What does a recently founded freight transport company do when it wants to avoid buying expensive locomotives? It leases them, for example from the Dispolok company in Munich. A few years ago, that would have been unthinkable. But at the beginning of the millennium, rail freight transport was liberalized in Europe.
Since then, every legally established private company has been authorized to offer transportation services on Europe's rail network. Germany now has more than 200 private railway transport companies. Some of them serve the former monopolist, the Deutsche Bahn, and some compete with the Deutsche Bahn. We take a look at the results of liberalization, ten years on.
