The French railway society “Veolia Cargo” hopes to become the new competitor of the Belgian railway society “de NMBS”. Veolia Cargo received an approval for his rolling staff and hopes to receive another approval for his material (trains). Veolia Cargo is not an unknown in our country, Veolia Transport (the mother company of Veolia Cargo) is the biggest controller of our city- and region lines for “De Lijn”.Nowadays, Veolia Cargo is active in 3 countries: French, Germany and the Netherlands. In 2006, the French railway society had a turnover of 100 million Euro. This with 850 employees and 189 engines. The turnover for this year would be estimated to 226 million Euro, an increase with 126 million.
This is not good news for “de NMBS”, because with Veolia Cargo the competition in Belgium grows to 9. Now there are 4 companies who submitted an application: CFL Cargo, the British EWS, the Dutch ACTS and Veolia Cargo. The other 5 companies have already an approval to ride on the Belgium net: Dillen & Le Jeune Cargo, SNCF Fret, Rail4Chem, Trainsport and ERS. So the competition is raising.
But there is one obstacle that prevents a fast grow: there is not a balance in the supply and demand of engines and the most important obstacle is a shortage of train drivers.
My opinion: I think that for the consumer nothing will change. Because the competition is for the transport of cargo. But I think that it is not a good thing, “de NMBS” needs a lot of money to exist. So when there is more competition, they lose a lot of money.
Source: http://www.hln.be/hln/nl/942/Economie/article/detail/96884/2007/12/08/Veolia-Cargo-wordt-nieuwe-concurrent-NMBS.dhtml
(Bram)
2 comments:
I hope that this new train society in any case will be much more reliable than the NMBS, because the NMBS you can nowadays no longer trust on! Always delay!
It will be good that the NMBS don't have a monopoly anymore. A monopoly is never good. The prices of tickets should go down now.
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