Railways are capital intensive and require regular investment to function effectively. The public sector cannot always meet the investment needs, which has created strong interest in mobilizing private investment in the railway sector. A new edition of “Railway Reform: A Toolkit for Improving Rail Sector Performance” explains how private financing can be attracted to the sector, with updated and expanded chapters on financing and governance and new and updated case studies.

The webinar will feature material from the revised report. It will highlight the relationship between funding and financing, and how railways with financing problems need to address the underlying funding gap, through increasing revenues and reducing operational and investment costs. It will address the role of risk and how strengthening sector and corporate governance can reduce the risk. These principles will be illustrated by the case of PKP Cargo, in which a turn-around of the railway’s operations enabled its stock to be floated on the Warsaw stock exchange. In some cases, railway have assets with value beyond their use for railway purposes. These assets can be developed with the private sector so that they contribute to the railway’s funding and attract private sector investment. The case of the Futakotamagawa Station Redevelopment Project will demonstrate this type of financing.

The webinar is organized by the Transport and ICT unit of the World Bank.