In this period, countries in Central and Eastern Europe celebrate or are close to celebrating 25 years since the initiation of the process of removing communist political regimes and replacing them with regimes based on pluralism and resettlement of the centralised and statism economy on the competition-based and mostly private structure.
Railways have been caught in this political-economic vortex and can hardly redefine their identity and positive role in the society. The increasing pressure of the new automotive vehicle owners and small and medium road transport companies have unbalanced the report of the two modes of transport, but also the public discourse on a modernised vision based on the power and capacity of railways to one based on the apparent simplicity and flexibility of road vehicles.
The railway giants, permanently shaken by media and political blows to resettle their business models and focus on profitable activities, are today still alive only due to inertia and can hardly reshape their path and send that modern message the society awaits: the abrupt entrance in the market economy logic has prevented central and east European railway managers, next to guardian political forums, to find the best way to resettle the activity and make it efficient. As the system relies on a massive structure of assets and a numerous staff, the social impact is huge. Also, the financial resources of the countries have been and are still limited leading to the extra-wear of existing assets and to ignoring modernisation activities. Meanwhile, this diversion of the public attention from the real needs of maintenance and investments of the three large railway branches (infrastructure, passenger transport and freight transport) has led to an amassment of enormous amounts of money necessary for the recovery of activity. There are no single and simple models to restart engines, on the contrary, everything that happened in other parts of the world has relied on other political and economic situations. We are experiencing a great pain today when we see simplistic sentences or communication errors that plunge the most efficient land transport into oblivion without mentioning the true wrongdoer: the owner-the public authority which, willingly or not, has considered that it should work that way too.
Restarting the engines depends today on a serious effort from railway management and employees who have to come up with a modern message (we have to remember that today’s users are not just workers on industrial platforms, but young people looking for speed, sensational and permanent socialisation).
The recent example of the Czech Republic, where a private investor and a segment of reconstructed infrastructure have managed to bring services at aeronautic industry level and to attract the segment of dynamic people in the region to its trains, shows that these models geographically reduced will be the nuclei of a positive loop which could avoid the implosion of the railway system. It is a team work in which the operator cannot do without the infrastructure manager, and the latter cannot manage without the public opinion and the support of inside specialists.
by Ştefan Roşeanu
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