IRO Bulletin - issue 8-2006

European rail expert Chris Dugdale starts an occasional series of articles on what is happening
in the EU.

Members no doubt have heard of various initiatives coming from the European Community, interoperability, safety, various “railway packages” and so on. Members may have wondered what they mean for us and indeed if they are necessary, given that the UK has a well established system for creating standards, ensuring level playing fields for commercial operations and monitoring safety. This paper is intended to provide some answers; it has been written as an initial paper to set the scene and is designed to be followed by others that explain the implications in slightly more detail. Some of the issues have been oversimplified, in particular by smudging the identity of many of the different sub-organisations that make up the Community.
We can probably understand all these initiatives a little better if we remember that European Community originated from an economic community. This is a crucial point; the prime objective of the European Community is increasing the prosperity of its members. The Community is therefore all about growing markets by free trade and competition. It has an almost religious conviction that more trade means more prosperity and that the key to creating that trade is competition, both internationally and within national economies.
Brussels initiatives have all to be read in the context of that objective. Right at the beginning it was obvious that transport had a role to play, there could only be fair trade if goods could be delivered at fair prices (in those days, German railways charged French produced coal at higher rates than German coal). Whilst pricing was rapidly sorted out, it took the Community quite some years to think about a policy for transport as such, at least partly because railways (and to a lesser extent) airlines belonged to national governments and were therefore off-limits for the Community for some time.
The second important point is that Community policy trumps national policy. Despite Member States often claiming they didn’t realise what they were signing up to, membership of the Community means that once the Community has agreed a policy on an issue, Member States are committed to that policy and can no longer follow different ones. The Community’s policy can of course be to leave issues in the hands of Member States (although that does seem to be a rare policy choice).
Community policy therefore tries to ensure that economic laws can operate properly to encourage efficiency.
The Community was persuaded early on (and long before many of the Member States) that on-rail competition was a good idea and permitted (very) limited rights of access right back in 1991. The logic at that time was to encourage efficiencies within the national railways, state owned and with a reputation for inefficiency. Policy changes as circumstances change of course, and currently revival of rail (and inland waterways) is seen as the only way to provide more capacity to move increasing volumes of goods and passengers without causing unacceptable road congestion.
Rail must become a more effective competitor to capture a large part of the growth in volumes. Rail operators should note however that the Community is unlikely to subsidise rail to stimulate modal transfer, subsidy is not a word in its dictionary!
These initiatives to open markets have continued and as they have continued it has become increasingly clear that ensuring fair access to the rail market requires more than just giving permission for access. For example, to ensure fair access, one railway must not be in a position to be able to veto or limit the access of another. This however was the reality, in most European states the national railway approved vehicles, it passed staff as competent, it wrote the rule book.
If the national railway wanted (and some railways were not in favour of competition), it could scupper competitors for “its” traffic. Accordingly, the Community had to move further down the path of more legislation to ensure that their objective of free on-rail competition could be achieved in practice.
At the same time, equipment and processes have to be mutually compatible so that staff, vehicles and systems can move freely. Whilst hauled vehicles in Europe are highly standard (and much more standard than the road vehicles with which the Community often compares them) traction, multiple units and signalling are quite a different case for reasons that readers will readily understand. The Community believed accordingly that the only way forward was to legislate for increasing interoperability (and to take the process of setting standards away from just the national railways).
We therefore have a series of “packages” each one going a little further than the previous one and each laying down an increasingly regimented system in which the framework for the operation of the railway moves into impartial hands. Furthermore the highest level of this process is increasingly not national but international.
British feelings about this must be mixed, British railways have had a freedom to manage their own affairs for many years and the fact that international complications could be ignored has meant that the UK could develop its own special solutions to its own problems (such as buck-eye couplings). At the same time however, it is undeniable that there are benefits for us all in making the industry more competitive to say nothing of the benefits which will arise from comparative studies of rail accidents (a number of accidents in various countries have had identical causes and could have been prevented by learning from each other).
Chris Dugdale runs his own consultancy specialising in “European” questions as they affect railways.

Annual Members’ Lunch

Not only sprouts come from Brussels

Appointment of new Board Members

Rail Professional Magazine

New “Members Only” area on our Website

Local Area events