The Railteam alliance
Today, I ran across a reference to the “Railteam” alliance and thought “what the heck is that? Never heard that before”. So I did some research and was able to find the following information in a Eurostar press release:
The Railteam alliance will offer travellers high-speed, high-quality travel across European borders. As well as Eurostar, other members include:
- Deutsche Bahn - Germany
- NS and HSA - Netherlands
- ÖBB - Austria
- SBB - Switzerland
- SNCB - Belgium
- SNCF - France
The rapid development of high-speed lines across northern Europe, linking major cities, has created the opportunity for an alliance under the working title ‘Railteam’, which has a vision to provide travelers with:
- Seamless connections at stations
- Through ticketing and fares - one ticket/fare for a through journey
- Easy access to timetables, information, booking and train services
- Real time journey information
- Universal, high-quality standards of customer service and facilities, such as on-board internet access
[Quoted from Pan-European ‘Railteam’ alliance expands @ eurostar.com ]
(I wish we would see some of these “features” in the U.S. …)
Looks like the whole thing is modeled after the alliances that already exists between various airlines (e.g. Star Alliance, SkyTeam, OneWorld, etc.). It will be interesting to follow the developments in the future - after all, a couple of years down the road, international rail travel is supposed to be deregulated in Europe.
It appears that the “Railteam” alliance does not currently have a website - there is something at railteam.com, but it does not appear to be related.
