During the past 15 years competitive tenders have become a common procedure to procure and
organise passenger railway services in European Union member countries. Different models have been
developed in different countries, spanning from the British radical privatisation and franchising of the
railway services to the more incremental processes in countries like Sweden, the Netherlands and
Germany. The variety of tendering models has occurred for a number of reasons. For example, EU
legislation permits different models of organising tenders, member countries have had different goals
with the introduction of tenders and other reforms, and within countries we find trial-and-error processes
aiming at reducing earlier flaws. In this article we will describe the dominating tendering procedures, look
into their theoretical rationale and discuss their possible pitfalls and advantages, drawing from the
experiences of several countries. It is evident that the different tendering regimes suffer from different
types of problems. In the Swedish tenders there have often been very few competing firms, in Britain the
long time span of the first round of franchised contracts resulted in difficulties in making correct
estimates of future developments etc. The article concludes with an overall appraisal of the different
models and explores the possibilities for learning across the tendering regimes.
