If there would be one thing i want to see coming to Europe, is a unified system of buying a ticket that gets you from A to B without having to buy multiple different tickets from competing companies in different languages. Like when you buy a plane ticket, but then for rails. Like i want to travel from Amersfoort Schothorst to Alcoy Spain, i don't want to have to look up 7 different websites, buy 7 different tickets, reserve seats in 4 different languages. If i were to fly there, i'd fly directly from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to Alicante Spain and take the train from there. If trains are to compete with planes, it needs to get simpler.
Interrail/Eurail is "almost" that solution, I guess. It makes sense for longer term travelling of at least 3 or 4 days crossing different countries. With one Eurail pass, I can take any train run by the national operator. But some operators make it complicated like SNCF, Renfe and Trenitalia, who make reservations mandatory and expensive. You can't even buy them online you need to queue up at the station to buy them at the counters. At least you can buy reservations in other countries you're travelling in.
International Rail services in Europe still got a long way to go, and its an issue of things like scheduling, connections etc. for waiting trains and different companies. Should be sorted with rideshare agreements, and better connection plans with trains going from one place to another. With High Speed most of the focus so far have been on national rail services, and not international services in countries like Spain(probably the country with the best highspeed rail services in all of Europe). I live in Madrid, but if I want to go to France, its a nightmare with connections and trains and not really something that makes sense like you said with different web sites, and using pages like Trainline etc. that got most of the companies also doesnt offer good booking, and if there is delays etc. So for me train in Europe so far is mostly just domnestic train services, with of course a few exceptions. There are some plans for some interesting projects like the Rail Baltica from Helsinki*(Tallinn) down thru the Baltic States, then into Poland, and then Germany and all the way to the Netherlands with high speed, and Spain is working on bettering the improvements with train from Lisbon to Madrid. I challenge anyone to check rail from Lisbon to Madrid these days :D and try to find a route, but its in the plans to be able to do it with Madrid-Badajoz-Lisbon eventually. Anyways, like you said, it needs to be done like with airlines, but one key is also having the lines built, as there currently is a lack of connections between countries, where lots of rail services stops at certain borders, and then there is the gauge-issues that is being fixed as well with new rail services being built.
firstly - it was a huge success. Secondly - it was not privatised, but more of *prihvatized*, you don't have this word in English but it means that its was a parody of privatisation with different targets. Government gifted one company all right on rail infrastructure, and no one else except them could build and own tracks. Plus neither have they given them right d\to decide themselves what to do, many projects were stopped and other promoted, what resulted in more sort of government company under private control, which has no relation to the private company, it is crony capitalism. Despite all of this far less incidents occurred and punctuality improved and it was actually profitable despite the fact that government subsidises cars
@@ratulxy Right, what happened in NL wouldn't be called privatization if we were talking about any other industry. Privatization means selling all public assets to private companies and changing the regulatory structure to accommodate them. What we're seeing in Europe is mainly state-owned enterprises competing on government subsidized tracks. I'm neutral on this "open access" model, and I can see issues arising if it's not carefully regulated, but it seems to be doing fine so far. The British model was actually a more thorough attempt at privatization, and of course it led to crony capitalism, where it was FORCED to be profitable in many cases, and services were better or worse depending on the particularities of various contracts, which were often corrupt and led to cost-cutting services and poor maintenance. There was a period when there were more accidents too. If I were Dutch, I would be against selling NS or ProRail in pieces or as a whole to private owners. That would lead to crony capitalism where the funding is somewhat public but the profits are wholly private. There's a reason most rail infrastructure and operators became nationalized in the first place; the private companies were failing miserably and sane countries saw the public service as important regardless. In the US, rail is much more privatized even though the only long distance operator is government subsidized. If you take away those subsidies or sell Amtrak to private owners, it would collapse again where they would only run in the profitable regions, and we'd be left with no service as opposed to bad service. The US solution is obvious, to nationalize the rail infrastructure and actually enforce Amtrak priority. Therefore, all this talk about "privatization" in Europe and Asia is very misleading since it still involves heavy government ownership and regulation, so its successes can't be attributed to private enterprises doing the right thing since pure competition on rail is flat out impossible. It's akin to privatizing roads and hoping companies would do the right thing in still providing cheap open access, which would not happen because their sole purpose is to make profit, often by avoiding competition and becoming a monopoly themselves or just slowly going broke. In economics, we call these situations "natural monopolies" like water supply and utilities, and I don't believe there's any good reason to get private enterprise involved because they would only take the most profitable routes and lines, and even those would fall apart eventually if the state didn't regulate them. In a dense country like NL, you can find foreign state-owned enterprises making a profit and providing better service in regional routes, but that's a far cry from private operators running on private tracks with minimal regulation. I think their success is due to the fact that they are used to being heavily regulated, and their public ownership means profit isn't their only motive.
@@jeois411 too many false things. Read about rail privatisation in Britain, there was only one big study. Where and when there were "more accidents" on the rails, if in any time there were fewer, actually noticeably fewer, it is just statistics. Private companies operating trains in the EU are actually private and have no relation to public space because as soon as public company enters in open access(really open access) market and do not have subsidies from the government - it has no difference from private company. Railtrack nationalisation will be a disaster, the current state of them are in most part due to regulations on the tracks, that's why many 2 track rail corridors become 1 track rail corridors. Statement that railways can not be profitable is a flat out lie, as private companies built all the USA transportation and worked perfectly, till the time when one man decided to ruin them with highway act.. Road have to be private, then railways can be entirely private(however in many cases than can be private already), and if you don't know private owner has to earn money and not fail due to competition - where your logic goes remains unknown - that will force more competition, that will create more need of other transport modes as rails - and there won't be any debate about 'why spend so much on highways and so little on rails'. You say only on the theme of government runned capitalism and not actual capitalism, as if smb(government) can decide what should and shouldn't be done you ll become crony capitalism. 'Natural monopolies' also do not exist, I bet you could not define monopoly also, as well as how long ago this term was made up
The service improvements you mention are very likely mandated in the tender and payed for by the subsidies regional governments pay to the operator. Also the network in the UK is also run by the state, after a series of accidents in the late 90ies.
They are often suggested by the operators, then mandated by the governments in future tenders. Local governments have many different jobs and there is no one there with expertise on modern rolling stock, etc. Yes the money comes from the government, but NS used to charge much more for less service (hence why they don’t win many contracts).
@@Thom-TRAIn the UK there is four franchises run by the UK, in what is know as the operator of last resort, who run LNER, Trans Pennine Express, Northern and South Eastern. The private company which maintained the tracks after British rail was called Railtrack who where brought out of bankruptcy by the UK government with the company called Network Rail, the reason for tracks bankruptcy was because of Southall Crash, Ladbroke Grove Crash, Hatfield Crash, Potters Bar and Great Heck Crash which all happened in a 5 year period. In the UK all tracks and stations are owned by Network Rail with the majority of them being leased out to the Train Operating Company's (TOC's) such as GTR (Govia Thameslink Railway who run Gatwick Express, Thameslink, Great Northern and Southern) or GWR, paths are given to Freight Operating Company's (FOC's) such as GB Rail Freight or Direct Rail Services (DRS), there is a few open access operators in the UK and they are Eurostar, Grand Central, Hull Trains, Lumo, North Yorkshire Moors Railway and Swanage Railway. The North Yorkshire Moors railway and Swanage Railway the reason for having the open access operator status is to permit them to run there heritage services on the mainline. The UK there is Mutiple different government organisations who deal with the running of the railway and some of the are DRS, ORR (Office of Rail and Road), RSSB (Rail Standards and Safety Board), DfT (Department for Transport), Network Rail. Most of the rolling stock is owned by ROSCO's who lease the trains to the TOC's and FOC's.
@@joshuaritchie3836 I only knew about the Operator of Last Resort, but that is more of a supervising autority that gets control over someone else's operations than a stable operator who conpetes for tenders. But then, I can be wrong.
It seems like long distance competition mostly works on fast lines of high demand. That's where you find Westbahn (Austria), RegioJet and Leo Express (Czechia). Likewise in Spain where you find international competitors only on the high speed lines. The problem here is if the private operators only do the "cherry picking" on those few lines, someone still has to provide service on less profitable lines, and that's usually the state-owned train operating company. People who happen to live on secondary mainlines also have an interest in good service, even if it doesn't make a profit. In the times of state railways it was a mixed calculation, profitable lines playing for those that made a loss. Now it seems the state has to make sure that regions get good service even if running trains there isn't that profitable.
That’s the open access providers. But the first 15 minutes of this video were about the regional lines, precisely the point you bring up. They were improved because of a partnership between public and private. In the Netherlands, all regional lines have half-hourly service. Companies want to win contracts, so they propose improvements to entice the governing authorities. These governments then make sure the operators stick to their word. Like I said, it’s the best of both worlds.
@@Thom-TRA Right, as long as companies don't go bankrupt or otherwise bust. Germany has had a few "emergency takeovers", some of which involving Abellio (NS group). Some regions are now taking precautions by maintaining a pool of vehicles and making contracts allowing employees to keep working for a different company if that happens.
@@Thom-TRA the Dutch or German model of contracting regional lines out to the best bidder every few years makes a lot of sense. Here in Germany I’ve generally seen a lot of improvements, but often after a few months of chaos. The German DB Regio also took a different route to NS and do compete for these contracts, but with better trains and service. Where I’m much more critical is on the main line/ long distance services. In Italy or Spain they had a lot of spare capacity, so having companies run trains on their own risk is probably a good thing. Here in Germany we don’t really have spare capacity at all, so competition would always reduce the number of trains DB could run. In this case outside companies Cherry picking profitable routes could very much mean less profitable routes suffering, because DB can’t subsidized them with different lines anymore. Also, giving up the basically countrywide integrated fare system would be incredibly annoying. The example of the card readers from the Netherlands looks completely ridiculous and the UK seems to be even worse with pricing and tickets as confusing as airlines. There are already a few services in Germany like Flixtrain, the ÖBB nightjets and Westbahn which aren’t integrated with DB and it’s quite annoying. Especially with the more expensive DB tickets, where you can take any train on the correct route. Because of course none of the privately run trains count, so it just makes it harder to understand and less convenient.
@@Thom-TRA would to see not-hst long distance trains with lower prices. A lot of 'hst' trains charge premium prices for not really fast journeys. ( Many in Germany , A'dam-Brus ..) The old TEE train 'etoile du nord' would do A'dam-Paris in 4:20h . Only 1 hr longer than the fastest thalys but at a fixed price 30-40% of that Thalys. Currently the Mons- stquenten is closed , but from Antwerp-Lille via the old IC line to Paris (4.5 hr ?) could be viable and have an edge against the Thalys ..
Spain is different because only high speed lines are standard gauge so foreign competitors have a natural barrier to only compete on high speed lines. (Unless they buy Spanish Talgos and pay to go through gauge changing facilities where high speed connects with Iberian Gauge tracks (1,668mm). Similarly, you are not likely to find competition on the Swiss nartrow gauge railways in the mountains. But could see a private luxury train doing tours on those (but not providing transportation, think national rail = ferry vs tour trains = cruise ship).
The biggest mistake in the UK was probably getting rid of the state operator entirely, instead of forcing it to compete directly with private companies. This is how we differ from the rest of europe stricturally, and I'd srgue we're worse off for it.
Call me old-fashioned, but I had rather had NS operating all lines in The Netherlands. Specifically, I really don't like the checkout/checkin required. That said, there's one specific cross-border line that I would love to see restored. It's the now non-existing direct connection between Eindhoven and Belgium (Eindhoven-Turnhout-Antwerpen).
You both seem to forget that the ticket fragmentation is a bad choice that the Netherlands made, and not an inherent flaw of competition. In Germany and Switzerland, this issue of checking in and out does not exist.
@@Dunkcanio by DE do you mean Denmark? Because Germany has integrated ticketing, except for a few open access operators. And you’re not disagreeing with me, you’re ignoring what I said: that fragmented ticketing is a choice, not an inherent flaw of competition. Ticket integration is not some unachievable goal. It’s definitely not an argument for lackluster monopolies.
@@Thom-TRA yes, I was meaning the fragmented open access operations in Germany. Excluding them from your point negates the one you were trying to make.
Coming from a poorer country, Trenitalia is shining in this new European landscape, turns out that they are quite a good operator, and very little local services in Italy were won by someone else (due to very tight budgets).
Рік тому+6
Interesting video! Just one minor detail: railway track infrastructure in the UK, major termini and major interchange stations are maintained by Network Rail, a public company (after the huge failure of the private company Railtrack to provide minimum safety standards).
The major interchanges would earn themselves back due to high ridership. But maintaining the hundreds of small stations must be a huge financial burden on the TOCs.
As much as I am interested in how this is gonna work out in the future, I'm worried that it will become a tariff jungle. Don't forget the Dutch railway is operated more like a metronetwork, than high speed train network. The dutch network is very accessible where you hardly have to watch the schedule. With frequencies somewhere between 2 and 10x per hour on every route. In countries like Germany, Spain, Italy or France you are forced to buy tickets in advcanced, or pay very high prices. A spontaneous 90 minute trip in a IC/ICE in Germany will cost €60 (Hannover-Dortmund for example) one way. In the Netherlands you can the whole country in a IC for €25 one way. I feel like making a system where it would be beneficial for people to book in advance and compare different operators on different sites, it would backfire in a compact country like NL that people will just use their cars, as almost all the large cities are within a 90 minute drive of each other. The NL doesn't have long distance corridor where this model would work, such as Paris-Lyon or Frankfurt-Munich where driving would take double as long as the train and the ride is more than 3 hours.
The regional railways work as they work in the Netherlands in all the country you mentioned. The point is that the Netherlands are so small that they don’t need anything else but what would be considered regional to move people throughout the whole country. In the case of the hs trains they going abroad they work exactly like they work in every other European country, with prices fluctuating according to demand. So Netherlands works exactly they way other European countries work, the only thing it has the others don’t it’s the integration with local transportation systems.
I won't be surprised if Dutch rail companies eventually are going to deliver the service of reserving in advance. The NS wants to deliver this "service" for some time now just like in the UK under the name of Abellio, but each time they get so much resistance they postpone this decision. Now with this EU wide standardization excuse they have to implement it before 2025 of course.
If Italian railways are going to operate keep one thing in mind. The Italian railways have the Fyra in their fleet and it would be likely that they’re gonna use it on less expensive tracks
Hi Thom, as always a very comprehensive overview of a rather complex topic - I fully agree that competition does generally provide for an improved customer focus in all aspects, especially in transport. Greater choices/options should result in improved customer service, as you identified that fast trains now compete with airlines in Europe - often being the preferred mode of transport not just on price. I particularly liked your role plays in which you demonstrated how the tender process usually operates (at least you even changed your caps & tops - the judge one with the towel was a classic). I hope your move to Washington DC all went well & that you no longer have to deal with the extreme cold/snow & ice of Grand Rapids & Chicago. As you know, Washington DC is also a major train passenger hub & I look forward to your in-depth analysis of the transit services. Proof yet again that trains are awesome.
Why did UK privatisation fail? Poor trains, poor track and too cheap a service with rushed tenders, and government wanting to invest nothing; end result ~ 50 people dead with 3 train crashes - another British success story!
So used to seeing Arriva on regional/commuter services, if they get it approved, a service to Paris would be really cool to see! Designing the Frecciarossa for cross Europe services is paying off, spreading everywhere...
Good video overall, however I noticed the differentiation you made between privatization in the EU and UK was that "In the rest of the EU, the maintenence of tracks is the responsibility of a seperate company, and not the train operating company". This is the same in the UK! All physical infrastructure in the UK is managed by network rail, who are a government agency, not by individual TOCs. hope this helps!
There is more trackside maintenance required in the UK than there is in mainland Europe. For example, stations are generally maintained by the TOCs. This is a huge financial strain that mainland European companies don’t face. It’s one of the flaws that experts point to as a reason for the demise of privatization in the UK.
I love these more in depth videos! I was just idly browsing wikipedia last night looking at a lot of this so it's nice to see a proper explanation of it all! I also love the general quality improvements over the last few years, keep it up!
Thank you for your good and informative videos. Railway competition is a topic on which I have a changing option on, over the years. In the end my conclutions is, that a railway-system runs at it's best, when it is fully integrated. Tracks, vehicles and operation needs to be synchronised with at least interfaces as a possible. In the end, state owned European railways in the 80s where bad, because of the lack of goverment effort, not a lack of competition. In the end, you need a long running constant plan and the will to spent money for it to develope your train system, like Switzerland does since more than 40 years.
Those last two are not contradictory. Not putting in enough effort is only possible when there’s no competition. Who else are passengers going to use? Seeing other people do it better has at least encouraged NS to do better, and the same can be said for the Italians, who finally stopped demanding ridiculous prices for their spotty HSR service after Italo entered the market. I agree about integration though, that’s what I like about the German and Swiss systems.
