Getlink aiming to double the number of destinations from London in ten years

[MatthewHutton]

Fort William - Glasgow will cost somewhere in the region of £10-£15m a year just in crew, fuel and rolling stock lease costs, and that excludes the sleeper

That seems extraordinarily high. I mean a train driver costs what £500/work day and a guard half that? And let’s say you need 6 drivers a day to do the trip that works out at like £1.5m/year in staffing costs.

A 16 car Shinkansen is like £30m to buy so the rolling stock cannot be that high.

 

[Trainbike46]

That seems extraordinarily unlikely.

I am calling the costs to keep a line open, up to speed to run say one train a day as “fixed”.

I mean if the marginal costs were large the railways costs would have dropped meaningfully during Covid.

During covid all staff was retained, all trains were retained, and all infrastructure was retained. The only costs that really reduced were traction energy (whether electricity or diesel), and in some cases overtime pay

 

[AdamWW]

If connecting local services were included as part of the fare of the high speed service (as RENFE does in Spain) that would make regional stations like Ashford more attractive

Or like Eurostar does with services to Brussels including travel to/from any station in Belgium at no extra cost.

Except I think they're about to/have just stopped doing that.

It's probably just not a priority vs manning Schiphol.

Reading the article, it seems they've increased the number of passengers that can be handled at Amsterdam without being able to increase the number of border staff to check passports.

 

[NCT]

First post on this forum, so apologies if it looks a bit 'going straight in'. There are some familiar 'faces' from various outfits, so hopefully my intervention doesn't feel too abrupt to everybody.

Regarding Eurostar's operating philosophy and its relationship with SNCF - from what I can gather (all circumstantial) SNCF is aggressive in seeking monopolistic profits especially in its TGV operations, and it seems reasonable to deduce that Eurostar is given a profit maximising business objective by its controlling shareholder. I would normally expect a government owned company to be social welfare maximising subject to a financial constraint of saying seeking a 2-5% profit margin - this is how companies like Nottingham City Transport and Lothian Buses operate.

The SNCF vs SBB comparisons are valid. There are at least two things where SBB stand out as 'best in class' in Europe - 1) a relentless focus on clockface timetable and 2) non compulsory reservation as standard.

It's not so much that about SBB's international services - when you arrive on an international train at Basel you know you can travel onwards to all corners of Switzerland seamlessly without ever having to wait very long, and you can break your journey and pick up the 'takt' wherever. You can't do that in France.

SBB doesn't run a lot of international services, and that's because most of Switzerland borders other countries' rural areas where the infrastructure is frankly a bit sh!t. On the small number of viable international corridors:
1) SBB has strong armed SNCF into running Paris - Basel at strict intervals and you can see the indirect benefit of LGV Sud-Est having an almost clockface timetable
2) SBB has worked with the Italian authorities to make Lugano - Milan clockface despite the sh!t infrastructure on the Italian side
3) SBB has shone on a light on the state of German infrastructure between Zurich and Munich

SNCF generally run enough services on the TGV network to be able to organise them into a takt, sometimes with a marginal increase in services to plug random holes in the day.
For example, Lille Europe - Marne-le-Vallee ought to be hourly, with 2 hourly towards Massy and 2 hourly towards Lyon and Marseille. This would immediately provide timetable structure clarity and encourage Eurostar to standardise its London - Lille - Brussels (- Amsterdam) service into clock-face hourly.

 

[signed]

For example, Lille Europe - Marne-le-Vallee ought to be hourly, with 2 hourly towards Massy and 2 hourly towards Lyon and Marseille. This would immediately provide timetable structure clarity and encourage Eurostar to standardise its London - Lille - Brussels (- Amsterdam) service into clock-face hourly.

There is basically no stock available to run a lot more than is currently running. At the very least until TGV M is fully rolled out and cascades happen (but that won't solve anything really, 100 TGV M is puney especially when they send 15 of them to compete with themselves (Italo) in Italy and when there are retirements of single-level stock to deal with)

 

[NCT]

As I have mentioned before, I an not wholly convinced by competition, I think that there are advantages to a universal operator if they are required to provide public as well as commercial services, but right now E* is a monopoly which only provides a limited range of services that it considers commercially viable. You would hope that competition could grow the market. The danger is that whilst new operators will force E* to up its game with additional stops at Ashford, etc, the smaller operators will be forced out of the market and we could be back to square one. Time will tell. I certainly can't see SNCF co-operating with the new operators when it owns much of E*. Having two long distance brands doesn't help. OuiGo is not designed for connections so you would have to rely on InOui or Lyria. (I still can't see why you don't have both brands in the same train but I obviously think along different lines to SNCF.)

