RAIL INFRASTRUCTURE CHARGES IN THE V4 COUNTRIES

Existing EU legislation requires a degree of separation between infrastructure managers who run railway networks, and railway undertakings which run the train services, with the aim of ensuring fair and equal treatment of all railway undertakings. Full independence of charging and capacity allocation is required, as these are seen as key to ensuring equal access [1]. The basic principles of railway infrastructure and services charges are defined in Directive 2012/34/EU of the European Parliament and the Council of 21 November 2012 that established a single European railway area. Services to be supplied to railway undertakings are divided into (I) minimum access package, (II) access including track access, (III) additional services, and (IV) ancillary services. Each member state establishes a charging framework, therefore the models of railway infrastructure charges are different in each country. In EU countries a different methodology is used for the internal design of the rail charging system. This paper deals with the rail infrastructure charges from two aspects in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. Firstly, we compare the model of the railway infrastructure charging system from the point of view of influencing factors such as train kilometres, gross tonne kilometres, passenger kilometres, time coefficient, environmental coefficients etc. Secondly, our research focused on the impact of different charges on the fees for rail passenger trains. Many studies compare the rail infrastructure fees absolutely without taking into account national disparities. For the realization of a relevant comparison, we re-calculated rail infrastructure fees in each country by a coefficient reflecting gross domestic product at purchasing power parity.