International Trade

The Rail Revolution

January 2008
Joseph Baron, International Trade Today

By all accounts, Europe is going into a high-speed rail frenzy, with new routes being built at exponential rates to the extent that they are set to triple in the next 13 years to 150,000km of track.

The big news is that last year French and German rail operators SNCF and DB launched a new service providing significantly reduced times between France, Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg.

On the new Paris-Strasbourg TGV East line, TGV trains are reaching speeds of 320km/h, an increase of 20km/h on the previous average. And the new route will translate – according to TGV-East director Alain Le Guellec – to a growth of passenger traffic in the order of 65 per cent by 2011. (Air France is said to be currently assessing the potential impact on its eastern business).

In a nutshell, it is now possible to catch a train from Paris to Stuttgart (3h40m), Munich (6h15m), Frankfurt (3h50m), Luxembourg (2h5m), Basel (3h30m) and Zurich (4h35mm).

And the prices aren’t bad either. I searched for a return journey from Paris to Stuttgart (outward bound October 15, return 16), and found the cheapest ticket cost 86.50 euros. The only annoyance during the booking process on the SNCF website was the pre-ticked insurance box – a trick one suspects has been ‘learned’ from some of its budget airline cousins.

The €4bn project has entailed the building of 338 bridges, viaducts and tunnels, the removing of 64m cubic metres of earth, and the use of 78,000 tonnes of steel for the rails – the equivalent of eight Eiffel towers.

Cross country co-operation - a major hurdle in this type of enterprise – seems to have been overcome with the creation of Railteam. Formed by the European... continued on page two >

 

 

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