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The European story of recent times has sadly been one of decline. Of economic underperformance, of losing battles against competitors, of the loss of the security of its citizens and of its future prospects. One symbolically important area where this is reflected is in the decline of railway services across the continent.
The railway is symbolically important for a number of reasons. Historically it was a display of technological and industrial prowess, and as urbanisation accelerated, it became a necessity for mobility. It is no wonder that various 20th-century regimes marketed themselves with claims about well-run railways, trains that always run on time, and similar clichés.
In a sense, public utilities such as railways may always have been subject to accusations of declining reliability over time. Travel, especially across distances that justify going by train, is of course time-sensitive, and any disturbance is likely to be met with frustration from passengers. Are we truly seeing a deterioration over time, as the common experience claims?
Train punctuality in Europe
In the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Sweden the decline of railway travel quality is a political topic. Numerous explanations have been put forward to explain punctuality problems that exist in each of the countries, often situated in the particular political climate of each nation. In the United Kingdom, the failure of reliable train service is often attributed to the privatisation of the railways, which was undertaken in the 1990s. In France and Germany, it is boiled down to lack of funds for the dominant national railway operators. In Sweden, it is a combination of both explanations.
By numbers, one common metric to measure the reliability of trains is through punctuality; what percentage of trains arrive at their final destination within a particular margin of delay? This margin is defined differently in different countries, but if a train is delayed by no more than five minutes, it is usually considered to be “on time”, in most developed countries. In the United Kingdom and Switzerland, punctuality is defined as three minutes.
Statistics of this kind that go back deep into the 20th century are actually hard to come by, but reliable numbers for Britain go back to 1996. That year, 89 percent of all British trains, operated by a host of different companies, ran “on time”. Today that percentage is 85 percent, according to official Office of Rail and Road statistics. Estimates, according to a study published in Fiscal Studies in 2002, claim that the number was around 90 percent in 1984.
A report by the French transport service quality authority found that the percentage of “on-time” trains dropped from 98 to 87 between 1954 and 2021. And this is with a definition of punctuality of 15 minutes, not the more common five minute-standard. In concrete terms, the number of trains that were more than 15 minutes late tripled over this period, as French media reported it.
Only 58 percent of long-distance trains in Germany ran “on time” in September 2023, according to publicly owned national railway operator Deutsche Bahn. Even accounting for the low mark perhaps being an extraordinarily bad month for German trains, in 2022 one in three long-distance trains failed to meet the “on time” threshold, according to public service broadcaster Deutsche Welle. For regional lines the number was less harrowing, with one in ten trains being more than six minutes late.
In Sweden official train punctuality statistics only go back to 2010, but they still tell a story. What can be seen according to government numbers is that 87 percent of trains avoided a delay of more than five minutes that year, a number which slowly climbed to a high of 92 percent in 2019. 2020 saw a peak of 94 percent, but there are reasons to consider the lockdown year an out-of-the-ordinary period. Since 2021, the number has again sharply dropped, and by 2024 Swedish train punctuality was back at 87 percent again.
For these countries, the anecdotal experiences of many seem to be confirmed by the official statistics. So what has happened? Media reports across all of the mentioned countries commonly cite the cause for the increased delays as increased passenger volumes, coupled with the aging of the tracks and trains themselves.
Overpopulation
The increase in passenger volumes over time helps explain common problems such as capacity deficiencies and overcrowded trains. In a sense, rail transportation has, in the words of The Independent’s travel correspondent Simon Calder, become “a victim of its own success”. The apparent rise in popularity of rail travel in the past few decades has outmatched the available number of trains running and tracks laid.
A few reasonable causes for the growing popularity of trains could be technological improvements that have in turn yielded rail transport more affordable than it was for most of the 20th century. Another could be increased urbanisation, creating more need for commuting possibilities. In today’s climate-aware society trains are also often promoted as a method of travel that is easy on the conscience, and morally superior to personal cars.
But perhaps more important ought to be the population growth Western Europe has experienced in recent decades, in no small part owed to mass immigration. Typically, the demographics that immigrate to Europe are already of working age, but are rarely endowed with the resources for private motor vehicles. This means they are more likely to require public transport for their daily lives upon settling in their new host country. This is a demographic development that is true of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Sweden alike.
