WHEN TO EXPECT THE EFFECTS OF RAILWAYS RESTRUCTURING: EXPERIENCE OF THE U.S.

Abstract

The restructuring of European railways, which is being conducted according to the model marked as “European”, stared as far as in the year of 1991.After 25 years into this process, the effects of are still not clearly visible. A similar process to restructuring, marked as “deregulation”, started a lot earlier (1980) in the U.S., thus imposing the need to question and research the experiences from the U.S. in context of timespan in which the effects of restructuring are starting to appear, and then interpreting those experiences as when to expect the effects of structural changes in Europe. The implementation of railway restructuring concept is a very long process, which upon its’ closure inevitably draws the question how much did the restructuring itself actually influence the current state in the railway industry, and how much was it up to the influence of other factors throughout the years of conducting the process. In this paper questions in the context of restructuring timespan, appearance of visible effects and relative influence of measures conducted on the effects themselves were addressed, using the example of deregulation process in the USA.