In an ideal world yes, but from a European Commission's point of view, when faced with organisations like SNCF and RENFE who'll never change their antiquated, protectionist and inward looking ways, relying on the market is the only way to harmonise the European rail operating environment and lower barriers to international services. What you want is basically
A) Track access becoming a matter of simple commercial transitions (of course heavily regulated, in terms of safety and timetable structure integrity etc, but the process needs to be transparent, fair and consistent), rather than subject to opaque tit-for-tat between protectionist national entities
B) International services being able to serve domestic demand on a fair basis regardless or who runs the trains so that those trains can wash their face (there are still too many cases of European International trains being pick-up and set-down only when not being in their 'home' countries despite relatively low frequencies in the domestic offer)

Fourth Railway Package rules applying to all railway operations are the only way of achieving those goals. Competition doesn't prevent national authorities from specifying comprehensive PSO contracts - when you have a good timetable Open Access either can't compete or they become part of the timetable. There are only a handful of competent railway authorities across the entire Europe - The Swiss, Dutch, Austrian, and Belgian, and that's pretty much it. The European Commission can't compel all national governments to 'just be competent'.

Especially with Britain being out of the EU, the prospect of a multi-government authority specifying a Eurostar PSO is pretty much non-existent. Theoretically, I do think that if all non-railway barriers were removed (by that I mean UK joining Schengen) then the unsuppressed market would be something like
- 2tph London - Paris
- 2tph London - Brussels (arriving Brussels xx13/43)
- 2tph Paris - Brussels (arriving Brussels xx17/47)
- 2tph Brussels - Amsterdam (departing Brussels xx22/52)
- 2tph Brussels - Cologne (departing Brussels xx25/55)
With the London and Paris trains alternating between going direct to Amsterdam and Cologne.

There's no condition for setting up such an authority and such a PSO, so the next best thing is for the market to provide a bastadardised version of that. The domestic railway cultures of the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands are such that Open Access paths settle into standard patterns anyway (I didn't invent those arrival/departure times above - they are an evolution of what you observe with trains that run currently, just not consistently every hour) - you can see the same thing happening in Italy. Looking at Italy and Spain you do see the market gravitating towards greater supply and lower profit margins, and hopefully the same is achieved on the Channel Tunnel corridor.

There is basically no stock available to run a lot more than is currently running. At the very least until TGV M is fully rolled out and cascades happen (but that won't solve anything really, 100 TGV M is puney especially when they send 15 of them to compete with themselves (Italo) in Italy and when there are retirements of single-level stock to deal with)

Of course there is a lead time for rolling stock orders (and that for the TGV M has been particularly long), but in the grand scheme of things this is a short term issue.

If you know the timetable you want to operate you order the number of trainsets for that timetable. As a railway operator you publicised your intended timetable in advance - towards the travelling public for developing your customer base and towards the industry so other operators can plan around you, taking into account various lead times (rolling stock order, track access, staff training etc). It seems this kind of railway culture is missing from SNCF. I'm seeing this culture displayed by the likes of Ilisto and Poxima.

 

[Tester]

In an ideal world yes, but from a European Commission's point of view, when faced with organisations like SNCF and RENFE who'll never change their antiquated, protectionist and inward looking ways, relying on the market is the only way to harmonise the European rail operating environment and lower barriers to international services. What you want is basically
A) Track access becoming a matter of simple commercial transitions (of course heavily regulated, in terms of safety and timetable structure integrity etc, but the process needs to be transparent, fair and consistent), rather than subject to opaque tit-for-tat between protectionist national entities
B) International services being able to serve domestic demand on a fair basis regardless or who runs the trains so that those trains can wash their face (there are still too many cases of European International trains being pick-up and set-down only when not being in their 'home' countries despite relatively low frequencies in the domestic offer)

Fourth Railway Package rules applying to all railway operations are the only way of achieving those goals. Competition doesn't prevent national authorities from specifying comprehensive PSO contracts - when you have a good timetable Open Access either can't compete or they become part of the timetable. There are only a handful of competent railway authorities across the entire Europe - The Swiss, Dutch, Austrian, and Belgian, and that's pretty much it. The European Commission can't compel all national governments to 'just be competent'.

Especially with Britain being out of the EU, the prospect of a multi-government authority specifying a Eurostar PSO is pretty much non-existent. Theoretically, I do think that if all non-railway barriers were removed (by that I mean UK joining Schengen) then the unsuppressed market would be something like
- 2tph London - Paris
- 2tph London - Brussels (arriving Brussels xx13/43)
- 2tph Paris - Brussels (arriving Brussels xx17/47)
- 2tph Brussels - Amsterdam (departing Brussels xx22/52)
- 2tph Brussels - Cologne (departing Brussels xx25/55)
With the London and Paris trains alternating between going direct to Amsterdam and Cologne.

