First they got rid of the money, all those francs and deutschmarks. Now you're going to be able to buy a train ticket from Paris to Vienna -- with unified timetables, signage and customer service making the trip easier.
That's the promise of "Railteam," a new alliance of the German, Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian, British and French railroads described by Guillaume Pepy, the CEO of the French national railway SNCF at a press conference in New York this week.
"We'll have better connections, integrated timetables, common service and quality standards. It's going to give easy access to prices and tickets, with through fares and through tickets," all the way from the Spanish to the Hungarian borders, he said.
If you arrive on a late train, the Railteam system will help hold your connection for you or let you hop easily onto the next train to your destination, said Nick Mercer, commercial director for the Eurostar rail line.
Along with the new alliance will come better service from notoriously surly French railway staff, Pepy said.
"We all know that the French people do not have a good reputation in service," Pepy said with a chuckle. "So we've created a 'university of service' to train our staff -- we have a tremendous job, to better train people and make them feel how to really warmly serve customers," he said.
The Railteam changes will appear in major European train stations by this summer, Pepy said.
Savings and Speed
With the dollar worth less and less each passing week, European railroads are also positioning themselves as "low-cost carriers," trying to keep fares down by using airline-style pricing strategies like charging less for tickets bought well in advance, said Fabrice Morel, the president of Rail Europe, which sells European railway tickets here in the US.
"If you now go on our website, you'll see that we have half a dozen fares available with various degrees of restrictions; in certain conditions, you can buy a ticket from Paris to Marseille for as little as 25 € ($34), he said.
Pepy, Mercer and Morel were joined at the press conference by Inaki Barron, director of high speed for the international railway association. They were going on a road trip to Washington, too, to talk about the tremendous success of European high-speed railways with a Congressional subcommittee.
High-speed trains in Europe have taken away much of the market share from airlines on trips of under about 500 miles, they said. They've made cities in northern France commuter distance from London, Mercer pointed out. And trains are much more environmentally efficient, putting out much less carbon dioxide per person than driving or flying, reducing sprawl and taking up less physical space than highways -- a selling point that really strikes home in Europe, but tends to fall on deaf ears in the United States.
And while they strained to find good things to say about Acela, Amtrak's deeply troubled 'high-speed' effort between Boston and Washington, they made it clear that a successful high-speed rail strategy takes long-term investment and dedicated tracks -- something that Amtrak, relying on annual Congressional appropriations and the goodwill of freight railroads, has never had a chance at.
For instance, all the traffic between Albany and Niagara Falls on New York's popular Empire Corridor has to share space with slow-moving CSX freight trains, a pretty normal state of affairs for our battered, second-class passenger rail system.
"I would like to stress the fact that the question is not having a high-speed train, the question is having high-speed track dedicated to the traffic," Pepy said. "If you want to build a high-speed system in the US, you need to invest for 50, 75 or even 100 years, and your system has to be able to think on this horizon."
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