DoDo can comment better on the technical details, but the economics of open access discourage investment in and maintenance of the infrastructure that competitors can piggy-back on.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

I don't know how much it factors in, but highways has a tradition of being payed by the government as a seperate item, while tracks has a tradition of being payed partly by the government ad partly by passengers as a bundled item together with traffic. I once read a Swedish text from the 70ies arguing that if the price structure was pushing goods from rail to roads because the (then national) rail company had to cover the costs of the tracks too, while the lorry companies only paid for the trucks and gas.

So to make the comparision equivalent, the onwer of the tracks shoould be the government and must take the full costs of maintaining the system, that is it should charge only congestion fees. In parctise I suspect this means a much bigger rail budget.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

In The Dawn Of Open Access (1/2), I wrote on unbundling in combination with franchising:

This model can certainly increase the total number of rail passengers, however, transfers become more problematic, branch lines are abandoned in advance of franchising, and the costs for taxpayers do not decrease but increase. Due to unbundling, train operators seek to externalise costs to the (still state-owned) infrastructure manager.

...and on unbundling and open access:

You can't run a railway like a highway completely, given signalling (see 310 km/h with ETCS) and the resulting need to run by schedule, so the means were created to organise trains into timetable slots ("train paths"). Train paths are sold at fixed rates ("track access charges")...

I won't quote the passages on (negative) experience with open access in railfreight in full, just list point-wise without detailed explanation:

• less profitable business was gotten rid off in advance & not much was gained back by startups
  
• new market players died out/showed risk aversion
  
• train paths needed the creation of a new bureaucracy
  
• track access charges are subject to incumbent-new entrant blame games and pushing of externalities (the point JakeS raised, which is one of, if not the most important problem)
  
• rolling stock commissioning is difficult (wholly standardized railways are far, far away)
  
• ownership & management of maintenance facilities is necessarily less effective
  
• distributed responsibilities lower safety
  
• pressure on labour, which also lowers safety

As for open access in long-distance passenger transport, extra issues also in short form:

• access to station facilities
  
• with train paths the issue is not just getting them but getting favourable ones (travel time, connecting services)
  
• competitive new entrants focus on the busiest lines, which has repercussions on the rest of the network of the incumbent

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}