Night train operators like European Sleeper could also unlock some latent demand in the rail market (or take passengers from airlines).

In austria we have in addition to regiojet also the westbahn which gives necessary competition to öbb, but also necessary capacity, I think that they are great honestly and much less overcrowded than öbb

Splitting up the state railways was a horrible idea. In example of Germany, before 1994 there was absolute competency and cooperation of all units involved. The track maintenance teams cooperated with the schedule planners, drivers could be used on regional or long distance trains, connecting trains could be contacted to wait, rolling stock was used widely and shared, staff knew their local areas and could give sufficient information. Nowadays everybody is fighting with eachother, trains get delayed because no one told anyone about construction works, trains are cancelled because there's no staff or rolling stock available even if a different branch has them, employees don't know anything and can't really give you information.

Greek railway operations were sold to Italy for 45.000.000€ in 2017 😭😭

Hi, one argument I have against open access competition that compete with already existing services: that they only run on profitables routes (obviously), and mostly take clients from the state-owned railway. That means they make less money, as it's used to subsidise smaller routes, it's not a great cycle. In France per example, we have almost 2 competitors on the Paris-Lyon axis because it's the number 1, but you have absolutely nothing on smaller lines. However SNCF has to run the two types of service. However open access can be wonderful to create new services, like European Sleeper per example

One small correction regarding the intro about Sweden would be that competition with SJ in the commercial passenger sector was only allowed from 2010 onwards.

it's so funny to me how the only profitable routes in sweden are stockholm-gothenburg and malmö-stockholm-åre, with the latter being operated only by snälltåget aside from the national operator. Private transit just doesn't work here, it's like when americans assume people would just fly everywhere and i go into a fit of laughter because we have like 10 commercial airports in the entire country and the only routes that see some genuine domestic traffic are between the 3 big cities, the far north, and the one island that is in the middle of the baltic sea. Most of the areas of sweden cannot be reached by plane or private transit, it simply does not exist and cannot exist.

another good example is Spain - especially the high-speed market. Italy is making small steps in this direction, currently with one big non-state company (Italo).

I'm not a fan of it. If private companies want to enter the market, they should at the very least cooperate regarding fares and passenger rights. One example: If you have an ICE season ticket between Berlin and Wittenberge, you can use the local trains and ICE as well as EC trains. Now Flixtrain came along and took some paths away from DB, especially in peak hours. So the affected EC trains had to be canceled on that section, instead Flix was now serving the station at that time. But they don't accept these season tickets, which means commuters have to buy a flixtrain ticket for every single time they want to use that train; since Flix themselves doesn't offer any season tickets. And that's just one example. Private operators should be forced to accept certain kinds of tickets, otherwise the system will just get more complex and frustrating for the customer. That's why Generalabo, Klimaticket and Oneticket are so important. But it only really works if everyone participates.

in poland we have the worst of all worlds - tons of train companies but owned by the government or regions - none of the benefits of competition, all of the downsides of fragmentation

Direct, clear, informative and humorous...great job mate ;) Would love to see you expand and talk more about this, expecially if you could analize the recent growth of night routes too!

Actually you forgot one of Europes most intresting private operator: Westbahn.

Hello Tramly. I have to say that in Romania, we have privatized our rail in the same way. We have 5 operators, state-owned CFR Calatori, Transferoviar Calatori, Regio Calatori, Astra Transcarpatic and Softrans. Transferoviar Calatori and Regio Calatori specialize in small routes, e.g. Ploiesti - Slanic, but also have some longer distance routes. Astra Transcarpatic and Softrans focus on longer services, such as Bucuresti-Constanta or Bucuresti-Brasov. Worth noting both of these companies are subsidiaries of rolling stock companies. I do have to say that in my honest opinion Astra is the best, but Softrans isn't bad either. Their home-made EMUs look kinda bad though. also why is there no liberec-prague direct train service

9:25 My country (Spain) is doing it on its public operator (Renfe), and from what I've seen in Catalonia so far, not counting the normal crappy services, it's been good. Tho, Madrid's whole transport network (Metro and Trains) collapsed yesterday

6:55 too harsh on the oppidum

I'm from the UK and i want to say that a Private rail is not a good option no matter the benefits. Just look at UK where Private railways has damage us with abserd price.

