In 1831, after his first journey on the fledgling Liverpool to Manchester railway, celebrated engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel wrote: “The time is not far off when we shall be able to take our coffee and write while 
going noiselessly and smoothly at 45 miles per hour”.
 As many short-haul commuters know to their cost, there are times when Brunel’s prediction can seem optimistic, even today. But over longer distances we can now sip cappuccinos and surf the net while travelling (relatively) noiselessly and smoothly at well over 150mph (240km/h).

The latest link in a European high-speed network that aims to cross the continent from Edinburgh to Naples and from Lisbon to Moscow by 2020 is the Italian line from Bologna to Milan. On 13 December, the first Frecciarossa train completed the journey between the two cities in 65 minutes, shaving 40 minutes off the previous fastest time, and reaching a top speed of 300km/h. This brings the station-to-station time between Italy’s two main business cities, Rome and Milan, down to just three and a half hours.


On the day the service started, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s leading financial newspaper, organised a Rome to Milan race between two of its journalists, one travelling on the new high-speed train and the other by plane. Despite the fact that that the Alitalia plane was half an hour late, it still beat the iron horse: by taxi, plane and taxi the point-to-point time between Via del Corso in Rome and Milan’s Piazza del Duomo was three hours 19 minutes, compared to four hours 20 minutes by taxi, train and taxi. But with a full-price economy ticket and longer taxi transfers, the plane option also cost nearly three times as much: €316, compared to just €111 by train. And now that mobile phone coverage is guaranteed in most of the tunnels along the route, train time can be much more productive than plane time 
for those who need to work on laptops or make business calls.


With the station-to-station time between Milan and Rome set to fall to three hours when the final Bologna-Florence section of the high-speed network down the backbone of Italy is completed at the end of 2009, Trenitalia CEO Mauro Moretti claims that “within two years”, 60% of the 3.7 million passengers who currently choose to fly the lucrative route each year will switch to train travel. The troubles of national carrier Alitalia have done nothing to harm Trenitalia’s case; extra trains had to be laid on back in September when strike action led to a slew of flight cancellations. 


Even the notoriously train-resistant US is embracing the high-speed gospel: on the same day that Barack Obama was elected president, Californians voted in favour of a $10bn (€7.5bn) bond to finance the construction of a fast rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even Russia is getting in on the act, with a RUB69bn (€1.6bn) plan to connect 18 cities by 2020 and a promise to open its first high-speed, Moscow-St Petersburg route later this year using Siemens-built Sapsan trains. But outside of high-speed rail pioneer Japan, western Europe remains the driving force, accounting for 70% of the world’s high-speed network. TGV trains have been zooming between French cities since 1981, while German and Spanish high-speed networks date back to the early 1990s. Only Britain lags behind, with the Folkestone to London section of the Eurostar service likely to remain the only proper high-speed line for the forseeable future.


Spain is a good test for claims that the tracks will soon beat the skies on many mid-length domestic routes. The inauguration of the Madrid-Barcelona AVE high-speed rail link in February 2008 at last gave passengers that travel on the world’s busiest air route (with almost 1,000 flights per week) a valid alternative, cutting the rail journey time between the two cities from three hours 55 minutes to just two hours 38 minutes. This is well under what is generally considered to be the ‘tipping-point’ rail journey time of three hours. A 2006 study by analysts Steer Davies Gleave for the European Commission calculated that high-speed routes that came in at around the two-and-a-half hour mark accounted for 44% to 85% of market share.


According to figures released by Spanish airport authority AENA in December, air passengers on the Madrid-Barcelona route have dropped by 23% since the high-speed rail service was launched. No doubt some defectors were also swayed by the kind of punctuality guarantees that few airlines would dare offer: if the AVE train gets into the station more than five minutes late, passengers are entitled to a full refund.


If experiences of other European high-speed city-to-city routes are anything to go by, the Madrid-Barcelona rail link looks set to increase its market share further. Some high-speed rail routes, such as Frankfurt-Cologne or Paris-Lyon, now account for well over 90% of all passenger traffic between those cities (including road travel). The effect on air traffic has been dramatic: EasyJet gave up its Paris-Marseille route in 2006 when the rail share rose to 69%, and there is now just one daily scheduled flight left between Paris and Brussels, which Thalys trains connect in one hour 25 minutes. Even Eurostar, which is not known for its cut-price tickets, now controls two-thirds of the market on the London-Paris and London-Brussels routes.


The credit crunch and the new green imperative are also helping to swing it for rail: corporate business travel managers under pressure to cut expenses and offset CO2 emissions are increasingly shifting employees onto trains, which cost less and (according to a recent report commissioned by the Greater London Authority) have between a third and a half of air travel’s CO2 impact per passenger.


