On 14 May 2025 Alstom told its shareholders that its order book had reached €95 billion. That is several years of trains, signalling and maintenance already signed, before a single new contract is won. Six months later Siemens reported that the order backlog of its Mobility business stood at €52 billion. Two companies, one market, and between them a queue of work longer than most careers take to reach their first promotion.
Those numbers are real, and they are the reason most commentary on rail says the money is in the makers. It is only half the story. The other half is written in French public accounts, in a regulator's market report and in the results of the company that runs the Paris metro, and it describes a very different business: one where the customer is the state, the calendar is set by a budget law, and the margin on running a network is thin by design.
In rail and urban transport the money is made in two places that behave nothing alike: the makers earn on long order books at modest margins, and the networks are renewed on a public schedule by operators who keep very little of each euro; a candidate who knows which of the two an employer lives in will read its hiring, its pace and its risks far better than one who reads the headline order book.
This is the first piece of the rail and urban mobility chapter of the CareerOn Industry Atlas. It reads eight documents, each opened and its passage checked before a word was written: the annual results of Alstom, Siemens, SNCF and RATP, a joint report by the French finance and environment inspectorates, a finance committee report of the National Assembly, the French transport regulator's market report and a special report of the European Court of Auditors. Three further documents we wanted, Alstom's full annual filing and two reports of the French Court of Auditors, could not be opened or read in full, and none of them is used.
Three businesses, not one
The word "rail" hides at least three businesses, and the first discipline of this piece is to keep them apart. There are the makers, who design and build rolling stock, signalling and the systems that tie them together. There are the infrastructure managers, who own and renew the track, the catenary and the stations. And there are the operators, who run trains, trams, metros and buses for passengers every day.
They are paid by different people. A maker is paid by operators and public authorities under contracts that can run for a decade. An infrastructure manager in France is paid largely by the state, through subsidies and a renewal budget. An operator is paid by fares and, overwhelmingly, by the transport authorities that contract it. The same euro of public money can therefore appear three times in three sets of accounts, which is exactly why this piece never adds figures across them.
No two of the documents below measure the same thing. An order backlog is work signed and not yet delivered. Revenue is work delivered in a year. Operating profit is what is left after the cost of delivering it. Public investment is money committed by a government, not money earned by anyone. Each chart that follows prints one measure per row and names the document that printed it.
The makers already hold years of work
Start with the makers, because that is where the headline numbers live. Alstom's results for its fiscal year 2024/25, published on 14 May 2025, report a backlog of €95 billion and describe it as "providing strong visibility on future sales". Siemens, reporting on its own fiscal year, puts the Mobility backlog at €52 billion.
The makers already hold years of work
| What the document prints | Measure | Company, date |
|---|---|---|
| Backlog of €95 billion | Orders not yet delivered, worldwide | Alstom, year to 31 March 2025 |
| Adjusted EBIT margin of 6.4% | Company-defined operating margin | Alstom, year to 31 March 2025 |
| Mobility order backlog of €52 billion | Orders not yet delivered, worldwide | Siemens Mobility, fiscal 2025 |
Sources 1 Siemens · 6 Alstom SA
A long order book is a rare thing in industry. It means a maker can plan its factories, its engineering hires and its supplier contracts years ahead. It also means that the work a graduate joins in 2026 was often sold several years earlier, to specifications written before they arrived. The rhythm of a maker is the rhythm of delivery: design reviews, type testing, homologation, commissioning, then decades of maintenance.
The order book is not the profit. Alstom's adjusted operating profit for the same year was €1,177 million, up 18%, which it states as a 6.4% margin on sales. That is a respectable figure for a company recovering from a difficult integration, but it is modest beside the size of the backlog. The makers earn steadily on very large volumes. They do not earn spectacularly on any single train.
For a candidate, this has a practical meaning. At a maker, the scarce skill is not selling; it is delivering what has already been sold, on time and to a certified standard. Quality, testing, certification and project control are where a long backlog becomes either profit or penalty. That is why so many entry roles at makers sit in those functions rather than in commercial teams.
France renews its network on a public schedule
Now leave the factories and walk onto the track. The French national network is owned and renewed by SNCF Réseau, and the money that renews it is, in large part, public. Three documents describe it, and they measure three different things.
The joint report of the finance and environment inspectorates, dated February 2024, finds that investment in the network, excluding major national projects, is stable at about €4.9 billion a year, of which €3.5 billion is carried by SNCF Réseau, and that €2.9 billion of that goes to renewing the core network. The French transport regulator's market report for 2024 records investment subsidies received by SNCF Réseau of €3.8 billion, up 2.2% on 2023. And the National Assembly's finance committee report of October 2024 describes a planned €28.4 billion over ten years for renewing and modernising the rail network, or €2.8 billion a year.
