RAILWAYS.

Railroad construction was a prime factor in European growth and national unification in the nineteenth century. The great rail networks the twentieth century inherited consequently varied a good deal in density and form, depending on the country concerned. Even before 1900, two great competitors to rail transport had made their appearance, namely the automobile and the airplane. Indeed, the railways of the twentieth century had to face several serious challenges: ever more lively competition from other means of transport, the need to maintain the profitability of existing infrastructure, and the persistent problem of the private or public ownership of the railroads.

The first response of the industry was of a technological kind, as steam locomotion gave way to diesel power and especially to electricity, allowing for significant increases in speed. It was during the interwar period (1918–1939) that the European railroads achieved their maximum expansion. Even at the time, the growing threat of road transport provoked pessimistic assessments: "Parliaments must resolve," said the leading

French civil engineer, Raoul Dautry, in 1933, "to declare certain rail lines devoid of public interest and initiate a national program of closings." The financial losses of the railroads became legendary as a more and more significant proportion of freight was hauled by road, not to mention the ever increasing numbers of automobile travelers (although, for the moment at least, the institution of the family car was no more than an idea). The extension of paid holidays for workers did not create the windfalls for the railroads that had been anticipated. In the 1930s some attempts at diversification were made, as in Great Britain, where three railroad companies launched Railway Air Services in order to compete with the airlines, or in France, where road-haulage concerns subsidiary to the railroads were set up. The idea of an integrated transportation system was proposed in several European countries, though a long-term solution along these lines was never found.

In the immediate wake of the Second World War, rail was practically the only available way of hauling freight. As European reconstruction proceeded, growing competition from road transport was buttressed by the fact that it offered greater flexibility, as, to a lesser degree, did air freighting. As a technical matter, trucks could transport more goods more quickly than railroads, and this capacity increased along with the improvement of the highway system and above all with the advent of superhighways.

The railroad industry reacted by abandoning less profitable sectors (notably short-haul lines). And as the total low-profit track miles dropped, so did the number of railroad workers (by between 15 and 60 percent across Europe in the years 1950–1980). This decline gave rise to much social tension in the form of railroad strikes and protests in rural areas concerning reduced passenger service. Diversification in the design of railroad cars, the automation of signal systems, and the elimination of small stations were among changes designed to counter this decline, which in fact paralleled that of the railroads' main client, heavy industry in general. In a Europe where speed and competitiveness were ever more important, truck hauling offered a solution free of the interruptions caused in rail transport by frequent unloading and reloading.

NATIONAL VARIATIONS

The issue of control over the railroads was a continual preoccupation in European countries, which made very varied choices in the matter, although certain overall tendencies may be identified. In Spain, for instance, a period of nationalization extended from 1913 to 1941. Even before the First World War, the Spanish were prone to speak of a "railroad problem," meaning that their system did not work well and needed replacing. In 1920 the state was obliged to advance large sums of money to the railroad companies and, beginning in 1923 and especially during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923–1930), such subsidies continued to grow. After the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) the head of state, Francisco Franco, nationalized the railroads, creating the Spanish National Railway Network, or RENFE. The French experience was similar, and in 1937 a national system was established, a joint enterprise with majority public ownership known as the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (National Railroad Company), or SNCF. In the United Kingdom, the state assumed control of the private railroad companies during the First World War but restored their private status when peace returned. The companies were then "grouped" by the Railways Act of 1921 into four large concerns, namely the Great Western Railway, the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, the London and North Eastern Railway, and the Southern Railway.

