National Railway & Rolling Stock Industry in France:A Lesson for India

French National Railways which is a state owned and state managed organisation has a fleet of 350,000 wagons. But there is one interesting feature, in that, it encourages the manufacturers to build special wagons to meet their particular needs by paying owners of such wagons same indemnities depending upon the type of the product and the tare to load ratio. This policy has yielded satisfactory results, since number of such wagons has increased from 33,000 in 1947 to 60,000 in 1964 allowing railways a considerable savings in capital expenditure.