Cross-Border Rail and the EU’s Learned Helplessness
I’m sitting on a EuroCity train from Copenhagen back to Germany. It’s timetabled to take 4:45 to do 520 km, an average speed of 110 km/h, and the train departed 25 minutes late because the crew needed to arrive on another train and that train was late. One of the cars on this train is closed due to an air conditioner malfunction; Cid and I rode this same line to Copenhagen two years ago and this also happened in one direction then.
This is a line that touches, at both ends, two of the fastest conventional lines in Europe, Stockholm-Malmö taking 4:30 to do 614 km (136 km/h) and Berlin-Hamburg normally taking 1:45 to do 287 km (164 km/h) when it is on time. This contrast between good lines within European member states, despite real problems with the German and Swedish rail networks, and much worse ones between them, got me thinking about cross-border rail more. Now, this line in particular is getting upgraded – the route is about to be cut off when the Fehmarn Belt Line opens in four years, reducing the trip time to 2:30. But more in general, cross-border and near-border lines that slow down travel that’s otherwise decent on the core within-state city pairs are common, and so far there’s no EU action on this. Instead, EU action on cross-border rail shows learned helplessness of avoiding the only solution for rail construction: top-down state-directed infrastructure building.
The upshot is that there is good cross-border rail advocacy here, most notably by Jon Worth, but because EU integration on this matter is unthinkable, this advocacy is forced to treat the railroads as if they are private oligopolies rather than state-owned public services. Jon successfully pushed for the incoming EU Commission of last year to include passenger rights in its agenda, to deal with friction between different national railroads. The issue is that SNCF and DB have internal ways of handling passenger rights in case of delays, due to domestic pressure on the state not to let the state railroad exploit its users, and they are not compatible across borders: SNCF is on time enough not to strand passengers, DB has enough frequency and extreme late-night timetable padding (my connecting train to Berlin is padded from 1:45 to 2:30, getting me home well past midnight) not to strand passengers; but when passengers cross from Germany to France, these two internal methods both fail.
At no point in this discussion was any top-down EU-level coordination even on the table. The mentality is that construction of new lines doesn’t matter – it’s a megaproject and these only generate headaches and cost overruns, not results, so instead everything boils down to private companies competing on the same lines. That the companies are state-owned is immaterial at the EU level – SNCF has no social mission outside the borders of France and therefore in its international service it usually behaves as a predatory monopoly profiteering off of a deliberately throttled Eurostar/Thalys market.
If there’s no EU state action, then the relationship between the operator, which is not part of the state, and the passenger, is necessarily adversarial. This is where the preference for regulations that assume this relationship must be adversarial and aim to empower the individual consumer comes from. It’s logical, if one assumes that there will never be an EU-wide high-speed intercity rail network, just a bunch of national networks with one-off cross-border megaprojects compromised to the point of not running particularly quickly or frequently.
And that is, frankly, learned helplessness on the part of the EU institutions. They take it for granted that state-led development is impossible at higher level than member states, and try to cope by optimizing for a union of member states whose infrastructure systems don’t quite cohere. Meanwhile, at the other end of the Eurasian continent, a continental-scale state has built a high-speed rail network that at this point has higher ridership per capita than most European states and is not far behind France or Germany, designed around a single state-owned network optimized for very high average speeds.
This occurs at a time when support for the EU is high in the remaining member states. There’s broad understanding that scale is a core benefit of the union, hence the regulatory harmonization ensuring that products can be shipped union-wide without cross-border friction. But for personal travel by train, these principles go away, and friction is assumed to only comprise the least important elements, because the EU institutions have decided that solving the most important ones, that is speed and frequency, is unthinkable.
Pedestrian Observations 
Trip update: we got to Hamburg 18 minutes late – so much for the German buffer time recovering delays.
And now my train home to Berlin has just departed, 51 minutes late. I guess DB really does need that hour of buffer time on the last train of the day.
I find it weird to argue for “top-down state-directed infrastructure building” and not even mention the current way the EU funds infrastructure through the Connecting Europe Facility and coordinates investment through the TEN-T network.
I took the “one-off cross-border megaprojects” to refer to this. I see why the investment situation is still far from the ideal, but I agree that the post underestimates to what extent it was even worse before.
