Romanian railway in Europe

Der Verwalter · Administrator

The railway industry in Romania seems to be recovering. As the Phoenix bird, the big centres of manufacture and design for rolling stock start to feather the ashes in which they were buried and to show themselves in all their glory, in front of the international railway world.
Built on a long tradition in the domain of the production for the Romanian national railways, the specific industry in our country has suffered, as the economy as a whole, because of the restructuring in the years 1990-2000. Similar to the European railway industry, the Romanian plants were aligned to the standards and the development plans of the national railways. The decline of transports by rail that followed the suppression of CAER was visible in the rhythm and the quality of the orders of the production units, which were forced to restraint their activity and concentrate on repair works for the traditional clients or the new foreign ones.

The privatization of the industry meant the start of the recovery in this economic sector. The dynamism of the new owners and the orientation towards the real needs on the market brought the first major change. From reactive actors, the Romanian manufacturers became proactive and proposed to the markets technological solutions that are meant to respond to the real needs of development and not to those of the railway. The centers of research and development have successfully moved to the private sector and the big production units adopted a new technology and started to introduce quality standards similar to the Occidental ones.

An industry that is, for the moment, characterized through refurbishment and modernization works of existing rolling stock proves, at the same time, its working skills at international level. The Romanian companies have developped as service and product providers for the European Union’s markets and the extra-European ones, being persuasive through high quality and seriousness.

Helped by the recovery of the Romanian railway sector and by orders issued for new rolling stock, we should wait for a strong recovery of some of the Romanian players, stand-alone or in international partnerships. This situation can be related to what we have encountered in sectors that were advantaged by an early decentralization, such as the technology of information and communications sector. There we noticed the establishment of a regional business sub-hub in Romania and we expect the same revigoration of the Romanian railway industry, too.

All of these are possible, because it was proven that the technologies “Made in Romania” stand for quality and innovation.