Word: transporter
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...publicity stunts go, this one could have been better timed. Throughout May and June, as waves of strikes disrupted public transport in France and forced the cancelation of hundreds of trains, the French national railroad company SNCF lugged 28 engines and carriages onto the Champs Elysées for an exhibition that promised to "put the whole of Paris under the spell of rail." The exhibits ranged from a replica of an 1829 steam locomotive to the latest version of the high-speed tgv. There were even models of the very commuter trains hardest hit by the strike...
...Every regular rail traveler has some version of that story, so it's 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...
...railroads were first built in the 19th century," says David Briginshaw, editor of the U.K.-based International Railway Journal. Some say even that's not enough: last week, the European Commission released a report suggesting that a further €235 billion should be spent on rail and other transport links throughout Europe. Can either approach work? The French experience with high-speed trains suggests that they can win back passengers. Last year, shortly after SNCF opened its €4 billion high-speed route between Paris and Marseilles, cutting travel time from 4 hr. 20 min. to just 3 hr., traffic...
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...
...last attempt at a stock market flotation after a slide in share prices, British telephone-directories group Yell announced plans for a $3.3 billion public offering, the largest in London in two years. Insurance For Cheats A Finnish group is offering to pay the fines of Helsinki public-transport users caught riding without a ticket. For €15 a month, pummit.org will pick up a one-off €50 fine for jumping the turnstile...