EU aims to spur night train ‘love’
The Commission hopes to boost overnight trains as a
way of cutting transport emissions.
The night train push is running into problems thanks
to a lack of specialized sleeper carriages |
BY JOSHUA
POSANER AND HANNE COKELAERE
December
14, 2021 8:04 pm
The
European Commission reckons it has found the right recipe to fix the big thing
going wrong with night trains — a lack of actual trains.
As part of
a new action plan on cross-border rail published Tuesday, the EU executive
announced plans for a Green Rail Investment Platform that will make it easier
for train companies to source loans from the Luxembourg-based European
Investment Bank to finance new carriages and trains. It's in line with the
broader Fit for 55 legislative package aimed at cutting the bloc's emissions by
55 percent by the end of the decade.
While
Tuesday's plan is aimed at boosting all forms of long-distance rail — deemed
critical to meet the bloc's climate targets and shift traffic away from
polluting short-haul flights — sleeper trains are a big beneficiary.
“We have to
love night trains, it’s nowadays the mantra,” said Transport Commissioner Adina
Vălean while presenting the plan.
Rail
operators are already moving — reversing a trend from a few years ago that saw
65 percent of overnight routes shuttered between 2001 and 2019 as people
shifted to much cheaper and faster flights operated by discount carriers. That
calculation is changing as climate change rises in importance and many
countries look to kill off domestic short-haul flights.
France,
Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Switzerland and the Netherlands have
all pledged some form of public investment to get night services back on track.
But the
night train push is running into problems thanks to a lack of specialized
sleeper carriages, incoherent national programs that don't allow for smooth
international integration, and spats over widely different levels of enthusiasm
for the concept among countries and rail operators.
“The
problem with night trains is that you can’t scale them up because nobody has
any trains,” said Jon Worth, a blogger who runs the Trains for Europe campaign
aimed at finding an EU solution for funding new rolling stock. "A load of
countries in Europe are thinking about this problem, but thinking about it
separately."
The EIB has
invested €8.7 billion in rolling stock over the last five years, and the new
platform is aimed at helping railways secure loans with long repayment periods
and EU guarantees.
France's
Transport Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari wants to purchase up to 300 new night
train carriages by 2030, while Italy is considering buying 70 for its national
lines and Spain has similar plans. Looking north, Sweden and Norway are also in
talks about new rolling stock for their cross-border services.
"If
all of those countries do their own thing, you end up with a piecemeal
patchwork solution which doesn’t suit Europe very well," said Worth. He
wants the Commission to corral countries to jointly purchase new trains,
driving down the cost through scale and making sure they can run on various
national networks.
Missing
links
Austria's
ÖBB, Deutsche Bahn, France's SNCF, Switzerland's SBB and Dutch railway NS have
a cooperation deal on basic measures to run sleeper trains — often using old
carriages dating back decades — but that team-up doesn't stretch to buying new
trains. The cost of a new seven-carriage train with a locomotive is around €30
million, says Worth.
Coordination
problems are also a drag on hopes for a European night train revival.
A plan to
put on a direct sleeper from Malmö in Sweden to Brussels via Copenhagen and
Hamburg failed because no rail operator offered to run it through Germany.
Europe’s largest economy — one of the first to ditch night trains in the
mid-2010s — is yet to commit to doing much more than allowing night trains put
on by other state railways such as ÖBB to run across its network, complicating
efforts to get new lines running south from Scandinavia, or west out of Central
Europe.
“[Germany
is] really a black island for night trains,” Denmark’s Transport Minister Benny
Engelbrecht, who backs the idea of joint night train purchasing, told POLITICO.
“That’s really a big barrier for night trains in Europe ... We would also like
to see the general rules and guidelines within the EU to promote night
trains."
In a letter
seen by POLITICO, Engelbrecht, along with his counterparts from Sweden and
Belgium, called on Vălean to “take leadership” and lift “troublesome hurdles
for the establishment of new cross-border night-train services” on the
Continent by rethinking public service obligation (PSO) rules that allow
subsidies for connections.
“There are
still too many technical, legal and economic obstacles to international night
trains,” said Belgium’s Green Mobility Minister Georges Gilkinet.
The
Commission action plan calls for countries to reduce track access charges and
to cut VAT on rail tickets and it also promises more clarity on PSO rules that
will make it easier to subsidize new routes.
But getting
people to drop the idea of flying across the Continent in a few hours for very
little money and to take a train instead is going to be difficult — as Vălean
admitted.
“I think
more and more [night trains] become romantically attractive," she said.
"If they are to replace airlines, I’m not sure, let’s wait and see.”
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