The total number of passengers carried increased from 244 million journeys in 2011 to 262 million last year, while passenger-km grew from 106.9 billion to 109.6 billion. Private operators increased their market share slightly from 13.6% to 13.9% (by passenger journeys), largely due to the entry of Westbahn, the country's first open-access long-distance operator.
However, 2012 was another lacklustre year for railfreight, which fell to 112.5 million tonnes, compared with 118.6 million tonnes in 2011. Freight performance fell from 22.1 billion to 21.5 billion tonne-km.
This is decline in freight volumes is attributed largely to the difficult economic climate and the restructuring of incumbent railfreight operator Rail Cargo Austria.
However, there was some positive news for open-access freight operators, which increased their market share (by tonne-km) from 14.4% in 2011 to 17.6% last year. Lokomotion has the largest overall market share of the open-access operators at 4.2%, followed by WLC (3.1%), LogServ (2.8%), LTE (2.7%), and TXL (2.2%).
On the Brenner corridor, private operators have a market share of 35%, while on the Vienna – Linz – Salzburg – Innsbruck axis the figure is 20%. Private operators have largely focussed their activities on the block train sector, where they achieved a market share of 26%.