There's no condition for setting up such an authority and such a PSO, so the next best thing is for the market to provide a bastadardised version of that. The domestic railway cultures of the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands are such that Open Access paths settle into standard patterns anyway (I didn't invent those arrival/departure times above - they are an evolution of what you observe with trains that run currently, just not consistently every hour) - you can see the same thing happening in Italy. Looking at Italy and Spain you do see the market gravitating towards greater supply and lower profit margins, and hopefully the same is achieved on the Channel Tunnel corridor.



Of course there is a lead time for rolling stock orders (and that for the TGV M has been particularly long), but in the grand scheme of things this is a short term issue.

If you know the timetable you want to operate you order the number of trainsets for that timetable. As a railway operator you publicised your intended timetable in advance - towards the travelling public for developing your customer base and towards the industry so other operators can plan around you, taking into account various lead times (rolling stock order, track access, staff training etc). It seems this kind of railway culture is missing from SNCF. I'm seeing this culture displayed by the likes of Ilisto and Poxima.

Welcome to the forum and thank you for a very useful and informative post.

 

[station_road]

It's probably just not a priority vs manning Schiphol.

The Schiphol border has been understaffed for the last couple of years as well - every time I have arrived at Schiphol recently there have only been 1 or 2 people doing non-EU checks and waits of well over an hour are common. The eGates can't come soon enough

 

[Bald Rick]

That seems extraordinarily high. I mean a train driver costs what £500/work day and a guard half that? And let’s say you need 6 drivers a day to do the trip that works out at like £1.5m/year in staffing costs.

That’s not how you cost a service. Put simply, you work out how many diagrams you need of each type of crew to run the service Monday to Friday, and then multiply that by a facctor to get the number of people you need to run the service 7 days a week. Typically that factor is between 2.5 and 3, sometimes higher when the diagrams are less efficient (as I suspect will be the case here, given the paucity of trains).

I don’t know how many crew diagrams there are running the West Highland service each day but I suspect it will be in the region of 6 driver diagrams and 6 conductor diagrams, spread across various depots. My guess is that you will need 15-20 of each to cover that, and two managers to manage them and their competences. Annual cost of a driver to the company will be well over £100k, and a conductor will be about 60% of that. Plus two managers. You are looking at at least £3m, probably £4m. That’s just crew….

Anyway we are well off topic, but I explain this just to show that the marginal cost of running railways is very expensive.

 

[Chester1]

The Schiphol border has been understaffed for the last couple of years as well - every time I have arrived at Schiphol recently there have only been 1 or 2 people doing non-EU checks and waits of well over an hour are common. The eGates can't come soon enough

I don't think it helps that a section of British travellers are very keen to blame brexit rather than their host country. This happened when I arrived at Berlin Brandenberg. It took half an hour for any staff to even turn up.... How desperate do you need to be to blame your own country to think leaving 200 passengers in a hall way for half an hour is OK?! It took another 45 minutes to get through the border. I was visiting a friend and will have to go through such a rubbish airport again but if it was a normal holiday I simply wouldn't chose to visit again for many years. It's particularly shocking when under staffing happens for Eurostar services that should be encouraged.

 

[The Ham]

That’s not how you cost a service. Put simply, you work out how many diagrams you need of each type of crew to run the service Monday to Friday, and then multiply that by a facctor to get the number of people you need to run the service 7 days a week. Typically that factor is between 2.5 and 3, sometimes higher when the diagrams are less efficient (as I suspect will be the case here, given the paucity of trains).

I don’t know how many crew diagrams there are running the West Highland service each day but I suspect it will be in the region of 6 driver diagrams and 6 conductor diagrams, spread across various depots. My guess is that you will need 15-20 of each to cover that, and two managers to manage them and their competences. Annual cost of a driver to the company will be well over £100k, and a conductor will be about 60% of that. Plus two managers. You are looking at at least £3m, probably £4m. That’s just crew….

Anyway we are well off topic, but I explain this just to show that the marginal cost of running railways is very expensive.

Looking at it the other way, historically it was said that the lease costs off a coach was £100,000 per year with other TOC costs meaning you need to triple that.

Assuming inflation has at least doubled that means for each coach you run it costs £600,000 a year.

Assuming you can't run a train 365 days a year you'd be looking at (say) 200 days of use a year, so around £3,000 a day per coach.

If we assuming 60 seats per coach you need about £50 per seat per day.

Shorter trains would be a bit more expensive (fewer passengers per staff member) and longer trains might be a bit cheaper (if you can split the costs between more passengers).

