Helsinki Workshop on Infrastructure Charging on Railways 31 July - 1 August, 2000

Whilst there is a long tradition of economic analysis of charging for the use of road infrastructure, the situation relating to rail is quite different. In most cases until recently railways have been integrated organisations with the same body responsible for infrastructure and operations. Rail infrastructure charging, if practised at all, has therefore been largely an internal transfer within the organisation. The principal exception to this has been the presence of access rights by one company over infrastructure owned by another in the case of North America. But the dominance of integrated national rail companies in Europe, and the fact that international traffic was operated by cooperation between the national railways rather than by one railway operating over the tracks of another, made the issue of no relevance here. The change in this situation started with the separation of infrastructure from operations in Sweden, which was undertaken with the aim of putting rail infrastructure on an equivalent footing to road. Later on the European Commission began pushing for separation of infrastructure from operations in order to encourage new entry and to promote competition between different rail companies.