That's interesting George,

Frank — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:27:47 -0700

That's interesting George, thanks. I wasn't aware that they didn't own the track.

While the passenger

graymond — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 02:42:52 -0700

While the passenger divisions of French National Railways (SNCF) are doing well, the freight division has been losing money for a number of years. To cut these losses, Fret SNCF has been pruning its network, leaving many areas without wagonload service. Since, as is customary in Europe, SNCF doesn't own its track, new rail operators are arriving to fill the gaps, offering unit-train and intermodal services and (potentially) local or shortline services.

George
http://railweb.ch

SNCF's Success

Frank — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:18:32 -0700

France's state-owned rail agency is going gangbusters:

[T]he new SNCF chairman sees rail stations, mainly in the regions, becoming new transport (and commercial) hubs not just for trains but for buses and trams – "all those places where people don't want to bring their cars."

SNCF executives believe rail can take market leadership from air and road on journeys up to four hours long and point to the success of Eurostar (part owned by the group) in increasing traffic so far this year by around a fifth on the back of shorter journey times between London and Brussels/Paris. You can even get to Marseille from Paris in little more than three hours.

Pepy is, therefore, unfazed by the recent move by Air France-KLM to join forces with French freight operator Veolia and launch its own TGV services to, say, Charles de Gaulle airport. "SNCF is not going to be an airline-style operator as we need to operate regional and local services as well."

This comes via Savage via AutoblogGreen, who both focus on SNCF's $1.7B profit in 2007. While that's certainly encouraging, I'd caution against focusing too much on those numbers. SNCF runs both freight and passenger service in France, as a government monopoly. I'm pretty sure that if the US congress decided to nationalize BNSF, Union Pacific and the rest and roll them up into a huge ball with Amtrak, the resulting agency would be profitable.

Still, it goes to show that if you invest consistently in rail infrastructure, you can expand it pretty rapidly when demand rises. On the other hand, if you let it decay for 40 years and then try to throw a hail mary at the last minute, it's going to be pretty difficult to achieve anything significant.

Orphan Road - SNCF's Success - Comments

That's interesting George,

While the passenger

SNCF's Success