Whereas the first half of the twentieth century was thus characterized by nationalizations, spurred by the fact that the reconstruction of European economies tended to increase the influence of the state, the emphasis shifted in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s. It appeared now that the state was unable to support free competition, having become entangled in management-union politics to the point where it could not make the right policy decisions at the right moment. A debate began, notably in Brussels, between free-market liberals on the one hand and the defenders of the public sector on the other. It emerged clearly that the state had not performed badly with respect to railroads—the most striking evidence being France's achievements with high-speed trains—but the outcome nevertheless favored the partisans of free-market laissez-faire. The Italian rail system, run directly by the state since 1905, underwent a long and arduous privatization between 1985 and 1995. Most countries separated infrastructural from commercial management. Regulatory authorities (as in the case of other "utilities") were responsible for maintaining properly competitive conditions. This weakening of the state's position was often to be explained as much by high budget deficits (to which the railroads frequently contributed) as by ideological pressures. The Italian Ferrovie dello Stato became a limited liability company not entirely emancipated from its public-

service role. The British railroads, nationalized in 1948, began running at a loss as early as the 1950s, despite modernization plans. The British experience with privatization is widely viewed as emblematic. British Rail was broken up into 125 private companies, beginning in 1994; the last British Rail train ran in Scotland in 1997. Several new entities were created (including Railtrack Track, the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising [OPRAF], and the Office of the Rail Regulator) in the context of franchising different parts of the network and encouraging competition. It is still too early to draw conclusions about the British experience. Delays, high accident rates, and lethargic modernization are much in evidence, but such shortcomings may be seen as the legacy of an exhausted state system.

SPEED

These changes in the legal status of the railroads occurred against a backdrop of dramatic technological change. In face of the challenge from road transport, the railroads naturally made the most of their traditional strengths in the public mind, namely security and reliability. But increased speed was undoubtedly the most powerful response to the expanding market share of both trucks and planes. The early success of the Shinkansen bullet train, introduced in Japan in 1964, was proof positive that high-speed links between major cities drew passengers. The Germans had already set out to develop magnetic levitation (maglev) trains that resolved the problem of friction. In theory such trains could achieve speeds in excess of 400 kilometers per hour. The French, for their part, founded their TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) high-speed system on the basis of traditional technology developed to near perfection. The construction of new dedicated lines for these trains

generally allowed distances themselves to be shortened. The TGV trains beat speed records: in 1955 the SNCF had established a new world speed record of 331 kph in somewhat risky fashion with an electric locomotive, a record surpassed only in 1981, when the first French TGV achieved 380 kph. More importantly, however, the TGV was a great hit with the public. The first, Southeastern, line was made even more profitable because its construction involved no great engineering feats. In 1990 the TGV train Atlantique achieved a speed of 515 kph. This kind of performance meant that rail transport for distances under eight hundred kilometers could once more compete with its rivals. Good marketing and pricing policies by the SNCF made France's main lines profitable.

Other countries could not match France's success. While French rail passengers could travel from Paris to Lyon in two hours by the beginning of the 1980s (on a TGV with an average speed of 213 kph), it still took six hours to get from Rome to Milan—longer than in 1939—at an average speed of 100 kph. In a Europe by now determined to think globally, such zones of backwardness could not be allowed to subsist within an increasingly internationalized network. Consequently, the Italians and the Spanish proceeded to develop tilting trains, the best known being the Pendolino on the Florence-to-Rome route (la Direttissima). The British had less success in the 1970s with their Advanced Passenger Train, which suffered from low investment in the rail sector. TGV lines later made their appearance in Spain, Germany, and Italy. At first, however, such broad support for the high-speed option did not mean that the technology was standardized: The French TGVs went through several generations (Southeastern, Atlantic, North), Germany's Intercity Express trains likewise went through ICE and ICE-M versions, while Spain developed its own AVE and Italy its ETR 500 high-speed systems. Little by little, though, standardization began to win out over national technological and industrial traditions.