@@Thom-TRANot enough effort from state is also possible with competing railway companies, e.g. when they let tracks get rotten. Then the best trainservice is useless. And in clock faced traffic, which I think is the best system for railways, you need to have synchronized systems. In airtraiffic you have point to point connections, where it is reasonable to choose between different companies. In a railwayconnection with many interchanges, it would be a wast if two trains run right after another, and then a long time no one, just to have the ability to choose between two companies. But it is not my turn, to set the rules. I just suffered due to them, by finding timetable solutions for the rail companies, that wanted to use 'my' tracks.
Yea my country railways, Indonesia, is still an integrated, state-owned companies. I'm still learning all these privatisation and breakup things, and I reckon that simpler is better? 😅
In Germany regional trains in a tender (so all regional trains) always have an integrated fare with other operators. The fares are set by a government agency that grants the contracts (different agencies for different regions). It only gets complicated if you leave the area of one agency and enter another.
@@Thom-TRA on the downside: the fares tend to be on the complex side - especially if you get to rural areas.t they are set by politicians and buerocrats. The exception being the 49 €-Ticket.
Arriva using ICE 3M totally make sense as 1. they're getting older and being replaced by the e320 ICEs and also the newer version of ICE 4 (XL) 2. ICE 3M has been long used on dutch - german routes, even NS had a fleet of them at some point
Ns still has a few of them to be used on the Amsterdam/Brussels-Frankfurt route with DB, but these units have a lot of reliability issues (especially running on both low and high frequency AC, but also with the doors due to vibrations caused by the engine being underneath the doors). Making it better to use the ICE 3 neo that is run between Frankfurt and Paris. They have much better reliability.
I'd argue having government monopolies are much better for commuting. Because they can intergrate services with other public transport like buses and also usually the timetables are made to have good connections and here is an example I have. The Struer to Vejle line was privatised in 2020 and Arriva took over from DSB (except 4 trains a day) Back when DSB ran the line there was a 2 hourly train heading straight to Copenhagen and a 2 hourly service cutting short at Fredericia (which is a major rail interchange) Nowerdays most trains are ran between Struer and Vejle and you get a 4 minute connection to a train to Copenhagen which is still ran by DSB. Sadly because of this if the Arriva train arrives late the DSB train will not care and leave the Arriva passengers behind. Also no Arriva trains don't atleast continue to Fredericia (I suppose this is due to their trains capped at 120 kmph which is much slower than the line speed). So really privatization does not really work if you want a public transport network with good intergration with other parts of the network.
@@jan-lukas I think if you want to privatise you should do a contract system like what TFL does. So the government makes the timetable and price then private contract can bid to run the trains. Denmark does this with the buses.
A bit late but here’s how the Dutch Model could work here: The Northeast Corridor=Main Line Network Amtrak would keep the service via a no-bid contract but in exchange for that exclusivity, track and infrastructure would be transferred to a new USDOT. That infrastructure company would be responsible for restoring the 457-mile route back to acceptable shape, leaving Amtrak to exclusively focus on running trains. State-Supported Routes=Tender System For routes under 750 miles, the tender system will be used and applied to individual states, multistate compacts and California's Joint Powers Authorities. These routes would be put up for bid for contracts ranging anywhere from five to 10 years, and the commuter rail model could also be worth a look. Exceptions are states like Virginia, which has a 30-year contract with Amtrak. Long-Distance Routes=open access model The overnight trains should be handled via this model. In addition to the FRA's Long Distance Service Study being utilized, other companies would run overnight service on the track via intense negotiations and assuming full responsibility. NEC Challengers The open access model would also apply to any operator who wants to take on Amtrak on its most favorable region.
I have a few points to add: - NS wanted to add Leeuwarden-Groningen to the main lines as well, as it was the only profitable line. However the government said no, the NS had to either retain all 7 of the northern diesel lines, or none of them. - Arriva also did ask to get the tender for the high speed line in 2013 stating that NS was not providing adequate service with the fyra debacle, however the NS managed to stop that. A shame if you ask me, we would have had ice's running between Brussels and Amsterdam by now (they said they needed 3-4 years to get ready, so that they could start running around 2017). - The main problem with the Thalys is there is only one other intercity between the Netherlands and Belgium, that the Benelux train, which is one hour slower, but essentially takes the same route between the Netherlands and Brussels (it stops in Breda and is reduced to an regional train in Belgium for some reason (causing much of the delay), but that is it). The result is that a lot of people going to Belgium take the Thalys as well, and the Thalys cannot handel all of that extra traffic.
On your last point: the amount of IC's going into Belgium is indeed scandalous. It will be improving rather soon (in railway terms, that is) in 2025 with a fast new Amsterdam - Brussels service by NS using the ICNG, and a slower train run with NMBS carriages that keeps the stopping pattern of the IC Brussel that runs today. Thalys should have foreseen this year's ago. They didn't, and are not interested in transporting as many people as possible, only in maximising their yields. The Eurostar merger might or might not improve the situation, since we could be seeing some e320 between Amsterdam and Paris, but, on the other hand, Thalys now needs to help cover the immense covid debt of Eurostar.
@@Giruno56 That would be nice if that happened and i think the new trains will not arrive before 2025 anyway. The ns wanted to prevent a second fyra and only ordered 2 to do testing at first, only ordering more trains for Belgium later on. But I havent heard of the NMBS introducing new trains and thought they were fiercely against skipping any stops in Belgium (to protect "their" thalys services as the quicker service). I do know the main reason that the ns only runs one train now is that parliament demanded ns use the high speed line for a faster icbrussels or the concession would be taken away. And that renting those traxx locomotives for these trains is quite expensive. So the ns did not really have the budget (especially after fyra and overbidding on the hsl concession) to buy/lease even more trains. I did hear about thalys wanting to use the eurostar trains, but apparently the maintenance yard for these is in the UK, and you can't exactly move these overnight. But it could actually help eurostar, as they bought too many trains, thinking there would be services to other UK cities and a UK-germany service as well. Using them on amsterdam-paris seems like a good option tough.
I do agree with what you say about Japan because it's either JR or the private companies. Also it is tough to know for that train pass in the Netherlands you have to do it like the Clipper Card in the California Bay area
In the case of Germany Austria and Switzerland it's still the National Railway operator that runs infrastructure for the railways. Austria ÖBB Infra Germany Deutsche Bahn Netze Switzerland SBB Infra
Yes but they are separate companies from the passenger train operating companies, they just keep the same name. ProRail could have just as easily been called NS Infra.
Its interesting to see how the privatisation and tendering out of regional lines has been succesful in the Netherlands, because in Denmark where I'm from its a VERY different story. The Danish rail sector was liberalised in 1998 and a tender soon after began to operate various secondary regional railways through Jutland. Several companies bid for the contracts, but low cost was a big part in the tender. Though not the lowest bid, Arriva won the contracts and took over a huge amount of the Jutlandian rail network, deploying at the time brand new Lint 41 trains on the routes... which were good with accessibility but in other ways a downgrade from the former, slightly older DSB rolling stock on parameters like comfort and capacity. But people werent unhappy. When stuff really went sour was in the late 2010's. In 2015, the previous left wing government had done a direct award of regional services in the north of Denmark from the State railways DSB to the regional transit agency, Nordjyske Jernbaner. They already owned and operated 2 former private railway branch lines in the area, as was the case with nearly all former private railway lines, not part of DSB. But now they'd operate the Mainline services too and were really succesful. However in 2015 a new right wing government would enter the frey, and do a retender. This time the price of the bid was extremely high, due to the parties wanting to spend as few taxes as possible, alligning with their party politics. One of the lines was the Svendborg line from Odense to Svendborg, which had been operated by DSB since 1949. Service was generally less reliable than desirable, but Arriva won the contract for it, and several other routes, as well as rewinning all but 1 line. However when Arriva entered service, everything went to shit! Arriva didnt invest in new rolling stock at all, instead taking over DSB's old fleet of branch line Siemens Desiro DMU's. 4 of these were sold in an agreement to Midtjyske Jernbaner, another regional authority owned agency who won the 1 line away from Arriva. However Arrivas reliability only became worse and worse and worse, with even more frequent cancellations, too low capacity, outdated trains, and service cutbacks! Midtjyske Jernbaner wasn't doing super well either. Arriva benefitted from having a large network, meaning on the line in question from Skjern to Holstebro, the operations would simply be an extension of another route. So trains from Aarhus to Skjern would simply continue from Skjern to Struer, where Arrivas main depot was at an hourly frequency. However with Midtjyske winning the line in isolaton, they had to cut back services to Holstebro, AND due to only receiving 4 trains, it meant they didnt have enough to maintain an hourly frequency with turnaround times. All of this resulting in a cut back and less reliable train service. And the authorities havent been interested in funding more either. Another hurdle here is ticket integration. We have a nationwide smartcard like the Dutch OV Chipkaard in the form of the Rejsekort (though the agency behind it for some stupid reason wants to replace it with a phone app). However for all other fares, private operators like Arriva have the problem of ticket integration since their tickets aren't integrated into the greater public transit agency. DSB has managed to do this in the east of Denmark where no lines have been tendered out, and where the trains generally are more well used. But in the west, neither DSB, nor Arriva, have been able to integrate their fares with the regional transit agencies. Nordjyske Jernbaner, who I mentioned before have integrated fares but thats because they're owned by the regional transit agency directly and managed by the Regional authority as a public service provider, not a private company. As for open access, its still in its infancy here but we have some. Most notably Snälltåget, who is owned by Transdev. Snälltåget, which runs open access in Sweden, runs a few night trains through Denmark, making a few stops here. The most notable of which being the Berlin Night Express from Malmö to Berlin, with through carriages from Berlin to Stockholm being attached to Snälltågets daytrains on this route. The biggest factor limiting open access operation here at the moment though is A: Lack of electrification on the mainlines, B: the high toll for crossing the Great Belt bridge, the only rail link between east and west in Denmark, and C: the long journey times to Germany. But 2 of these 3 problems will be fixed in the coming years via the electrification program and the Fehmarn tunnel. Along with this, SJ, the Swedish State railways, have repeatedly shown interest in operating open access on the Danish railways, and even tried once over 10 years ago with a service between Copenhagen and Odense, hoping to capture long distance commuters, and through travellers to Stockholm. However due to poor marketing and few departures, this service ended after only a few months. But the electrification to Aarhus, the 2nd largest city here, is planned to be operational in 2026-27, and a ton of intercity traffic happens between Aarhus and Copenhagen, which SJ and many others likely bang on. SJ has even made specifications to its new 250km/h trains to make them capable of operating in Denmark, and I bet they'll want to use them here once the conditions are right.
As I understand the Japanese system the former JR company was split into various passenger companies and one freight.The plan being to dish them out to the oligarchs and plutocrats but only a few companies are owned by the private sector most former JR companies remain state owned.A similar system totally failed in New Zealand.Another very similar system in Scotland, England and Wales is in the process of a long protracted failure.
It's been cool to see this type of thing happening throughout Europe. Love to see competition in the high speed rail market. It makes them appear even more like airlines!
Im all for it as long as all national operators use the OV chipcard system and my 40% off peak reduction will be valid on all lines. Better service is good but I dont want a hassle and have to think about which train, which ticket... things like that, enter a sort of suscription hell like the streaming services mess. That would seem a huge step back. I just want a serivce that works and that I dont have to think about. Just show up, tap in, wait and go. If the competing companies can manage to make that work and can operate under a single umbrella so to speak, im all for it.
the thing I like least about this style of privatization is the relatively short tenders potentially disincentivizing private companies from maintaining their networks towards the end of their time, and the semi-constant change that can result in. I feel like fully privatizing all the infrastructure that the private companies run on as they did in Japan could be beneficial if the routes are able to be profitable (with real estate ventures to help), but then again I am just a person on the internet who doesn't really understand national transport policy
Privatizing infrastructure has never turned out good, just look at Germany, UK, USA, and so on and so on. I do think that privatizing service can work great sometimes and be a really bad thing sometimes. But that's also the same with public services, generally speaking
@@jan-lukas you know that electric grids, sewage, drinking water, internet, are all public infrastructure that are privatized right? The world isn’t black and white. Full capitalism isn’t ideal, government control of everything is not effective either.
@@jan-lukas It worked wonders in Japan, and the golden age of railroading in the US and UK was brought about by private ownership in a style similar to Japan right now (a country which is also experiencing a rail golden age).
It is a HUGE mistake to have the infrastructure seperated from operation. Might work fine on roads, but for railways, there's too much depending on the infrastructure design and availability. Half the Dutch network is offline for maintenance every weekend, and months on end during holidays, which is insane. But the monopoly that Prorail has end the fact that it doesn't serve passengers directly, means they (read: the government that own Prorail) can do it. the Netherlands desperately needs the Japanese system where infrastructure is owned by the main user, while other users are still allowed on the tracks.
@@Thom-TRA not sure, there have been years where the line from my hometown to Utrecht has been offline for more than 30 days, that's closing in on 10% of all annual trains being cancelled. For planned "maintenance", I'm not counting system errors. There are even times when the line is down because of situations on the other side of Utrecht, because they removed too many switches in Utrecht and can't turn back trains there.
An excellent video Thom and very up-to-date. I can't wait for the Luik/Aken service to begin in December. I'll be FLIRTing between all three countries (BE/DE/NL) from my base in Valkenburg.
@@Thom-TRA I'll keep you posted. BTW, Arriva have announced a plan to start a service from Groningen to Paris. That would mean a purchase of new rolling stock.
Great video. I think it's great if the open-access operators can bring down prices, improve service and bring more people onto the rails over less efficient modes. I'll just be on the record saying I'd welcome Trenitalia and the Frecriarossa 1000 with open arms to the Northeast Corridor as an open access operator if it brought down ticket prices and improved service and wow do those trains look nice. It'll be interesting to see what Brightline has up their sleeeves in terms of WAS-BOS. The NEC has showed up on a map of corridors they want to run in the U.S, and I wonder if this would be a new build or operating on the Northeast Corridor as an open-access operator. I think the U.S. could really get better passenger and freight service if we created an infrastructure agency that maintained the tracks throughout the U.S. "Don't know what I'd call it," then work towards open access for freight and passenger breaking up the Class 1's monopolies, while putting policies in place that would also alllow for high quality regional, intercity and high speed passenger service and improvements for the long-run like full electrification of mainlines and the heavier used secondary lines.
Amtrak makes profit on the NE Corridor which helps subsidize unprofitable routes. It also doesn't own all tracks along the way (eg: north of New York). The US government might allow competition only revenues from tracks usage by comeptitors would compensate for loss of revenue by Amtrak. And there would be a huge problem of bidding for access to Penn Station and the tunnesl in New York which would drive price and lower frequency for NJ Transit and Amtrak.
I recently proposed to the european transport agency a new high speed line between Lille and Stuttgart, connecting Luxemburg and some smaller cities in between. Such a line, with target speeds up to 400Km/h would connect London St. Pancras and Stuttgart in 2:50h or to Munich in 4:20h. Nuremberg in less then 5h, Frankfurt city in 3:30h or Luxembourg in 2h. I believe such a project would drastically improve connectability betweeen Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Uk and Brussels. Any thoughts on that possibility?
Ah this is the jerk who also put it on LiniePlus I think. Just ignoring geography and if such a line is actually possible. I could also tell you what feels like thousands of corridors to connect using such lines, but nearly every time the simple answer is: it's just not (economically) feasible to do so
@@jan-lukas now suddenly you care about what’s economically viable? I thought travel was a human need and it doesn’t matter if there’s a profit to be made or not.
I prefer the Italian, French, Austrian and German model where the historical railway monopolist has become a group which owns the train operator, the track operator and so on. This has not blocked competition. What I do not understand is why the stations on the Netherlands are owned by NS Stations and not by Prorail.
Loved the video. I needed a bit of humor. Their system sounds a bit like ours, except it is much more extensive with higher frequency, and they control most of the tracks. While Amtrak runs the Northeast Corridor and long distance routes, most other Amtrak services are state subsidized, such as the Empire Service which runs about a dozen trains a day each way between New York City and the state capital at Albany with some trains continuing on to Maine, Vermont, Montreal via the Adirondacks, and points West. In Western NY, there are only 4 trains per day in each direction, including one to Toronto, one to Chicago, and two to Niagara Falls, NY. Former member of Congress, the late Louise Slaughter, fought for more frequent, high speed service, but it seems to no longer be a priority, even with the increased funding available. And now, private companies are starting to take an interest in offering rail service in the U.S., including Brightline in Florida and Nevada/California. I wonder if foreign operators will take an interest here.
The problem the US has is that the freight companies own the track and whilst law states that Amtrak should be prioritized... afaik they don't get that priority because it is cheaper to pay the fine. US needs to buy up the track or just give passenger rail dedicated track that freight trains aren't allowed on or something.
