Development of railway contracting for the national passenger rail services in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article mainly gives an overview of the policy developments in the Dutch railway sector over the past decade. The sector has come a long way and the outlook now looks positive. Customer satisfaction and performance have improved and the number of people that travel by train is rising. The development of a more long-term policy window for the sector seems to have brought rest and stability and room for continuous growth of passenger numbers. The combination of a policy making and negotiation regulatory style seems to have worked out very well on the performance of the sector. In a second section the paper also considers a theoretical framework on regulation schemes and develops a first tentative attempt to apply these schemes on an analysis of the Dutch railway sector by giving some statements for discussion.