As the dust settles on the general election result and we await further details on the timeline and specifics for rail reform in the UK, we can turn our attention to the business end of the Euro 2024 men’s football tournament!

It struck the team at Rail Partners that football isn’t the only competition in town. One point the industry, the outgoing administration and the new government all agree on is that competitive open access operators should play an important role in the future of the UK’s railways.

Rail Partners’ Track to Growth report, published last year, sets out the benefits that open access train companies deliver for passengers and taxpayers in Britain and across Europe. Track to Growth shows that harnessing on-rail competition through the introduction of open access operators has led to more customers, more services, newer trains and cheaper fares. 

As the four remaining teams prepare to go head-to-head on the pitch in the semi-finals of the European championships, we have looked at their countries’ use of on-rail competition and open access operators. We’ll be sharing some posts on Twitter / X today and tomorrow with some of the case studies from our Track to Growth report.

For example, in England the three open access operators on the East Coast Mainline have had a noticeable impact over the past year. Lumo, Hull Trains, and Grand Central, along with state-operated LNER, who they compete against, all recorded strong passenger recovery post-Covid. This growth in passenger numbers has outpaced the national trend and provides clear evidence that on-rail competition in certain, mainly long-distance, domestic rail markets can deliver benefits for all operators, whether public or private, and more importantly the passengers and local communities they serve.

As Track to Growth evidenced, on-rail competition has also been generating benefits for travellers across Europe and ultimately helping to incentivise passengers onto rail. This is good for economic growth and a crucial part of the strategy for reducing carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions from transport, supporting the delivery of targets to reach net zero. Open access operators also offer communities better connections to urban centres as well as employment opportunities. 

In Spain, on-rail competition started in 2021 when Ouigo launched operations on the Madrid-Barcelona route. Spain's state-operator Renfe, in response to Ouigo’s and Iryo’s entry to the rail market, launched a new low-cost service of its own, AVLO, designed to compete with the new operators. In France, on-rail competition began when Trenitalia started operating alongside the French state operator SNCF on the Paris-Lyon-Milan high-speed line in 2021. In the Netherlands, in 2022, Arriva launched the country’s first domestic open access operations, operating night trains between Maastricht and Schiphol. This enabled people to travel by rail through the night for the first time, connecting passengers with early morning flight departures from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.

The successes that open access operators deliver across the UK and Europe shows the private sector can be a vital ingredient in a customer-focused railway.

Follow along on our X/Twitter page here: https://x.com/RailPartners and read our Track to Growth report here: https://railpartners.co.uk/our-work/publications/track-to-growth