@@roadtrain_ In New York, Conrail, a federal corporation similar to Amtrak, took over some freight lines and owned a portion of the tracks used by the Empire Service. They did give Amtrak priority and maintained the rails at a higher standard. For a time, Amtrak was able to run Turboliner trains at 120 MPH on their part of the route and up to 89 MPH on Conrail tracks. Unfortunately, with the push to privatize, Conrail was sold to commercial interests and now CSX maintains to a lower standard, limiting AMTRAK to 79 MPH maximum (but often lower) while violating the passenger right of way law, making service much slower and less predictable.
@@jstephens2758 I know about conrail, mainly thanks to Alan Fisher. But yeah, giving amtrak priority once again would be such a boost for the US. Your country was built on rails after all
Another interesting case of NS vs franchising is the R-Net branding on the regional rail line from Gouda to Alphen aan den Rijn, which is operated by NS but the branding is as if R-Net were a separate regional company like Arriva or Keolis.
Well the Netherlands seems to be doing public transit by private operators really well. Kind of makes you wonder how you can use this to make trains better in a lot of places
@@chickenpommes19I live in Drenthe and I get 30 ish minute (the trains don't go exactly every 30 minutes but it's 2 trains an hour) service over here. Compared to germany where trains may come every 1 or 2 hours I'd say it's pretty decent.
Thank you very much for this excellent and highly amusing video ! I agree with all that you say, especially about the possIbility of the Italian Frecciarossa trains running between Paris and Amsterdam. The Thalys service is pretty good, but their TGV based trains are showing their age. I do hope you are enjoying using the trains in the DC area, and hope you will report soon !
Well explained indeed! Privatization does not work equally well in other countries, but the Dutch case makes a convincing argument for how it can work. Being Swiss I'm skeptical about the benefits it would bring us here. Some benefits of opening our tracks are evident tough: It's great to have TGVs, Railjet and ICE trains connecting Swiss cities with destinations in France, Austria and Germany, for example. I'd also welcome Frecciarossa trains heading up north trough the Gotthard and Simplon to Bern, Geneva and Zürich, but that will take a couple more years and a few technical adaptations, I fear.
@@lars3321because there's different ways to do privatization. It all depends on what exact parts you actually privatize (infrastructure, trains, personnel) and also what policies are enacted to stop problems in the actually privatized areas.
@@lars3321 usually private companies need to be profitable, especially in Switzerland with the mountains and demographics you face high investment for a low ridership, by having one big pot of money that takes the huge income on some route has to be distributed to unprofitable routes because if you were to stop those, the influx to the big routes would also fall apart and everything fails. I don't see this problem in the netherlands where you can have sort of get "my garden, your garden" and make that profitable on a smaller scale.
Awesome video!! Eurostar will not stop service to the Netherlands as a whole for an entire year, just not to Amsterdam. Rotterdam will still see multiple services a day to London and passengers travelling from Amsterdam can take alternative trains (Thalys for example) to Rotterdam or Brussels.
The nonsense of privatisation, one state owned company competing in another country with another state owned company undercutting prices at the expense of their taxpayers. We've seen this with Abbelio ( a full owned daugter of state owned Dutch NS) in Scotland. A disaster, for consumers in Scotland as wel as the Dutch taxpayer who's going to pick up the bill. These so called "private "enterprises are delivering at best services in foreign countries, services that they don't deliver at home. Trains from Freciarossa ( a full daughter of Italian state owned railways) delivering better hi speed services than her parent company at home!! Same with Arriva ( German state owned railways). That is NOT real competition because when things go wrong the parent company picks up the bill and that is the German, Italian French..ect taxpayer. Further more private companies are only interested in the best routes the only ones that make money. Like Flix, only between big cities undercutting the "dumb"state owned railways. That is NOT in the best interest of the consumer because the small lines are the live lines for a liveable countryside, since you can't make a profit there these services will suffer unless the government subsidises the operator. Cutting away the profitable parts of the network a state owned operator is left with only "bleeders"so the taxpayer has to fork out even more money...
This whole comment just kind of screams that you did not pay attention to anything. And your logic is so flawed. “Profit for shareholders, cost for taxpayers,” you yell. The shareholders of these state-owned railways are the state! And what do you think it costs taxpayers when a government monopoly messes things up? What do you think the Fyra/HSL disaster cost the Dutch taxpayer? Your thoughts are inconsistent, the result of a way of thinking that puts the conclusion first and then tries to come up with arguments to support it.
@@Thom-TRA You are the one who is really missing the point. Fyra WAS a private company, owned by NS international and NMBS. That is exactly my point, playing entrepreneur ( with salaries on par with the private sector, God forbid that they would have done it for a mere civil servant one) and when it fails the tab is for the taxpayer who's also left with the costs of the unused tracks. So what's the point of separate entities then besides more high payed directors? This privatisation bull shit of yours is so 1980's. Further more, what's your point?
@@roelkomduur8073 you are arguing for something that never existed. NS has never been a public institution. There have never been not-for-profit railways in the Netherlands, or most of the world. Your state-sponsored fantasy is so 1940s.
@@Thom-TRA Okay then ,give me one(1) example of a working private system then? Besides Japan with you clearly don't know the details of .I can give you loads of your misguided idiot privatisation bull.
Ain't it possible for multiple companies to run on the main lines, to secure competition? Like it works in Aviation? Another concern is if the national companies are forced to take the least profitable lines, if there will be a requirement from the government that there have to be service for these
They actually do! It’s called the OV-chipkaart, and it’s about to be replaced with something called OVPay. Remember, Japan also makes you check in and out between operators. The difference is that in Japan, different companies leave from different parts of the station, so it’s not as much of a problem.
As someone who frequently use the Brussels-Amsterdam line, I cant wait for new competitor agaisnt NS and Thalys. NS has doubled their prices over 5 years. Thalys has done some cool students fair offer but 90% of their tickets are still way overpriced on tha route (ranging from 50 to 100€.
I think the national network should stay as it is, seeing as it is more like a national metro/sbahn system than classic train lines. International/high speed rail might benefit from liberalization though, I'd love to see prices through the Chunnel lowered because of competition :)
👋 Hi 0:49 Isn’t this law also one reason why the big 4 doubled the length of the trains- to block passenger trains in sidings instead of stopping freight in sidings…? 11:51 Aren’t the NS involved in Abellio ? Money is coming in, no? 18:03 Imagine a direct train Amsterdam-Brussels-Lille -Paris Marne la Vallée-Lyon St.Exupery-Torino-Milano - Roma…😛
The big guys will do everything to not follow the rules… And yes! Abellio is owned by NS. But they lost a few big contracts in Germany and the UK because of their bad service.
I think that it's more probable to imagine a direct train that goes through Germany and Switzerland rather Belgium and France for an Amsterdam Rome route
11:13 the issue of rolling stock can be eliminated if the state owns the trains and leases them to the company winning to tender, Like Metronom in Germany, where the rolling stock is owned by LNVG, a company owned by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
But train operators can only operate certain train types, so wouldn't it be best to also "lease" the train drivers together with the trains? Because else if a company takes over a route they might not find enough spare operators resulting in negative consequences for service. And if you now have infrastructure, trains and personnel already, why shouldn't the state operate the railway on its own? I do understand the benefits that competition definitely has, but you should never forget that companies want money, and nothing else
@@jan-lukasWe experienced the leasing in regional traffic in Dresden with the city railway. The Stadtbahn was commissioned by the Verkehrsverbund Oberelbe to operate more regional railway lines in the Dresden area. The city railway itself had no trains and leased them. Then came the day when the Stadtbahn simply filed for bankruptcy and simply ceased operations. The VVO lost its operator and readers no longer received any money for the trains. The leasing company's trains now run on the same routes for DB Southeast. If the city railways had had their own trains, they wouldn't just have broken up.
NS didn't had bad service on regional lines. they did what the regional goverment wanted them to do. and with the newer contract (lets say for arriva limburg) that same regional goverment wanted different (better) things so those companies do that. but i have to say NS is still the best in the netherlands the other companies lack ALOT.
You are very misinformed if that’s really what you believe. Maybe ask someone what NS was like on the regional lines before you make a claim as ridiculous as that, since you probably can’t remember it.
@@Thom-TRA asking some random induvidual won't help either, if the concession says "run 2 train per hour" NS does it like that. In the newer concession it's "4 trains per hour" then they will do it like that. Simple as that. That's how that concession system works.
3:05 I mean, you're explaining where NS came from, historically but also what the letters stand for, and then go on to contextualise what those dutch words mean in English. Imagine that part being like “NS stands for dutch railways, which starts with two completely different letters.”
I tend to prefer tender options than open access options. This is because when there is competition, to be honest it starts get confusing for most of the people. In order to travel from one city to another you have to search throughout different web-sites to see which is the most competitive. Well, if the Government decides to provide a website that collects data from all companies, it's a different story...but in general I think that trains should not behave like airplanes: you should be able to go to the station, go to a ticket machine/office, get a ticket and go on the first train available, without any hassle of knowing WHOSE company is your train. I think train companies should be divided by areas and functions, without interfering with each other. For High Speed I am not sure myself! >_< The Dutch solution of giving main line services to a big corporation and secondary lines to smaller companies it's a great compromise in my opinion: the strength of a big corporation can handle the busy corridors, whilst the smaller companies can focus on delivering little projects. As for the international competition: I tend to be on the protectionism side but I am not against a foreign company doing its job IN THE country. Even if the rail company is from another country, it still has to run trains IN your country, provide salaries IN your country and in general do business in the country. You could argue that the managers and stake holders that live abroad will not directly provide benefits to the country, but is definitely a small percentage; but you could potentially also impose the formation of smaller local branches: for example you could tell Arriva to create Arriva NL with its own headquarter in The Netherlands.
as someone living in belgium id really appreciate if i could go to the netherlands for an okay price and a journey that does not take 6 hours or is unreliable because of crappy rolling stock
The OV chipkaart isn't perfect. But it is just... so nice to use. I can use it ANYWHERE. Regardless of where I need to go and what provider I need to use. I never have to buy a ticket. Also, recently we've seen the ability to use phone apps or even your pincard to check in and check out, meaning the OV chipkaart will probably eventually become obsolete as it is fully integrated into the bankpass' abilities. My dream is that eventually, I can use my OV chipkaart or equivelant to travel anywhere in the EU because the system will be fully connected.
Meanwhile, in Germany: "Company A, you are the cheapest, we are legally required to pick you. You certainly won't cheap out on personel and only hire engineers who are fully trained to standards and won't behave like half-brained idiots, right? ... Right?"
You forgot to mention the Arriva Intercity train project from Nijmegen to Aachen vv. The non electrified parts of the route are being upgraded and electrified for more capacity. Not so long ago a sleeping line close to closure run by the state railway and now suffering severe capacity shortage. At last after 2 decades regional goverments cooperating with operators are now a big benefit for passengers. At first euhhh to say it mildly their were some serious problems-scandals (political/staff/unreliable equipment/coruption etc.etc.)
The ultimate end of what you advocate is that a government monopoly which answers to the people will be replaced, after inevitable consolidation, with a private monopoly which can do whatever it wants.
That is a really bad take. For starters, I’m not advocating for anything. This is an informational video with my observations mixed in. I’ve observed that the passenger experience has improved drastically since the *private monopoly* that was the national railroad was forced to break up. Even in the US, which has insufficient anti-trust laws compared to Europe, we have not seen the formation of one monopoly, rather we see a government monopoly on passenger rail that is at the whims of whoever helms a political administration. The ultimate outcome of what you advocate for is an antiquated, out of touch system that is led by an organization that disguises its lack of expertise in the industry as public accountability. The world is bigger than the US, the options are more than just left or right.
@@Thom-TRA haha that’s true they make a lot of problems (like suddenly catching fire lol) but I’d also be kinda sad to see them go garter just 20 years of service - maybe they find a way to make them more reliable?
I don't think it's entirely fair to compare the NS of the 90's with the private companies of today. I am convinced that if NS were to run on many of the privatized lines today, it would also be able to offer good service. Since I myself travel by train in the Netherlands, I find it less pleasant to check in and out with different carriers. Also because the rates differ per train carrier and different subscriptions. It is also worth mentioning that many drivers and conductors from private companies are switching to the NS since the collective labor agreement is better there. Many trains are therefore still canceled on many regional lines.
What proof do you have, other than you’re “convinced.” NS hasn’t even performed well on the Hoofdrailnet, even in the 21st century. After the HSR, rolling stock issues, service cuts, fraud. I think there’s a reason they only won one contract. And as large a company as they are, I don’t think the “accountability” of a small, provincial government scares them as much as competition. If NS was the only company running regional lines, I think we’d see old rolling stock, bad service, and a lot of excuses, their specialty. I see no evidence, current or historical, that would suggest otherwise.
@@Thom-TRA I certainly understand what you mean. NS has done a number of things that are not acceptable. But now they finally have new high speed trains, many old trains are being modernized. Although the timetable can be improved after corona, we are slowly moving in the right direction. We cannot say this about the regional carriers. There are still many train cancellations, the service is poor, staff shortages and toilets are often out of order. Perhaps the future will prove otherwise, but for now regional carriers are certainly not showing their best.
@@Thom-TRA What are you talking about? NS outperforms ALL regional operators in the Netherlands, and has for the past 5 years, on objectively measurable values such as punctuality, train cancellations, and all other factors...
@@purrt-kurt I really hope you don’t do research for a living, because there is one serious flaw in your analysis: You cannot take NS’s performance in the last 5 years and use it to justify their performance 10-20 years ago. Why do you think NS’ performance has improved? Do you think the countless changes in leadership, the fraud, high speed debacles, the deteriorating service, abandonment of international connections, the millions in fines, the government bailouts, do you suppose any of that might have had something to do with it? Maybe they saw the competition and realized they needed to get their act together? If NS has improved so much that they are the best operator for a regional line, then they will win the contracts. So far they aren’t winning anything. So NS is doing alright _now_ on the HRN (they still suck on the HSL). That doesn’t say much about how they compared to regional operators on regional lines back then. Your allegiance to the company has disabled you from objectively looking at history.
I really like this video. I'd like to provide my two cents, however. You sum up many advantages that have come since the regional operators run the trains. These have however not been paid for by these companies, but by the provinces or the national government. There is no reason to think NS wouldn't have made use of speed increases or capacity upgrades. It's hard to compare the sum that the 'old' NS received for operating the entire network with the regional companies, but it's fair to say that overall, government investment in these lines has increased drastically. Of course, I would love to see the ETR1000 in the Netherlands. I am however skeptical, as this is not the first time competition on Amsterdam - Paris has been announced (the Italians have done it before with Thello), but I remain optimistic. In summary, as high speed lines are generally only built when there is a market for them, it makes sense that multiple companies compete. On the core network however, with the incredibly high frequencies, I'd be more cautious.
I think government interest has increased because of the private involvement. These agencies know much better what the rolling stock market is like. It’s the innovations seen on some lines that have inspired governments to demand them on others. We do know what NS would have done on these lines. We have 60 years of precedence. NS performs better when they’re afraid of losing a contract. When they’re comfortable, they don’t put in the effort. They’ve shown this time and time again.
@@Thom-TRA I'd say that that is switching around the causality. I'm writing this reply while using a Groningen - Zwolle train run by NS however, so I might be biased :). For me, the most critical difference between regional lines now and prior to privatisation is the investment. The success of regional services is more the success of decentralisation than anything else. The market conditions for these trains are rather artificial: the national government subsidises infrastructure management, and a local authority subsidises the operation. These companies do not, in fact, voluntarily run more trains than their contract states: they only run their contract, and even that is hard at times. Arriva for example has been running most of the lines in Groningen and Friesland at half the required frencuency at weekends for over a year. NS, on the other hand, is only contractually obliged to run two trains an hour to all stations within the core network. Of course, NS runs way more, but those are technically unnecessary. And on price: for consumers, Arriva tickets are not cheaper than NS tickets; it depends, but generally the price per kilometer for private operators is higher than for NS. Running a train is much more expensive for NS than it is for Arriva, since NS has the obligation - as it is a large company impacted by labour unions - to have at least one train manager on every train. Things like this make NS rather conservative and less flexible than a private company, but these are generally a good thing.
@@Giruno56 I think you switched around the causality. Decentralization only worked because it allowed parties onto the market who are eager to win contracts and keep them. I can’t think of a single good reason why if in the 1990s, NS had been held accountable by the government of Overijssel or Friesland instead of the national government, they would have introduced new trains or raised frequencies. I remember back in 2014 they were still using Mat’64 in Limburg and DDAR in Brabant. I know of only one regional line where service improved after NS took over: Alphen - Gouda. And that was after 2 decades of private operators running things around the country: the local government knew what to demand. Your argumentation starts with wanting NS to look good, then moves back to try and justify it. There’s no reason to believe NS would have the same successful results on regional lines: they never won any contracts. They even lost Zutphen-Apeldoorn. It’s hard for some people to admit, but NS ruins almost everything they touch. Look at the HSL, their constant failure to order rolling stock on time, their out-of-touch campaigns, the list goes on and on. Even if you truly believe that all the improvements only came from decentralization, then the private operators were still necessary to scare NS and remind them that someone else can do their job too.
