In Europe, many countries have completely separated their railways into totally separate infrastructure managers and railway undertakings (train operators) and the European Commission has sought to make such complete vertical separation a legal requirement.

<title>A<sc>bstract</sc> </title> Benchmarking of rail firms has become a matter of substantial interest and many authors have emphasised the importance of transaction costs in regard to assessing the desirability of vertical separation. However, due to data and methodological limitations, previous rail efficiency...

Whether transaction costs increase following full vertical separation of railways has been the subject of much debate, but there is still little quantitative evidence on this question. This paper applies a bottom-up approach to compute transaction costs between train operation and infrastructure...

This paper discusses the effects of institutional organisation on the transactions and interactions between train operators and infrastructure managers in the three most liberalised rail systems in Europe, namely Britain, Germany and Sweden. The heart of the analysis is a major in-depth...

This is the first paper in the literature to formally study the cost impact of competitive tendering in rail maintenance. Sweden progressively opened up the market for rail maintenance services, starting in 2002. We study the cost impacts based on an unbalanced panel of contract areas between...