Crowding may have an impact on punctuality, which numbers from the United Kingdom and Sweden show. In the midst of the 2020 pandemic, Swedish trains reached a 94 percent success rate in reaching their destination on time, while British trains scored its decade-high 86 percent in the first quarter of 2020. Lowered passenger volumes seem to have positively impacted time-keeping, but one might have expected Britain, which enforced a much harsher lockdown than Sweden did, to have climbed even higher. Obviously, this is where the faults of the infrastructure itself comes into play.
Crowding also requires train companies to invest in more trains in order to accommodate the needs, perhaps as opposed to investing in maintenance of existing trains and tracks. This means the railway systems of Europe are expected to tend not only to growing customer bases by expanding, but also to make sure that what already exists is in good shape. On the surface, investing in more direct physical capacity makes more sense for a business that wants to appear accessible for a growing number of people (perhaps especially so if it is a wholly private company, like the British train companies). Thus, there is a short-term market logic that may explain the overall decline in railway services.
European complacency
Much of Europe was subject to ambitious railroading projects in the technology’s infancy. In a sense, many British trains run on tracks that were first laid in the Victorian era. The same issue has been raised in France, Germany, and Sweden, where the maintenance deficit on some lines is said to go back many decades. It is something of a natural law that the progenitors of a technology or mode of thought tend to rest on their laurels as the rest of the world is catching up to them, only to wake up too late to realise they’ve been eclipsed. The same analogy has been used to describe Britain’s loss of status as Europe’s top industrial power to Germany in the early 20th century, and can be applied to the general European loss of economic prowess to the United States through the century.
The faults of European railways are often magnified in comparison to East Asian train systems. In the 2010s and onward, Europe has stood in the shadow of the massive expansion of high-speed rail travel in China, which is a prominent feature of the low-intensity Chinese propagandisation against the West. Before China it was Japan that was envied for its remarkably punctual and orderly trains.
Japan, while in many respects a late industrialiser, has a history of railway transportation that goes almost as far back as Western Europe. Its trajectory in the aging that both it and Europe is experiencing differs however, which a cursory glance at the punctuality of its trains reveals. The average delays on the high-speed Shinkansen “bullet train” line of Tokaido, for example, amounted to just over one minute in 2023, according to its operator’s annual report.
While there are geographic and economic – not to mention cultural – factors that no doubt place a lot of pressure on Japanese railway operators to perform well, there is something crucial missing from the equation: Japan, in contrast to Western Europe, has a shrinking population. This means, as outlined previously, that investments can more easily be focused on maintenance, as opposed to expansion. This may explain a larger part of the discrepancy than is commonly acknowledged in the European railway debate. The fact that Japanese infrastructure serves a slower developing population grants it a degree of leeway against the inevitable tide of ‘early adopter complacency’, of which there is no lack of in other sectors in Japan.
China, on the other hand, has the advantage of being a still-emerging economy (although some would dispute the accuracy of that), eager to implement the technology that others invented long before it. And so it does not only to develop economically, but also in pursuit of international status. Out of both utility and prestige, China is a giant investor in domestic high-speed rail that more or less puts European systems to shame. As a result, it is not uncommon in European politics to hear calls to enter a high-speed train ‘arms race’ with China.
How will Europe get moving again?
It seems fair to assess that parts of Europe have taken their railways for granted for too long. Satisfying more or less politically engineered goals, such as accommodating a constantly growing and increasingly public transport-dependent population, seems to have taken priority over the long-term sustainability of the railway.
This makes it all the more risky for Europe to be lured into a technological arms race with China. An attempt at a technological leap, which is always enthusiastically supported by the “green” side of politics, risks spiralling into a catastrophe of wasted resources, as fundamental problems with existing infrastructure are not addressed. The railway, which has carried European industry on its back for 150 years, needs a rest from the constant stress put on it by progressive politicians.
But this is not an issue that is resolved with a raised maintenance budget alone. Just as Europe understood for most of the 20th century (and as perhaps China and Japan understand to this day), the state of a nation is never better than the state of its railroads. Europe must also work to restore the immaterial values that once helped make its societies, along with its trains, the most well-functioning in the world.