@@Thom-TRA Allow me to clarify a few things from my previous reply. With decentralisation, I do not refer to the concession model alone; instead I have the increased tasks, responasabilities and budgets of provincial governments in mind. One of the very few competences of a Dutch province is public transit, for which it gets a - very serious - allocation from the national government. > I can’t think of a single good reason why if in the 1990s, NS had been held accountable by the government of Overijssel or Friesland instead of the national government, they would have introduced new trains or raised frequencies. It is not only about accountability. Sure, provinces being able to hold NS responsible might have improved something, but the important element here is funding. Those new trains and increased services do not magically appear out of the private company: they are paid for by the province. Why NS had no interest in improving these lines in the 80's and 90's has to do with the peculiar public/private position of NS: it remained an independent private company, but received a single cheque from the national government for the operation of the entire network. >I remember back in 2014 they were still using Mat’64 in Limburg and DDAR in Brabant. If anything, it shows either the underfunded nature of Dutch railways or mismanagement of those funds, which I severly doubt. >Look at the HSL, their constant failure to order rolling stock on time, their out-of-touch campaigns, the list goes on and on. I completly agree on the utter incompetency that rules the HSL debate. So many things have gone wrong however in this story, at both government level and NS, that it is too complex to serve as a good example. As I said before, I am not opposed to open acces on international connections; this is the system we have chosen on European level, so abberations like Thalys make no sense. With respect to rolling stock, you probably mean the 2010's? I'd like to know what out of touch campaigns you are referring to? I get the impression you divide train companies into groups that you argue - due to fancy new trains or frequencies - are succesfull, e.g. Arriva, and those that are not. I find this a way too narrow view. Some defects might be attributable to NS, but most are not, but are connected to historical development or the organisation of the railway network, which is one of Europe's busiest and most complex. Internationally, looking at punctuality and customer satisfaction, NS is in the top 3 eith for example Switzerland, despite the Netherlands spending almost half of what Switzerland spends per capita on rail. >Your argumentation starts with wanting NS to look good, then moves back to try and justify it NS delivers - discounting the period following covid - decent service.
I think it's a good thing that NS will need to compete with other train operators on the international routes. On the Amsterdam to Bruxelles-Midi route NS has done a really bad job. The whole Fyra debacle made sure they wouldn't be running high speed trains for several years. Even though they didn't run high speed trains the ticket prices were still really high. And there are several more things, like the constant delays and cancellations and the fact that the trains stop at several smaller stations in Belgium causing longer travel times. NS and Thalys really need to improve their service and competition will drive them to improve their current and future services. Regarding the matter of competition on the hoofrailnet I think it definitely can be done and could improve service but they need to get rid of the need to check out and in when you switch rail operators. I also still have a few doubts about the private companies which now run the regional lines in the country. They definitely improved service on those lines but there is still quite a lot of room for improvement. The toilets on arriva trains are frequently out of order and the GTW Stadler trains they are running are getting outdated. There were reports that parts are failing a lot as the trains are getting older. The Qbuzz trains on the Geldermalsen-Dordrecht line are also old and still don't have toilets. Keolis also has it's issues. It commited fraud by signing secret contracts with bus manufacturers which led to the provinces to give it's concessions to different companies. But NS also has a lot of problems. Some are very similiar, like corruption. So I believe that the hoofdrailnet should be opened up to the private rail operators but the government needs to make sure that they don't repeat a lot of their mistakes and that service actually improves.
Privatisation hasn't been good for the Dutch train connectivity, even just 20 years ago it was cheaper to take the train on a 130km trip, even if you had a passenger in your car and split the costs, nowadays if I go solo in my car a trip from Heerenveen to Amsterdam it's a third cheaper to go with my car, and for the record, my car is a gasoline car from the 90s, so a diesel or LPG would be even cheaper.
Your logic is flawed. You’re pointing to the inflation of a train ticket over the past 20 years, and blaming privatization. The railways were already privatized 20 years ago, and you don’t provide any evidence of causality. Populistische drogredeneringen, meer niet.
@@Thom-TRA Having taken 19 and 20 between Atlanta and Baltimore and seeing 20's departure time at Union Station being 2 in the afternoon is the perfect example of that LOL
Another excellent and engaging report, Thom. Here in the UK the idea of privatisation was heavily promoted with the promise of competition and choice. Competing companies would keep ticket prices low. Alas, competition hasn't materialised with usually one train operating company running entire route networks. One newcomer, however, is Lumo on the north east route between London and Edinburgh which has been well received but services are limited to just five per day each direction. I hope more competitors will start operating, similar to the situation with the French railways.
The UK problem is their ancient and restricted loading gauge means foreign companies can't compete with their own trains, reducing competition to competition within one single country with bespoke rolling stock, driving up prices. Nationalisation won't change that, widening the loading gauge would. But the Brits will never do that, it would imply their network isn't perfect now.
The issue with Lumo is that it is not allowed to compete with LNER. It is supposed to only compete with short haul airline but obviously some LNER passengers might have been moved to Lumo.
Sounds all great, but the problem is ticketing. We need much more interoperability. All tickets must be accepted by all operators. Having to buy two tickets for a connection shouldn't be an option. Another problem is that a lot of routes aren't profitable. Giving profitable ones to private companies just takes money from people and government. As they now have to subsidize other railway lines without the income from the profitable ones.
Subsidy is necessary in this case to guarantee consistent service. Otherwise the service in one area is at the whims of whatever the profit is on busier lines. Not exactly fair. Plus, companies usually don’t use their profits to improve non-profitable divisions of their company. And NS was the biggest example of that, when they had all the regional lines under their control.
@@Thom-TRA This all has to do with political will. In Switzerland the profitable routes definitely subsidize the unprofitable ones. Even if operated by the same company. If governments actually want to improve services privatisation is mostly the wrong path. Switzerland has a lot of private railways, but these are mostly owned by the regions and towns they pass through. So services are always quite good. Sadly the Netherlands wasn't able to so it seems.
Love the "judge" version of Thom 🙂 In Britain, Network Rail is the owner and maintainer of infrastruture (not sure about Wales and Scotland). But the bidding system is all screwed up with some areas granting exclusive passenger service on a line but in others, there is competition allowed. It is simpler in terms of interational trains as there is less "need to serve the local population" which national railways have traditioally served. In France, it is my understanding that competition is allowed in major routes, but not local routes where traffic isn't enough to make SNSF TER and Intercité profitable. So you'll see competition on high speed lines (with Trenitalia competing on Paris-Lyon for instance). International routes have seen "open access" for some time, even in Netherland with Nightjet doing overnight trains, and not European Sleeper having started Germany to Brussels via Amsterdam overnight services. German ICE trains make it to Paris and vice versa. Thalys was French-Belgian and made provided service in Netherlands. (I think it is part of Eurostar). PKP runs trains into many countries from Poland is is able to sell tickets from say Germany to a 3rd country. Same with ÖBB. However, they all have problems with Germany because the cost of runnng trains on the direct lines or usig the main stations is very high. Snälltåget run a train from Stockho;m to Berlin (as does SJ as well). ÖBB overnight trains can be quite complex with some cars going to Berlin, some to Frankfurt, some to Vienna, some to Budapest and some to Warsaw for instance and they can change locos a few times along the way. And of course, there was the famous Paris-Moscow overnight train that used RZD rolling stock but changed locos along the way (and bogies at Brest , Belarus) and then paid for transit through Poland, Germany and France. In France, they now seemed forced to open Paris transit for bidding. For instance Keolis won a tram contract over RATP. (BTW, the S is pronounced in Kéolis). And the RATP will soon have to bid to run its own Paris métro system. This may go beyond reasonable. I think there is a big difference etween privatizing train service and making tracks open access. It makes sense to have a government onwed passenger service to provide service in the country, and allow foreign operators to compete on certain lines. But when competition reduces profits from TGV operation, it means SNCF needs more subsidies to run local services. BTW, because of ÖBB's Nightjet,s success and birth of other overnight train services running into European capitals, the SNCF reversed its decision to abandon night trains a couple years ago and has refurbished old rolling stock and restarted services from Paris to Toulouse, Nice and in Briançon and I think another few places. The success of Nightjet as well as many PKP services is a wakeup call fopr SNCF. (NL may be too small for its local overnight services, but it could run them to Germany or Spain or other places if it had equipment). However, giving a license for local unprofitable services is not that wise as it emulates the failures of England's system. It is better to have the governmemt operate those srevices as it is a public service and it costs more to give subsidies to a company that must be profitable running an unprofitable service. When the provate operator has a contract to run X trains per day, it runs X trains per day and won't add more to cope with increased demand as they woudl then cease to be profitable since they lose money on each passenger with a fixed subsidy. But if the subsidy is per seated passenger, then there is more incentive to increase capacity when demand grows. BTW, Kéolis is partly owned by SNCF and Caisse de Dépôt du Québec, and the later also now owns 18% of Alstom, so expect Kéolis services to choose Alstom equipment from now on. (CDPQ help recapitalize Bombardier Transportation (which was split from nearly bankrupt Bombardier) ending with 30% ownership of it, but the investment came with conditions which forced Bombardier to sell its stake because it couldn't afford to keep it, so it was sold to Alstom and CDPQ converted its 30% ownership of BBD Transportation into 18% of Alstom). Kéolis has a number of comuter trai operation contracts around the world including USA, and Bombardier had many as well which are now Alstom contracts. Caisse de Dépôt has a stake in both so it will get interesting when Kéolis would bid against Alstom on such contracts.
If only the US set up an organization like prorail i feel like it would improve rail infrastructure and traffic control so much. It would be so much more fare. And yes while i think the private companies filling the gaps is a good thing i do think it's good that the main or biggest public rail provider being overseen or co ownerd by the government is a good thing. Without some of the changes the government had made public rail would not have been the same in the Netherlands at least for normal rail high speed rail is a different story and we will have to see in the future about that.
Also just gotta say i know NS is a monopoly and those are not great but i grew up my entire life seeing NS trains i can't help but feel a bit sentimental over them though a lot of the trains i felt that way about are gone now but still i hope no matter what we will keep seeing NS trains for a long time to come. But for real though as someone who lives in the US now why can't we have nice things ;-; the government really needs to take a look and see what other countries with successful rail networks are doing and implement similar laws and strategies because whatever we are doing now isn't working very well for us. Well i guess the only one's it's working for is fright companies though only the ones big enough to for monopolies.
@@Thom-TRA oh i definitely think there would be less derailment's if the US had it's own USrail they would probably enforce a limit to cargo train lengths as well as crew minimums as well as maintain the rails and signals properly and add more tracks where necessary. At least that's what i think it would be useful for.
The US is distinctly different than most countries in the world have nationalized the railways. Only Amtrak is nationalized in this country. Of course other government agencies run trains. But still, in this country trains are basically private industry, which is not the case in most other countries.
That’s what I wanted to show with this video: that every place is different, and that what works for one place won’t necessarily work for other places.
I love the interest of all these different companies in expanding services to the netherlands, but I really dont understand why it seems like no one is interested in the Rotterdam-Eindhoven and Nijmegen-Roermond corridors which have massive ridership
Nijmegen -Roermond is a huge mess. They were going to double track and electrify it years ago, it’s still not done. The majority of the demand is between Nijmegen and Venray/Venlo anyways.
Doesn't the saying go wise people learn from the mistakes of others? Well this dude is failing that test. Privatisation is for fraudulent neo-libs. National infra should always remain nationalised lest you repeat Thatcherite era mistakes 👍
Glad this worked out for the Netherlands. However, Im not a huge fan though. Privatization seems to eventually erode roadblocks in the sake of money. At least thats what happened in the US to every industry. But hey as long as the rails are public thats good
The problem in the US is that the government either doesn’t care or actively sabotages things, all for “freedom.” Not something I’m as worried about in highly-regulated Europe.
Interesting competitive times for European Train Services. Yet the Customer experience of booking and ticketing cross border and even cross regional services in EU has to improve. Wonder if EU will have to do some after work on this topic like open Data ticket access so that App Services can be created.
Ariva is pronounced ariva both a's like a not ay, without rolling the r, the i like e, and a bit of emphasis on the v because as you said it's from England (Sunderland to be presice. my fellow Geordies make you're welcome to banter about it)
Arriva in the Netherlands is most certainly pronounced the way I did, and since I am a Dutch person making a video about the Dutch company Arriva, I’m just going to thank you for your opinion.
Hi Thom, great explanatory video as always. I personally agree with all your opinions on the privatizations. IMHO monopolization and lack of competition are the sure recipe of much bigger problems than privatization and competition could ever cause. Also I hope the move to Washington, DC was good for you and your wife. Good luck at your new place and hope to see you visiting Chicago often enough to make new videos in the future.
@@jan-lukas the USA was never privatized. It has always been private , only passenger operations were nationalized. If you’re going to comment so much, please research more.
If there would be one thing i want to see coming to Europe, is a unified system of buying a ticket that gets you from A to B without having to buy multiple different tickets from competing companies in different languages. Like when you buy a plane ticket, but then for rails.
Like i want to travel from Amersfoort Schothorst to Alcoy Spain, i don't want to have to look up 7 different websites, buy 7 different tickets, reserve seats in 4 different languages. If i were to fly there, i'd fly directly from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to Alicante Spain and take the train from there. If trains are to compete with planes, it needs to get simpler.
It’s 2023, I really don’t understand why this continues to be such a challenge. Let’s get some great minds together and fix this once and for all.
God yes this needs to happen. The difficulty is so unnecessary.
Get to Alcoy/Alcoi before the branch line from Xativa/Jativa is closed 🤣
Interrail/Eurail is "almost" that solution, I guess. It makes sense for longer term travelling of at least 3 or 4 days crossing different countries. With one Eurail pass, I can take any train run by the national operator. But some operators make it complicated like SNCF, Renfe and Trenitalia, who make reservations mandatory and expensive. You can't even buy them online you need to queue up at the station to buy them at the counters. At least you can buy reservations in other countries you're travelling in.
International Rail services in Europe still got a long way to go, and its an issue of things like scheduling, connections etc. for waiting trains and different companies. Should be sorted with rideshare agreements, and better connection plans with trains going from one place to another.
With High Speed most of the focus so far have been on national rail services, and not international services in countries like Spain(probably the country with the best highspeed rail services in all of Europe).
I live in Madrid, but if I want to go to France, its a nightmare with connections and trains and not really something that makes sense like you said with different web sites, and using pages like Trainline etc. that got most of the companies also doesnt offer good booking, and if there is delays etc. So for me train in Europe so far is mostly just domnestic train services, with of course a few exceptions.
There are some plans for some interesting projects like the Rail Baltica from Helsinki*(Tallinn) down thru the Baltic States, then into Poland, and then Germany and all the way to the Netherlands with high speed, and Spain is working on bettering the improvements with train from Lisbon to Madrid. I challenge anyone to check rail from Lisbon to Madrid these days :D and try to find a route, but its in the plans to be able to do it with Madrid-Badajoz-Lisbon eventually.
Anyways, like you said, it needs to be done like with airlines, but one key is also having the lines built, as there currently is a lack of connections between countries, where lots of rail services stops at certain borders, and then there is the gauge-issues that is being fixed as well with new rail services being built.
"government monopolies do not benefit passengers…"
"…but private ones do" - some guy in the British parliament, probably
Rule of thumb: if it comes out of British parliament, be skeptical
firstly - it was a huge success. Secondly - it was not privatised, but more of *prihvatized*, you don't have this word in English but it means that its was a parody of privatisation with different targets. Government gifted one company all right on rail infrastructure, and no one else except them could build and own tracks. Plus neither have they given them right d\to decide themselves what to do, many projects were stopped and other promoted, what resulted in more sort of government company under private control, which has no relation to the private company, it is crony capitalism. Despite all of this far less incidents occurred and punctuality improved and it was actually profitable despite the fact that government subsidises cars
@@redakteur3613 I am sorry, crony capitalism is capitalism. Capitalism is antithesis to democracy.
@@ratulxy Right, what happened in NL wouldn't be called privatization if we were talking about any other industry. Privatization means selling all public assets to private companies and changing the regulatory structure to accommodate them. What we're seeing in Europe is mainly state-owned enterprises competing on government subsidized tracks. I'm neutral on this "open access" model, and I can see issues arising if it's not carefully regulated, but it seems to be doing fine so far. The British model was actually a more thorough attempt at privatization, and of course it led to crony capitalism, where it was FORCED to be profitable in many cases, and services were better or worse depending on the particularities of various contracts, which were often corrupt and led to cost-cutting services and poor maintenance. There was a period when there were more accidents too.
