The railway accessibility of peripheral areas to the TEN-T network: a case study in the Alps

European transport planning highly fosters the railway Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T), while giving ancillary attention to the secondary railways that should enable the access of peripheral areas to this network. Even in the academic debate, considerable work focuses on the high-speed railways and their implications, while fewer studies discuss the role of secondary railways in peripheral EU areas. This gap may exacerbate the disparities between central and peripheral EU regions. As such, the aim of this paper is to direct the attention towards the secondary railway lines serving the peripheral EU areas, by measuring the railway accessibility of these peripheral areas to the main nodes of the TEN-T network. We focus on a cross-border case study in the Alps, and we measure the accessibility provided by nine secondary railways to the main TEN-T nodes within it. On average, results show that the observed secondary-railway nodes register ca 20% lower accessibility figures than the TEN-T ones. However, this mismatch varies significantly among the secondary nodes belonging to our study area (from ca a min of 2% to a max of 40%). It is crucial to address such unbalances at the EU and regional level since a significant portion of the EU population resides outside the TEN-T catchment area, and thus depends on the secondary railway system to access the TEN-T network in a sustainable way.