Therefore a 16 coach train carrying just 200 people would need an income if £240 per person (£3,000*16 coaches and then divide that by the 200 passengers). Obviously that reduces depending on how many legs the train is used for:
- London/Paris £240
- London/Paris and back again £120
- London/Paris/London and then back to Paris £80
- London/Paris and back again twice £60

However with each leg needing the train for at least 3 hours (fastest journey time plus 44 minutes for emptying, cleaning and loading) that's 12 hours of in service for that train, which is potentially starting to get close to its daily limit (at least when looking at the average across all trains).

That's also assuming that least costs are only double the historic value and other factors haven't altered the value of other factors.

However it does also highlight why building very fast infrastructure can make a significant difference to the economics of running trains, as if you can double the number of legs you can run with one diagram the costs can be split between far more passengers and so the cost per passenger can be lower (even doubling fuel costs, which are quite small in the greater scheme of things, isn't going to make much of a difference), especially if that makes rail travel faster than any other option and so rail become far more attractive to more people.

 

[RT4038]

Ok but Paris-Stuttgart or Paris-Frankfurt also have terrible service levels (worse than Glasgow-Fort William for example) even though both ends are large cities and the journey times are under 4 hours end-end.

I really doubt the demand from Paris-Stuttgart is lower than Glasgow-Fort William. Fort William is village sized.

Glasgow-Fort William has 3 trains per day (2 on Sundays), plus the sleeper 6 nights a week = 26 trains per week.
Paris-Stuttgart has 5 trains daily = 35 trains per week.
Paris-Frankfurt has between 6 and 7 trains per day plus a sleeper 3 days per week = 43 trains per week

The seating capacity offered on the Paris-Germany trains will be away over double that of Glasgow-Fort William

Glasgow-Fort William is entirely domestic, and the travel demand will be quite different to that of those International trains (including airline competition), quite apart from the huge operating subsidy that Fort William will get compared to the International service, which probably has to financially wash its face. I think it is a mistake to assume that International travel demand, and government funding, is the same as Domestic services. The cultural and historical history of neighbouring countries can produce completely different outcomes (Belgium/Netherlands vs. Hungary/Croatia to take examples at the extremes. You can have a view of where France/Germany sits!)

I find it extremely unlikely the short trains aren’t covering their marginal costs.

Your definition of marginal costs does not really matter - what matters is what any operator (be it the SNCF or others) are going to be paying and attributing to the operation of these trains, which inter alia will be at least:

• The full costs of providing the rolling stock - lease/ownership costs (initial purchase and midlife refurbishments, maintenance, cleaning etc)
• The full costs of staffing the trains, including proportional provision of spare staff/supervision/shunting etc.
• The track access/station access charges

No operator is going to be bothered in running these trains if they are not going to be making a reasonable contribution to the overall overheads of the undertaking, nor without a suitable contingency for the risk of unforeseen events (strikes/disasters/accidents etc etc). Nor will they run them if, for the same investment, they could make a better contribution somewhere else. It is myopic to think that anyone is going to provide such service at a bare minimum of cost, especially as a sizeable proportion of benefactors would be citizens of another country.

Regarding Eurostar's operating philosophy and its relationship with SNCF - from what I can gather (all circumstantial) SNCF is aggressive in seeking monopolistic profits especially in its TGV operations, and it seems reasonable to deduce that Eurostar is given a profit maximising business objective by its controlling shareholder. I would normally expect a government owned company to be social welfare maximising subject to a financial constraint of saying seeking a 2-5% profit margin - this is how companies like Nottingham City Transport and Lothian Buses operate.

Is there any evidence that SNCF is making more than 2-5% profit margin, or indeed any profit margin at all? I suspect that any profits made by TGV / E* operations are being used to subsidise uneconomic operations elsewhere within the French railway industry.

 

[Sir Felix Pole]

Is there any evidence that SNCF is making more than 2-5% profit margin, or indeed any profit margin at all? I suspect that any profits made by TGV / E* operations are being used to subsidise uneconomic operations elsewhere within the French railway industry.

Notionally, SNCF made a profit of 1.6 billion euros last year, but of of course there are substantial subsidies from the state and the regions.

SNCF 2024

In 2024, SNCF Group reported a net profit of €1.6 billion and positive free cashflow of €1.6 billion, driven by sustained growth in revenue (€43.4 billion, +4.8%) and effective cost controls. These results confirm the Group’s virtuous trajectory since 2021.

Ridership continued to rise at SNCF VOYAGEURS, for both regional journeys and high-speed travel in France and in Europe. KEOLIS reported fresh growth, winning major tendered contracts. And in a logistics market facing a steep slowdown, GEODIS and Rail Logistics Europe turned in satisfactory results and higher margins.