THE CHANNEL TUNNEL

This grand project has a very long history indeed. In 1750 the Academy of Amiens held a contest for the best proposal on how to create a permanent link across the English Channel. After Napoleon conceived the idea of invading England with his Grand Army, there was never any shortage of thinkers and visionaries eager to address this challenge. A good case in point is Aimé Thomé de Gamond, who produced numerous projects for bridges and both submerged and excavated tunnels. Inspired by Saint-Simonism—the system of socialism conceived by Claude Henri de Saint-Simon—and the Manchester school of nineteenth-century liberalism, a group met in 1872 and established the Channel Tunnel Company. At the time, the British were interested in a faster route to India, while the French wanted their country to become an obligatory trade crossroads. Two kilometers of tunnel were dug in 1875. But the British aborted the project for fear of invasion, the favorable position of Queen Victoria notwithstanding. Overland links (the Alpine tunnels of Simplon, Mont-Cenis, Saint-Gothard, and Lötschberg) subsequently came into their own, and the port of Antwerp, notably, handled a great part of Asian trade. Tunnel enthusiasts rallied once again in the 1920s, arguing that direct rail connections between the two main colonial powers in the world would be of strategic importance. The Second World War and reconstruction put the project back on the shelf. Later, however, when the SNCF initiated its high-speed explorations in the 1960s, the idea of a direct line via tunnel to London emerged spontaneously. In 1975 the British Labour government backed off from the project on the grounds of the cost of a new London-to-Dover rail line (this time, only 500 meters of tunneling had been done). The French then fell back on their Southeastern TGV line, inaugurated in 1981. The great success of that line, coupled with the ever growing need to connect Great Britain to Europe and the Lille region's

aspiration to become a transport hub, eventually created conditions that made the old "Chunnel" plan seem both necessary and feasible. In 1982 the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the French president François Mitterrand lent their decisive support, and on 29 July 1987 a Franco-British agreement was finally ratified authorizing the construction and exploitation of a tunnel under the English Channel. The French could henceforth look forward confidently to rail links not only with London but also with Cologne and Amsterdam via Brussels. The modernization of the rail network of southeastern England (which resembled a commuter-rail system) was also needed, but this was tackled only gradually; the second portion of a dedicated high-speed line from central London to the Channel Tunnel is scheduled to open in 2007, at which point the London–Paris run should take about two-and-a-half hours.

From the technical point of view, the Channel Tunnel was a triumph, but difficulties were encountered over contractual, security, and financial issues. The tunnel was opened on 6 May 1994. Within a few years talk of high-speed lines or links gave way to talk of a high-speed network, and Western Europe's high-speed rail lines became one of its defining spatial components.

By the end of the twentieth century, high-speed trains were handling 12 percent of all rail passenger traffic in a group of seventeen countries, an impressive proportion in view of the number of lines yet to be built. Debate among experts continued, however, an important unanswered question being whether high-speed rail should serve major cities alone or whether entire regions could benefit from its expansion. Was there not a danger that high-speed intercity service might create a tiering of regions within states, with some regions being well served while others were left out? The prospect at the close of the twentieth century was continual growth in trans-European trade and ever more apparent signs of dangerous overdevelopment. A new sensitivity to problems of security, environmental protection, and energy savings might be expected to favor the sort of collective transportation solutions that rail offered. In practice, however, the railroads continued to be penalized by policies sharply biased toward road transport, which by the turn of the century was garnering 72 percent of freight haulage and 88 percent of passenger traffic, as compared with 15 and 6 percent respectively for the railroads. The continuing construction of a unified Europe cannot bypass the question of the environmental planning of the whole territory and the need to restore a reasonable balance among regions. In this context rail transport must necessarily play a structuring role, as it did in the nineteenth century, when towns that declined rail service experienced slower growth. By the end of the 1990s, many different approaches to the question of the European railroads presupposed the advent of global policies based on a thorough comparative study of the direct and indirect costs of the transportation alternatives. Rail was indisputably the most appropriate choice from the standpoint of sustainable development (as witness, for example, the clear superiority of rail freight in view of the excessive growth of heavy-truck traffic). A transport policy that challenges the hegemony of laissez-faire economics, however, has yet to be framed.

See alsoAutomobiles; Public Transport.

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Alain Beltran