Statens Järnvägar
| Statens Järnvägar Kungliga Järnvägsstyrelsen
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| legal form | Swedish authority |
| founding | 1887 as Kungliga Järnvägsstyrelsen , from September 1, 1966 Statens Järnvägar |
| resolution | January 1, 2001 |
| Seat | Stockholm , Sweden |
| Branch | railroad |
| Website | http://www.sj.se/ |
Statens Järnvägar , or SJ for short , was the general name of the former Swedish State Railways , which had a monopoly on all of Swedish rail transport until 1990 and managed the rail infrastructure until the 1990s. Officially, the company was called Kungliga Järnvägsstyrelsen until September 1, 1966 .
Until January 1, 2001, the SJ existed as an entrepreneurial authority . Since then, the passenger transport division of the former railway authority, which has been converted into a stock corporation, has been called SJ AB .
Name definition of the state railways
On January 22, 1855, the engineer Nils Ericson was commissioned to lay out trunk lines and to operate them after the opening. Ericson received the management post of an authority established for this purpose in 1856 , the "Styrelsen för statens järnvägsbyggnader" ( German roughly: "Office for State Railway Construction" ).
In this position, Nils Ericson transferred the transport tasks to "Styrelsen för statens järnvägstrafik" ( German roughly: "Office for State Railways" ) in 1863 with a general director as head. In 1882 “Statens järnvägsbyggnader” was assigned to “Väg- och vattenbyggnadsstyrelsen” ( German roughly: “State road and water engineering authority” ).
On June 1, 1888 numbers were "Styrelsen för Statens järnvägsbyggnader" merged with "Styrelsen för Statens järnvägstrafik" and formed the "Kungliga Järnvägsstyrelsen" ( German "Royal Railway Office" or "Royal Railway Authority") for the Sveriges Statsbanor for the Union with Norway united Sweden or after the dissolution of the union from 1905 for Statens Järnvägar in Sweden.
The state railway time
When the first main lines, known as “ Stammbahnen ”, were opened in 1856 , an enormous development began when Kungliga Järnvägsstyrelsen employed railway attendants along all lines, furnished service apartments for all railway attendants and station staff and created architecture departments that dealt with the appearance of the stations and the layout and design of the railway systems decided. Until 1973 there was a separate garden department that was responsible for decorating the station squares.
The importance of the state railways grew into the middle of the 20th century, not least due to a Reichstag resolution of 1939 on the general nationalization of the railways in Sweden , according to which many of the numerous Swedish private railways were nationalized and incorporated into the Kungliga Järnvägsstyrelsen . As a result, the state railways achieved a strong position in the years after the Second World War . They carried out passenger and freight traffic on the entire state rail network and operated bus routes across the country. Via the subsidiary AB Svenska Godsbilcentraler (ASG), the state railways played a role in road freight transport. There was a chain of travel agencies owned by the railway and the state railways operated train and car ferries. There were own workshops for train operations. The authorities were responsible for building and maintaining the routes. The company reached its maximum size in 1950, when it employed almost every hundredth Swedes with 50,000 employees. The majority of employees in the public sector worked for the state railways at the time.
In 1963 the Swedish Reichstag demanded that every form of transport should be economically self-sustaining. This decision led to the closure of a large part of the branch lines in Sweden. At the same time, bus transport was further developed, so that the state railways became the largest bus company in Sweden in the 1970s.
privatization
In the 1980s, the aim of Swedish transport policy was to split up and sell the SJ. Initially, the route network was separated from train operations: the route network was transferred to Banverket in 1988 , a state company (authority) that was responsible for the infrastructure of Swedish rail traffic until March 31, 2010. On April 1, 2010, these tasks were taken over by the newly established Trafikverket , which is also responsible for the construction and maintenance of the roads.
In further steps, the travel agencies were sold in the 1990s and bus transport was spun off into the Swebus company , which is now owned by the British company Stagecoach . On January 1, 2001, the main business areas of SJ were finally transferred to six new, independent stock corporations. For technical reasons, a small remainder of the original SJ remained, called Affärsverket Statens Järnvägar (SSRT), which does not operate its own railway traffic, but owns some vehicles and rents them out to various transport companies.
