Can't Anyone Here Run A Railroad?

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As publicity stunts go, this one could have been better timed. Throughout May and June, as waves of strikes disrupted public transport in France and forced the cancelation of hundreds of trains, the French national railroad company SNCF lugged 28 engines and carriages onto the Champs Elysées for an exhibition that promised to "put the whole of Paris under the spell of rail." The exhibits ranged from a replica of an 1829 steam locomotive to the latest version of the high-speed tgv. There were even models of the very commuter trains hardest hit by the strike, so the crowds at the show could at least admire the handsome trains they couldn't take to work.

No matter. "Even in the strikes, people are happy to go to this exhibition," said Gad Weil, one of the organizers. "The adventure of rail continues in this society. People expect a lot from trains."

Europe has nurtured idealized visions of railroads ever since the British engineer George Stephenson drove a steam engine from Stockton to Darlington — the world's first public railroad — in 1825. In theory, given the vast rail infrastructure that has been built in Europe since, traveling by train should be easy, safe and environmentally clean. The reality can be a rude shock: the 5.7 billion annual passengers on Europe's railroads encounter trains that are dirty or late when they run at all. A recent German poll found that Deutsche Bahn (DB) has by far the worst image of any company in the nation. In the U.K., almost 60% of passengers say trains don't provide value for money — and service got so bad on some of the main commuter lines into London that the government last month sacked the company that operates the franchise. In Italy, where almost one in five commuter trains is more than 10 minutes late, signs at major rail terminals have a column for what platform a train will arrive on, one for what time it's scheduled to arrive, and one labeled ritardo: how late the train will be.

That's indicative of the biggest complaint: European railroads are run haphazardly by bloated monopolies immune to the concept of service. Rail freight still only moves around Europe today at an average of 18 km/h; even George Stephenson managed to go faster on some stretches of his maiden run 178 years ago. And passengers sometimes don't do much better. Linda Bienge, a 39-year-old clerk in Berlin's criminal court, was traveling back to the German capital from Dresden one evening recently when her train came to a standstill for almost two hours. "I was fuming," she says. It took the conductors 45 minutes to apologize for the delay. But they never explained what caused it.