At year-end 2024, SNCF RÉSEAU hit a milestone in France’s rail reform package, reporting positive free cash flow to meet its commitments to the French State. Five years on, SNCF Group’s results allowed it to make record investments in the French rail industry—over €10 billion.

SNCF is also setting up subsidary companies, with very much more inferior terms and conditions for staff, to bid for the regional contracts. They have just won the contract for Nice to Ventimiglia services on this basis.

 

[MatthewHutton]

That’s not how you cost a service. Put simply, you work out how many diagrams you need of each type of crew to run the service Monday to Friday, and then multiply that by a facctor to get the number of people you need to run the service 7 days a week. Typically that factor is between 2.5 and 3, sometimes higher when the diagrams are less efficient (as I suspect will be the case here, given the paucity of trains).

I don’t know how many crew diagrams there are running the West Highland service each day but I suspect it will be in the region of 6 driver diagrams and 6 conductor diagrams, spread across various depots. My guess is that you will need 15-20 of each to cover that, and two managers to manage them and their competences. Annual cost of a driver to the company will be well over £100k, and a conductor will be about 60% of that. Plus two managers. You are looking at at least £3m, probably £4m. That’s just crew….

Anyway we are well off topic, but I explain this just to show that the marginal cost of running railways is very expensive.

I get to £2.8m with a driver cost of employment of £120k working 200 days a year and 8 drivers needed on a given day to offer the service. 600x8x365x1.6 is £2.8m - albeit with some manager costs on top.

Probably including the full sleeper cost and the Oban service the total marginal cost is £10m. But even so I would expect that it does still break even or nearly break even on marginal costs - even if there is no contribution towards the organisational fixed costs or the fixed costs of keeping the line open.

To come back to the topic any marginal train that is running on a line that isn't at capacity doesn't need to make a contribution to the central organisational costs, nor does it need to make a contribution towards the fixed costs of keeping a line open. So if running 4 trains a day between, say, Lille to somewhere 5 hours away and you had 100 passengers paying an average one-way fare of £40 that would bring in £11.5m of revenue and would probably justify service on a sensible commercial basis.

EDIT: To make clear why this matters, there are tonnes of French connections like Lyon-Toulouse which has 4 trains a day which is broadly the same service level as the West Highland line - and there are other pairs that are worse than that. Once we accept that the West Highland line only serves villages and broadly covers its marginal costs (even if it is only 80-90% or something) then questions do have to be asked about why city-city service in France isn't a whole lot better)

Paris-Stuttgart has 5 trains daily = 35 trains per week.

I can only see at most 3 direct services a day on Bahn.com, and the first one leaves at 1:54pm and the last one leaves at 5:54pm

The seating capacity offered on the Paris-Germany trains will be away over double that of Glasgow-Fort William

So they should run more, shorter trains like the British would. There's capacity on the track.

No operator is going to be bothered in running these trains if they are not going to be making a reasonable contribution to the overall overheads of the undertaking

We don't have to go out to the back and beyond to find British services like this. There are plenty of British mid-evening services into and out of London that have a handful of passengers on them and are only worth running on the basis that they cover their marginal costs (which in terms of those trains is only the driver and the fuel and the signalling and doesn't include the rolling stock as that is needed for the peak service).

 

[SHD]

The profitability figures for SNCF Group mentioned above are consolidated. Even though intragroup transfers (such as track access charges) are neutralized in those revenue and profitability figures, I would certainly not use them to evaluate the profit margin of commercial, open-market railway operations. What you might want to look at are the financials at SNCF Voyageurs level (they are certainly published somewhere in the financial report) and even that will not be good enough for the discussion, as they lump together the financials of openmarket and subsidized operations.

 

[Will Mitchell]

https://bettertransport.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Runways-to-Railways-Report.pdf

Recently published by the Campaign for Better Transport.

Rightly calling on the Government to revisit the channel tunnel security requirements and proposing onboard passport checks.

 

[SHD]

I found figures at activity level :
https://www.groupe-sncf.com/medias-...df?VersionId=JTU9hiMEroCrrgimyGnThNGNHlt1oK5G page 31

TGV/Intercités operations have an EBITDA margin of 15.5%. Im not sure that it’s the same metric as the “2 to 5% profit margin” mentioned above.

 

[MatthewHutton]

https://bettertransport.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Runways-to-Railways-Report.pdf

Recently published by the Campaign for Better Transport.

Rightly calling on the Government to revisit the channel tunnel security requirements and proposing onboard passport checks.

No government is going to change the security though unfortunately.

At best maybe standing passengers will be allowed.

