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Electric slide

Freight shippers skirt the Czech rails

March 7th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
With a rail system incompatible with its neighbors', the Czech Republic is losing a million crowns weekly.
It may seem a slight annoyance that when you take a train from Germany to the Czech Republic, you have to wait and change locomotives.
But, for the Czech freight industry, the electrical incompatibilities that cause these delays are far worse than an annoyance. They’re causing the Czech railroads to lose business to neighboring countries.
“Because of our technical problems, trains now run via Austria or Poland” instead of the Czech Republic, said Jiří Mužík, director of the Association of Railway Companies.
KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
Czech rail business grew 6.5 percent in 2006 but will require years of work to meet EU standards.
“For freight train operators, this east-west axis is important,” he said. “The country is losing money.”
With trucks now moving most of Europe’s freight, national borders mean less and less, reduced to roadside stands crossed with little fuss. Trucks are quick and efficient, perfect for the just-in-time inventory schemes favored by big business.
It’s different for railroads: Borders mean everything. Over the past century, European countries have been laying down a crazy quilt of national railways with little mutual consultation, resulting in contiguous states with incompatible electrical and signaling systems — like the Czech Republic and Germany.

As a result, daily freight trains run from Hamburg to Vienna and Budapest, but rather than taking the straight shot southeast through the Czech Republic, the trains curve through Bavaria and into Austria.

From these lines alone, the state would take in 1 million Kč ($46,860) weekly. (Fees are similar throughout Central Europe.) Another line that avoids the country, running from Rotterdam to Bratislava, would add another half-million a week, said Mužík.
These losses don’t include the business that would go to domestic freight operators — particularly České dráhy (ČD), the dominant state-owned company — actually transporting the goods across the country.
Sending trains through Austria is mainly a question of quality, said Tatjana Luther-Engelmann, spokeswoman at Railion, Deustche Bahn’s freight company.
“The German and Austrian electrical systems are the same, so we don’t have to change locomotives at the border,” she said. “In the Czech Republic, we need several changes.”
The Transportation Ministry admits that it is difficult to adjust high-end electric locomotives to the country’s safety system. Czech upgrades are planned, but still far in the future. But the ministry disputes the amount of lost business in the meantime.
“I don’t think that many trains avoid the Czech Republic on purpose,” said Jaroslav Soušek, director of the ministry’s rail section.
High standards
The Czech Republic has the second-densest concentration of rail track in Europe, after Switzerland. Much of it isn’t up to West European standards, however.
“Only in the Czech Republic can you see technical equipment over 100 years old sitting next to top modern technical equipment,” Soušek said.
Also creaking with age is the country’s signaling and safety system, which keeps trains from colliding on the tracks.
“The system dates back to the 1950s, but it is relatively flawless,” said Mužík. “But the new locomotives interfere with it, so they can’t really be used.”
That’s the crux of the country’s railway problem. Modern locomotives, like those built by Siemens or Alstom, use powerful motors driven by AC electricity. These engines throw off such a strong electromagnetic field that they violate the country’s standards for electrical emissions on the rails.
“These standards are historically low. They’ve been left behind by evolution,” said Petr Šimral, executive director of Railtrans.
Šimral’s company, a small private operator, had a high-speed line between Prague and Ostrava planned to open last November, using Siemens locomotives. On test runs, the trains spiked past the country’s standards, delaying the line’s launch until summer.
Getting the safety systems right is critical: If the trains were to interfere with the Czech signals — say, declaring a track free when there’s actually a locomotive pulling 20 cars of coal barreling down it at highway speeds — the results could be tragic.
Modern trains can be adapted to the Czech market, Soušek said, evident from Italian-made Pendolino passenger trains now running.
“They’ve been in operation for 14 months in the Czech Republic and surrounding states without a problem,” he said, although technical glitches plagued the trains during their launch.
Once the European Union has settled on a universal signaling system, the Czech Republic will adopt it, Soušek said. Such a plan is currently being drafted by the European Railway Agency.
But Railon can only see its shipments increasing in the Czech Republic if one condition is fulfilled: “It must become possible to use our multisystem locomotives for transit,” said Luther-Engelmann. “Today, the Czech system causes too many problems.”
Chugging along
From 1993 to 2004, the amount of freight moved on Czech rails dropped 40 percent, with this void filled by increased road shipping. This mirrored a Europe-wide trend.
In 2003, the market began to recover, and last year rail business grew 6.5 percent in the Czech Republic. This is mostly “because the highways are jammed with trucks,” said Mužík.
Over the next five years, Czechs will be modernizing major rail lines to comply with a new set of EU standards that will boost interoperability between countries. The standards call for a unified navigation system, called GSM-R, and an automatic signal system, called ECTS.
“These costs are going to amount to billions of crowns,” Soušek said. “We suppose that money from European structural and development funds will be used to finance this.”
As part of the EU’s plans, member states had to fully open their freight markets to international competition by Jan. 1 of this year. The Czech Republic was an early adopter, separating ownership of the railway system from ČD several years ago.
The number of licensed railway operators in the country has doubled in the past two years, from nine to 18. But, like former national railways across Europe, ČD maintains a dominant position on the market.
The EU hopes the national companies will begin to compete against each other — ČD will spin off its profitable cargo division this summer — but for now Railon sounds more interested in maintaining the status quo when asked if it will enter the Czech market.
“We have a good cooperation with České dráhy,” said
Luther-Engelmann. “We want to use all of our resources to enhance traffic in a common way.”
Naďa Černá and Hela Balínová contributed to this report.


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