Rolling Stock Management and Railway Efficiency: Evidence from a Line-Level Analysis of Regional Rail Services in France

Previous studies on railway efficiency have focused mainly on national or regional scales, while line-level analyses and the role of rolling-stock characteristics remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by examining how rolling-stock attributes, including fleet age, diversity, and maintenance practices, affect efficiency. Using a novel dataset of train-line observations from a French region (2021–2022), we apply a two-stage approach combining Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with Tobit regression to identify the main drivers of efficiency. Our results show that rolling-stock age and diversity significantly reduces efficiency, reflecting the logistical and maintenance difficulties of heterogeneous fleets. Preventive maintenance is positively associated with efficiency, whereas corrective maintenance has the opposite effect. We also document a structural trade-off: in the context of rolling-stock shortages, reallocating trains to high-density corridors improves efficiency on major routes but degrades both efficiency and service quality on medium- and low-density lines. Moreover, non-discretionary factors such as population or line characteristics play only a limited role, confirming that efficiency outcomes primarily depend on operator practices and Public Transport Authority (PTA) decisions. Penalties, by contrast, appear ineffective given their minimal financial weight in operator budgets. Beyond these findings, the study demonstrates the value of line-level efficiency analysis. In addition to capturing local drivers such as rolling-stock age and diversity, this approach is particularly relevant in the context of market liberalization, where regional services will increasingly be tendered at the line or group-of-lines level. By providing PTAs with a transparent and reproducible framework for assessing efficiency, this methodology supports more informed tender design and contractual arrangements. In this way, it helps ensure that regional railways operate not only efficiently but also in line with broader policy objectives of service quality and accessibility.