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Massive Changes Coming To Europe's Confusing Train System

January 15, 2010 at 3:15 PM | by | Comment (1)

The demise of RailTeam—which was supposed to integrate booking across Europe's many different rail lines—may have put trains behind in Europe's trains vs. airlines deathmatch. But now European governments are trying to bolster trains by going in a different direction. Instead of a pan-European plan to integrate rail lines under a single system, they've embraced deregulation.

RailTeam was originally conceived as a way of dealing with a very specific problem: since most countries are dominated internally by state-owned rail companies, getting across borders forces customers to deal with multiple companies. Now RailTeam's approach—to integrate across those different companies—failed. The push for deregulation deals with the same problem by letting individual rail companies expand their coverage more easily. In a few years, you might only need to book with a single company to get from Spain to Germany across France, eliminating the entire need to juggle different systems.

A few more technical details, plus some hopeful soundbites, after the jump.

'This means a lot for our industry,' says Frederic Langlois, president and CEO of Rail Europe (raileurope.com), which sells European train tickets and rail passes. 'The landscape is going to evolve big-time. There will be more trains to sell and more availability'... A private company plans to enter the market with high-speed trains in Italy by 2011, he says. Italy is an increasingly popular destination for Rail Europe customers, he says. And 'no one has made an announcement, but I think a lot of companies are crunching the numbers to compete with Eurostar,' he says.

You obviously won't see any changes over the next few months of course. But a little after that, the industry will begin to change with more (and hopefully more modern) rail companies. We can't wait...especially when it means all kinda of new train livery to spot on the rails.

[Photo: Thryduulf / Wiki Commons]

Related Stories:
· Rail riders will soon have more options in Europe [USA Today]
· Train Travel [Jaunted]
· Europe Travel [Jaunted]

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It's all change

I think that the Europeans are more likely to keep hold of state owned rail networks, rather than privatise further and deregulate. just look at the mess that caused in England. With all the austerity cuts and strike going through this year it's going to a nightmare by air and rail, we've decided to get a hire car this year instead of training through Spain. The last Metro strike had Madrid in Gridlock for 3 days, definitely want to avoid delays like this.
rickyb on August 13, 2010 at 11:39 AM #Permalink

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