The dangers of transporting freight by road are clear: 12 people died in Austria’s Tauern Tunnel in May 1999, another 11 were killed in Switzerland’s Saint-Gothard last October after trucks crashed and caught fire. Yet the fact remains that Europe’s single market for goods and services is expanding faster than common-sense policies about how to move those goods around. The EU is expected to add 10 more Eastern European members by the end of 2004; by 2010, the European Commission predicts transcontinental freight traffic will have risen 50 percent, and much of that will have to cross the enormous obstacle of the Alps. Right now the only practical way for most heavy traffic to get through is by truck and tunnel. And while that could change if safer and cleaner rail lines were opened, the chances are that won’t happen anytime soon.
That may come as some surprise to foreign visitors, who are often impressed with Europe’s high-speed passenger trains. Yet when it comes to moving freight, Europe is for truckers. Several private trucking companies have adapted quickly and creatively to the demands of European unification. Some of the bigger truckers trace cargoes with the Global Positioning System and sophisticated computers. And if trucks also bring more road hazards and pollution, at present there is no alternative. Right now only 8 percent of European merchandise moves by rail, compared with more than 40 percent in the United States. Delays are so common that the average speed for freight is about 18km an hour. As a European Commission white paper noted last year, “that’s slower than an ice-breaker opening a shipping lane in the Baltic Sea!”
The railways have had trouble outgrowing a heritage of national rivalries and open warfare between Europe’s countries. The result is what another European Commission report calls “a mosaic of badly interconnected national systems.” Language barriers remain a problem, requiring crew changes at some borders. Switching systems and signals differ. In some places, as between Spain and France, the tracks are different widths. Most trains are electric, but voltages differ. Weight and length allowances vary.
And efficiency is more of a dream than a goal. Europe’s railroads still have to deal with “phantom trains” that run so late they combine with others and disappear from the railroad’s records. A report by International Rail Road Union president Werner Kulpe in 2000 noted that of 20,000 international transport trains checked in Europe, only about half were punctual. In an era when many companies depend on “just-in-time” inventories to make a profit, railroads are rarely on time at all. Nor does such inefficiency come cheap. The Continent’s railways are almost all state-owned monopolies, and, according to the European Commission, those states’ taxpayers fork out more than $30 billion a year to keep the trains running… badly.
Yet there is little official enthusiasm for changing the system. Michel Charlet, mayor of the town of Chamonix at the entrance to the Mont Blanc tunnel, has lobbied in vain with successive governments in Paris to close the tunnel to heavy trucks. Environmental groups like Alp Action have taken the issue to international forums, with little apparent effect. “We’ve come up against the economic power of the trucking companies,” says Catherine Berthet, in the mayor’s office. It can’t help that France’s state-owned railway system is also one of its biggest trucking concerns.
What few reforms there are have come from outside official EU channels. Switzerland, in the middle of the Alps and of Europe–but not a member of the union–has tried imposing its own limits on the 20,000 trucks that transit the country every day. They’re banned at night and on weekends, and taxes on the ones that do go through are earmarked to build new rail tunnels through the Alps. One of those, at Gothard, will be the world’s longest: 57km. Eventually the aim is to have most truck traffic carried under and through the mountains on roll-on roll-off trains much like the shuttle that now goes beneath the English Channel.
One of the most interesting projects, albeit unique, has been developed by home-furnishings giant Ikea. With 20 million cubic meters of freight to transport each year, the company decided to start its own railway. “Originally we wanted to buy our own tracks,” says Christer Beijbom, CEO of Ikea Rail, “but we didn’t succeed in purchasing any. So we set up our own operations with our own trains and bought time slots from the national rail companies.” The first 1,000km route from Almhult, Sweden, to Duisburg, Germany, opened just last month. Plans call for the network to expand to Italy and eventually Poland. Thus far, says Beijbom, the trains are averaging 65km an hour and emit 70 percent less carbon dioxide than trucks carrying similar loads. A consortium of German chemical companies led by BASF is also developing its own facility, Rail4chem.
If the problem of transport in Europe is going to be addressed, though, broader changes are obviously needed. The most important of these is deregulation, which is supposed to go into effect next year when, theoretically at least, the engines of any European company will be able to cross national frontiers pulling their own freight trains. Unfortunately, few analysts believe that competition alone will make European rail more efficient. “The railroads have always had a hard time adjusting quickly, and draconian reforms don’t work,” says Denis Doute, director of freight services for the French rail company SNCF. Germany’s Deutsche Bundesbahn has had to face internal competition since 1994, but remains the country’s biggest operator by far. “The market’s not easy for newcomers,” says Doute.
The reality is that governments have helped create the imbalance between road and rail in Europe–and government action will likely be needed to fix it. The French emphasis on using rail to move people instead of goods, for instance, has helped cripple freight service. “All the investments went to passenger traffic,” says Doute. Freight trains have had to find “windows” to run in between passenger trains, unlike those in the United States, which often travel on separate tracks. Their loads and their lengths are much more limited as well. “There’s a real desire to further develop the freight network,” Doute claims. “But that requires massive investments to modernize existing infrastructures and open new ones.” The political will to fund that kind of investment is lacking, which means the citizens of Chamonix will have to hold their noses for a while longer.
