Produzione, costi e performance delle principali reti ferroviarie dell’Unione Europea [Production, costs and performance of the main European rail networks]

The last decade has seen significant developments in the liberalisation and deregulation of the railway industry in Europe. One characteristic has been vertical disintegration and the separate regulation of previously state-owned companies. This study has focused on the measurement of the quality of rail infrastructure managers’ policies, infrastructure output and productivity. The objectives of the benchmarking have been targeted to determine what and where improvements are called for and to analyse the determinants of high performance levels in those organisations that have been shown to maintain high quality standards in their service delivery. That is why this paper has founded worthwhile to reclassify, using homogeneous criteria, the income statements of six European rail infrastructure managers. In an effort to fine-tune the analysis the paper has also rebuilt the traffic data in these countries in order to compute productivity and cost indicators for the rail infrastructure networks. The results, based on indicators of unit cost, suggest that the two most productive rail network is in Sweden, with a network that is efficiently managed leading to reduced cost, and Germany, which has a network characterised by significant rail traffic, which is then able to improve productivity and to bring down the unit cost. The Italian case is ranked third among the six networks and is also to be considered the only rail infrastructure in which traffic and productivity have increased while the production cost has decreased. The remaining three networks show mixed results. The cost of the Spanish rail network is relatively low but this advantage is eroded by weak traffic. Great Britain has a rail infrastructure that is fairly expensive in terms of production cost and this factor is only partially offset by an intense circulation. The French network, finally, has a production cost in line with the average, along with a productivity below the average in terms of trains per km of rail track and where only a higher average train load can rebalance this situation