Starting this week, we’ll take you behind the scenes of Midnight Trains HQ. And so why not start from the very top? Right now we’re going to explain how exactly we’re going about buying our trains. Without totally giving away our plans (that would be silly from both a strategic and competition point of view), we’ll be letting you in on how we’re going about purchasing our engines, carriages and more, over the course of a three-part article series.
There are two options for a new operator like us: buy secondhand or new material, both of which it’s possible to buy two different ways. You can either buy the gear outright (so we’d be the owners of our own trains) or by leasing carriages instead. Each of these possibilities evidently brings its own set of advantages and disadvantages, with neither offering the perfect solution.
In this first instalment, we’ll be focusing on secondhand material – the option many major European operators, like Regiojet and Transdev, go for. To start, this solution has the advantage of limiting the upfront cost (the prices theoretically being less than if the material were new), as well as reducing the time it would take to get the trains on rails (delays in production for new material can be pretty long). But as always, things are always a little more complex than they seem.
In Europe, secondhand material is very rare. The majority of new operators look for what we in the industry call ‘hauled’ material: passenger carriages that are pulled along by a locomotive engine, like those Corail cars you may well have sat in on a TER journey in France. However, very little of this sort of material has been produced over the past 20 years, since the big operators have been so focused on high speed and the engine power that requires – as is the case with TGV.