No Eurostar isn’t the worst performing train company in Europe. But if you’re T&E does it matter?

A message from a friend this morning: “Have you seen that piece in The Guardian saying Eurostar is the worst performing train service in Europe?”

Oh what now, my heart sinking as I waited for her to send me the link.

This is The Guardian’s piece, and it relates to this report by Brussels based pressure group Transport & Environment.

And yes, there it is – Eurostar ranked bottom of all the companies assessed, with Trenitalia on top closely followed by SBB and, err, RegioJet. And with CFR, BDZ and Hellenic Train ranking as better than Eurostar.

Now as any of you who read my rail commentary know, I am not the biggest fan of Eurostar, especially its ex-Thalys arm on the Paris-Bruxelles route. But is it the worst performing in Europe? Hell no. So how then did it end up at the bottom of the ranking?

The answer is because trying to even compile a ranking like this is comparing apples and oranges.

Eurostar scored zero on the “night trains” category. Amazing! It’s a high speed operator, not a night train operator. And it scored very low on ticket price and low due to an absence of special fares and reductions. But hey ho, it’s a commercial service! Legacy operators like SNCF or DB are going to have lots of special fares that they are obliged to have as hangovers from their time as state owned monopolies.

Meanwhile German operators scored low due to a lack of reliability – not wrong as anyone who has travelled in Germany recently can attest. But I would put money on it that if Trenitalia (the highest scoring) started running trains tomorrow in Germany it would do no better.The quality of the outcome is about the entire system, not just an operator.

I could go on and on about the criteria, but I will resist. My critique here is not so much of this T&E report, but whether any report of this nature would make much sense. Buried in amongst the league tables in the PDF are some solid recommendations as to what different operators could do better, but little of that is new and does not get the media coverage anyway – it is the league table that does.

And in the end you have to ask yourself: what is the downside for T&E for having come up with such a spurious ranking?

It was not just The Guardian that swallowed it whole, but Spiegel and Tagesschau in Germany, SRF in Switzerland, El Pais in Spain, L’Express in France, BNNVARA in Netherlands. Even RailTech – industry press that should know better – covered it. Massive coverage of the report. Lots of eye balls on the ranking. Funders will be happy. When approaching policy makers in Brussels they’ve made the splash they wanted.

Meanwhile a bunch of folks online have been attempting serious analysis of the conclusions, or just getting annoyed at the spurious nature of the report. But in the end we don’t matter. “It’s complicated” is not a line that a busy journalist wants. Copy and paste the press release, generate controversy with the league table, job done. Some people in Eurostar’s headquarters might be fuming, but if you are T&E do you care?