/ / / /

Ambitious Pan-Europe Railway Integration Fails Because Of Cost Issues, Stupidity

December 3, 2009 at 4:34 PM | by | Comments (0)

Remember how two years ago—way back in July 2007—we promised you that European company RailTeam would facilitate booking trains across the continent's high-speed rail system? Eventually you would have been able to purchase "seamless" "RailTeam journeys," functionally replacing Europe's current mess of tracks with a single glorious network. In retrospect it looks like we may have called that putt a little too early. As of last week they are out of business:

European high-speed operator group RailTeam let slip the axing of the project at an event in Brussels last week after spending two years evaluating the system... Unfortunately it now looks like the project will be consigned to the short to medium term dustbin of great ideas after rising costs and complications with creating the system were cited as reasons for the axe to fall.

In fairness to us, we actually expressed some early skepticism about the project's cost effectiveness. According to this announcement from late last week, you'd think that cost effectiveness plus scalability was exactly what did them in. But now it looks like the project may have failed because of that oldest and most reliable of all business factors: sheer mindblowing human incompetence.

If this report from Tuesday is accurate, it seems like the RailTeam never consulted a single travel technology firm. Not once in two years.

Just so everyone's on the same page: their project involved creating a coordinated travel system, integrating schedules and infrastructure from across an entire continent into a single high-tech system, and they never consulted anyone about travel technology. We're genuinely interested what they were telling themselves: did they think they had already hired all the industry's best people or were they really dumb enough to believe you can just learn the tricks of a trade from the ground up?

Either way, they were wrong and now it'll be years before someone tries again. Tools.

[Photo: Sebastian Terfloth / Wiki Commons]

Related Stories:
· Pan-European train booking system axed, backers say too expensive and complicated [TNooz]
· Trains [Jaunted]
· Europe Travel [Jaunted]

Comments (0)

Post a Comment

Return to » Ambitious Pan-Europe Railway Integration Fails Because Of Cost Issues, Stupidity

Join the conversation!

Not a member? .
Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy (Revised 08/01/2011). © Condé Nast Digital. All rights reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast Digital.
Ad Choices