Besides the seemingly ignored environmental costs applicable to trains, there is also massive government subsidy for rail travel which I'm sure equals or even exceeds that given to aviation (through alleged hidden absence of tax on fuel).
For example, the train operating companies here in the UK are paid a fortune to operate their train services: and we're not talking branch line routes here. Virgin in particular gets a massive government subsidy to operate such routes as London-Manchester and London-Glasgow where the likes of BA and BD have to sink or swim on their own.
It's not any better on the much vaunted continent. Whilst SNCF technically makes a profit (albeit a small one) the company which owns the tracks (and also builds those massively expensive Lines a Grande Vitesse), RFF, is in massive amounts of debt. Here's the text of a very interesting article from June last year (about the time when everyone was saying you were about to be able to get to Marseilles from London quicker than you could get to Glasgow and wasn't it pathetic etc. etc.)
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Viewed from the English side of the Channel, the achievement is breathtaking. Once the new TGV service starts, it will be possible to travel from London’s Waterloo station to Marseilles in about six hours—two hours fewer than it takes to travel by train from London to Inverness in Scotland. There is talk of a direct train from Waterloo to the new Marseilles St Charles station. For Parisians, it means they can escape the cold and wet of the French capital to reach the balmy Côte d’Azur in just three hours—one hour 20 minutes less than the old service.
But there is another side to this tale of gloire: the French may rival Japan in their brilliant inter-city rail network, but, as taxpayers, they pay dearly for the privilege. There is a huge black hole in the railways’ accounts, into which billions of euros are poured each year. And there are parts of the network (notably the Ile de France area around Paris) where consumers are revolting against the horrible state of a train service that is reminiscent of southern England’s, with traffic outgrowing capacity and track and rolling stock wearing out too quickly.
On the surface, it looks as though the railways are making only a small loss of FFr1 billion ($130m), the figure expected this year after punishing strikes over Easter. But that is just the tip of un très grand iceberg. The real horror of French rail finances is buried in another company, called Réseau Ferré de France (RFF). RFF owns the track and signals, and charges SNCF, the sole national operator, for access. But it pays SNCF, in turn, for managing the network.
In the mid-1990s, the European Commission was pressing the French to separate track and rail operations in the interests of greater financial transparency, and also to open the way for some competition on the tracks. Eventually, the French opted for separation in 1997, but for a different reason: SNCF as it was then constituted was going as bust as only a nationalised industry could, halfway through spending FFr300 billion on its TGV network. So the huge debts were shunted into the new state-owned company—where the grim financial picture is still tucked away.
The accounts for 2000 show RFF running at a loss of euro1.7 billion a year. But the true figure is in fact much higher, because there is, in addition, a subsidy from the government of euro1.6 billion. Now that SNCF is itself slipping back into the red, that means that the total losses on French railways are around euro3.5 billion a year.
And the future looks even bleaker. The long-term debt inherited by RFF has risen from euro20.7 billion four years ago to euro22.8 billion, and there is little prospect of reducing it by much. So, over the past three years, under a programme known as “reform of reform”, the company has tapped the international capital markets for loans worth euro18.5 billion, not to spend on shiny new lines but just to refinance its old debts.
As a result, RFF pays interest charges amounting to euro2.4 billion a year. That is almost as great as its biggest trading expense, the euro2.6 billion it pays to SNCF for managing the network . Since the state guarantees the debt, RFF gets an extra subsidy in that it does not have to pay full market interest rates. In addition, RFF in its first four years enjoyed about euro5.4 billion of capital provided by the state. Each year the government puts in new equity to cover the loss: last year the figure was euro1.9 billion.
RFF is supposed to get itself into profit and start paying down its debts, but there is no reasonable prospect of that happening. Mr Gallois has been making noises for some months about redefining SNCF’s financial relations with RFF and the state. This year the 250km extension of the line to Marseilles will put up his access charges to euro1.7 billion. SNCF complains that the track charges will swallow all its passenger revenues on the Marseilles run.
Mr Gallois thinks that the government should just bite the bullet and take over the debts on RFF’s books, in effect writing off the infrastructure investment of building the high-speed network. In that way SNCF might win lower access charges. In practice, however, the government has asked RFF to reduce its borrowings by about half over the next ten years, and the European Commission is increasingly critical of France’s support for its railways, expecting a more commercial framework and the opening of at least some lines to competition. The first customers for Marseilles will be paying about euro62 for an off-peak single ticket, or euro75 at rush-hour. That may yet turn out to be a short-lived bargain at the taxpayer’s expense.
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So, if that prat from Friends of the Earth on Channel 4 news last night is complaining about an alleged 'hidden aviation subsidy', tell him to take a look at RFF's balance sheets.
Oh PS........the new Channel Tunnel Rail link takes up about as much space as Heathrow.
But it only goes from London to the Kent coast........whereas from Heathrow you can end up anywhere (as my baggage frequently reminds me!......)