The connections out of Switzerland seem mostly thanks to SBB, right? (As opposed to the EU, supporting your point.) Katzenberg Tunnel has vastly improved the connection from Basel towards Freiburg, built thanks to Swiss pressure on the hesitant Germans. Electrification of the line from Switzerland to Munich only happened thanks to Swiss pressure and funding, unfortunately hampered by unbelievably incompetent planning by DB, resulting in little to no improvement. The Swiss also pushed hard for Italy to upgrade the line from Chiasso to Milan and helped with the financing.
There are cross-border rights when there are delays spelled out in https://www.seat61.com/european-train-travel.htm#The_CIV and subsequent sections.
Certainly in opposition the British Labour Party rail minister met with SNCF to try and improve things. So there is at least some political movement.
They want nudge too. A bunch of bespoke services that runs infrequently and ruin timetables beyond the benefit they could give.
Labour’s rail strategy is to plunder London’s rail system for the benefit of Outer Britain by running into the ground with insane timetables thanks to giving the Cleethorpes direct London services and pushing all industrial/warehousing to the North. Hence the freight mainline snarls, the maintainence backlogs (because they run at night) all of which hit London hardest since its the interface between the channel tunnel, the largest ports and the rest of the UK.
Also is an Xenophobic administration allergic to learning from abroad because ewww forrigners. Instead “Very Light Rail” for conventry and a tram for leeds that costs what a spanish metro line costs.
I am not sure there is a big issue with extending the existing London-Lincoln services to Cleethorpes?
And in terms of freight connectivity the best way from my perspective to improve it is to do things like Oxford-Cambridge and other similar improvements. I.e building cross country lines outside of London.
Its just the most recent one of these pander-services. Cleethorpes branch has limited space for multiple service direction, lacks electrification or higher quality signalling and is isolated for passenger rail depots. That means when the poor quality rolling stock with its many-power standards interfaces with the very busy ECML it creates high cascade risk for very little gain unlike say Hull.
Indeed and we have two potential bypass systems even without East-West rail if we would use them. The Ipswich-Ely-Peterborough-Sleaford-Lincoln-Yorkshire arc and the Gloucester-Hereford-Shrewsbury-Wexford-Chester one. But we’d need to have cost control and investment in electrification, passing loops and signalling to make it work. And if we did it would take years.
So instead ruthlessly prioritise, start building warehouses in southern England again around the major ports (multi-story East Asian style). Cut the land arbitrage economy.
The stuff has to leave the warehouses so you haven’t solved the problems.
There are many, different, solutions but they cost money. If nobody wants to spend money you can all sit in traffic.
Right now the British government’s official industrial policy is to have frieght coming out of the Channel tunnel/Channel ports take a train through London’s clogged network, then along our clogged mailines to be deposited and processed in Midlands and driven back to London on our clogged motorways. This only makes sense in a crazy land arbitrage sense and some of the particularly stupid “green” sense.
Otherwise plonk the warehouse next to the port and have them take a short drive to the customers (London).
It’s difficult to believe planning rules are preventing warehouses being built in Essex or Kent if desired.
And there are loads in Milton Keynes
Oh there is no explicit government directive nor policy, just a consistent thread going back to 1947.
Instead its that local government is given responsibility for roads and no share of road use taxes. And Southern localities also have much of their business rates stolen. Add in the gerrymanders to keep actual working class locked away in safe seats in local government (see Kent/Essex CC maps). And since the Blair years the centre has mandated that new housing use “Brownfield first” i.e. developers the national government will back you building on Southern English factory land, if you want greenfield or infill in existing housing units you’re on your own with the local government which we have specifically bankrupted to nimby by stealing their tax revenues, assets and then leaving them to pick up the social care bill.
Furthermore the balkanising of Southern England (inc a weak relative to boroughs GLA) means its impossible to co-ordinate on large scale infrastructure e.g. Thames Gateway, and Thames Lower Crossing all took forever because the politics were impossible to manage.
In the North and Midlands you have the “advantage” of oodles of low density abandoned factory land, low density council house suburbs and in the Midlands lots of boring flat rural land along major motorways with not many people living there. Hence you can do massive infill in your inner Victorian industrial zone while getting central government subsidies for your “advanced manufacturing parks” and “enterprise zones”, “Freeports” plus keeping 100% of your business rates unlike London which gets barely 70% and has to use much of that to pay for bus services/roads that are paid by central subsidy say in Manchester.
