Open access passenger rail competition in Slovakia - Experience from the Bratislava-Kosice line

摘要

Several years after the EU's first railway package was issued, rail transport reforms in the EU have resulted in some more or less successful entries from open access operators onto the passenger transport market. The first newcomers appeared among franchises in the UK (notably Heathrow Express in 1998, Hull Trains in 2000, Grand Central in 2007; for details see Rederer et al., 2017; Jones, 2000; CMA, 2016) and Germany (Hamburg-Koln-Express in 2012, Locomore in 2016, Flixtrain in 2018; for details see Nigrin et al., 2017). For both countries, it was distinctive that the operators focused on niche markets apart from the main lines; the reason was the system of franchises in the UK and the incumbent's strong market position in Germany. A distinctly different situation occurred in Austria in 2011, when WESTBahn entered the main line from Vienna to Salzburg in open competition against the incumbent (Tomes and Jandova, 2018). In Italy, after the short life of the private operator Arenaways on the Milan-Turin line in 2011, the private operator NTV entered the main high-speed line in open competition against the incumbent Trenitalia in 2012 (Bergantino et al., 2015; Beria et al., 2016). A similar situation also occurred in Sweden, where the private operator Snalltaget has provided several services between Malmo and Stockholm since 2009 and was followed in 2015 by MTR Express, which commenced operations on the main Stockholm-Gothenburg line (Vigren, 2017).