If I were Dutch, I would be against selling NS or ProRail in pieces or as a whole to private owners. That would lead to crony capitalism where the funding is somewhat public but the profits are wholly private. There's a reason most rail infrastructure and operators became nationalized in the first place; the private companies were failing miserably and sane countries saw the public service as important regardless. In the US, rail is much more privatized even though the only long distance operator is government subsidized. If you take away those subsidies or sell Amtrak to private owners, it would collapse again where they would only run in the profitable regions, and we'd be left with no service as opposed to bad service. The US solution is obvious, to nationalize the rail infrastructure and actually enforce Amtrak priority. Therefore, all this talk about "privatization" in Europe and Asia is very misleading since it still involves heavy government ownership and regulation, so its successes can't be attributed to private enterprises doing the right thing since pure competition on rail is flat out impossible. It's akin to privatizing roads and hoping companies would do the right thing in still providing cheap open access, which would not happen because their sole purpose is to make profit, often by avoiding competition and becoming a monopoly themselves or just slowly going broke.
In economics, we call these situations "natural monopolies" like water supply and utilities, and I don't believe there's any good reason to get private enterprise involved because they would only take the most profitable routes and lines, and even those would fall apart eventually if the state didn't regulate them. In a dense country like NL, you can find foreign state-owned enterprises making a profit and providing better service in regional routes, but that's a far cry from private operators running on private tracks with minimal regulation. I think their success is due to the fact that they are used to being heavily regulated, and their public ownership means profit isn't their only motive.
@@jeois411 too many false things. Read about rail privatisation in Britain, there was only one big study. Where and when there were "more accidents" on the rails, if in any time there were fewer, actually noticeably fewer, it is just statistics. Private companies operating trains in the EU are actually private and have no relation to public space because as soon as public company enters in open access(really open access) market and do not have subsidies from the government - it has no difference from private company. Railtrack nationalisation will be a disaster, the current state of them are in most part due to regulations on the tracks, that's why many 2 track rail corridors become 1 track rail corridors. Statement that railways can not be profitable is a flat out lie, as private companies built all the USA transportation and worked perfectly, till the time when one man decided to ruin them with highway act.. Road have to be private, then railways can be entirely private(however in many cases than can be private already), and if you don't know private owner has to earn money and not fail due to competition - where your logic goes remains unknown - that will force more competition, that will create more need of other transport modes as rails - and there won't be any debate about 'why spend so much on highways and so little on rails'. You say only on the theme of government runned capitalism and not actual capitalism, as if smb(government) can decide what should and shouldn't be done you ll become crony capitalism. 'Natural monopolies' also do not exist, I bet you could not define monopoly also, as well as how long ago this term was made up
The service improvements you mention are very likely mandated in the tender and payed for by the subsidies regional governments pay to the operator. Also the network in the UK is also run by the state, after a series of accidents in the late 90ies.
They are often suggested by the operators, then mandated by the governments in future tenders. Local governments have many different jobs and there is no one there with expertise on modern rolling stock, etc.
Yes the money comes from the government, but NS used to charge much more for less service (hence why they don’t win many contracts).
@@Thom-TRAIn the UK there is four franchises run by the UK, in what is know as the operator of last resort, who run LNER, Trans Pennine Express, Northern and South Eastern. The private company which maintained the tracks after British rail was called Railtrack who where brought out of bankruptcy by the UK government with the company called Network Rail, the reason for tracks bankruptcy was because of Southall Crash, Ladbroke Grove Crash, Hatfield Crash, Potters Bar and Great Heck Crash which all happened in a 5 year period. In the UK all tracks and stations are owned by Network Rail with the majority of them being leased out to the Train Operating Company's (TOC's) such as GTR (Govia Thameslink Railway who run Gatwick Express, Thameslink, Great Northern and Southern) or GWR, paths are given to Freight Operating Company's (FOC's) such as GB Rail Freight or Direct Rail Services (DRS), there is a few open access operators in the UK and they are Eurostar, Grand Central, Hull Trains, Lumo, North Yorkshire Moors Railway and Swanage Railway. The North Yorkshire Moors railway and Swanage Railway the reason for having the open access operator status is to permit them to run there heritage services on the mainline. The UK there is Mutiple different government organisations who deal with the running of the railway and some of the are DRS, ORR (Office of Rail and Road), RSSB (Rail Standards and Safety Board), DfT (Department for Transport), Network Rail. Most of the rolling stock is owned by ROSCO's who lease the trains to the TOC's and FOC's.
One major difference that I see is that the UK decided not to keep a state owned competitor around, and that looks like a big mistake.
@@giacintoboccia9386 The UK did keep a state owned competitor around.
@@joshuaritchie3836 I only knew about the Operator of Last Resort, but that is more of a supervising autority that gets control over someone else's operations than a stable operator who conpetes for tenders. But then, I can be wrong.
It seems like long distance competition mostly works on fast lines of high demand. That's where you find Westbahn (Austria), RegioJet and Leo Express (Czechia). Likewise in Spain where you find international competitors only on the high speed lines.
The problem here is if the private operators only do the "cherry picking" on those few lines, someone still has to provide service on less profitable lines, and that's usually the state-owned train operating company.
People who happen to live on secondary mainlines also have an interest in good service, even if it doesn't make a profit. In the times of state railways it was a mixed calculation, profitable lines playing for those that made a loss. Now it seems the state has to make sure that regions get good service even if running trains there isn't that profitable.
That’s the open access providers. But the first 15 minutes of this video were about the regional lines, precisely the point you bring up. They were improved because of a partnership between public and private.
In the Netherlands, all regional lines have half-hourly service. Companies want to win contracts, so they propose improvements to entice the governing authorities. These governments then make sure the operators stick to their word. Like I said, it’s the best of both worlds.
@@Thom-TRA Right, as long as companies don't go bankrupt or otherwise bust. Germany has had a few "emergency takeovers", some of which involving Abellio (NS group). Some regions are now taking precautions by maintaining a pool of vehicles and making contracts allowing employees to keep working for a different company if that happens.
@@Thom-TRA the Dutch or German model of contracting regional lines out to the best bidder every few years makes a lot of sense. Here in Germany I’ve generally seen a lot of improvements, but often after a few months of chaos. The German DB Regio also took a different route to NS and do compete for these contracts, but with better trains and service.
Where I’m much more critical is on the main line/ long distance services. In Italy or Spain they had a lot of spare capacity, so having companies run trains on their own risk is probably a good thing. Here in Germany we don’t really have spare capacity at all, so competition would always reduce the number of trains DB could run. In this case outside companies Cherry picking profitable routes could very much mean less profitable routes suffering, because DB can’t subsidized them with different lines anymore. Also, giving up the basically countrywide integrated fare system would be incredibly annoying. The example of the card readers from the Netherlands looks completely ridiculous and the UK seems to be even worse with pricing and tickets as confusing as airlines.
There are already a few services in Germany like Flixtrain, the ÖBB nightjets and Westbahn which aren’t integrated with DB and it’s quite annoying. Especially with the more expensive DB tickets, where you can take any train on the correct route. Because of course none of the privately run trains count, so it just makes it harder to understand and less convenient.
@@Thom-TRA would to see not-hst long distance trains with lower prices. A lot of 'hst' trains charge premium prices for not really fast journeys. ( Many in Germany , A'dam-Brus ..)
The old TEE train 'etoile du nord' would do A'dam-Paris in 4:20h . Only 1 hr longer than the fastest thalys but at a fixed price 30-40% of that Thalys.
Currently the Mons- stquenten is closed , but from Antwerp-Lille via the old IC line to Paris (4.5 hr ?) could be viable and have an edge against the Thalys ..
Spain is different because only high speed lines are standard gauge so foreign competitors have a natural barrier to only compete on high speed lines. (Unless they buy Spanish Talgos and pay to go through gauge changing facilities where high speed connects with Iberian Gauge tracks (1,668mm). Similarly, you are not likely to find competition on the Swiss nartrow gauge railways in the mountains. But could see a private luxury train doing tours on those (but not providing transportation, think national rail = ferry vs tour trains = cruise ship).
The biggest mistake in the UK was probably getting rid of the state operator entirely, instead of forcing it to compete directly with private companies. This is how we differ from the rest of europe stricturally, and I'd srgue we're worse off for it.
Another way you differ is the narrow loading gauge which means having to use bespoke non-standard, therefore expensive train types.
Call me old-fashioned, but I had rather had NS operating all lines in The Netherlands. Specifically, I really don't like the checkout/checkin required.
That said, there's one specific cross-border line that I would love to see restored. It's the now non-existing direct connection between Eindhoven and Belgium (Eindhoven-Turnhout-Antwerpen).
Yep. All it does is cause ticketing nightmares and fragmentation.
It's not reduced prices.
You both seem to forget that the ticket fragmentation is a bad choice that the Netherlands made, and not an inherent flaw of competition. In Germany and Switzerland, this issue of checking in and out does not exist.
@@Thom-TRA Hard disagree. And it’s not just the Netherlands that’s made this choice.
UK and DE have similar problems fragmenting a system.
@@Dunkcanio by DE do you mean Denmark? Because Germany has integrated ticketing, except for a few open access operators.
And you’re not disagreeing with me, you’re ignoring what I said: that fragmented ticketing is a choice, not an inherent flaw of competition. Ticket integration is not some unachievable goal. It’s definitely not an argument for lackluster monopolies.
@@Thom-TRA yes, I was meaning the fragmented open access operations in Germany. Excluding them from your point negates the one you were trying to make.
Coming from a poorer country, Trenitalia is shining in this new European landscape, turns out that they are quite a good operator, and very little local services in Italy were won by someone else (due to very tight budgets).
Interesting video! Just one minor detail: railway track infrastructure in the UK, major termini and major interchange stations are maintained by Network Rail, a public company (after the huge failure of the private company Railtrack to provide minimum safety standards).
The major interchanges would earn themselves back due to high ridership. But maintaining the hundreds of small stations must be a huge financial burden on the TOCs.
The name of the FS backed group QBZZZ smashed me as someone that uses FS daily but also some Arriva services
Fun fact: FS bought Qbuzz from NS!
As much as I am interested in how this is gonna work out in the future, I'm worried that it will become a tariff jungle. Don't forget the Dutch railway is operated more like a metronetwork, than high speed train network. The dutch network is very accessible where you hardly have to watch the schedule. With frequencies somewhere between 2 and 10x per hour on every route. In countries like Germany, Spain, Italy or France you are forced to buy tickets in advcanced, or pay very high prices. A spontaneous 90 minute trip in a IC/ICE in Germany will cost €60 (Hannover-Dortmund for example) one way. In the Netherlands you can the whole country in a IC for €25 one way.
I feel like making a system where it would be beneficial for people to book in advance and compare different operators on different sites, it would backfire in a compact country like NL that people will just use their cars, as almost all the large cities are within a 90 minute drive of each other. The NL doesn't have long distance corridor where this model would work, such as Paris-Lyon or Frankfurt-Munich where driving would take double as long as the train and the ride is more than 3 hours.
The eu is mandating all train operators adopt a single comprehensive ticket system. So it should be being worked on at least.
The regional railways work as they work in the Netherlands in all the country you mentioned. The point is that the Netherlands are so small that they don’t need anything else but what would be considered regional to move people throughout the whole country.
In the case of the hs trains they going abroad they work exactly like they work in every other European country, with prices fluctuating according to demand. So Netherlands works exactly they way other European countries work, the only thing it has the others don’t it’s the integration with local transportation systems.
I won't be surprised if Dutch rail companies eventually are going to deliver the service of reserving in advance. The NS wants to deliver this "service" for some time now just like in the UK under the name of Abellio, but each time they get so much resistance they postpone this decision. Now with this EU wide standardization excuse they have to implement it before 2025 of course.
Strong argument
If Italian railways are going to operate keep one thing in mind. The Italian railways have the Fyra in their fleet and it would be likely that they’re gonna use it on less expensive tracks
I don’t think they will run the fyra in NL. That would be too much backlash.
I have been praying for years for a highspeed connection between Amsterdam-Utrecht-Eindhoven
It's way to densely populated to build a high-speed line on that route
12:50, most UK tracks are owned and maintained by network rail, it's no different to ProRail, DB Netze, SBB Infra, or similar
I know that in the UK at least station maintenance is the responsibility of the TOCs
Hi Thom, as always a very comprehensive overview of a rather complex topic - I fully agree that competition does generally provide for an improved customer focus in all aspects, especially in transport. Greater choices/options should result in improved customer service, as you identified that fast trains now compete with airlines in Europe - often being the preferred mode of transport not just on price. I particularly liked your role plays in which you demonstrated how the tender process usually operates (at least you even changed your caps & tops - the judge one with the towel was a classic). I hope your move to Washington DC all went well & that you no longer have to deal with the extreme cold/snow & ice of Grand Rapids & Chicago. As you know, Washington DC is also a major train passenger hub & I look forward to your in-depth analysis of the transit services. Proof yet again that trains are awesome.
The move went great and I love the weather here!
Why did UK privatisation fail? Poor trains, poor track and too cheap a service with rushed tenders, and government wanting to invest nothing; end result ~ 50 people dead with 3 train crashes - another British success story!
Oof
Ah yes, let's mock dead British people!
So used to seeing Arriva on regional/commuter services, if they get it approved, a service to Paris would be really cool to see! Designing the Frecciarossa for cross Europe services is paying off, spreading everywhere...
Frecciarossa is becoming the European flagship…
Good video overall, however I noticed the differentiation you made between privatization in the EU and UK was that "In the rest of the EU, the maintenence of tracks is the responsibility of a seperate company, and not the train operating company". This is the same in the UK! All physical infrastructure in the UK is managed by network rail, who are a government agency, not by individual TOCs. hope this helps!
There is more trackside maintenance required in the UK than there is in mainland Europe. For example, stations are generally maintained by the TOCs. This is a huge financial strain that mainland European companies don’t face. It’s one of the flaws that experts point to as a reason for the demise of privatization in the UK.
God I'd love to see a no-transfers Amsterdam-Rome Frecciarossa service.
I love these more in depth videos! I was just idly browsing wikipedia last night looking at a lot of this so it's nice to see a proper explanation of it all!
I also love the general quality improvements over the last few years, keep it up!
Thank you!
What a crazy coincidence that you were researching this! I hope it helped
Thank you for your good and informative videos.
Railway competition is a topic on which I have a changing option on, over the years. In the end my conclutions is, that a railway-system runs at it's best, when it is fully integrated. Tracks, vehicles and operation needs to be synchronised with at least interfaces as a possible.
In the end, state owned European railways in the 80s where bad, because of the lack of goverment effort, not a lack of competition.
In the end, you need a long running constant plan and the will to spent money for it to develope your train system, like Switzerland does since more than 40 years.
Those last two are not contradictory. Not putting in enough effort is only possible when there’s no competition. Who else are passengers going to use?
Seeing other people do it better has at least encouraged NS to do better, and the same can be said for the Italians, who finally stopped demanding ridiculous prices for their spotty HSR service after Italo entered the market.
I agree about integration though, that’s what I like about the German and Swiss systems.
@@Thom-TRANot enough effort from state is also possible with competing railway companies, e.g. when they let tracks get rotten. Then the best trainservice is useless.
And in clock faced traffic, which I think is the best system for railways, you need to have synchronized systems. In airtraiffic you have point to point connections, where it is reasonable to choose between different companies. In a railwayconnection with many interchanges, it would be a wast if two trains run right after another, and then a long time no one, just to have the ability to choose between two companies.
But it is not my turn, to set the rules. I just suffered due to them, by finding timetable solutions for the rail companies, that wanted to use 'my' tracks.
Yea my country railways, Indonesia, is still an integrated, state-owned companies. I'm still learning all these privatisation and breakup things, and I reckon that simpler is better? 😅
In Germany regional trains in a tender (so all regional trains) always have an integrated fare with other operators. The fares are set by a government agency that grants the contracts (different agencies for different regions). It only gets complicated if you leave the area of one agency and enter another.
I think that’s a good way to set it up
@@Thom-TRA on the downside: the fares tend to be on the complex side - especially if you get to rural areas.t they are set by politicians and buerocrats. The exception being the 49 €-Ticket.
@@Thom-TRAEddie Dempsey is going to hate this
The company A-C skit was awesome! Especially a company suing another 😂
Come to my Broadway show 😂
Arriva using ICE 3M totally make sense as
1. they're getting older and being replaced by the e320 ICEs and also the newer version of ICE 4 (XL)
2. ICE 3M has been long used on dutch - german routes, even NS had a fleet of them at some point
Ns still has a few of them to be used on the Amsterdam/Brussels-Frankfurt route with DB, but these units have a lot of reliability issues (especially running on both low and high frequency AC, but also with the doors due to vibrations caused by the engine being underneath the doors). Making it better to use the ICE 3 neo that is run between Frankfurt and Paris. They have much better reliability.
Yeah the ICE 3M are showing quite a few problems, so it will be interesting to see what they end up using
@@Thom-TRADB Fernverkehr wants to sell them, but even they know it's very unlikely someone wants to buy the shitshow that the BR406 is.
