All Tickets, Please

Trucking firms are also feeling the competition, as more companies switch to cost-effective rail shipping. According to one recent study, more than 900 American trucking companies went under in the first quarter of this year. For some the logic is clear. One of the country's largest trucking concerns, J.B. Hunt, last week announced that it would be shifting more of its cargo from road to rail. Given all the interest, more mergers, acquisitions and general dealmaking across the rail sector seem likely. Germany's Deutsche Bahn has already bagged a clutch of smaller foreign companies in the attempt to create an international network that can operate across Europe's liberalizing rail market.

More deregulation is sorely needed. Over the last 10 years, the total volume of freight travel has leapt 74 percent in Britain and 52 percent in Germany, but only because those states often deregulated their rail networks. Elsewhere, networks are dominated by less efficient state owned operators. "The market has really grown as far as it can," says Monika Heiming of the European Rail Freight Association. "In future, it is going to flat-line until the infrastructure improves." Bottlenecks are commonplace on crowded networks, especially when freight takes second place to passenger traffic, and Europe lacks the standardized signaling system that's vital to efficiency. Likewise, critics of Amtrak say the U.S. government should stop funding it and let private operators bid on existing tracks and equipment to provide better service.

Will a seamless international rail network ever become a reality? That much-vaunted "Eurasian land-bridge" between China and Europe took months of patient planning between different national companies. History may again be on the side of the railways. But then history, like some rail services, never works to an exact timetable.

With Daniel Stone in New York

© 2008