Long-distance passenger rail services: Review and improvement

The situation of long-distance in Europe rail has faced different developments at literally different speeds since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Relevant central European parts of the OEM Corridor (e. g. Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Hungary) first suffered a considerable decline in cross-border long-distance rail traffic due to the emergence of low-cost airlines and the freedom of car purchase in the 1990s. Since the beginning of the millennium and partly following the 2004 accession of Middle and Eastern European countries to the European Union, a slight renaissance of Eurocity trains and market penetration of high-speed rail products can be perceived. The other countries in the eastern part of the corridor have mostly not recovered from the rail decline and lag behind. In Greece, rail development suffers generally from unfavourable conditions (different track gauges and disproportion of land and population distribution) and a lack of innovation, and has thus been negatively impacted by the abovementioned boom of car and air. Its geographical isolation in Europe also plays a role. The political downturn of former Yugoslavia reinforced the situation. For passenger rail along the corridor, the paper argues that considerable improvements in service quality and travel time reduction can be made without doubtful high investment in high-speed rail infrastructure. Moreover, building up existing rail infrastructure may avoid giving up conventional rail services as shown for some high-speed rail cases.