A story entitled “I love to travel Europe by train. But here’s what a joined-up 21st-century network needs” by María Ramírez was published by The Guardian yesterday.
‘I don’t disagree with the piece’ was the gist of my answer when asked about it on social media, but the piece does not really answer the point posed in the title*.
So let’s have a go at actually answering what a joined up railway network in Europe would need, and use the parts of the article to do so.
The subheading of the piece “Passenger numbers are rising, but competing with budget airlines will take work on ticket prices, infrastructure and integration” gives a clue as to where the solution lies, but that too is going to need some unpacking.
The need for more rail trips and by extension fewer short haul flights and fewer car journeys is obvious, but how to do it rather less so.
Is the picture when it comes to railway trips a glass half full or half empty? “In 2023, the last year with full data available, European trains were popular again, recovering from the pandemic’s effect, with a record 429bn passenger-kilometres (the number of rail passengers multiplied by the kilometres travelled)” Ramírez writes. But that represents only about 7% of passenger-km in the entire EU. Rail might be green, but is it relevant? Rail is doing well on its own terms, but not very well comparatively.
“Rail passenger numbers are expected to reach record highs in 2025 as routes keep expanding. The new year brings fresh connections between Paris and Berlin, Barcelona and Toulouse, Amsterdam and London and Budapest and Kyiv” Ramírez continues. But this is off. Paris-Berlin is one daily ICE each way a day, taking 8 hours. Barcelona-Toulouse will likewise be one train a day, if it launches later in 2025. Budapest-Kyiv is likewise once a day. Amsterdam-London with a handful of Eurostar services a day remains complex due to low terminal capacity in Amsterdam, and overall through trains through the Channel Tunnel transport fewer passengers today than they did in 2019.
The biggest cross border change of all is missing from this list: since mid-December there are two regular trains an hour, all day, between Belgium and Netherlands**. Up from one per hour. That’s 16 extra trains a day between Bruxelles and Rotterdam – a bigger increase than all the other routes stated. Compare that with Frankfurt (Main) – Paris that, despite a trip time of under 4 hours, has only 67**** direct trains a day. The new Barcelona – Toulouse will likewise increase the number of trains on the high speed line between Figures and Perpignan to just 6 a day each way.
So we need to think beyond the shiny once a day services, and look at capacity on international routes as well.
What would rail reaching its potential look like on a route, rather than just the existence of the route.
And what would we need to get there?
More trains for a start.
For example neither SNCF nor Renfe has any more high speed TGV or AVE trains to run on France-Spain high speed services***, and there is no other rival (Flixtrain? Trenitalia?) that has any suitable trains at all. Germany-France ought to be a little easier in coming years, as some more cross border ICEs will be freed up from national services.
You cannot run more trains as you have no more trains to run.
So the crux is this: someone has to help finance the procurement of more trains for international operation. National governments are understandably reluctant to do this for international routes, so could the EU – via the European Investment Bank – better provide finance? Cross border problems need cross border solutions after all. Or could some sort of consortium or train manufacturer driven initiative help here?
Then to the next issue: “travelling by train throughout mainland Europe […] is a much more practical option than most people imagine. But finding out about it can be frustratingly difficult. Exceptions such as ÖBB Scotty, the Austrian railways app, show what is possible, but there’s still much work to be done.”
The passive tense is doing a lot of work there! Work to be done by whom?
The problem is that railways are lousy at data sharing – we do not even have a proper and complete railway timetable for the entire EU. Behind tools like ÖBB Scotty and DB Navigator is the UIC Merits database, and that is missing data for whole countries (like Latvia). And then if you even can find a connection you cannot book a ticket for it, because data sharing on ticketing is even worse than timetables. The problem is that railways do not actually really want more passengers. However – unlike the not enough trains problem above – the EU is set to intervene on data sharing on ticketing in 2025.
An article like this from Ramírez in The Guardian would have been a good opportunity to underline that legislation would help here, but that opportunity was missed. Leaving railways to fix this themselves is not going to work – that much is clear.
“Competition has also driven down prices on some routes, particularly in Spain, Sweden, Austria and France.” France is a bit of a stretch. But the rest yes. And I would add Italy and Czechia. But if you want to make this happen you need to create the conditions for it – theoretically competition could fix a bunch of international routes, but only if rivals have trains to run, and can run them economically. And as Belgium-Netherlands shows, you can also do it via cooperations between state railways, or through public service obligation (PSO) contracts. But overall, yes, competition can in some places be part of the solution.