And I could add extra stories in power generation, electricity substations water, graveyards, mobile phone towers, in which they all the same basic story, the South is underbuilt relative to population/income because the national government quite deliberately steals the benefits through tax centralisation, makes decision making impossible by wrecking political incentives/local state capacity.
The only place where where the south has an advantage in infrastracture per capita is in electric railways, and that really because 1. Core network predates 1947 i.e. Tube, Bus and Southern 3rd rail. 2. Fare revenue gives South a source of revenue Outer Britain can’t match and has struggled to completely steal. No that they haven’t had no success given how “national” government have overloaded TfL’s budget with stuff they give for free to Scotrail or TfGM.
And MK is 1. Beyond the greenbelt and protected landscapes/conservation areas. 2. On border between South and Midlands. 3. Very unique circumstances giving it relatively few nimbys/racists/gammons. 4. Smol relative to the size of southern England (250,000 people versus 28 million).
They let people in London buy stuff from warehouses in Milton Keynes. Or anyplace else beyond London’s equivalent of Ninth Avenue. 28 million is …. very generous. That does leave the other 40 million people who can get stuff from a warehouse in Milton Keynes. Or anyplace else.
The truck doesn’t evaporate when it’s empty. It goes back to the warehouse. There would be more trucks going to the warehouses in the south because, I suspect you find this hard to believe, people in the rest of England, even Scotland and Wales, buy stuff.
No idea about east of London, but certainly in the Thames Valley there has been an extreme reluctance to engage with the public (Oxford Cambridge expressway, Oxford to Bicester railway and HS2), extreme reluctance to provide benefits to those affected by the construction (HS2) and reluctance to consider alternatives (HS2 and possibly the lower Thames crossing where the rail alternative hasn’t been looked at properly.
Also with Cleethorpes currently the trains sit for 90 minutes in a siding at Lincoln, Cleethorpes is an hour north and has 4 platforms so it could sit in one of them for 90 minutes instead. Or possibly 75 minutes with a 15 minute stop in Lincoln on the way to London for reliability.
There really aren’t many other trains so difficult to see how there would be delays, and only the five minutes from Cleethorpes to Grimsby is single track anyway.
Buying stuff with other’s people money is No.1 characteristic of the Tax-Land-Labour arbitrage with side gig in welfare society of Outer Britain. Its the main reason why the UK is high consumption/high debt/high financialisation*/low capital investment economy.
*Yes Outer Britain is more dependent on financial sector you can tell because deleverage/retrenchment episodes e.g. post-1992 and post-2008 (yes pre austerity) its Outer Britain esp the North that collapses harder. Because the main basis on the domestic financial sector is mortgages and northern housing actually worth that much without the Southern housing crisis sparking a speculative boom.
Actually with these infrastructure projects they defer too much to local parochial NIMBY and councillors. The problem is the nature of taxation, Lower Thames Crossing/East-West Rail are clearly for the benefit of the local economy but in UK local government financial system is so ridiculous they don’t see it.
HS2 is different since they decided to copy what they thought the TGV and ignored the obvious reality of successful HSR commuting in East Asia and the use of said exburban stations to provide extra platform and passing loop space, see Oyama or Takasaki stations. Instead oversized Curzon and Euston with constantly changing designs.
ECML is issue here not the Cleethorpes-Lincoln bit, crappy multi-power units on lower quality raillines serving smol failed communities with nothing to offer except assertions of moral and racial superiority. And ECML and WCML have to keep serving multiple of these kinds of communities and because its their structure it means timetables from Inverness to Brighton get affected. To what end?
I really don’t think extending the Lincoln train to Cleethorpes will cause delays.
And you might not like them but serving smaller places is the price of living in a society.
Also unless you close Cleethorpes station entirely such service is going to be profitable to operate.
And also if you can’t sell building new infrastructure that benefits local people to them then your community engagement sucks.
you do have to go to parish council meetings etc to talk to people.
The truck and the traffic it creates doesn’t give a shit where the money came from to buy the cheap crap that is pouring in on the container ships. One of the alternatives is have the containers arrive near the existing warehouses north of London. Or upgrade the railroads. Or something other than rant at policies you don’t like while you sit in traffic.
