Nearly a year ago, the first private railway company put an end to the monopoly of PKP. Will it be profitable? The business plan of PCC/Arriva consortium which won the tender to offer railway transport in kujawsko-pomorskie region for the next three years provided a margin of profit of 3-5 percent. The beginning was very hard, however.
“Costs were two times higher than expected”, Piotr Rybotycki, PCC/Arriva director admitted.
The company had estimated it needed PLN 1.5m (EUR 448,500) to launch operations. It had 13 trans from Torun local authorities but needed to buy three more, employed 150 employees and had many additional costs connected with ticket sales, train announcing, fees for access to railway, etc. The debut was not great. Trains were late or didn’t come at all.
„Local authorities fined us, stopped paying for part of the tickets because some routes were not covered, which in turn forced us to provide bus transport”, director Rybotycki said.
The fines amounted to PLN 500,000. Bus transport cost several hundreds thousand zloty. In addition, ticket sales were lower than expected.
The situation is better today. The trains come on time, the number of passengers is growing, and local authorities pay full subsidy to tickets. The consortium can still achieve what it had planned. According to Mr. Rybotycki, after the third quarter of the year, he will be able to say whether private railways in kujawsko-pomorskie region are profitable or not.
(PLN 1 = EUR 0.299)