I'd argue having government monopolies are much better for commuting. Because they can intergrate services with other public transport like buses and also usually the timetables are made to have good connections and here is an example I have.
The Struer to Vejle line was privatised in 2020 and Arriva took over from DSB (except 4 trains a day)
Back when DSB ran the line there was a 2 hourly train heading straight to Copenhagen and a 2 hourly service cutting short at Fredericia (which is a major rail interchange)
Nowerdays most trains are ran between Struer and Vejle and you get a 4 minute connection to a train to Copenhagen which is still ran by DSB.
Sadly because of this if the Arriva train arrives late the DSB train will not care and leave the Arriva passengers behind.
Also no Arriva trains don't atleast continue to Fredericia (I suppose this is due to their trains capped at 120 kmph which is much slower than the line speed).
So really privatization does not really work if you want a public transport network with good intergration with other parts of the network.
The thing is: you can force private operators to integrate with other services, but you need to have the political will to actually do so.
@@jan-lukas this is a good point!
@@jan-lukas I think if you want to privatise you should do a contract system like what TFL does. So the government makes the timetable and price then private contract can bid to run the trains. Denmark does this with the buses.
A bit late but here’s how the Dutch Model could work here:
The Northeast Corridor=Main Line Network
Amtrak would keep the service via a no-bid contract but in exchange for that exclusivity, track and infrastructure would be transferred to a new USDOT. That infrastructure company would be responsible for restoring the 457-mile route back to acceptable shape, leaving Amtrak to exclusively focus on running trains.
State-Supported Routes=Tender System
For routes under 750 miles, the tender system will be used and applied to individual states, multistate compacts and California's Joint Powers Authorities. These routes would be put up for bid for contracts ranging anywhere from five to 10 years, and the commuter rail model could also be worth a look.
Exceptions are states like Virginia, which has a 30-year contract with Amtrak.
Long-Distance Routes=open access model
The overnight trains should be handled via this model. In addition to the FRA's Long Distance Service Study being utilized, other companies would run overnight service on the track via intense negotiations and assuming full responsibility.
NEC Challengers
The open access model would also apply to any operator who wants to take on Amtrak on its most favorable region.
That’s actually a pretty good comparison
I have a few points to add:
- NS wanted to add Leeuwarden-Groningen to the main lines as well, as it was the only profitable line. However the government said no, the NS had to either retain all 7 of the northern diesel lines, or none of them.
- Arriva also did ask to get the tender for the high speed line in 2013 stating that NS was not providing adequate service with the fyra debacle, however the NS managed to stop that. A shame if you ask me, we would have had ice's running between Brussels and Amsterdam by now (they said they needed 3-4 years to get ready, so that they could start running around 2017).
- The main problem with the Thalys is there is only one other intercity between the Netherlands and Belgium, that the Benelux train, which is one hour slower, but essentially takes the same route between the Netherlands and Brussels (it stops in Breda and is reduced to an regional train in Belgium for some reason (causing much of the delay), but that is it). The result is that a lot of people going to Belgium take the Thalys as well, and the Thalys cannot handel all of that extra traffic.
On your last point: the amount of IC's going into Belgium is indeed scandalous. It will be improving rather soon (in railway terms, that is) in 2025 with a fast new Amsterdam - Brussels service by NS using the ICNG, and a slower train run with NMBS carriages that keeps the stopping pattern of the IC Brussel that runs today. Thalys should have foreseen this year's ago. They didn't, and are not interested in transporting as many people as possible, only in maximising their yields. The Eurostar merger might or might not improve the situation, since we could be seeing some e320 between Amsterdam and Paris, but, on the other hand, Thalys now needs to help cover the immense covid debt of Eurostar.
@@Giruno56 That would be nice if that happened and i think the new trains will not arrive before 2025 anyway. The ns wanted to prevent a second fyra and only ordered 2 to do testing at first, only ordering more trains for Belgium later on. But I havent heard of the NMBS introducing new trains and thought they were fiercely against skipping any stops in Belgium (to protect "their" thalys services as the quicker service).
I do know the main reason that the ns only runs one train now is that parliament demanded ns use the high speed line for a faster icbrussels or the concession would be taken away. And that renting those traxx locomotives for these trains is quite expensive. So the ns did not really have the budget (especially after fyra and overbidding on the hsl concession) to buy/lease even more trains.
I did hear about thalys wanting to use the eurostar trains, but apparently the maintenance yard for these is in the UK, and you can't exactly move these overnight. But it could actually help eurostar, as they bought too many trains, thinking there would be services to other UK cities and a UK-germany service as well. Using them on amsterdam-paris seems like a good option tough.
UK experience makes me very wary of rail privatisation, but I have to admit I'm drooling of the thought of taking a Frecciarossa to Amsterdam
I do agree with what you say about Japan because it's either JR or the private companies. Also it is tough to know for that train pass in the Netherlands you have to do it like the Clipper Card in the California Bay area
In the case of Germany Austria and Switzerland it's still the National Railway operator that runs infrastructure for the railways. Austria ÖBB Infra Germany Deutsche Bahn Netze Switzerland SBB Infra
Yes but they are separate companies from the passenger train operating companies, they just keep the same name. ProRail could have just as easily been called NS Infra.
More explainers like this please!!! Love your simple approach to explain this issue!!!
Thank you! Will do
Somehow Switzerland is working perfectly fine without this liberalisation on rails....
🤔
Its interesting to see how the privatisation and tendering out of regional lines has been succesful in the Netherlands, because in Denmark where I'm from its a VERY different story.
The Danish rail sector was liberalised in 1998 and a tender soon after began to operate various secondary regional railways through Jutland. Several companies bid for the contracts, but low cost was a big part in the tender. Though not the lowest bid, Arriva won the contracts and took over a huge amount of the Jutlandian rail network, deploying at the time brand new Lint 41 trains on the routes... which were good with accessibility but in other ways a downgrade from the former, slightly older DSB rolling stock on parameters like comfort and capacity. But people werent unhappy. When stuff really went sour was in the late 2010's.
In 2015, the previous left wing government had done a direct award of regional services in the north of Denmark from the State railways DSB to the regional transit agency, Nordjyske Jernbaner. They already owned and operated 2 former private railway branch lines in the area, as was the case with nearly all former private railway lines, not part of DSB. But now they'd operate the Mainline services too and were really succesful. However in 2015 a new right wing government would enter the frey, and do a retender. This time the price of the bid was extremely high, due to the parties wanting to spend as few taxes as possible, alligning with their party politics. One of the lines was the Svendborg line from Odense to Svendborg, which had been operated by DSB since 1949. Service was generally less reliable than desirable, but Arriva won the contract for it, and several other routes, as well as rewinning all but 1 line.
However when Arriva entered service, everything went to shit! Arriva didnt invest in new rolling stock at all, instead taking over DSB's old fleet of branch line Siemens Desiro DMU's. 4 of these were sold in an agreement to Midtjyske Jernbaner, another regional authority owned agency who won the 1 line away from Arriva. However Arrivas reliability only became worse and worse and worse, with even more frequent cancellations, too low capacity, outdated trains, and service cutbacks! Midtjyske Jernbaner wasn't doing super well either. Arriva benefitted from having a large network, meaning on the line in question from Skjern to Holstebro, the operations would simply be an extension of another route. So trains from Aarhus to Skjern would simply continue from Skjern to Struer, where Arrivas main depot was at an hourly frequency.
However with Midtjyske winning the line in isolaton, they had to cut back services to Holstebro, AND due to only receiving 4 trains, it meant they didnt have enough to maintain an hourly frequency with turnaround times. All of this resulting in a cut back and less reliable train service. And the authorities havent been interested in funding more either.
Another hurdle here is ticket integration. We have a nationwide smartcard like the Dutch OV Chipkaard in the form of the Rejsekort (though the agency behind it for some stupid reason wants to replace it with a phone app). However for all other fares, private operators like Arriva have the problem of ticket integration since their tickets aren't integrated into the greater public transit agency. DSB has managed to do this in the east of Denmark where no lines have been tendered out, and where the trains generally are more well used. But in the west, neither DSB, nor Arriva, have been able to integrate their fares with the regional transit agencies. Nordjyske Jernbaner, who I mentioned before have integrated fares but thats because they're owned by the regional transit agency directly and managed by the Regional authority as a public service provider, not a private company.
As for open access, its still in its infancy here but we have some. Most notably Snälltåget, who is owned by Transdev. Snälltåget, which runs open access in Sweden, runs a few night trains through Denmark, making a few stops here. The most notable of which being the Berlin Night Express from Malmö to Berlin, with through carriages from Berlin to Stockholm being attached to Snälltågets daytrains on this route. The biggest factor limiting open access operation here at the moment though is A: Lack of electrification on the mainlines, B: the high toll for crossing the Great Belt bridge, the only rail link between east and west in Denmark, and C: the long journey times to Germany. But 2 of these 3 problems will be fixed in the coming years via the electrification program and the Fehmarn tunnel.
Along with this, SJ, the Swedish State railways, have repeatedly shown interest in operating open access on the Danish railways, and even tried once over 10 years ago with a service between Copenhagen and Odense, hoping to capture long distance commuters, and through travellers to Stockholm. However due to poor marketing and few departures, this service ended after only a few months. But the electrification to Aarhus, the 2nd largest city here, is planned to be operational in 2026-27, and a ton of intercity traffic happens between Aarhus and Copenhagen, which SJ and many others likely bang on. SJ has even made specifications to its new 250km/h trains to make them capable of operating in Denmark, and I bet they'll want to use them here once the conditions are right.
Thank God for Irish rail
You're right, privatisation has failed in the UK and in Germany it isn't doing too well either
As I understand the Japanese system the former JR company was split into various passenger companies and one freight.The plan being to dish them out to the oligarchs and plutocrats but only a few companies are owned by the private sector most former JR companies remain state owned.A similar system totally failed in New Zealand.Another very similar system in Scotland, England and Wales is in the process of a long protracted failure.
The JR companies are not state-owned; and while they do have the longest track length, they are only 7 companies in a country with over 100.
It's been cool to see this type of thing happening throughout Europe. Love to see competition in the high speed rail market. It makes them appear even more like airlines!
I love the variety in rolling stock and liveries that comes with it!
Im all for it as long as all national operators use the OV chipcard system and my 40% off peak reduction will be valid on all lines. Better service is good but I dont want a hassle and have to think about which train, which ticket... things like that, enter a sort of suscription hell like the streaming services mess. That would seem a huge step back. I just want a serivce that works and that I dont have to think about. Just show up, tap in, wait and go. If the competing companies can manage to make that work and can operate under a single umbrella so to speak, im all for it.
And now we're in a position where a Flixbus to Limburg from Amsterdam is about half the price of a train ticket....
the thing I like least about this style of privatization is the relatively short tenders potentially disincentivizing private companies from maintaining their networks towards the end of their time, and the semi-constant change that can result in. I feel like fully privatizing all the infrastructure that the private companies run on as they did in Japan could be beneficial if the routes are able to be profitable (with real estate ventures to help), but then again I am just a person on the internet who doesn't really understand national transport policy
That’s definitely a risk, one that can be prevented by threatening with fines for leaving service in a bad state for the next operator.
Privatizing infrastructure has never turned out good, just look at Germany, UK, USA, and so on and so on. I do think that privatizing service can work great sometimes and be a really bad thing sometimes. But that's also the same with public services, generally speaking
@@jan-lukas you know that electric grids, sewage, drinking water, internet, are all public infrastructure that are privatized right?
The world isn’t black and white. Full capitalism isn’t ideal, government control of everything is not effective either.
@@jan-lukas It worked wonders in Japan, and the golden age of railroading in the US and UK was brought about by private ownership in a style similar to Japan right now (a country which is also experiencing a rail golden age).
It is a HUGE mistake to have the infrastructure seperated from operation. Might work fine on roads, but for railways, there's too much depending on the infrastructure design and availability. Half the Dutch network is offline for maintenance every weekend, and months on end during holidays, which is insane. But the monopoly that Prorail has end the fact that it doesn't serve passengers directly, means they (read: the government that own Prorail) can do it.
the Netherlands desperately needs the Japanese system where infrastructure is owned by the main user, while other users are still allowed on the tracks.
Overdrijven is ook een vak. But I am always in favor of making railways more like the Japanese system.
@@Thom-TRA not sure, there have been years where the line from my hometown to Utrecht has been offline for more than 30 days, that's closing in on 10% of all annual trains being cancelled. For planned "maintenance", I'm not counting system errors.
There are even times when the line is down because of situations on the other side of Utrecht, because they removed too many switches in Utrecht and can't turn back trains there.
3:05 bruh not those clowns who hate hearing a foreign language 💀
It’s so bad
An excellent video Thom and very up-to-date. I can't wait for the Luik/Aken service to begin in December. I'll be FLIRTing between all three countries (BE/DE/NL) from my base in Valkenburg.
I’ll have to hear how the journey is!
@@Thom-TRA I'll keep you posted. BTW, Arriva have announced a plan to start a service from Groningen to Paris. That would mean a purchase of new rolling stock.
@@Eurobazz I talk about the Groningen to Paris train in this video
Great video. I think it's great if the open-access operators can bring down prices, improve service and bring more people onto the rails over less efficient modes. I'll just be on the record saying I'd welcome Trenitalia and the Frecriarossa 1000 with open arms to the Northeast Corridor as an open access operator if it brought down ticket prices and improved service and wow do those trains look nice. It'll be interesting to see what Brightline has up their sleeeves in terms of WAS-BOS. The NEC has showed up on a map of corridors they want to run in the U.S, and I wonder if this would be a new build or operating on the Northeast Corridor as an open-access operator.
I think the U.S. could really get better passenger and freight service if we created an infrastructure agency that maintained the tracks throughout the U.S. "Don't know what I'd call it," then work towards open access for freight and passenger breaking up the Class 1's monopolies, while putting policies in place that would also alllow for high quality regional, intercity and high speed passenger service and improvements for the long-run like full electrification of mainlines and the heavier used secondary lines.
Amtrak makes profit on the NE Corridor which helps subsidize unprofitable routes. It also doesn't own all tracks along the way (eg: north of New York). The US government might allow competition only revenues from tracks usage by comeptitors would compensate for loss of revenue by Amtrak. And there would be a huge problem of bidding for access to Penn Station and the tunnesl in New York which would drive price and lower frequency for NJ Transit and Amtrak.
I recently proposed to the european transport agency a new high speed line between Lille and Stuttgart, connecting Luxemburg and some smaller cities in between. Such a line, with target speeds up to 400Km/h would connect London St. Pancras and Stuttgart in 2:50h or to Munich in 4:20h. Nuremberg in less then 5h, Frankfurt city in 3:30h or Luxembourg in 2h. I believe such a project would drastically improve connectability betweeen Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Uk and Brussels. Any thoughts on that possibility?
That’s a great idea!
Ah this is the jerk who also put it on LiniePlus I think. Just ignoring geography and if such a line is actually possible. I could also tell you what feels like thousands of corridors to connect using such lines, but nearly every time the simple answer is: it's just not (economically) feasible to do so
@@jan-lukas now suddenly you care about what’s economically viable? I thought travel was a human need and it doesn’t matter if there’s a profit to be made or not.
I prefer the Italian, French, Austrian and German model where the historical railway monopolist has become a group which owns the train operator, the track operator and so on. This has not blocked competition.
What I do not understand is why the stations on the Netherlands are owned by NS Stations and not by Prorail.
Who knows…
Loved the video. I needed a bit of humor. Their system sounds a bit like ours, except it is much more extensive with higher frequency, and they control most of the tracks. While Amtrak runs the Northeast Corridor and long distance routes, most other Amtrak services are state subsidized, such as the Empire Service which runs about a dozen trains a day each way between New York City and the state capital at Albany with some trains continuing on to Maine, Vermont, Montreal via the Adirondacks, and points West. In Western NY, there are only 4 trains per day in each direction, including one to Toronto, one to Chicago, and two to Niagara Falls, NY. Former member of Congress, the late Louise Slaughter, fought for more frequent, high speed service, but it seems to no longer be a priority, even with the increased funding available. And now, private companies are starting to take an interest in offering rail service in the U.S., including Brightline in Florida and Nevada/California. I wonder if foreign operators will take an interest here.
The problem the US has is that the freight companies own the track and whilst law states that Amtrak should be prioritized... afaik they don't get that priority because it is cheaper to pay the fine. US needs to buy up the track or just give passenger rail dedicated track that freight trains aren't allowed on or something.
@@roadtrain_ In New York, Conrail, a federal corporation similar to Amtrak, took over some freight lines and owned a portion of the tracks used by the Empire Service. They did give Amtrak priority and maintained the rails at a higher standard. For a time, Amtrak was able to run Turboliner trains at 120 MPH on their part of the route and up to 89 MPH on Conrail tracks. Unfortunately, with the push to privatize, Conrail was sold to commercial interests and now CSX maintains to a lower standard, limiting AMTRAK to 79 MPH maximum (but often lower) while violating the passenger right of way law, making service much slower and less predictable.