The worst cases here are where a sensible high-speed line would pass through a country without serving anywhere (or nowhere of significance) in that country. Obvious examples include some of the routes between Italy and Germany that pass through Switzerland and Austria – though at least those generally would serve Innsbruck or Bern or Zurich.
There would be absolutely no incentive for Austria to fund a Verona-München line (via Innsbruck) as the vast majority of the benefits go to Italy and Germany, but the costs fall mostly on the mountain-crossings in Austria. Only by the EU stepping in can something like that be funded.
A similar story applies to speeding up Brussels-Antwerp in Belgium – the main beneficiaries are people who aren’t travelling to/from Belgium, ie people who are not themselves Belgian.
I am not sure that this is true. Brussels South to Antwerpen Centraal is 47.6km, London Marylebone to High Wycombe is 45.3km. London-High Wycombe with a 100mph/160kmh top speed is done in as little as 24 minutes with DMUs.
With some domestic commuter level improvements Brussels to Antwerp should be able to manage something similar, perhaps 25 minutes. Now sure with a 300km/h top speed and 3 minutes to accelerate and decelerate you could do the trip in 14 minutes with 10% padding, but it’s a pretty small saving in the scale of things.
Depending on who you ask, Brussels metro area is 2.3-3.4M and Antwerp is 1.4-1.8M. Amsterdam is 2.0-2.9M, Rotterdam 1.9M and the Hague is 1.1-1.4M. The whole of the Randstad is 6.7 to 8.4M. Based on population is would seem that people using the Brussels-Antwerp line would be as likely to be travelling between the two as passing through from Amsterdam/Rotterdam to somewhere else. Brussels and Antwerp are not ‘beet field stations’.
The bigger question in regards to Alon’s original post is why the Netherlands and Belgium didn’t get together to build a Lille-Brussels-Antwerp-Rotterdam-Amsterdam as a single 320km line rather than piecemealing it as HSL Zuid, HSL 1 and 4, etc. Paris-Lyon is 409km, the whole Benelux connection would easily be a single combined project.
Sure. But you get into some of the same issues as elsewhere as the Belgians didn’t care about the service north of Brussels as they cared more about service to London and Paris and Brussels Antwerp is “good enough” – certainly making Brussels Antwerp more than 160-200km/h is tough to justify.
Belgium and The Netherlands got together and chose the most reasonable Brussels-Amsterdam route through largely urbanized land. It turns out HSL Zuid was badly built. A recent article in Spoorpro and Railtech described “The monstrosity of Design & Construct contract” and argued that “A coup was staged from above at the highly competent HSL project office in Utrecht. The Trojan horse was a consultant from TwynstraGudde. The model shifted power to Financial and project managers while sidelining technical experts.” Price collusion and shoddy construction have now been discovered, resulting in 120 km/h speed restrictions until viaducts can be repaired.
I think “the EU’s learned helplessness” title is unfair. The EU is now helping a lot. The LGV Nord, Chunnel tunnel, LGV 1 and HS1 opened in 1993, 1994, 1997 and 2003 without any EU financing, but HSL Zuid, the most delayed part of the PKBA+L project, received 194 million out of its 7 billion cost in 2009 Euros (2.3%). The EU financed respectively 10.2%, 14.3%, 8%, 5.67% and 3% of the construction costs of the 2007 Est 1, 2010 Perpignan-Figueras, 2011 Rhin-Rhone, 2016 Est 2, and 2018 Nimes-Montpellier Bypass LGVs. The EU is now paying for 50% of the Brenner Base Tunnel cost, and will likely shoulder 40, 20 and 11% of the Mont d’Ambin tunnel, South of Bordeaux LGVs and Vitoria-Bilbao AVE costs. The main obstacle to the financing of international links is not the EU. It is local. Portugal returned EU funds because it prioritizes the domestic rail projects over a HSR connexion to Madrid. The top-down approach is not going to work.
I think there is also a big obstacle that the French TGV track access charges are too high for non Paris services to be commercially viable.
Coming from Britain, the standard LGV charge is currently 8.14 Euros per train-km if going to Brussels and 10.62 E/km to Marseille. These non-Paris charges are similar to the ones in other continental high speed tracks. High access charges are only found on high demand markets like Gare de Lyon-Marseille (23.83 E/km) or Chunnel Tunnel-Gare du Nord (19.51 E/km).
