24/03/2023 – By Frédéric de Kemmeter – Railway signalling and freelance copywriter – Suscribe my blog
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In France, four entrepreneurs are trying to put private trains on the rails. But they face a number of challenges. None of the four has a similar business, but all are talking about filling a gap in the national rail supply. A quick overview.
It’s not easy to launch your own trains in France. Several entrepreneurs want to launch their own trains where SNCF has abandoned services. They all have a different business model. It is true that the country has already seen the « new entrant » through Thello since December 2011. And it is true that two other new entrants have come – or are going to come – into the French railway landscape: Trenitalia, which has been present since December 2021 with Italian capital, and soon Renfe, with Spanish capital, which plans to start its first services by April 2023.
For our part, we are looking here at projects whose interest is that they are exclusively French. So it is not a question of ‘evil foreigners coming to eat SNCF‘, but of initiatives that want to fill a hole in the national offer.
Railcoop
This is probably the most atypical project. It is a cooperative that has so far almost 13,000 « members » who have bought €100 shares. The cooperative has about €8 million at its disposal but wants to reach €43 million to finance its project to revive the Bordeaux-Lyon line.
Half of this sum is needed to finance the assets, while the other half is needed in the form of a guarantee from banks and financial lending institutions. Railcoop does not currently have this guarantee to present. Recently, the cooperative reportedly confirmed a first train service for 2024, one day in one direction, one day in the other.
Recently, the metropol council of Lyon voted a subsidy of €80,000 to take 800 shares in the rail cooperative. This capital investment allows « Greater Lyon » to participate in the revival of these lines abandoned by the SNCF. The Lyon-Bordeaux line was stopped in 2014 due to a lack of profitability.
Midnight Train
It is a project that aims to ‘reinvent the night train‘ at competitive prices compared to air travel. It is a start-up company with a top management team, including, behind the two founders Adrien Aumont and Romain Payet, personalities such as Franck Gervais, former CEO of Thalys, and Odile Fagot, former Director of Transformation & Performance Finance at SNCF.
Midnight train wants to launch night trains with an innovative concept of a hotel on rail with a restaurant car and a bar car. The operator says it has the necessary finances and has chosen a manufacturer for its rolling stock, without giving further details.
So far, Midnight train is known for its glamorous marketing communication to 60,000 subscribers to its newsletter and social networks. The aim is ‘to establish the brand and create desire before the product arrives‘, the french newspaper explained Les Echos.
Kevin Speed
This company, really french despite its English name, aims to offer high speed travel, for everyone, every day. This new company was set up in 2021 by Laurent Fourtune, an engineer who has worked for the RATP (Paris public transport) and Getlink, the Channel Tunnel operator.
Kevin Speed wants short high-speed trains for medium-distance journeys. The company is aiming for fast, frequent Intercity-style rotations, with up to 12 rotations per day and very few station stops. It advertises fares of €3 for a 100 kilometre journey.
Kevin Speed wants to sign a « long-term contract » with SNCF Réseau in order to have guaranteed train paths and thus allow the rolling stock to be amortised on services that it has not yet specified.
Le Train
This project comes from the south-west of France (Bordeaux, Aquitaine). ‘The Paris-Bordeaux high-speed line has created frustrated people,’ Alain Gertraud, the general manager, explained to weekly newspaper La Vie du Rail. The city of Angoulême, in particular, does not benefit from enough services and the local elected representatives are unhappy.
Le Train is now a small holding company based near Angoulême, with several subsidiaries, which may be companies that either own rolling stock or do maintenance.
The area targeted by Le Train extends mainly to the north of Bordeaux, with the Bordeaux-Nantes, Bordeaux-Tours and Bordeaux-Rennes routes. Last February, the company announced an framework agrement to purchase of 10 Talgo Avril trainsets. One of these trains is currently being approved in France for the operator Renfe, which will eventually use them on its Barcelona-Lyon services (and later on Paris?).
This approval is therefore a boon for Le Train and an asset for Talgo, which will have ready-to-use trains. Maintenance could be carried out in the workshop planned by Lisea, the private concessionaire for the Tours-Bordeaux high-speed line. But this still remains conditional at this stage.
We can be said that Le Train seems to be the most successful of the four projects so far. It will be interesting to follow all these projects in a France where the SNCF brand clearly dominates the long-distance segment, despite the recent entry of Trenitalia and the upcoming entry of Renfe. 🟧
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24/03/2023 – By Frédéric de Kemmeter – Railway signalling – Suscribe my blog
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