Everyone is now looking to 1 January 2010, the date set by the EU for the liberalisation of train services across the continent. Several private consortia are already gearing up for the challenge, including Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori (NTV), an Italian group that includes Fiat chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo and Diego della Valle, head of luxury goods manufacturer Tod’s, among its shareholders, together with banking group Intesa Sanpaolo and French national train company SNCF. NTV has already commissioned 25 ultra-high-speed (300km/h-plus) trains from Alstom, which will be done out in flame-red Ferrari colours, and will work three high-traffic, business-oriented routes on the Italian network: Turin-Milan-Rome-Naples, Rome-Venice and Rome-Bari. Services are due to launch in the summer of 2011, and the aim, says Montezemolo, is to “grab a 20% market share by the end of 2013”.

Trains of Thought

Europe’s rails are now open to competition, but it’s collaboration that will get the continent moving, reports Sarah Wachter

At the moment just 7% of Europeans travelling to another country within Europe choose rail. This could be set to change markedly, as the EU’s international rail passenger market opens to competition across the continent on 1 January 2010. Nevertheless the so-called ‘Big Bang’ is more likely to a be drawn-out affair, 
unfolding over decades, than a riot of mergers and acquisitions or a starburst of high-speed, cross-border travel deals. This is because of the closer collaboration required among national operators, the massive task of harmonising widely varying technical and safety standards and the heavy costs of ordering new cars and laying track. Moreover, until there is a common standard for everything from training for conductors to signaling systems – or “interoperability” – operators will not be able to make huge investments in cars that could travel anywhere from Dunkerque to Dubrovnik. And, of course, rail companies, often founts of national pride and huge employers, hardly lend themselves to rapid restructurings and acquisition. 


“If rail companies think about creating more seamless, consumer-oriented services, then rail has a real future,” says Paul Seabright, an economics professor at the University of Toulouse. “That means fixing it so that you can go to a website and book the alarm clock, a taxi to your door, luggage already checked, and then be whisked to your compartment.”


However, some national rail outfits are more up-for-it than others. The broad outline of a network of hubs is emerging, linking Paris, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Milan, and Warsaw. Guido Friebel, an economics professor at Frankfurt University, says most new services and players are initially likely to involve a neighbouring country. But experts are reluctant to say whether the future will take shape more via strategic alliances — such as the cooperation between France’s SNCF and Deutsche Bahn (DB) to jointly provide a trilingual service for trains between Frankfurt and Paris and Paris and Stuttgart — or through outright stake-taking and acquisitions. 


Whether rail titans, such as Deutsche Bahn and SNCF bulk up and outmanoeuvre their counterparts in smaller countries, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, will likely be kept in check by employment concerns, Friebel says. He cites Belgium, where the national rail company has only a couple of profitable lines and employs upwards of 40,000. “In the short run, there will be more cooperation in the passenger market than real competition,” Friebel predicts, adding that this may change if a new operator provides employment guarantees. 


The battleground is likely to hot up for travellers on routes between European cities 300km to 800km apart, journeys which take a maximum of four and a half hours. The main competitors will be airlines, which have suffered steep losses on some short-haul routes, such as Paris–Lyon, to high-speed train service, and the EU rail giants such as DB and SNCF. Last autumn, Air France-KLM announced a joint venture with French transport and utilities firm Veolia, accelerating the prospect of a partnership to create a new high-speed rail player in Europe. Another airline that might follow is Lufthansa, while UK carrier Virgin already runs a large train franchise in the UK. Analysts say airlines will look to complement their transatlantic services by selling high-speed rail services to other hubs, such as Brussels, Geneva and Lyon. 


Experts agree that DB is the fittest operator in Europe, after years of building up its European expertise through snapping up freight and logistics companies and regional rail transport companies, including English Welsh & Scottish Railway, Spanish freight carrier Transfesa. When market conditions improve, DB also plans to privatise 24.9% of a unit made up of urban, regional and long-distance, high-speed rail transport, and to plough one-third of the capital raised into new investments, including acquisitions. DB and the railway company of Austria now run trains in each other’s backyard, and DB plans to increase traffic to Basel, Switzerland once the route has been upgraded.


Across the border, SNCF has been bulking up via series of freight acquisitions. Last autumn, SNCF also bought 20% of Italian high-speed rail company NTV.


Until the technical issues are resolved, probably the biggest hurdle to creating a seamless European network is the fact that some rail companies are rejecting access to trains on the pretext of technical issues or ‘non-tariff’ barriers. Two cases lodged at the European Commission in the freight market are under review, one involving a rejection by a country due to alleged lack of certification of a locomotive, and one alleging a professional authority was not aboard to certify equipment. 


Whether the international passenger rail market evolves by dint of cooperation, regulation, acquisition or litigation, Seabright thinks the credit crunch may accelerate the process: “You can safely predict that the debt of national governments will be many times larger than at the moment, posing a serious risk of a national savings crisis. It will be a huge exercise, and politically difficult to bring back some order to government balance sheets… In the next three to four years, they will be looking to sell off assets, like railways.”