Can France's oversized trains help the government
push back against EU pro-competition measures?
France is known for its high-speed TGV network, the sleek red Thalys
trains heading to northern Europe, the Eurostar to London. Lesser
known are the workhorse trains of the Transport express régional
(TER) service that primarily carry commuters and students in villages
and small cities off the mainlines. They have gained a bit more
notoriety this week in France, when Le Canard enchaîné, the
weekly satirical newspaper that carries out the best overall
investigative journalism in the country, has just reported that the
2000 new trains purchased by French national railway operator SNCF
are too fat.
The regional trains are operated by the SNCF, the
French national railway operator, on behalf of 20 of the country's
regional governments, and run on the lines owned by Réseau ferré de
France (RFF), the network owner.
Prior to the SNCF fobbing off the loss-making
regional service onto the regions beginning in the 1990s, service
quality and number of users had been in steady decline. The SNCF far
preferred its shiny intercity and TGV services, and their shiny
profits, to the poky trains (the metal-sided models formerly common
on these lines were known as the “petit gris” or “gray snails”)
that continue to this day to provide vital service to rural France,
at least on the lines where the SNCF hasn't ditched them in favor of
more economical bus service. Starting in 1995, the SNCF began signing
contracts with regional governments determined to turn things around.
The regional governments were motivated both by the principle of
offering citizens the public service of affordable public
transportation, and the need for a social and economic investment
that allows students to travel to high school and universities,
workers to get to their jobs, citizens to access public services like
hospitals and courts, and consumers to come to the cities to shop.
It's a service that comes with a price, with national
and regional subsidies covering nearly 80% of the cost of service, a
cost to the various regions of up to 20% of their annual budgets,
over 6 million euros yearly for the biggest spender, Rhône-Alpes
with a network centered on Lyon (the Paris region operates under a
special system). Regional transit is such a priority that one region,
Languedoc-Roussillon (capital Montpellier), has decided to expand a
pilot program offering tickets for just one euro to its entire
network as of January 2015.
Languedoc-Roussillon and the other regions have not
only reversed the decline in rail use, but seen significant increases
in ridership, prompting the SNCF to order 2000 new trains from French
train builder Alstom and its Canadian counterpart Bombardier, with a
total cost of 15 billion euros (over 20 billion dollars).
And here's where the problem arises: these new trains
are too fat. They were ordered and purchased by the SNCF on behalf of
regional governments, using the regions' money. Everyone involved
wanted trains that were as wide as possible to offer more seats and
reduce the cost per passenger of these newly popular trains. The SNCF
based its specifications on information from RFF, which assured the
SNCF that per current standards, there was at least 10 centimeters
available on each side compared with previous trains. Alstom and
Bombadier designed their trains accordingly, only to find that those
extra centimeters that exist in theory nationwide do not exist in
practice in a frighteningly large number of older stations. In 1300
of the 8700 train stations in France, the platforms are too wide and
the space for the train too narrow to accommodate these new trains.
In these stations, it's not “mind the gap”, it's “mind the edge
of the platform gashing the side of the train open like the iceberg
gutting the Titanic”. While RFF gave correct specifications for
current railworks, in certain regions of France the legacy stations
predate these standards, and most of those do not allow enough track
width for the new TER trains.
As a result, these platforms need to be narrowed, at
a cost of up to 80 million euros. The regions are refusing to pay for
RFF's mistake, while RFF, already heavily indebted, claims it can do
the work within the scope of its existing multi-billion-euro budget,
raising the eyebrows of Gallic doubters.
Meanwhile a nation is mocking, everyone is pointing
fingers at each other, and politicians are making hay, with calls for
official reports and parliamentary hearings.
The timing of the story is curiously convenient for
those who regret the status quo of French rail, and who are working
to undue the 1997
European Union-inspired spinoff of RFF. It's a
problem that is allowing some who have never accepted the split of
SNCF into infrastructure owner RFF and services operator SNCF (it
kept the unitary firm's name)
to push back in a big way. The French did as
little as possible to make this separation possible, with SNCF
retaining ownership of train stations (but not the platforms), and a
new subsidiary of SNCF, SNCF Infra, created to carry out railway
maintenance for RFF. The EU's aim was to allow competition on
European rail networks, a goal that has only very slowly come to
fruition in France, and on only a few routes. More important for
French politicos than promoting competition to the state-owned SNCF
was to free it from the crippling debt incurred by infrastructure
development, allowing it to pay regular dividends to the government
while saddling RFF with a burden that continues to limit its capacity
to maintain and expand the network (see, for example, last year's deadly suburban rail accident at Brétigny-sur-Orge).
Current minister for transport Frédéric Cuvillier
is blaming the train width cock-up on the split between the two
entities, and is using this blunder to push the government's plan to
reunite the rail firms in a single holding company (
SNCF Groupe uniting the existing SNCF as SNCF Mobilité and RFF and SNCF Infra as SNCF Réseau). The European Union is planning to introduce stricter
rules for separating network ownership and rail operations this year,
and to ensure a
fait accompli contrary to the spirit of this
reform, the legislature has to pick up the pace. Given that the
problem of the oversized trains has been known since 2013, the timing
of this public revelation seems rather convenient for a government
seeking to undo the pro-competition measures imposed by the EU.
It's all really odd: clearly at some point the SNCF
(or RFF or whatever) would have had to bring the stations up to code.
It's happening now, it could have happened earlier, it could have
happened later. Had RFF (or SNCF) simply stated at the time this new
project was launched that this would be the opportunity to bring all
stations in line with current standards, allowing for more profitable
use of the rail lines, it would have been seen as a forward thinking
initiative. Instead, they look like dolts, with calls for the CEOs of
both SNCF and RFF to be fired. The whole thing makes sense neither as
policy nor as a plot. Maybe it is just stupidity.
And while the national government is strengthening
the role of the SNCF over the national rail system, eight of the
largest regions are in the process of forming a legal entity to order
and purchase their own trains, to be free of their costly reliance on
the SNCF. The new trains will be giving this group an extra push, as
they join the protests of those refusing to pay for the dolts.
