Word: freights
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...what platform a train will arrive on, one for what time it's scheduled to arrive, and one labeled ritardo: how late the train will be. That's indicative of the biggest complaint: European railroads are run haphazardly by bloated monopolies immune to the concept of service. Rail freight still only moves around Europe today at an average of 18 km/h; even George Stephenson managed to go faster on some stretches of his maiden run 178 years ago. And passengers sometimes don't do much better. Linda Bienge, a 39-year-old clerk in Berlin's criminal court, was traveling...
...little surprise that rail has lost out badly as a means of transportation. In the past three decades, travel by private car grew three times as fast as passenger transport by rail - leaving rail's share of journeys at just 6%. The €10 billion rail-freight business has fared even worse: its share of the European Union market has collapsed from 21% in 1970 to just 8% today. (By comparison, about 40% of freight goes by rail in the U.S.) Things have got so bad that Britain's Royal Mail last month ended 173 years of tradition by announcing...
...rail's decline may not be terminal. For one thing, competition is finally being injected into the railroad system. Throughout the 1990s, the European Commission forced state railroads to split track management from management of passenger and freight services in an effort to break their stranglehold and pave the way for private rail operators. The liberalization program culminated earlier this year in a cautious first opening of the freight market to international competition. As of March 15, it became possible for private railroad operators to gain access to 50,000 km of track throughout the E.U. Several companies have already...
...billion in investment over the next decade - to get back on track. Advocates of liberalization on the Continent say they'll be careful not to repeat Britain's mistakes. They look instead at Sweden. It became the first European nation to split its track operations from passenger and freight services in the late 1980s, and has seen an upturn in rail traffic and a growing number of private rail operators. They include IKEA, the big furniture company, which has set up its own rail operations between Sweden and its biggest market, Germany. But elsewhere, the official reaction to liberalization...
Matthais Raith is showing Europe that railroads can be a growth industry. The 53-year-old native of Kaiserslautern runs a private German railroad company called Rail4Chem, which specializes in transporting hazardous chemicals, including sulfuric acid and paraffin. At a time when most state-owned rail-freight companies are losing money and customers, Raith's sales have almost tripled in the past two years, to €24 million. Rail4Chem was founded by the chemical giant BASF in 1999 after it bought a polyurethane and fertilizer plant in eastern Germany, only to find that state-owned Deutsche Bahn (DB) wasn...