 

[NCT]

I don't think it helps that a section of British travellers are very keen to blame brexit rather than their host country. This happened when I arrived at Berlin Brandenberg. It took half an hour for any staff to even turn up.... How desperate do you need to be to blame your own country to think leaving 200 passengers in a hall way for half an hour is OK?! It took another 45 minutes to get through the border. I was visiting a friend and will have to go through such a rubbish airport again but if it was a normal holiday I simply wouldn't chose to visit again for many years. It's particularly shocking when under staffing happens for Eurostar services that should be encouraged.

There's the folly of making ourselves a third country and making ourselves unnecessarily vulnerable, but that's off-topic.

The railway dimension is that Brexit has exacerbated the problem of having to run a railway like an airline - the 'blame' goes deeper of course - it's towards the fact that Britain isn't in Schengen - and yes the point I'm making is an entirely academic one. The problem of non-Schengen-membership include:
- Passport checks add significant amounts to the passenger's generalised journey time making rail less attractive / competitive (alongside security and compulsory reservation)
- International services can't carry non-UK passengers making trains like Frankfurt - London unviable
- Needing dedicated facilities at stations which restrict throughput and add to overall costs - the reason this thread exists in the first place.

I found figures at activity level :
https://www.groupe-sncf.com/medias-...df?VersionId=JTU9hiMEroCrrgimyGnThNGNHlt1oK5G page 31

TGV/Intercités operations have an EBITDA margin of 15.5%. Im not sure that it’s the same metric as the “2 to 5% profit margin” mentioned above.

This is very helpful, and accords with what I've been able to glean from elsewhere.

Eurostar to order 50 new trains as revenue reaches €2bn in 2023

High-speed operator Eurostar is preparing to invest in up to 50 new trains following a strong financial performance in 2023 and debt refinancing.

www.railjournal.com

https://mediacentre.eurostar.com/mc_view?language=uk-en&article_Id=ka4Rz000007RgGrIAK

Eurostar made a EUR423m EBITDA on a EUR2bn revenue - that's an eye-watering margin. Competition can't happen soon enough.

Is there any evidence that SNCF is making more than 2-5% profit margin, or indeed any profit margin at all? I suspect that any profits made by TGV / E* operations are being used to subsidise uneconomic operations elsewhere within the French railway industry.

Open Access profits should not be used to cross-subsidise other operations. By EU law Open Access cannot require subsidies and subsidised operations should be part of competitive government contracts which come from their budgets. I find the idea of government extracting monopolistic profits from its own commercial operations 'off'.

=================

As for the discussion of marginal costs - traditionally the British 'conventional wisdom' is that peak fares cover the rolling stock capital costs as well as their mileage and time driven costs, so that off-peak services only need to cover the non-rolling stock costs, as the trains would be sitting there anyway so represent a sunk cost. (Yes, running an intensive off-peak service does marginally increase your fleet size as maintenance cycles get shorter - each unit gets to 10000 miles quicker)

I'd be staggered if across TGV and Eurostar land there weren't plenty of opportunities to increase off-peak service levels within the existing rolling stock. There's also the question of diagram efficiency - typically when you don't operate to a 'takt' structure you cannot optimise terminal turnaround times and you have low diagram utilisation.

Clearly not all service groups can resource uplifts in services within the existing fleet. An additional Paris - Barcelona roundtrip will require an additional trainset. Paris - Nice is probably run with 6 diagrams - 3 morning departures from each end which then form 3 afternoon departures from each end - so running a midday service clearly will trigger another unit. However things like Paris - Lyon and Paris - Bordeaux almost certainly can have their timetable 'holes' filled.

 

[Bald Rick]

Probably including the full sleeper cost and the Oban service the total marginal cost is £10m. But even so I would expect that it does still break even or nearly break even on marginal costs

It will be more than £10m including the Oban line but excluding the sleeper.

Nveretheless, to break even on £10m, that implies an average of £27,500 revenue each day.

Given that the whole WHL, including the Oban line and the sleeper carries around on average 1200 passengers (single trip) a day, then to breakeven would requires an average fare of about £23. Which is rather more thsn almost anyone is paying. Being an almost entirely leisure railway, there’s a lot of railcards, rovers, child fares, and more than a few staff on discounted tickets. Few are on full price tickets.

 

[MatthewHutton]

It will be more than £10m including the Oban line but excluding the sleeper.

Nveretheless, to break even on £10m, that implies an average of £27,500 revenue each day.

Given that the whole WHL, including the Oban line and the sleeper carries around on average 1200 passengers (single trip) a day, then to breakeven would requires an average fare of about £23. Which is rather more thsn almost anyone is paying. Being an almost entirely leisure railway, there’s a lot of railcards, rovers, child fares, and more than a few staff on discounted tickets. Few are on full price tickets.