In round numbers: if it is 10E per km to go to Marseille, and 1000km from Calais to Marseille, then there is a 10,000E fee to run a train between them?
There are 1067 km between Calais-Frethun and Marseille St Charles assuming you travel by Lyon St Exupery. The conventional rails will cost 3.96 Euro/km (x 7 km in your case). For the other 1060 km, the above LGV market fee will be affected by two coefficients. It will be cut by 44% for departures scheduled during off-peak hours (10:00 to 11:00 or after 20:00), unchanged on “normal hours”, raised by 15% on “full hours” (7 to 9, 15 to 17, 18 to 19) or by 25% on “peak hours” (6 to 7, 17 to 18). The second coefficient based on seat capacity and density would result in a 8.5% cut for a single ICE3 with 111 Premium and 333 standard seats, or a 2% raise for a pair. A TGV-M with 206 Premium and 544 Standard seats will incur a 2.59% raise as a single unit or 18.42% as a pair. As a new entrant, you will negotiate a 5 year break. Trenitalia just entered the Paris-Marseille market with a 37.5% discount until next May 31 and a 16.5% discount from June 1st, 2026 to December 12, 2026. The discount for years 3, 4 and 5 will be based on year 2 income and costs.
Besides the market fee you must pay for the marginal costs, the wear and tear caused by your train. A single ICE3 will be charged about 1 Euro/km for the tracks and 0.284 E/km for the electrical installations. On your run, a pair of Ouigo twin-deck TGVs would also need about 33 kWh/km at maybe 0.12 E/kWh. Finally, add a 10% VAT.
Surely if one was to run something without contention like a new service every two hours from Brussels to Strasbourg the cost should be pretty close to the marginal wear and tear costs of <€2/km?
From Brussels to Strasbourg via LGV Nord and Est is classified as “Intersecteur International type 1”. On top of the marginal costs, the “Redevance de Marche” with one intermediate stop would be 14.17 Euros/km as opposed to around 10 Euros/km in a “type 2” run like London-Strasbourg. The type 2 discount is here because SNCF knows that high speed trains coming from privately built infrastructure like the Chunnel Tunnel and the Figueras-Perpignan link are already hit by high access charges.
€14/km is extremely expensive for non Paris. And means you aren’t running services that would otherwise make sense.
That means you are not running services that may not make sense. According to SNCF Reseau, marginal costs represent respectively 9%, 16% and 27% of exploitation (running signaling operations), maintenance and renewal costs. Services paying only marginal costs would increase ridership but would also take away riders from competing services paying full costs. This would not be not sustainable.
I think it is very unlikely that adding marginal services would take away significant ridership from full cost services that already run.
Do not forget that despite the massive capacity boost from the LGVs that the French rail network has lower traffic than the British one aside from the RER compared to Thameslink/the Elizabeth line where the RER really does a whole lot better.
Yeah and that pass-the-hot-potato/free-rider problem also exists in Japan, where a bunch of projects are stuck because the financial rules since 1987 mean the prefecture where it actually being built pays 40% of the cost (40% national gov, 10% operator). So the Nagasaki Shinkansen can’t be completed because Saga prefecture would have to pay for it and gets relatively few of the benefits. Ditto the Shikoku proposals that require Okayama to pay-up the majority of track necessary.
There really needs to be a report comparing EU, US and China in terms continental scale transport systems. In fairness the current system “worked” for road/air/tidewater ports because those don’t require the same tight coordination, and the EU’s structural/readjustment money could build a lot more in the poorer regions of eastern Europe (or Ireland in the 1970-80’s). That could actually help shift the conversation.
It would require the EU to develop extra fiscal firepower sufficient in scale to pay for it since I don’t see how it could easily displace existing spending (e.g. Ukraine).
“There would be absolutely no incentive for Austria to fund a Verona-München line (via Innsbruck) as the vast majority of the benefits go to Italy and Germany, but the costs fall mostly on the mountain-crossings in Austria. Only by the EU stepping in can something like that be funded.”
