There are many causes of the railway's problems. One is the privatization and competition of train traffic and track maintenance.
Trains can be an efficient, punctual, cheap and climate-friendly way of transporting private persons and industrial goods. So it was a long time in Sweden before we saved up on this means of transport. There are many reasons why the trains so rarely run on time.
The railway's problems depend on privatization and competition of train traffic. It becomes difficult to ensure quality, for example, in track maintenance or when trains have to meet with different suppliers who are only trying to do the minimum according to their contract according to the logic of competitive capitalism.
Another is the international demands for extraordinary subsidies of the carbon dioxide spewing air traffic.
Ulf Adelsohn warned of the neoliberal train policy in 2011 under the Alliance government:
«SJ has been a playhouse for ignorant politicians for the past twenty years.»
The Swedish people want train traffic across the entire country, even though only four lines are actually profitable. The government often has absurd profitability requirements for the railway, which is difficult to reconcile with the people's wishes for train traffic across the whole country.
The maintenance of the track network has also been neglected since the 1980s at the same time as the train traffic was expanded. It has created the railway's problems.
The third reason for the train problems is that the state did not set aside enough funds for maintenance. A DN article points to a crucial difference compared to Russia's railway maintenance,
which works exemplary regardless of the weather. The difference is that Russia has an army of railway workers. They are immediately put to work at the slightest operational disruption. In Sweden, we have instead sharply cut down on the number of track workers and replaced them with more and more white-collar workers.
With an investment budget that runs over several budget years, the state would have time to let the upgrading of the railway network pay for itself, as I point out elsewhere in this book. We could get the money by letting the state create the money.