OK even if we go with your figures and it merely covers 1/3rd of the marginal costs it is still a railway that only serves villages and where there are no plausible onward/through journeys. This still brings into question why the French cannot run a better service between large cities like Lyon and Toulouse or Paris and Stuttgart that are a similar or smaller time apart.

(I also very much doubt the interrail, sleeper passengers and other passes are counted properly for the West Highland Line - there is no way there are only 3500 passengers from London Euston to Fort William a year including the sleeper - https://railalefan.co.uk/labs/flowstats/FTW/ and there is no way for staff to scan an interrail as far as I am aware)

 

[signed]

I can only see at most 3 direct services a day on Bahn.com, and the first one leaves at 1:54pm and the last one leaves at 5:54pm

There are 2 Paris-Stuttgart (from Paris at 0654 and at 10 sth from memory) that are temporarily curtailed to Karlsruhe due to works in Germany.

 

[RT4038]

There are 2 Paris-Stuttgart (from Paris at 0654 and at 10 sth from memory) that are temporarily curtailed to Karlsruhe due to works in Germany.

Yes. A few weeks ago I rode the 15h54 on a Saturday, which was also temporarily curtailed at Karlsruhe due to German engineering works.

So they should run more, shorter trains like the British would. There's capacity on the track.

I suspect there are at least two reasons why they don't do that - (a) The overwhelming flow of passengers is into Paris in the morning, and away from Paris in the evening [not many people going from Paris to Stuttgart for the day], so they wish to concentrate their capacity on those flows at those times of day , and indeed this can be seen from the timetable. They don't want a repeat of Operation Princess, and (b) more trains = more drivers and conductors, which in France will be expensive commodities. Quite possibly the track access charging regime favours infrequent long trains over frequent short ones (but I am only guessing], although this has always been the French way.

We don't have to go out to the back and beyond to find British services like this. There are plenty of British mid-evening services into and out of London that have a handful of passengers on them and are only worth running on the basis that they cover their marginal costs (which in terms of those trains is only the driver and the fuel and the signalling and doesn't include the rolling stock as that is needed for the peak service).

No doubt the French have a number of these trains already as a proportion in their schedule, and probably will not be wishing to add more, certainly not more which mainly benefit citizens of other countries. I can't see that long distance trains from Paris to Stuttgart or Marseille to Lille are going to be operated in marginal time.

This still brings into question why the French cannot run a better service between large cities like Lyon and Toulouse or Paris and Stuttgart that are a similar or smaller time apart.

I think we have established that the Paris-Stuttgart service is ordinarily more frequent than you thought (and is International and will have a different demand profile than a National service). I suspect that the three trains per day between Lyon and Toulouse have sufficient capacity for the amount of traffic on offer between the two points. France is not Britain - the demographics and Geography are not the same, and the existence of a TGV line avoiding Lyon means that the Lyon-Toulouse service has to pretty much stand up for itself financially on traffic originating/finishing at its terminals [most of the other intermediate flows are also catered for by other trains].

I found figures at activity level :
https://www.groupe-sncf.com/medias-...df?VersionId=JTU9hiMEroCrrgimyGnThNGNHlt1oK5G page 31

TGV/Intercités operations have an EBITDA margin of 15.5%. Im not sure that it’s the same metric as the “2 to 5% profit margin” mentioned above.

The TGV/Intercities operation will be paying the margin of 15.5% to its sole owner, the French Government, who will no doubt be offsetting this against the huge subsidies that are being paid to other parts of the French railways as a whole.

 

[NCT]

The West Highland Line and Paris - Stuttgart/Munich markets are so different there's no point attempting to make comparisons between the two. The economic, political and regulatory conditions are about as far apart as possible.

In the near term capacity is constrained on the German side until Stuttgart21 and Rastatt Tunnel are complete (and preferably Mannheim - Frankfurt HSL but I'm not holding my breath). Even with those things delivered infrastructure on the German side will remain tight and there's absolutely merit in running lots of silly short trains.

What this market would benefit from is an hourly (long-term half hourly) Strasbourg - Karlsruhe frequency as part of a takt. This is so that between trains that originate in Paris and Lyon, there's (at least) 1tp2h to Stuttgart (and Munich), and 1tp2h to Frankfurt. When the train runs to Stuttgart it connects at Karlsruhe (cross platform) to a Basel - Frankfurt service so the effective Paris - Frankfurt frequency is hourly all day. This I believe can be operated with only an incremental increase in resources.

 

[Chester1]

There's the folly of making ourselves a third country and making ourselves unnecessarily vulnerable, but that's off-topic.

