ÉcoTrain: €3 million to answer the wrong question
It is one of the 100 startups to watch in France, according to Challenges – ÉcoTrain wants to build a new train to run on abandoned branch lines, and they have €3 million of initial funding. They even brought their prototype to the Elysée, and you can find more background about the whole thing here. I can’t find a Creative Commons Licensed image of the thing though, hence no picture of it here.
Anyway what is the idea?
France has a bunch of freight-only and abandoned railway lines. And ÉcoTrain thinks that running trains on these lines is a good idea, and that the problem is with the train. Make it cheap enough, light enough, and autonomous, and – bingo! – the problem is solved.
But that is an answer to the wrong question.
You instead need to answer: given the financial resources available in sparsely populated areas of France (and indeed anywhere else for that matter), what is the best and most cost effective way to provide a public transport offer?
And it is probably…
… a bus.
What advantages is ÉcoTrain going to have over a bus?
Faster? Doubtful, given the state of the tracks on French branch lines
Cheaper? Also doubtful, because while you might eliminate the driver as it is theoretically autonomous, the cost to acquire it is going to be much higher than a bus
More reliable? Perhaps, but how much of a problem is road congestion in rural areas that are going to slow down buses? The issue is more often the lousy timetables of such buses that do not connect with anything. And how and where are these ÉcoTrains going to be maintained?
In other words, the problem here is not the train. The problem is the state of the tracks, and the lack of available finance for a proper public transport offer in rural areas, neither issues that ÉcoTrain can begin to solve.
(And before anyone trainsplains me, yes there might be edge cases – like the Stourbridge Town line, but generally if a railway line can sustain a train, financially, then run a small train – like a Stadler RS Zero)
Source: https://jonworth.eu/ecotrain-eu3-million-to-answer-the-wrong-question/
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