Ten years ago, rail infrastructure charges were virtually unknown in Europe. Rail services were generally provided by state owned, vertically integrated organisations, and there was simply no need to levy charges for the use of the rail network. Two sets of events changed this: (a) some countries, notably Sweden and Great Britain, decided to restructure the railway industry, introducing among other things a vertical separation between infrastructure provision and train operations; and, (b) the European Commission implemented a package of measures that created rights of access for certain types of service to rail networks in each Member State. Once other parties are granted access rights, then clearly there needs to be some way of charging for infrastructure use. This paper addresses both policy and practice in relation to rail infrastructure charging in the European Union, paying particular attention to a set of measures recently put forward by the European Commission in the form of a proposed Directive. These measures are described in Section 4 and discussed in Section 5. Section 2 describes the earlier development of the Commission's policy in relation to access rights and infrastructure charges, and Section 3 summarises the current approaches to infrastructure charging adopted by individual Member States. (Author/publisher).
Abstract