@@jstephens2758 I know about conrail, mainly thanks to Alan Fisher. But yeah, giving amtrak priority once again would be such a boost for the US. Your country was built on rails after all
Another interesting case of NS vs franchising is the R-Net branding on the regional rail line from Gouda to Alphen aan den Rijn, which is operated by NS but the branding is as if R-Net were a separate regional company like Arriva or Keolis.
I used to take that train every day! Been thinking of making a video explaining R-NET someday
Well the Netherlands seems to be doing public transit by private operators really well. Kind of makes you wonder how you can use this to make trains better in a lot of places
@@chickenpommes19 Those buses that are meant to fill gaps in the rail network aren’t that good?
@@chickenpommes19I live in Drenthe and I get 30 ish minute (the trains don't go exactly every 30 minutes but it's 2 trains an hour) service over here. Compared to germany where trains may come every 1 or 2 hours I'd say it's pretty decent.
Thank you very much for this excellent and highly amusing video ! I agree with all that you say, especially about the possIbility of the Italian Frecciarossa trains running between Paris and Amsterdam. The Thalys service is pretty good, but their TGV based trains are showing their age. I do hope you are enjoying using the trains in the DC area, and hope you will report soon !
Stay tuned for a report from the brand new station next Saturday!
Thalys is also extremely expensive
Well explained indeed! Privatization does not work equally well in other countries, but the Dutch case makes a convincing argument for how it can work. Being Swiss I'm skeptical about the benefits it would bring us here. Some benefits of opening our tracks are evident tough: It's great to have TGVs, Railjet and ICE trains connecting Swiss cities with destinations in France, Austria and Germany, for example. I'd also welcome Frecciarossa trains heading up north trough the Gotthard and Simplon to Bern, Geneva and Zürich, but that will take a couple more years and a few technical adaptations, I fear.
Why would it work in the Netherlands but not in Switzerland?
@@lars3321because there's different ways to do privatization. It all depends on what exact parts you actually privatize (infrastructure, trains, personnel) and also what policies are enacted to stop problems in the actually privatized areas.
@@lars3321 usually private companies need to be profitable, especially in Switzerland with the mountains and demographics you face high investment for a low ridership, by having one big pot of money that takes the huge income on some route has to be distributed to unprofitable routes because if you were to stop those, the influx to the big routes would also fall apart and everything fails. I don't see this problem in the netherlands where you can have sort of get "my garden, your garden" and make that profitable on a smaller scale.
An explainer on TEN-T would make a nice companion piece.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Awesome video!! Eurostar will not stop service to the Netherlands as a whole for an entire year, just not to Amsterdam. Rotterdam will still see multiple services a day to London and passengers travelling from Amsterdam can take alternative trains (Thalys for example) to Rotterdam or Brussels.
They’re not going to turn it around in Rotterdam
The nonsense of privatisation, one state owned company competing in another country with another state owned company undercutting prices at the expense of their taxpayers. We've seen this with Abbelio ( a full owned daugter of state owned Dutch NS) in Scotland. A disaster, for consumers in Scotland as wel as the Dutch taxpayer who's going to pick up the bill. These so called "private "enterprises are delivering at best services in foreign countries, services that they don't deliver at home. Trains from Freciarossa ( a full daughter of Italian state owned railways) delivering better hi speed services than her parent company at home!! Same with Arriva ( German state owned railways). That is NOT real competition because when things go wrong the parent company picks up the bill and that is the German, Italian French..ect taxpayer.
Further more private companies are only interested in the best routes the only ones that make money. Like Flix, only between big cities undercutting the "dumb"state owned railways. That is NOT in the best interest of the consumer because the small lines are the live lines for a liveable countryside, since you can't make a profit there these services will suffer unless the government subsidises the operator. Cutting away the profitable parts of the network a state owned operator is left with only "bleeders"so the taxpayer has to fork out even more money...
This whole comment just kind of screams that you did not pay attention to anything.
And your logic is so flawed.
“Profit for shareholders, cost for taxpayers,” you yell.
The shareholders of these state-owned railways are the state! And what do you think it costs taxpayers when a government monopoly messes things up? What do you think the Fyra/HSL disaster cost the Dutch taxpayer?
Your thoughts are inconsistent, the result of a way of thinking that puts the conclusion first and then tries to come up with arguments to support it.
@@Thom-TRA You are the one who is really missing the point. Fyra WAS a private company, owned by NS international and NMBS. That is exactly my point, playing entrepreneur ( with salaries on par with the private sector, God forbid that they would have done it for a mere civil servant one) and when it fails the tab is for the taxpayer who's also left with the costs of the unused tracks. So what's the point of separate entities then besides more high payed directors? This privatisation bull shit of yours is so 1980's. Further more, what's your point?
@@roelkomduur8073 you are arguing for something that never existed. NS has never been a public institution. There have never been not-for-profit railways in the Netherlands, or most of the world. Your state-sponsored fantasy is so 1940s.
@@Thom-TRA Okay then ,give me one(1) example of a working private system then? Besides Japan with you clearly don't know the details of .I can give you loads of your misguided idiot privatisation bull.
Ain't it possible for multiple companies to run on the main lines, to secure competition? Like it works in Aviation?
Another concern is if the national companies are forced to take the least profitable lines, if there will be a requirement from the government that there have to be service for these
very in depth video! I was shocked as well by the announcement from arriva that they want to run highspeedrail to from Groningen to Paris!
I remember having to read it twice to make sure I wasn’t imagining anything!
The Netherlands need to have a singular payment card system similar to what Japan did with the Suica and Pasmo cards.
They actually do! It’s called the OV-chipkaart, and it’s about to be replaced with something called OVPay. Remember, Japan also makes you check in and out between operators. The difference is that in Japan, different companies leave from different parts of the station, so it’s not as much of a problem.
As someone who frequently use the Brussels-Amsterdam line, I cant wait for new competitor agaisnt NS and Thalys. NS has doubled their prices over 5 years. Thalys has done some cool students fair offer but 90% of their tickets are still way overpriced on tha route (ranging from 50 to 100€.
I think the national network should stay as it is, seeing as it is more like a national metro/sbahn system than classic train lines. International/high speed rail might benefit from liberalization though, I'd love to see prices through the Chunnel lowered because of competition :)
👋 Hi
0:49 Isn’t this law also one reason why the big 4 doubled the length of the trains- to block passenger trains in sidings instead of stopping freight in sidings…?
11:51 Aren’t the NS involved in Abellio ? Money is coming in, no?
18:03 Imagine a direct train Amsterdam-Brussels-Lille -Paris Marne la Vallée-Lyon St.Exupery-Torino-Milano - Roma…😛
The big guys will do everything to not follow the rules…
And yes! Abellio is owned by NS. But they lost a few big contracts in Germany and the UK because of their bad service.
I think that it's more probable to imagine a direct train that goes through Germany and Switzerland rather Belgium and France for an Amsterdam Rome route
@@marcusmagni
There’s no HS in Switzerland nor between Cologne and Basel - with the double speed the Amsterdam-Paris- Rome could worth it….
11:13 the issue of rolling stock can be eliminated if the state owns the trains and leases them to the company winning to tender, Like Metronom in Germany, where the rolling stock is owned by LNVG, a company owned by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
But train operators can only operate certain train types, so wouldn't it be best to also "lease" the train drivers together with the trains? Because else if a company takes over a route they might not find enough spare operators resulting in negative consequences for service. And if you now have infrastructure, trains and personnel already, why shouldn't the state operate the railway on its own?
I do understand the benefits that competition definitely has, but you should never forget that companies want money, and nothing else
@@jan-lukasWe experienced the leasing in regional traffic in Dresden with the city railway. The Stadtbahn was commissioned by the Verkehrsverbund Oberelbe to operate more regional railway lines in the Dresden area. The city railway itself had no trains and leased them. Then came the day when the Stadtbahn simply filed for bankruptcy and simply ceased operations. The VVO lost its operator and readers no longer received any money for the trains. The leasing company's trains now run on the same routes for DB Southeast. If the city railways had had their own trains, they wouldn't just have broken up.
NS didn't had bad service on regional lines. they did what the regional goverment wanted them to do. and with the newer contract (lets say for arriva limburg) that same regional goverment wanted different (better) things so those companies do that. but i have to say NS is still the best in the netherlands the other companies lack ALOT.
You are very misinformed if that’s really what you believe. Maybe ask someone what NS was like on the regional lines before you make a claim as ridiculous as that, since you probably can’t remember it.
@@Thom-TRA asking some random induvidual won't help either, if the concession says "run 2 train per hour" NS does it like that. In the newer concession it's "4 trains per hour" then they will do it like that. Simple as that. That's how that concession system works.
@@jeffreyjacobs7080 if that’s what you want to believe, I have a bridge I’ve been meaning to sell
3:05 I mean, you're explaining where NS came from, historically but also what the letters stand for, and then go on to contextualise what those dutch words mean in English. Imagine that part being like “NS stands for dutch railways, which starts with two completely different letters.”
I tend to prefer tender options than open access options. This is because when there is competition, to be honest it starts get confusing for most of the people. In order to travel from one city to another you have to search throughout different web-sites to see which is the most competitive.
Well, if the Government decides to provide a website that collects data from all companies, it's a different story...but in general I think that trains should not behave like airplanes: you should be able to go to the station, go to a ticket machine/office, get a ticket and go on the first train available, without any hassle of knowing WHOSE company is your train.
I think train companies should be divided by areas and functions, without interfering with each other.
For High Speed I am not sure myself! >_<
The Dutch solution of giving main line services to a big corporation and secondary lines to smaller companies it's a great compromise in my opinion: the strength of a big corporation can handle the busy corridors, whilst the smaller companies can focus on delivering little projects.
As for the international competition: I tend to be on the protectionism side but I am not against a foreign company doing its job IN THE country. Even if the rail company is from another country, it still has to run trains IN your country, provide salaries IN your country and in general do business in the country.
You could argue that the managers and stake holders that live abroad will not directly provide benefits to the country, but is definitely a small percentage; but you could potentially also impose the formation of smaller local branches: for example you could tell Arriva to create Arriva NL with its own headquarter in The Netherlands.
I'd like to see that's in America. I think competition in passenger rail in the US is needed.
as someone living in belgium id really appreciate if i could go to the netherlands for an okay price and a journey that does not take 6 hours or is unreliable because of crappy rolling stock
One day… sorry the international service has been so bad
@@Thom-TRA hoping for that ICNG service to brussels to not get delayed any longer haha
The OV chipkaart isn't perfect. But it is just... so nice to use. I can use it ANYWHERE. Regardless of where I need to go and what provider I need to use. I never have to buy a ticket. Also, recently we've seen the ability to use phone apps or even your pincard to check in and check out, meaning the OV chipkaart will probably eventually become obsolete as it is fully integrated into the bankpass' abilities. My dream is that eventually, I can use my OV chipkaart or equivelant to travel anywhere in the EU because the system will be fully connected.
It is definitely better than getting paper tickets! And I’m glad every agency in the Netherlands accepts it
Meanwhile, in Germany: "Company A, you are the cheapest, we are legally required to pick you. You certainly won't cheap out on personel and only hire engineers who are fully trained to standards and won't behave like half-brained idiots, right? ... Right?"
Funny that the biggest idiots in the German railways were Abellio, owned by NS
You forgot to mention the Arriva Intercity train project from Nijmegen to Aachen vv.
The non electrified parts of the route are being upgraded and electrified for more capacity.
Not so long ago a sleeping line close to closure run by the state railway and now suffering severe capacity shortage.
At last after 2 decades regional goverments cooperating with operators are now a big benefit for passengers.
At first euhhh to say it mildly their were some serious problems-scandals (political/staff/unreliable equipment/coruption etc.etc.)
What’s Limburg without a good political scandal or two? 😂
NS isnt operating in Germany any more. Abellio Germany has gone out of business in 2021 due to losses, that NS did not want to compensate any more.
Abellio NRW is out of business, they still run in other lands
The ultimate end of what you advocate is that a government monopoly which answers to the people will be replaced, after inevitable consolidation, with a private monopoly which can do whatever it wants.
That is a really bad take.
For starters, I’m not advocating for anything. This is an informational video with my observations mixed in. I’ve observed that the passenger experience has improved drastically since the *private monopoly* that was the national railroad was forced to break up.
Even in the US, which has insufficient anti-trust laws compared to Europe, we have not seen the formation of one monopoly, rather we see a government monopoly on passenger rail that is at the whims of whoever helms a political administration.
The ultimate outcome of what you advocate for is an antiquated, out of touch system that is led by an organization that disguises its lack of expertise in the industry as public accountability. The world is bigger than the US, the options are more than just left or right.
Well now i know what could happen to these ICE3(M) sets that are supposed to be replaced with the new Velaro Neo Trains in December of 2024 haha
They’re pretty bad trains though so it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re just scrapped
@@Thom-TRA haha that’s true they make a lot of problems (like suddenly catching fire lol) but I’d also be kinda sad to see them go garter just 20 years of service - maybe they find a way to make them more reliable?
I don't think it's entirely fair to compare the NS of the 90's with the private companies of today. I am convinced that if NS were to run on many of the privatized lines today, it would also be able to offer good service. Since I myself travel by train in the Netherlands, I find it less pleasant to check in and out with different carriers. Also because the rates differ per train carrier and different subscriptions.
It is also worth mentioning that many drivers and conductors from private companies are switching to the NS since the collective labor agreement is better there. Many trains are therefore still canceled on many regional lines.
What proof do you have, other than you’re “convinced.” NS hasn’t even performed well on the Hoofdrailnet, even in the 21st century. After the HSR, rolling stock issues, service cuts, fraud. I think there’s a reason they only won one contract. And as large a company as they are, I don’t think the “accountability” of a small, provincial government scares them as much as competition. If NS was the only company running regional lines, I think we’d see old rolling stock, bad service, and a lot of excuses, their specialty. I see no evidence, current or historical, that would suggest otherwise.
@@Thom-TRA I certainly understand what you mean. NS has done a number of things that are not acceptable. But now they finally have new high speed trains, many old trains are being modernized. Although the timetable can be improved after corona, we are slowly moving in the right direction.
We cannot say this about the regional carriers. There are still many train cancellations, the service is poor, staff shortages and toilets are often out of order.
Perhaps the future will prove otherwise, but for now regional carriers are certainly not showing their best.
@@Thom-TRA What are you talking about? NS outperforms ALL regional operators in the Netherlands, and has for the past 5 years, on objectively measurable values such as punctuality, train cancellations, and all other factors...
@@purrt-kurt I really hope you don’t do research for a living, because there is one serious flaw in your analysis:
You cannot take NS’s performance in the last 5 years and use it to justify their performance 10-20 years ago.
Why do you think NS’ performance has improved? Do you think the countless changes in leadership, the fraud, high speed debacles, the deteriorating service, abandonment of international connections, the millions in fines, the government bailouts, do you suppose any of that might have had something to do with it? Maybe they saw the competition and realized they needed to get their act together?
If NS has improved so much that they are the best operator for a regional line, then they will win the contracts. So far they aren’t winning anything.
So NS is doing alright _now_ on the HRN (they still suck on the HSL). That doesn’t say much about how they compared to regional operators on regional lines back then. Your allegiance to the company has disabled you from objectively looking at history.
I really like this video. I'd like to provide my two cents, however.
You sum up many advantages that have come since the regional operators run the trains. These have however not been paid for by these companies, but by the provinces or the national government. There is no reason to think NS wouldn't have made use of speed increases or capacity upgrades. It's hard to compare the sum that the 'old' NS received for operating the entire network with the regional companies, but it's fair to say that overall, government investment in these lines has increased drastically.
Of course, I would love to see the ETR1000 in the Netherlands. I am however skeptical, as this is not the first time competition on Amsterdam - Paris has been announced (the Italians have done it before with Thello), but I remain optimistic.
In summary, as high speed lines are generally only built when there is a market for them, it makes sense that multiple companies compete. On the core network however, with the incredibly high frequencies, I'd be more cautious.
I think government interest has increased because of the private involvement. These agencies know much better what the rolling stock market is like. It’s the innovations seen on some lines that have inspired governments to demand them on others.
We do know what NS would have done on these lines. We have 60 years of precedence. NS performs better when they’re afraid of losing a contract. When they’re comfortable, they don’t put in the effort. They’ve shown this time and time again.
@@Thom-TRA I'd say that that is switching around the causality. I'm writing this reply while using a Groningen - Zwolle train run by NS however, so I might be biased :).
