Word: railing
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Still, no one is predicting railroads will put airlines out of business. Railteam, a ticketing consortium of seven leading high-speed rail operators, aims to boost the number of people who now use fast trains for international European travel each year from 15 million to 25 million by 2011. That compares with some 160 million who travel across borders by air in Europe every year, a number that is expected to double by 2020. The railroads' relatively modest growth expectations are grounded in some harsh economic realities: new high-speed rail lines take years to plan and build as well...
...effort to gain operating efficiencies and to outmaneuver rivals, some of Europe's main rail operators are already forming partnerships. SNCF, for example, runs a high-speed Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam-Cologne service called Thalys along with Belgian rail operator Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Belge (SNCB) and Germany's Deutsche Bahn (DB). DB also uses the French company's track to operate its high-speed Intercity-Express (ICE) trains between eastern France and Paris. But, despite their cooperation on some routes, DB and SNCF are locking horns over Eurostar. The French have a majority stake...
...further complicate matters, new companies are looking to muscle their way onto the tracks. Italian start-up Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori (NTV) is set to launch Europe's first privately operated high-speed service in Italy in 2011, in competition with Italy's former rail monopoly Trenitalia. Headed by Fiat and Ferrari CEO Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, NTV plans to establish a broad network of high-speed Italian services that dovetail with French routes run by SNCF, which owns...
...years. That may not sound like much, but the smaller players are making money while the state-owned giant is not. "What's significant in this isn't the element of competition alone, but the more efficient business models new players brought to old markets," says Alain Bonnafous, a rail expert at Lyon's Laboratory of Transport Economics. "Better organization and increasing return on investment makes all the difference...
...winners are bound to be passengers. Further deregulation is in store: in 2012, national markets, not just international routes, are slated to be opened to more competition. "Travel as we've known it recently is being turned on its head, with larger numbers of people using high-speed rail to avoid the hassles, delays and stress of taking an airplane," says Mark Smith, a U.K.-based industry expert and founder of rail-travel website seat61.com. "On routes of three hours or less, you get to your destination faster and more comfortably than by air. And which is more glamorous these...