I wanna talk about the contracting system used in Germany for regional trains. It was decided that this is the job of the states, not the federal government. So the states, or sometimes even governments below the state level, contract companies to run regional trains for them. That has one unfortunate consequence: Internal borders in Germany now matter for transit, as when a regional train is supposed to cross one, it has to be ordered by two authorities. I can't think of an example, but I think there are cases where direct connection between places was lost simply because the route crosses a border and the two sides couldn't agree on what service to order. Before privatisation, DB had a huge pool of both vehicles and drivers that could be used mostly anywhere as required. This was obviously good in case a train broke down or something. But since all those redundant vehicles and workers cost a lot of money, private operators could bid with cheaper offers than DB, with the consequence that should a vehicle break down, that's the end of the customers' journeys. This then prompted DB to reduce its fleet and staff size to be more competitive in the bidding process, so now it's got the same problem as the private operators. Train cancellations because of staff shortages are really common these days, no matter who the operator is. Another weird thing that's been developing more recently: The contracts usually leave the rolling stock up to the contractee, so either DB could use its massive fleet as required, or the private operator could win the contract with the promise of more modern rolling stock. But what's starting to become more common is that the contractor supplies the vehicles. Which raises one question: Where's the competition? The traveling public gets the same trains no matter the operator, so the only competition is how cheap the offers are. That further insentivises the operators to cut costs, so they reduce the amount of staff as much as possible. That's not how competition on railways should work in my opinion. I think competition on railways can work, especially on medium to long distance routes, as seen in France, Spain, and Italy for example. There, the customer is the traveling public. They can choose which service they take on their journey. But franchise models for regional transit don't really work, at least in my opinion.

ČD recieves subsidies for the Prague-Brno route! But RegioJet does not.

Tramly: Nobody should be forced to go to Brno. Ahh, you are a citizen of Prague I see. Great video as always!

Great video man!

>czechia known for trains

I´m from Germany and the DB ist one of the worst train companies here in regional traffic with a lot of cancellations. Around Dresden, where the biggest part of regional traffic is operated by DB it´s very worse. Since autumn 2023 there were 2 train lines in bus replacement due to a lack of train drivers and nearly all rush hour extra train are cancelled. Despite these cancellations a lot of trains are too short due to a lack of trains. The majority of private railways doing a better job than DB, especially "die Länderbahn" which is also operating in Czechia I´m often in Czechia because I´m living near the border and the traffic in general works so much better than in Germany. But in my opinion ČD is one of the best companies with a good organisation. For example GW Train Regio isn´t even making a extra time table for contruction works, so there are trains with around 20 Minutes delay because the replacement bus was slower, meanwhile ČD trains on the same route are on time beause the time table was adapted for replacement bus. I like travelling with Leoexpress, but they have to cancel connections if one of their FLIRT is out of order, a big quality disadvantage compared to ČD

I wish we had trains in my country. There's literally only two passenger railways in my country. We used to have more, but due to extensive lobbying by the auto industry and a wave of politicians that wanted to copy the USA, we lost most of them.

3:12 lmao that’s my local train service.

I like your humour

Nejlepší dopravci v ČR jsou: ČD LeoExpress KŽC DLB Arriva RegioJet Za mě se za poslední 3 roky Regio strašně zhoršil...

private train operators are objectively worse then the state operators. from my experience, flix train was worse then the Czech state operator. They are only there to exploit the customer. innovation on rails has only been done by state operators doing a public service. Anything about "the market" and "competition" is a bad idea.

These rail companies are only interested in profit , not in providing a service , and it is service That EU citizens living outside cities need . Sorry to say the Eu rail network is far from providing a service for all citizens , and that needs to change .

Fun fact John Major original plan was to spit the UK Rail into ¼s en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_(British_railway_companies)