For me, the most critical difference between regional lines now and prior to privatisation is the investment. The success of regional services is more the success of decentralisation than anything else. The market conditions for these trains are rather artificial: the national government subsidises infrastructure management, and a local authority subsidises the operation. These companies do not, in fact, voluntarily run more trains than their contract states: they only run their contract, and even that is hard at times. Arriva for example has been running most of the lines in Groningen and Friesland at half the required frencuency at weekends for over a year. NS, on the other hand, is only contractually obliged to run two trains an hour to all stations within the core network. Of course, NS runs way more, but those are technically unnecessary. And on price: for consumers, Arriva tickets are not cheaper than NS tickets; it depends, but generally the price per kilometer for private operators is higher than for NS. Running a train is much more expensive for NS than it is for Arriva, since NS has the obligation - as it is a large company impacted by labour unions - to have at least one train manager on every train. Things like this make NS rather conservative and less flexible than a private company, but these are generally a good thing.
@@Giruno56 I think you switched around the causality. Decentralization only worked because it allowed parties onto the market who are eager to win contracts and keep them.
I can’t think of a single good reason why if in the 1990s, NS had been held accountable by the government of Overijssel or Friesland instead of the national government, they would have introduced new trains or raised frequencies. I remember back in 2014 they were still using Mat’64 in Limburg and DDAR in Brabant.
I know of only one regional line where service improved after NS took over: Alphen - Gouda. And that was after 2 decades of private operators running things around the country: the local government knew what to demand.
Your argumentation starts with wanting NS to look good, then moves back to try and justify it. There’s no reason to believe NS would have the same successful results on regional lines: they never won any contracts. They even lost Zutphen-Apeldoorn. It’s hard for some people to admit, but NS ruins almost everything they touch. Look at the HSL, their constant failure to order rolling stock on time, their out-of-touch campaigns, the list goes on and on. Even if you truly believe that all the improvements only came from decentralization, then the private operators were still necessary to scare NS and remind them that someone else can do their job too.
@@Thom-TRA
Allow me to clarify a few things from my previous reply. With decentralisation, I do not refer to the concession model alone; instead I have the increased tasks, responasabilities and budgets of provincial governments in mind. One of the very few competences of a Dutch province is public transit, for which it gets a - very serious - allocation from the national government.
> I can’t think of a single good reason why if in the 1990s, NS had been held accountable by the government of Overijssel or Friesland instead of the national government, they would have introduced new trains or raised frequencies.
It is not only about accountability. Sure, provinces being able to hold NS responsible might have improved something, but the important element here is funding. Those new trains and increased services do not magically appear out of the private company: they are paid for by the province. Why NS had no interest in improving these lines in the 80's and 90's has to do with the peculiar public/private position of NS: it remained an independent private company, but received a single cheque from the national government for the operation of the entire network.
>I remember back in 2014 they were still using Mat’64 in Limburg and DDAR in Brabant.
If anything, it shows either the underfunded nature of Dutch railways or mismanagement of those funds, which I severly doubt.
>Look at the HSL, their constant failure to order rolling stock on time, their out-of-touch campaigns, the list goes on and on.
I completly agree on the utter incompetency that rules the HSL debate. So many things have gone wrong however in this story, at both government level and NS, that it is too complex to serve as a good example. As I said before, I am not opposed to open acces on international connections; this is the system we have chosen on European level, so abberations like Thalys make no sense.
With respect to rolling stock, you probably mean the 2010's?
I'd like to know what out of touch campaigns you are referring to?
I get the impression you divide train companies into groups that you argue - due to fancy new trains or frequencies - are succesfull, e.g. Arriva, and those that are not. I find this a way too narrow view. Some defects might be attributable to NS, but most are not, but are connected to historical development or the organisation of the railway network, which is one of Europe's busiest and most complex. Internationally, looking at punctuality and customer satisfaction, NS is in the top 3 eith for example Switzerland, despite the Netherlands spending almost half of what Switzerland spends per capita on rail.
>Your argumentation starts with wanting NS to look good, then moves back to try and justify it
NS delivers - discounting the period following covid - decent service.
We never got high speed rail in California until the public voted a public system.
I think it's a good thing that NS will need to compete with other train operators on the international routes. On the Amsterdam to Bruxelles-Midi route NS has done a really bad job. The whole Fyra debacle made sure they wouldn't be running high speed trains for several years. Even though they didn't run high speed trains the ticket prices were still really high. And there are several more things, like the constant delays and cancellations and the fact that the trains stop at several smaller stations in Belgium causing longer travel times. NS and Thalys really need to improve their service and competition will drive them to improve their current and future services.
Regarding the matter of competition on the hoofrailnet I think it definitely can be done and could improve service but they need to get rid of the need to check out and in when you switch rail operators. I also still have a few doubts about the private companies which now run the regional lines in the country. They definitely improved service on those lines but there is still quite a lot of room for improvement. The toilets on arriva trains are frequently out of order and the GTW Stadler trains they are running are getting outdated. There were reports that parts are failing a lot as the trains are getting older. The Qbuzz trains on the Geldermalsen-Dordrecht line are also old and still don't have toilets. Keolis also has it's issues. It commited fraud by signing secret contracts with bus manufacturers which led to the provinces to give it's concessions to different companies. But NS also has a lot of problems. Some are very similiar, like corruption. So I believe that the hoofdrailnet should be opened up to the private rail operators but the government needs to make sure that they don't repeat a lot of their mistakes and that service actually improves.
Privatisation hasn't been good for the Dutch train connectivity, even just 20 years ago it was cheaper to take the train on a 130km trip, even if you had a passenger in your car and split the costs, nowadays if I go solo in my car a trip from Heerenveen to Amsterdam it's a third cheaper to go with my car, and for the record, my car is a gasoline car from the 90s, so a diesel or LPG would be even cheaper.
Your logic is flawed. You’re pointing to the inflation of a train ticket over the past 20 years, and blaming privatization. The railways were already privatized 20 years ago, and you don’t provide any evidence of causality. Populistische drogredeneringen, meer niet.
@@Thom-TRA nou ja ik gok dat dat meer dan inflatie is
@@schtormm een gok zeg je? Precies. Meer niet.
HaHaHa - i took part in a government tender and it went down exactly the way you portrayed it. Spot on.
I will view this as my Oscar nomination 😂
As an east coast american, I struggle to avoid Norfolk Southern coming to mind every time you say NS lmao
When Dutch people think they have the worst NS, America is like, let me show you something…
@@Thom-TRA Having taken 19 and 20 between Atlanta and Baltimore and seeing 20's departure time at Union Station being 2 in the afternoon is the perfect example of that LOL
Another excellent and engaging report, Thom. Here in the UK the idea of privatisation was heavily promoted with the promise of competition and choice. Competing companies would keep ticket prices low. Alas, competition hasn't materialised with usually one train operating company running entire route networks. One newcomer, however, is Lumo on the north east route between London and Edinburgh which has been well received but services are limited to just five per day each direction. I hope more competitors will start operating, similar to the situation with the French railways.
The UK problem is their ancient and restricted loading gauge means foreign companies can't compete with their own trains, reducing competition to competition within one single country with bespoke rolling stock, driving up prices. Nationalisation won't change that, widening the loading gauge would. But the Brits will never do that, it would imply their network isn't perfect now.
The issue with Lumo is that it is not allowed to compete with LNER. It is supposed to only compete with short haul airline but obviously some LNER passengers might have been moved to Lumo.
I wish that Canada could replicate what the Netherlands did to their rail system. ,
Sounds all great, but the problem is ticketing. We need much more interoperability. All tickets must be accepted by all operators. Having to buy two tickets for a connection shouldn't be an option.
Another problem is that a lot of routes aren't profitable. Giving profitable ones to private companies just takes money from people and government. As they now have to subsidize other railway lines without the income from the profitable ones.
Subsidy is necessary in this case to guarantee consistent service. Otherwise the service in one area is at the whims of whatever the profit is on busier lines. Not exactly fair. Plus, companies usually don’t use their profits to improve non-profitable divisions of their company. And NS was the biggest example of that, when they had all the regional lines under their control.
@@Thom-TRA This all has to do with political will. In Switzerland the profitable routes definitely subsidize the unprofitable ones. Even if operated by the same company. If governments actually want to improve services privatisation is mostly the wrong path.
Switzerland has a lot of private railways, but these are mostly owned by the regions and towns they pass through. So services are always quite good.
Sadly the Netherlands wasn't able to so it seems.
3:05 is especially hilarious because in thos particular vodeo he was speaking in his first language, Dutch!! Jajaja
Both English and Dutch are my first languages :)
@@Thom-TRA still! :) (they both are? Oo sounds interesting, if you feel comfortable please tell me more!)
@@BellaBellaElla i learned both at the same time
@@Thom-TRA like from parents?
Love the "judge" version of Thom 🙂
In Britain, Network Rail is the owner and maintainer of infrastruture (not sure about Wales and Scotland). But the bidding system is all screwed up with some areas granting exclusive passenger service on a line but in others, there is competition allowed.
It is simpler in terms of interational trains as there is less "need to serve the local population" which national railways have traditioally served.
In France, it is my understanding that competition is allowed in major routes, but not local routes where traffic isn't enough to make SNSF TER and Intercité profitable. So you'll see competition on high speed lines (with Trenitalia competing on Paris-Lyon for instance).
International routes have seen "open access" for some time, even in Netherland with Nightjet doing overnight trains, and not European Sleeper having started Germany to Brussels via Amsterdam overnight services. German ICE trains make it to Paris and vice versa. Thalys was French-Belgian and made provided service in Netherlands. (I think it is part of Eurostar).
PKP runs trains into many countries from Poland is is able to sell tickets from say Germany to a 3rd country. Same with ÖBB. However, they all have problems with Germany because the cost of runnng trains on the direct lines or usig the main stations is very high. Snälltåget run a train from Stockho;m to Berlin (as does SJ as well).
ÖBB overnight trains can be quite complex with some cars going to Berlin, some to Frankfurt, some to Vienna, some to Budapest and some to Warsaw for instance and they can change locos a few times along the way.
And of course, there was the famous Paris-Moscow overnight train that used RZD rolling stock but changed locos along the way (and bogies at Brest , Belarus) and then paid for transit through Poland, Germany and France.
In France, they now seemed forced to open Paris transit for bidding. For instance Keolis won a tram contract over RATP. (BTW, the S is pronounced in Kéolis). And the RATP will soon have to bid to run its own Paris métro system. This may go beyond reasonable.
I think there is a big difference etween privatizing train service and making tracks open access. It makes sense to have a government onwed passenger service to provide service in the country, and allow foreign operators to compete on certain lines. But when competition reduces profits from TGV operation, it means SNCF needs more subsidies to run local services.
BTW, because of ÖBB's Nightjet,s success and birth of other overnight train services running into European capitals, the SNCF reversed its decision to abandon night trains a couple years ago and has refurbished old rolling stock and restarted services from Paris to Toulouse, Nice and in Briançon and I think another few places. The success of Nightjet as well as many PKP services is a wakeup call fopr SNCF. (NL may be too small for its local overnight services, but it could run them to Germany or Spain or other places if it had equipment).
However, giving a license for local unprofitable services is not that wise as it emulates the failures of England's system. It is better to have the governmemt operate those srevices as it is a public service and it costs more to give subsidies to a company that must be profitable running an unprofitable service. When the provate operator has a contract to run X trains per day, it runs X trains per day and won't add more to cope with increased demand as they woudl then cease to be profitable since they lose money on each passenger with a fixed subsidy. But if the subsidy is per seated passenger, then there is more incentive to increase capacity when demand grows.
BTW, Kéolis is partly owned by SNCF and Caisse de Dépôt du Québec, and the later also now owns 18% of Alstom, so expect Kéolis services to choose Alstom equipment from now on. (CDPQ help recapitalize Bombardier Transportation (which was split from nearly bankrupt Bombardier) ending with 30% ownership of it, but the investment came with conditions which forced Bombardier to sell its stake because it couldn't afford to keep it, so it was sold to Alstom and CDPQ converted its 30% ownership of BBD Transportation into 18% of Alstom).
Kéolis has a number of comuter trai operation contracts around the world including USA, and Bombardier had many as well which are now Alstom contracts. Caisse de Dépôt has a stake in both so it will get interesting when Kéolis would bid against Alstom on such contracts.
I see a legal career ahead of me
If only the US set up an organization like prorail i feel like it would improve rail infrastructure and traffic control so much. It would be so much more fare. And yes while i think the private companies filling the gaps is a good thing i do think it's good that the main or biggest public rail provider being overseen or co ownerd by the government is a good thing. Without some of the changes the government had made public rail would not have been the same in the Netherlands at least for normal rail high speed rail is a different story and we will have to see in the future about that.
I like your balanced approach! It makes you wonder if there would be less derailments in the US if there was a ProRail type of organization.
Also just gotta say i know NS is a monopoly and those are not great but i grew up my entire life seeing NS trains i can't help but feel a bit sentimental over them though a lot of the trains i felt that way about are gone now but still i hope no matter what we will keep seeing NS trains for a long time to come.
But for real though as someone who lives in the US now why can't we have nice things ;-; the government really needs to take a look and see what other countries with successful rail networks are doing and implement similar laws and strategies because whatever we are doing now isn't working very well for us. Well i guess the only one's it's working for is fright companies though only the ones big enough to for monopolies.
@@Thom-TRA oh i definitely think there would be less derailment's if the US had it's own USrail they would probably enforce a limit to cargo train lengths as well as crew minimums as well as maintain the rails and signals properly and add more tracks where necessary. At least that's what i think it would be useful for.
The US is distinctly different than most countries in the world have nationalized the railways. Only Amtrak is nationalized in this country. Of course other government agencies run trains. But still, in this country trains are basically private industry, which is not the case in most other countries.
That’s what I wanted to show with this video: that every place is different, and that what works for one place won’t necessarily work for other places.
Awesome video! Like awwwwwesome! Thanks for your hard work!
Thank you! Appreciate the positive feedback
If the Dutch system made it so that it had a single fare system you wouldn't need to do the tap out tap in thing
I love the interest of all these different companies in expanding services to the netherlands, but I really dont understand why it seems like no one is interested in the Rotterdam-Eindhoven and Nijmegen-Roermond corridors which have massive ridership
Nijmegen -Roermond is a huge mess. They were going to double track and electrify it years ago, it’s still not done. The majority of the demand is between Nijmegen and Venray/Venlo anyways.
Great video.. I learnt so much.. Thanks..
remember england whent down the same rout and then had to go back to national privitisation is a con
Remember that England did things very differently, on a very different network, and that this is a bad argument
england is also run by people who are WAAAAAY more incompetent
Doesn't the saying go wise people learn from the mistakes of others? Well this dude is failing that test. Privatisation is for fraudulent neo-libs. National infra should always remain nationalised lest you repeat Thatcherite era mistakes 👍
Your acting skills are amazing😂😂😂
And the Oscar goes to
Maastricht is where my favorite classical music artist is from.
Who’s that?
@@Thom-TRA Andre Rieu?
Glad this worked out for the Netherlands. However, Im not a huge fan though. Privatization seems to eventually erode roadblocks in the sake of money. At least thats what happened in the US to every industry. But hey as long as the rails are public thats good
The problem in the US is that the government either doesn’t care or actively sabotages things, all for “freedom.” Not something I’m as worried about in highly-regulated Europe.
3:04 The commenter: ThIs Is EnGlIsH lAnD! wE sPeAk EnGlIsH!
It reminds me of a meme I once saw, where someone asked why they speak an American language in the UK
Interesting competitive times for European Train Services. Yet the Customer experience of booking and ticketing cross border and even cross regional services in EU has to improve. Wonder if EU will have to do some after work on this topic like open Data ticket access so that App Services can be created.
I think such a project is definitely within the realm of possibility
The explanation is excellent! You would be a good teacher.😀👍
Thank you!
Trip back to memory lane (i.e 'omg i'm so old').
Ariva is pronounced ariva both a's like a not ay, without rolling the r, the i like e, and a bit of emphasis on the v because as you said it's from England (Sunderland to be presice. my fellow
Geordies make you're welcome to banter about it)
Arriva in the Netherlands is most certainly pronounced the way I did, and since I am a Dutch person making a video about the Dutch company Arriva, I’m just going to thank you for your opinion.
@@Thom-TRA Pronouncing Arriva is very confusing, Alot of Brits say Ariva meanwhile I say Arreeva or Arrive-va.
I enjoyed that video👍👍
Pretty well explained!
Hi Thom, great explanatory video as always. I personally agree with all your opinions on the privatizations. IMHO monopolization and lack of competition are the sure recipe of much bigger problems than privatization and competition could ever cause.
Also I hope the move to Washington, DC was good for you and your wife. Good luck at your new place and hope to see you visiting Chicago often enough to make new videos in the future.
The move went great, thanks for the well-wishes!
If you want to see chaos caused by privatization look at Germany, the UK or the USA
@@jan-lukas the USA was never privatized. It has always been private , only passenger operations were nationalized.
If you’re going to comment so much, please research more.
Nice video, I love the judge hahaha
My legal career peaked at that moment