The Swedish Railways after the split
Passenger traffic (SJ AB)
Passenger travel was taken over by "SJ AB". Today it operates Swedish long-distance rail travel on profitable routes independently . Lines that cannot be operated at cost will be awarded by state authorities after tendering to the railway company that has submitted the cheapest offer. Regional traffic is a matter for the provincial and regional parliaments ( Swedish landsting ). Accordingly, each province has its own company that organizes regional transport and orders the necessary transport services from the transport companies. The cheapest company for the provision of the transport is determined by tender, whereby SJ can participate in the tenders for long-distance and regional transport services. For a long time , SJ AB was only able to gain a few services in regional transport and lost important routes in long-distance transport. After the turn of the millennium, it managed to take over more traffic again in cooperation with other railway companies.
From mid-2015, thousands of refugees, mainly from Syria, came to Sweden via SJ. On December 21, 2015, SJ announced that it would cease passenger traffic from Denmark . The reason is that SJ is not in a position, as requested by the Swedish government, to verify the identity of all passengers entering Sweden. After the massive influx of people, the government temporarily suspended the Schengen Agreement and passed a law that prescribes identity checks on all public transport. From January 4, 2016, all transport companies face fines if they bring passengers into the country without proof of identity with a photo. The railway said it did not have the capacity to carry out such controls and was therefore temporarily suspending passenger traffic until a workable solution was found. On March 1, 2016, operations on the Malmö – Copenhagen route were resumed.
Freight transport
The freight transport division of the old SJ was transferred to the Green Cargo (GC) company. Already in the 1990s, the ore transport on the northern Swedish ore railway Luleå – Gällivare – Kiruna – Narvik was outsourced. This was carried out by the mining company LKAB through its subsidiaries Malmtrafik i Kiruna aktiebolag ( MTAB ) in Sweden and MTAS (in Norway). MTAB was renamed LKAB Malmtrafik AB .
Green Cargo, together with its subsidiary TGOJ, handles a large part of the Swedish rail freight transport, but has to face increasing competition from new competitors such as Hector Rail . In the past, there has been repeated speculation about a cooperation or merger between Green Cargo and Railion , the freight transport company of Deutsche Bahn .
Further business areas
The maintenance and repair of the trains has been taken over by EuroMaint AB and TrainTech Engineering AB (today Interfleet Technology ), Jernhusen AB manages the properties of the former state railway, Unigrid AB is responsible for the IT infrastructure, and TraffiCare AB took care of the station and Train dispatch. The TraffiCare AB has meanwhile been partly sold and partly reorganized.
See also
literature
- Rico Merkert: The liberalization of the Swedish railway system - an example of the vertical separation of network and transport operations. In: Economic discussion contributions from the University of Potsdam; Contribution to Discussion No. 62; uni-potsdam.de (PDF).
Web links
- Website of the SJ. SJ AB, accessed June 1, 2017 (Swedish).
Individual evidence
- ^ CG Björling: Järnväg . In: Theodor Westrin (Ed.): Nordisk familjebok konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi . 2nd Edition. tape 13 : Johan – Kikare . Nordisk familjeboks förlag, Stockholm 1910, Sp. 420-430 (Swedish, runeberg.org - here pp. 427-428).
- ↑ Postcard with the imprint "Statens Järnvägar", canceled with the official stamp of the "Kungliga Järnvägsstyrelsen". Retrieved January 1, 2017 .
- ^ Postcard with the imprint "Sveriges Statsbanor". Retrieved January 1, 2017 .
- ↑ Refugees - Sweden's railway stops train traffic from Denmark. In: tagesschau.de. Norddeutscher Rundfunk, December 21, 2015, archived from the original on December 22, 2015 ; accessed on May 15, 2019 .
- ↑ SJ återupptar trafik till Danmark. aftonbladet.se, February 2, 2016, accessed May 15, 2019 (Swedish).
