Comment by sofixa
6 days ago
> but are actually leased by their operators in Europe; there are five or six, I think, main ROSCOs —- rolling stock companies —- in the UK for example.
Nah, this is a UK absurdity because they UK decided to privatise their railways in the worst possible way - every single part (rail infrastructure, operations, rolling stock) was privatised in a local monopoly manner. The rolling stock owners could lease to multiple different operators, so there was some limited competition on that front (probably eviscerated by the need for the ROSCOs to have a profit margin, on top of the fact that there were 10 of them, which meant reduced economies of scale both at acquiring but also maintaining those trains).
They're currently trying to nationalise some parts, after already nationalising the infrastructure (because people died due to bad maintenance due to misaligned incentives - maintenance doesn't bring profits).
But other than that, rolling stock leasing mostly exists in freight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_stock_company
> trains are actually not only mass produced (e.g. by Bombardier)
But yes, trains of all types are mass produced by companies such as Alstom (which were already massive and also bought Bomboardier's train arm), Siemens, Stadler, etc. They can be customised (size, features, etc.), but e.g. the Alstom Metropolis line of metro trains can be found all over the world.
There is definitely leasing of freight and passenger trains in mainland Europe, albeit not on the UK scale -- there are at least thousands of leased passenger trains in Europe as I had understood it, including some trains leased by predominantly UK-based ROSCOs like Beacon, AFAIK.
But admittedly that comment was mostly my brain blipping while creating that sentence by settling on the old, broader definition of "Europe" where we used to be significant and that I sometimes use when talking to Americans, hence the subclause clarification about the UK within it.
The point I was getting to is that outside the USA (which definitely has nationally-specific rail vehicles like Amtrak and BART) things are broadly commoditised and relatively off-the-shelf, both in the rail-specific hardware sense and in the wider construction sense.
I don't think there is anything particularly different between building a road and building a railway line in terms of construction skills, and indeed where major roads and rail in the UK are concerned there's at least half a dozen or so major construction firms doing both, right? Clancy, Balfour Beatty, Octavius, Eurovia, Babcock etc. (and those are mostly just names I remember seeing out of train windows)