I wasn't really commenting on genuine issues caused by not being in Schengen. I was commenting on the absolutely pathetic inclination of some of the passengers. Putting a plane load of passengers in a hallway with no staff and no explanation for over half an hour and then taking another 45 minutes to process them isn't acceptable whatever country they are from. Instead of being annoyed with really poor treatment the inclination of several people around me was to blame brexit, ignoring what was clearly understaffing, poor organisation and a really bad airport design. I expect a few minutes extra entering EU since brexit and that's been my experience, its fair enough to blame that on brexit. It doesn't really help transport links with the EU if a chunk of passengers will go with their political prejudices when faced with chronic understaffed border controls. It sounds like the problem at Amsterdam is understaffing and that will hinder Eurostars growth.

 

[BahrainLad]

Has it occurred to you that, like St Pancras, these airports were never designed or resourced to process the volumes of non-EU arrivals they are now faced with?
My regular European airport, Faro, now receives on an August Saturday almost 60 flights from the UK in a single day, filled with passengers who are almost all UK passport holders, who all now need to be manually checked and stamped.

Prior to the UK’s departure from the EU I think there was perhaps one flight a day that has this kind of passenger mix (from Toronto) so the increase is substantial.

You yourself say “I expect a few minutes extra entering EU since brexit and that's been my experience, its fair enough to blame that on brexit” now multiply that by 180, then 60, and you see how a problem might result.

 

[The Ham]

Has it occurred to you that, like St Pancras, these airports were never designed or resourced to process the volumes of non-EU arrivals they are now faced with?
My regular European airport, Faro, now receives on an August Saturday almost 60 flights from the UK in a single day, filled with passengers who are almost all UK passport holders, who all now need to be manually checked and stamped.

Prior to the UK’s departure from the EU I think there was perhaps one flight a day that has this kind of passenger mix (from Toronto) so the increase is substantial.

You yourself say “I expect a few minutes extra entering EU since brexit and that's been my experience, its fair enough to blame that on brexit” now multiply that by 180, then 60, and you see how a problem might result.

Given a day it's made up of 24 * 60 then 180 * 60 is the same as 7.5 days of people time if it only takes 1 minute to do the required work.

OK, not all the flights will be full or even necessary all non EU passport holders, but there's a fair chance that's still about 3 days of people time per day. That would require 6 people to deal with everyone within a 12 hour window.

 

[Bald Rick]

Putting a plane load of passengers in a hallway with no staff and no explanation for over half an hour and then taking another 45 minutes to process them isn't acceptable whatever country they are from. Instead of being annoyed with really poor treatment the inclination of several people around me was to blame brexit, ignoring what was clearly understaffing, poor organisation and a really bad airport design.

I fly to Geneva regularly. I was never delayed at immigration until Brexit happened. My average delay since is an hour. Swiss Border control have increased the number of immigration officers on duty, and expanded the border control area. I’m not sure how that can be blamed on anything but Brexit.

 

[Chester1]

I fly to Geneva regularly. I was never delayed at immigration until Brexit happened. My average delay since is an hour. Swiss Border control have increased the number of immigration officers on duty, and expanded the border control area. I’m not sure how that can be blamed on anything but Brexit.

That's fair enough, that is clearly brexit related like St Pancras until the border control area is expanded. The disaster that is Berlin Brandenberg is well known and a national embrassment. The friend I was visiting said 45 minutes is a minimum passport queue time in his experience and he uses e gates. That won't compute for a certain type of Brit who thinks we do everything worse. To point stuff like that out hurts their escapism.

 

[Sir Felix Pole]

Has it occurred to you that, like St Pancras, these airports were never designed or resourced to process the volumes of non-EU arrivals they are now faced with?
My regular European airport, Faro, now receives on an August Saturday almost 60 flights from the UK in a single day, filled with passengers who are almost all UK passport holders, who all now need to be manually checked and stamped.

Prior to the UK’s departure from the EU I think there was perhaps one flight a day that has this kind of passenger mix (from Toronto) so the increase is substantial.

You yourself say “I expect a few minutes extra entering EU since brexit and that's been my experience, its t airport awhat I thought was ludicrously early but needed all the time

Lisbon Airport is getting rather fraught too, with a large number of Brits to deal with at passport control on top of the wide range of inter-continental flights it already had. UK passport holders can use the e-gates leaving Lisbon for home, but last year I had to queue for ages at the manual control because I had arrived in Schengen in Spain not Portugal - not an untypical itinerary. I had arrived at the airport ludicrously early, or so I thought, but it was getting rather too close for comfort. It wouldn't have been an issue pre-Brexit.