On the 1^st December 2022, ALLRAIL held the first event in its new office: the State of Market Opening reception.

Railway industry associations (ALLRAIL, CER, UNIFE) and the Europe's Rail Joint Undertaking research programme have signed a memorandum of understanding to undertake a study into ‘Smart & Affordable High-Speed Services in the European Union’. The study will demonstrate the benefits of a radical transformation of the rail network to provide high speed services linking all major continental cities. 

While other competing long distance transport modes are setting themselves net zero emission targets, ALLRAIL believes that rail can do it bigger and better: high speed trains with large capacities connecting places around Europe on a frequent basis will lead to low fares and high revenue. The outcomes of this study must enable high speed rail to become the backbone of long-distance travel in Europe. 

With the introduction of the Commission's trans-European transport network proposal (TEN-T), AERRL and ALLRAIL would like to emphasise the need for making the ERTMS the priority number one for the future of rail. This would require obligations on the part of the players, in order to ensure deployment based on transparent and synchronised planning as well as ambitious subsidy programmes coming from the Commission.

The EU Commission (‘EC’) announced that it had come to the preliminarily conclusion that the state-owned rail incumbents Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) and Czech Railways (ČD) breached EU competition rules by colluding to hinder access to used 2nd hand rolling stock for the commercially driven new entrant cross-border passenger rail operator RegioJet.

But there is a further implication: if the EC’s allegations are true - then hindering access to 2nd hand rolling stock is being used to engineer market failure. New entrant operators are then less able to start commercially driven services, because they are not getting fair access to wagons, and there is very little alternative supply.

Consequently, such engineered ‘Market Failure’ will lead to unnecessary taxpayer-funded Public Service Obligations (PSOs) in long distance cross-border rail.

The European Commission has sent Czech and Austrian national operators ČD and ÖBB a statement of objections setting out its preliminary view that they may have colluded to prevent new entrant RegioJet acquiring second-hand passenger rolling stock for use on competing services.

According to ALLRAIL, the alliance of new entrants to the passenger market, the lack of access to second-hand vehicles is one of the biggest barriers preventing newcomers from starting commercially-driven open access services. With no functioning market for long distance coaches owned by incumbents, dominant players should be required to sell or rent underutilised vehicles to newcomers without preferential treatment for other incumbents or unnecessary scrapping.