“Cross-border rail connections are still slower than they should be and collaboration between countries is fraught with disputes: for instance, the Spanish and French governments are blaming each other for delays on the Madrid-Paris lines.” Oh hell, this one looks like it has been over-edited. Yes, Renfe’s series 106 AVE trains have not been approved in France, but then again those same trains cannot run in Spain either just now due to a software fault, and reviews of these trains are terrible. But there are a bunch of places where some joined up political thinking would not go amiss, but again we are back to the domination of the national ego. At the very least the European Commission should compile an annual cross border rail index to give us a fair picture of where all of this is getting better and getting worse.
“The European commission is investing billions of euros in expanding high-speed rail connections, aiming to double their use by the end of this decade.” Yes, but most of that is going into lines – like the Figueres-Perpignan line much discussed here. But without matching this with attention to services running on those lines you make little progress.
“A new, better-integrated European rail traffic system is planned to phase out the current patchwork of national ones.” That’s ERTMS. But its implementation is slow, expensive and fraught with problems. We can’t wait for this to save us. And then the next sentence: “However, connections to local trains have often been neglected in favour of high-speed rail. That needs to be improved.” That has nothing to do with ERTMS, and a lot to do with railway companies and national and local governments – especially in France and in Spain – being totally incapable of coordinating timetables. This one is political, not technical.
And next on the wish list: “If trains are to compete with low-cost, often subsidised, flights, affordability also has to be addressed.” Passive tense again. By whom? How? Capacity maximisation, rather than profit maximisation by monopoly incumbent operators, has to be part of it (as I explain here with the case of Bruxelles-Paris) – but there is not one way to solve this, but we do have the worst of state operators and the worst of a market in many places.
“Governments must also continue to invest in basic infrastructure, with support from EU funds, to prevent systems from becoming obsolete. Track maintenance may not have the same glamour for politicians as inaugurating high-speed trains, but it’s the backbone of a reliable service” Yes, that’s correct, as is the diagnosis.
So, to draw all of this together, what do we need?
First, timetable and ticket data – this is the easiest one. You do not need to build anything new, at least not anything physical. The 2025 Regulation from the Commission on this needs to be clear, tough and passenger friendly – plan and book a ticket from A to B by train anywhere in Europe.
Second, a stock take of what we have. In my work on railway policy in the EU I am told over and over by Commission officials they are unaware of the situation on the ground, and where it is getting better or worse. An annual railway index EU-wide would help us establish that, help us all learn to improve.
Third, rolling stock. We do not literally have enough trains to up the services cross border at the places we need rail to increase its market share. Some sort of EU rolling stock plan, with a greater role for the EIB to finance it, makes sense here (although I readily admit I need to personally think more deeply how to do it).
Fourth, timetable coordination. All across Europe – in border regions in particular, but not only, poorly planned timetables limit rail’s potential. Powers for the EU Agency for Railways to coordinate paths at borders could possibly help here.
Fifth, coherent EU wide oversight of infrastructure investments – not least as a lot of infrastructure improvements can be financed through TEN-T. Political pressure from the EU level to force member states that are sluggish building or renovating their TEN-T corridors would be a start.
And if you want more ideas, try this post.
* – the title was likely not written by Ramírez herself but by a busy sub-editor, but this is not my central point here!
** – previously there was an hourly InterCity Bruxelles-Antwerpen-Rotterdam-Amsterdam, now there is an hourly EuroCity Direct Bruxelles-Antwerpen-Rotterdam-Amsterdam and an hourly EuroCity Bruxelles-Antwerpen-Rotterdam. There are also some compulsory reservation Eurostar trains on the route as well.
*** – SNCF sent 6 of its cross border TGVs to Spain to run them as OUIGO there, and stripped French signalling from them, and only has 6 left – so it cannot run more than 3x a day Paris-Barcelona. Renfe ordered series 106 trains to run cross border to France – but these trains have been plagued by problems, so older series 100 are used.
**** – thanks to a rather pedantic follower who pointed out that for most of the year there are 7 Frankfurt-Paris trains a day, just 6 for part of the year and some days, and if I count night trains there can be as many as 8. Text corrected accordingly.
