own individual safety standards and tech- nical systems in their rail networks. Cross- border services are hampered by the need to deal with multiple safety authorities in each of the nations they travel through, as well as technical hurdles such as different signaling systems.
This is why the EU wants the European
Railway Agency (ERA) to become the sole issuer of safety certificates and vehicle authorisations across all member states, to “remove the remaining administrative and technical barriers” to its dream of a single European rail area.
One of the imminent plans – known in EU circles as the ‘market pillar’ – is to open up domestic railways to new competitors and train services from December 2020.
From this date, newcomers will be able to launch competing services on existing rail routes. They will also be given the opportunity to bid on public service rail contracts from 2023 – competitive tender- ing for these public contracts will then “become the norm”, says the EU. It is this opening up of rail markets in the EU from 2020 that companies such as Trans Metropolitan want to exploit – even if they are not yet willing to tell us about the routes they plan to serve. “We are looking at taking advantage of
European market deregulation,” says Sven Gossel. “Rail is really where the airline industry was 20 years ago back in 1995.” But he admits that starting a new rail company is a far from an easy proposition,
adding: “As a newcomer, you are just not taken seriously.”
UK franchises
for the East Midlands rail franchise after further delaying the original March 2018 start date for the next contract. Three bidders for the franchise had originally been shortlisted earlier this year: Arriva Rail, First Trenitalia and Stagecoach. But now other
companies can join the competition for the new franchise as transport secretary Chris Grayling has decided to extend the current East Midlands Trains franchise, which is
operated by Stagecoach Group, until August 2019. The government is in
the process of carrying out a public consultation to find out what East Midlands Trains’
passengers want as part of the next franchise. East Midlands Trains operates services from London St Pancras to Sheffield and between Liverpool and Norwich. It runs 470 services per week and carries 26 million passengers per year. As part of the revised franchise timetable, the
government will issue tender invitations to short- listed bidders in April 2018 and plans to award the new contract in spring 2019. In August, the Department for Transport awarded the West Midlands franchise to a new consortium, West Midlands Trains – a Dutch-Japanese JV. The next rail franchise contracts to be awarded will be Southeastern in August 2018, followed by West Coast in November 2018.
One of the biggest barriers to new entrants is the fact that many state-owned rail com- panies are currently so dominant in their individual domestic markets – often with market shares of more than 90 per cent. “It’s going to be hard to compete with the market power of the big guys. They are so big – the likes of SNCF, Deutsche Bahn and Trenitalia,” says Gossel. “That may change or may not change. “In most of the countries, the network is still owned by the government and that creates a clear conflict of interest. The EU needs to do a lot of homework on this.” The potential opening up of European rail to increased competition could eventu- ally make a big difference to the industry, according to Antoine de Kerviler, director of rail and ground travel at Amadeus. “There are very few routes where you
have two railways operating on the same route,” says de Kerviler. “There is one route in the Czech Republic and a couple of routes in Sweden, but that’s about it, where you have different providers on the same city pair. “My understanding is that railways will be able to operate in any EU country but we haven’t heard any clear announcement about this yet,” he adds. “Deutsche Bahn carried out an experi- ment of running trains in the Channel Tunnel to London a few years ago. If they put on a train from London to Frankfurt that’s not going to change things, but if they put on a train between Paris and London then that would change the picture.” De Kerviler thinks the EU’s plans to create a single European rail market could encourage competition with other modes of transport, particularly low-cost airlines.
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