The British are remarkably ignorant about what goes on on Continental Europe. As a consequence we tend to make one of two mistakes: either believing that everything there is good or believing that everything there is bad. Neither, of course, is the case. We also fall into the trap of believing that what applies in one Continental country applies to all the others. That, of course is totally untrue.

Since 1992, all European Union railways and even some non-EU railways have been subject to a greater or lesser extent to fragmentation - largely as a consequence of European Directive 91/440, the principal aim of which was to reinvigorate Europe's railways and encourage the growth of trans-national rail services by introducing competition onto the network. The method chosen was to split the infrastructure from the operations (the wheel/rail split) and thereby, in theory at least, allow different operators to use the same bit of track. This was done at least in part due to the apparent success (or non-failure) of such a scheme in Sweden.

We are fortunate, therefore, that Carlo Pfund either of or in association with (I am not sure which) LITRA (a Swiss rail think tank) has conducted a survey of the effects of fragmentation on the railways of seven different European countries (not Britain you'll be glad to hear). This is not of mere academic interest to the Swiss. The Swiss have a long standing policy of incorporating EU law into their own and have already split the nationalised operator, SBB, into infrastructure and operations. I understand from a private conversation that this is already causing problems albeit minor ones and there is some anecdotal evidence (though nothing conclusive) that punctuality is slipping.

The peculiar thing about 91/440 is that every country has chosen to interpret it in a different way. At one extreme is the Netherlands (not the UK as it happens) which split the network into infrastructure, timetabling, signalling and operations. At the other is France which created an infrastructure operator (RFF) which contracts out all work to SNCF who also, as it happens, runs all the trains.

Fragmentation in the Netherlands has been a disaster. Although I cannot find a figure for pre-fragmentation punctuality the target (presumably regarded as achievable) was 88%. Since then it has slipped to 74% and cancellations have sky-rocketed. [Incidentally, whereas a British train is "late" if it arrives 5 minutes after the schedule, in the Netherlands that figure is 3 minutes] And they have had none of the compensations that we have had in the UK such as large numbers of new trains and at least some operators (Chiltern and GNER spring to mind) growing their businesses and improving customer service. In 2001, the "Crisis and Collapse" (as it became known) came to a head and the Department of Transport intervened dismissing the head of NS, the train operator.

Even in France, Pfund points out that planning for the future has become a lot harder with the beginning of a turf war between SNCF and the new upstart RFF.

So what of that Swedish model? While Pfund points out that it has not been a great success be accepts that it hasn't been an abject failure either. It seems that the effects of fragmentation are not uniform. Pfund believes that the answer lies in density. He points out that the severest problems have been felt on the densest networks: in the UK and the Netherlands while on sparsely used networks in Norway and Finland the effects have been far less. It seems that dense networks with high-intensity operations magnify the problems of fragmentation.

In writing Blessing or a Curse? Pfund has taken on an enormous task and I think he can be forgiven when perhaps the chapter, say, on Portugal isn't of the same quality of that on the Netherlands. The English translation also clearly wasn't done by a native speaker so, at times, it can seem rather clumsy. He also comes no nearer to a philisophical explanation as to the failure of fragmentation. Nevertheless, this is probably the most comprehensive survey we have of the effects of railway fragmentation and the conclusion is there for all who wish to see it: fragmentation doesn't work.

Separation Philosphy of the European Union - Blessing or Curse? Carlo Pfund, LITRA, 10 Euros