the time they were nationalised in the 1950s the railways were still in heavy decline and more or less up until the early 2000s all the planning was about a managed decline of the railways, hence the lack of investment, justified by the falling passenger and freight numbers year-on-year.
- jimnotgym 10y ago
  As other posters have mentioned it is not that clear. Lots of people are using the problems with one rail franchise ('Southern' which is key when our media is so London centric) to justify their ideological opposition to private ownership. For me rail pre-privatisation was terrible. By the end of WW2 the railways were worn out and the the response was to close half of the network! Outside of London Underground, trains were in massive decline. this has been largely reversed. Virgin trains for example are by far the best on the network due to their significant investment in the best rolling stock and pushing for improved tracks. However there are massive problems in the way the franchises are awarded and where profits and subsidies go, but these are not problems of ownership. The government controls the infrastructure and awards the franchises....and regulates the ticket prices (which are a joke not least in their variability). However, now there is a huge increase in passenger numbers on UK rail. This is a success story. Yes bad operators should lose their franchise, but lets not punish the operators who are dong well!

specialist 10y ago

upcoming plan to liberalize rail transport neoliberalize, aka Freedom Markets™

johannes1234321 10y ago

Currently this is mostly the case in Germany. The rail network is accesible for anybody and the subsidary running this has to give all companies the same rates and treatment, whether it is another subsidary of the same corporation or a different private rail company. For cargo this works quite well. There are many small companies doing transports. This goes from small companies which own one engine which you can hire to pull the cars you hire somewhere else over the network to large companies which work all over Europe. There is tough competition between those companies. For regional services this works in a way where local administrations call for bids to run specific lines. This works okay'ish and the government-owned company looses more and more of the services (one could argue whether that's good ...) Some of these biding processes fail miserably, like the current round for the commuter trains (S-Bahn) at Nuremberg which went through different court cases already. For long distance this is complicated as for long distance it is really hard to be profitable unless you are part of a bigger network. The national company operates long-distance without (direct) subventions (well, details of finances are complicated ...) thus there is little requirement to cooperate with private long distance companies. One typical example: Those Locomore tickets are only valid on their trains and there are no combination tickets from regional to locomore trains. The passenger not living close by a station where that private line goes has to get two independent tickets and has the risk that the second ticket is useless when the first train is late and he can't make the connection. Also train operation costs are high (you need an engine, cars and then the fees for the tracks) For a cargo train you can arrange with a customer to make sure you've got a full train etc. with a passenger train you need more than 50%, maybe even more, of the seats to be taken for being profitable this is extremely hard with a single connection ... and for multiple connections investment becomes very big.