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The EU wants to open up the continent’s rail industry, but what obstacles could block the track to a single rail market?


By ROB GILL 


  at an industry conference, you usually expect to hear a lot about all the


services they can offer. But this was not the case when Sven Gossel, CEO of Germany-based Trans Metropolitan, gave a presentation at the Amadeus Rail Innovation Forum in Prague. Gossel simply would not be drawn on what type of services his new rail company would be operating and on which routes its trains would be running – although the few hints he did give suggested that


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Germany would be heavily involved in Trans Metropolitan’s plans. So far, all we really know about Trans


Metropolitan is that Gossel set up the company in 2016 with “friends from the airline and car industry” and it plans to run rail services that will “connect major European cities”.


What Gossel did talk about at the confer- ence was the European Union’s plans to deregulate the rail industry, which is of- ficially known as the 4th Railway Package and is due to start opening up rail to more competition across the EU from 2020. It aims to remove bottlenecks, build missing cross-border connections and promote


integration and interoperability between different modes of transport.


 It may not have a catchy title, but the 4th Railway Package has the lofty ambition of creating a “single European rail area” by “encouraging competition and innovation in domestic passenger markets”. The general idea is to replicate – at least as far as possible – the single European aviation market across the continent’s rail network, which, the EU hopes, will lead to “wider choice, cheaper fares and improved quality for passengers”. The EU makes the point that countries currently use their


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