Boosting passenger train transport is key for reducing greenhouse gas emissions of transport and for accelerating Europe’s energy transition. Are EU railways on track? Establishing a fair picture of the state of Europe’s passenger railways is a hard task. It is essentially a question of whether you see the train as half full or half empty. Jon Worth reports.
At one level, the railway industry can point to a strong rebound of passenger numbers post-COVID pandemic, with 2023 passenger-kilometres in Europe surpassing those of the previous highest in 2019 for the first time. But with rail’s modal share hovering around 8% in most European countries, and it hitting just 20% in leader Switzerland, there is obvious potential to do a lot better.
The impetus of changed work patterns post-pandemic (and an accompanied decline in business travel) has been more than outweighed by greater passenger numbers for leisure journeys. 2023 was a record year for the sale of Europe-wide Interrail passes – a leisure product. Environmental sustainability concerns among consumers, and the variety of geopolitical crises on Europe’s borders, have inevitably pushed this partial change of behaviour.
No-one doubts that railways are a green transport mode – rail contributes only 0.4% of EU transport emissions, with 57% of Europe’s railways electrified, including all the major corridors. The challenge for Europe’s railways is rather: can they achieve greater modal share, and hence greater relevance for Europe’s climate transition?
An additional challenge Europe-wide is that while national railway systems in Europe work comparatively well, once you try to cross a border by train, everything gets more complicated. Rail’s cross-border market share lags behind its share nationally, and a slew of financial, operational and technical problems abound.
When I have presented the concrete examples of missing services or complicated booking systems from my #CrossBorderRail project to Commission officials, the reaction has generally been ‘oh, we did not know it was so bad!’ EU action has focused largely on the big questions–investment in infrastructure, and to some extent, liberalisation of rail services. But this has led to some poor outcomes, like the partly EU-funded Perpignan–Figueres cross-border high-speed line with just five passenger trains a day each way on it.
The biggest rail firms in Europe–state owned and predominantly national thinking–are not too dissatisfied with this state of affairs. Why, they ask, would anything need to be done by the EU to boost cross-border passenger rail, as international passenger trains are already full?
For years, campaigners have been dissatisfied with this state of affairs, and demanded that at least it should be easier to book train tickets EU-wide, with the argument that easier booking would lead to more demand, more demand to more services, and hence a virtuous cycle. How can it be, the argument goes, that it is still impossible to book trains from Hamburg to Rome, or Nantes to Wrocław, on one single website (or more than one) – as after all, this works for planes? And even where it does work to purchase in one transaction, passengers are often left with incomplete passenger rights if their trip uses multiple operators.
Now, finally, the Commission seems ready to listen. Ursula von der Leyen, in her Political Guidelines for her second term, understood the problem. ‘Cross-border train travel is still too difficult for many citizens,’ she wrote. ‘People should be able to use open booking systems to purchase trans-European journeys with several providers, without losing their right to reimbursement or compensatory travel.’
This was followed up by Commissioner for Transport Apostolos Tzitzikostas, who went a step further in announcing that a Regulation on this matter will be proposed in 2025. Despite coming from a Member State with a struggling national railway, Tzitzikostas has so far demonstrated a greater grip of the policy and more commitment to railway issues than his predecessor Adina Vălean.
The devil is going to be in the detail of what the Commission will propose. What might seem obvious from the customer point of view is nowhere near as important or straightforward for railway companies. There are also some issues inherent in the railway market that make the conundrum complex.
Were I to book a plane ticket from Berlin to Barcelona, I would have a choice of at least three airlines that each cover the whole route. By train, I have two companies for the part of my trip in Germany (Deutsche Bahn or Flix), one in France (SNCF) and two into Spain (SNCF or Renfe); and no single firm can cover my entire trip. Were my Deutsche Bahn train to be delayed, meaning I miss the Renfe train from Lyon to Barcelona, who is to foot the cost of my night in a hotel or pay me compensation?
The line from the state-owned railway companies – represented in Brussels by Community of European Railways – has essentially been ‘leave it to us, we will solve this problem ourselves’; however, it is obvious that this is an inadequate answer, with SNCF this year having reduced rather than increased its international ticket offer, and Deutsche Bahn refusing to sell tickets for night train startup European Sleeper. Tzitzikostas is right – only a Regulation is going to fix this problem.
Other common complaints are that train travel Europe-wide is both too costly and too slow, but both of those problems are much harder to solve than the ticketing conundrum, although Tzitzikostas at least has some kind words about partially trying to address both of them.
Addressing the cost and speed issues ultimately brings us first and foremost to infrastructure – and ensuring there is both adequate capacity to run more (and lower cost) trains, and lines to run trains at speeds that are competitive.
With the Trans European Transport Network (TEN-T) core network due to be complete by 2030, the Commission wants to be tougher on Member States that have not drawn on EU funds to complete investments in cross-border rail infrastructure. Holding Member States to account on this would be a welcome departure from the hands-off approach of the past decade. Tzitzikostas also wants to supplement TEN-T with a plan for a Europe-wide high-speed railway network, although how the two fit together is not altogether clear yet.
The Commissioner has also stated he wants to help the revival of night trains in Europe, but here the problem is a different one – the absence of the trains themselves, in that only a handful of railways have bought any new night trains in the past two decades. If the Commissioner is determined to solve that one, he is going to have to find money for fleet procurement and persuade railway companies there is a market for slower overnight services rather than more lucrative daytime high-speed trains.
Now well into 2025, thinking about the railway trips we might each take through the Austrian mountains or along the shores of the Mediterranean, we can do so with a little hope that this year, the Commission is going to make a departure from the passenger rail policy of the past, and start to make the continent’s railways a little more customer friendly.
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union.