As far as I am aware, Austria and Italy are splitting the non-EU funded part of the Brenner Base Tunnel that will connect Munich and Verona. Additionally, did the EU fund any of the Innsbruck Bypass/Inntal Tunnel or New Lower Inn Railway (which form the rest of the connection across Austria along with the Brenner Base Tunnel)? If not, then together with the even split with Italy on BBT that would seem to contradict the argument that Austria has no incentive to fund something like that because it only serves Innsbruck (and with the Innsbruck bypass even that is not served!)
More relevant to Alon’s post is that there is no high speed line under construction from Munich to Brannenburg to meet the Austrian Lower Inn Railway. Again, this doesn’t speak to the idea that only Germany/Italy would want to fund something like this. I’m not sure the status of a HS line in Italy from Verona to the south portal of BBT.
Lotschberg, Gotthard, Brenner, Mont D’Ambin – a lot of rock is being moved in the Alps over a third of a century for cross border links.
Between Munich and Innsbruck you only save 36km by going direct rather than via the Inn valley, or 12 minutes at 200km/h – almost certainly the best approach is to improve the existing Inn Valley line as has already happened and Munich-Rosenhiem-Salzburg which is also on the Paris-Vienna axis. And Rosenhiem-Wörgl is also important for Vienna-Innsbruck trains and connections from Germany to Kitzbühel and Zell am See for tourism.
And yet Switzerland has invested around 20 bn CHF into NEAT (new railway link through the Alps) because they see big advantages for themselves as well: shift cargo from road to rail to reduce air and noise pollution and traffic in the country, and better rail connections (most connections between Germany and Italy require a transfer and stop at least 9 times on the way, but also for cargo).
Austria built the Brennerbahn when the pass was a mountain crossing in the Austrian empire. After WW1 it became an international crossing between Austria and Italy. Nowadays it is only a choke point between Northern Europe and Italy. Fixing it is a European priority and Austria is only expected to pay 25% of the bill.
Base tunnels have their own incentives. They lower operating costs as freight trains don’t need to be shortened or pushed through the mountains, and their more accommodating gauge facilitates the transportation of lorries. These benefits only kick in if the entire corridor is fixed. Further down on the Italian side this means a new 10.7 km Trento tunnel.
More accommodating gauge? The Gotthard and Brenner base tunnels have the same standard gauge as the older culmination tunnel / pass, right?
New tunnels are built with the latest European 4-meter corner height structure gauge. After opening the Gotthard base tunnel, SBB spent another 940 million Francs to get the same gauge on the entire route between Basel and Italy.
Ah, structure gauge, not track gauge. That makes sense, thanks, Alain.
IIUC there was intermodal traffic on the Gotthard and Brenner lines before but it only accommodated trailers up to 3.8 m. Since 2020 the Swiss part of the Gotthard line has been 4m-capable but the Italian side is still working on it with planned completion by 2028. Is this correct?
The Italians are supposed to finish work in 2028 between Iselle, Domodossola and Sesto Calende on the Simplon route. They are also digging a third tunnel under the Valico dei Giovi to reach the sea in Genova. This one will be wider, longer at 37 km, and flatter (1.25% ramp) than the previous ones.
Given DB’s current struggles, SBB is now sending some northbound freight trains on the French side of the Rhine and on February 11, 2025, France signed on a plan to expand the loading gauge on tunnels near Reding, north of Strasbourg, and fix various local issues.
New tunnels are built with the latest European 4-meter corner height structure gauge. After opening the Gotthard base tunnel, SBB spent another 940 million Francs to get the same gauge on the entire route between Basel and Italy.
New tunnels are built with the latest European 4-meter corner height structure gauge. After opening the Gotthard base tunnel, SBB spent another 940 million Francs to get the same gauge on the entire route between Basel and Italy.
The EU cannot act like a state because it is not a state. Since the Treaty of Lissabon (at the latest) it has been clear that it won’t be a superstate that can direct member states to build inter-state railways. That’s legally impossible. It can only regulate and incentivize.
Rather than learned helplessness it’s about member states that do not want their planning prerogative taken away which is somewhat understandable.
What a bizarre article. You are talking about a route that’s operating on a detour precisely because of infrastructure works co-funded by the EU. Copenhagen – Lubeck is being comprehensively upgraded over the entire length. Do you seriously envisage having Planning Permissions being granted in Brussels over the lengths and breadths of EU countries bypassing national processes?