Next summer, Czech operator RegioJet intends to expand its five-country night train running from Prague to the Croatian coast, while Flixtrain has mulled offering its own sleepers in France.The Swedish government has pledged to fund a night train to Brussels from 2022, but in parallel Snälltåget, a private company, is promising to increase its own service next year on the Stockholm to Berlin route. Snälltåget’s manager Carl Adam Holmberg says policymakers can do more to help out the industry by reducing track access charges — the fixed per kilometer fee for using the track — rather than just looking to subsidize routes by big state players.

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The only night train operator between Sweden and Germany over the past eight years has been Snälltåget, a privately owned venture, doing it on a commercial basis without subsidy. Next year it will serve Denmark as well.
Now, state rail incumbents are lobbying for directly awarded taxpayer subsidy for night trains between the same countries - only for themselves.

• Aleš Ondrůj, Senior Director Communications, RegioJet
• Carl Adam Holmberg, Head of Snälltåget
• Nick Brooks, Secretary General ALLRAIL
• Barbora Mičková, Policy Officer ALLRAIL
-> Recorded 17th June 2020

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Arthur Kamminga presented ALLRAIL vision on the topic of "How to stimulate international passenger rail?" at the Hearing on European support for international passenger rail transport at the Commission for Mobility of the Belgian House of Representatives, taking place on 17th December 2019 at the Chamber of Representatives of Belgium. 

For Nick Brooks, head of the Allrail lobby group representing a dozen private rail operators in Europe, old monopoly mentalities are a major hindrance to a Ryanair of European rail. The high cost of buying track access from national operators deters would-be market entrants, he says, if they aren’t scared off already by the high cost of market entry. You can’t lease trains like planes, he says, requiring deep-pocketed operators for long-distance rail competition to succeed.

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