France renews its network on a public schedule
| What the document prints | Measure | Publisher, date |
|---|---|---|
| About €4.9 billion a year into the network, of which €2.9 billion for renewing the main lines | Annual investment, outside major projects | IGF and IGEDD, February 2024 |
| €28.4 billion over ten years, or €2.8 billion a year, for renewal and modernisation | Planned envelope in the 2022 performance contract | Assemblée nationale, October 2024 |
| €3.8 billion of investment subsidies received, up 2.2% | Subsidies received in 2024 | Autorité de régulation des transports, February 2026 |
Sources 3 Inspection générale des finances et IGEDD · 4 Assemblée nationale · 7 Autorité de régulation des transports
These figures sit side by side in the chart, and they must not be added. One is a measured level of investment, one is a subsidy actually received in a year, and one is a planned envelope over a decade. What they share is more important than what separates them: in every case the rhythm is set by the state. The size of next year's renewal programme depends on a budget law, a performance contract and a political decision, not on a customer's order.
SNCF as a group is large. Its 2024 results report revenue of €43.4 billion, up 4.8% on 2023. But that group figure mixes passenger services, freight, logistics and the network, and it tells a reader very little about the money available for track renewal in a given year. The network's budget is a public number, negotiated in public, and anyone who wants to work on it should learn to read that negotiation.
The European Court of Auditors adds a warning from the continental scale. In its special report on the trans-European transport network it concludes that the 2030 deadline for completing the EU core network will not be met. Large cross-border projects slip. For a maker, that is a delay in delivery. For an infrastructure manager, it is a longer career on the same project.
Building keeps more of each euro than running
The third business, operating, is where most people who work in transport actually work, and it has the thinnest margins of all. RATP, which runs the Paris metro, RER lines, trams and buses and operates networks elsewhere, reported for 2024 consolidated revenue of €7.1 billion, up 10%, and current operating profit of €167 million, an improvement of €73 million.
Divide the second figure by the first and the operator keeps about 2.4 cents of operating profit on every euro of revenue. Alstom's reported margin for its own year is 6.4%. The two companies do not use the same definition of operating profit and their years do not coincide, so the chart prints each measure under its own name and makes no claim that one is a precise multiple of the other. The direction, though, is plain: building keeps more of each euro than running.
Building keeps more of each euro than running
| Company | What the document prints | Kept per euro of sales |
|---|---|---|
| Alstom, maker | Adjusted EBIT margin of 6.4% | About 6.4 cents (company measure) |
| RATP, operator | Revenue €7.1 billion; current operating result €167 million | About 2.4 cents (computed) |
Sources 6 Alstom SA · 8 Groupe RATP
This is not a sign that operators are badly managed. It is the design of the business. A transport authority sets the service, the fares and much of the cost base, and it contracts an operator to deliver it. The operator's margin is the reward for running the service reliably, not for owning an asset or a technology. Its growth comes from winning and keeping contracts, and in France that contest is now open, which is why the regulator's reports have become a working document for anyone in the sector.
For a candidate, the operator's world has its own logic. The scarce skills are in reliability: maintenance of fleets, the planning of service, the commissioning of new lines and the move to electric buses. The pace is daily. A failure is visible to a million passengers by nine in the morning. Careers are built on keeping promises, not on long engineering cycles.
What the documents do not say
A careful reader should also know where the evidence stops. None of the eight documents gives a clean figure for how much of a maker's order book comes from French public buyers, so this piece does not estimate one. None of them lets us compare the margins of makers and operators on a single definition, so the comparison above is a direction, not a ratio. And the two reports of the French Court of Auditors that would have deepened the picture of network finances could not be read in full, so their conclusions are not reported here at all.
We also held back a claim that circulates widely: that public investment in rail is rising sharply everywhere in Europe. The French documents describe a stable level of investment and a planned envelope; the regulator records a modest rise in subsidies. That is a steadier story than the headlines, and it is the one the documents support.
What this means for your career
The practical lesson is to ask, of any employer in this field, which of the three businesses it lives in. The answer tells you how it is paid, how fast it moves and what it needs from you.
If it is a maker, it is paid for delivering a backlog already sold. Your value lies in getting a certified product out of the door on time: project control, testing, quality and certification. Two CareerOn simulations rehearse exactly that work: the junior project lead on tramway infrastructure and the rail quality and certification engineer, who stands between a finished train and its authorisation to carry passengers.
If it is an infrastructure manager, it is paid on a public schedule. Your value lies in turning a budget line into renewed track, safely and within a possession window at night. The high-speed line project lead simulation rehearses the planning, interfaces and trade-offs of that kind of programme.
If it is an operator, it is paid for reliability on thin margins. Your value lies in keeping a fleet available and a service punctual, and in making new technology, from electric buses to fast charging, work in daily service rather than in a pilot. The tramway fleet maintenance engineer and the fast-charging project lead simulations rehearse that daily discipline.
A last piece of advice, drawn from the documents themselves. When you prepare for an interview, read the one document that pays your future employer: the results release of a maker, the performance contract and budget of a network, or the regulator's report on an operator's market. Candidates who can say where the money comes from, and how steadily it arrives, sound like people who already work there.
How we read these documents
Every figure in this piece was checked against a passage in one of eight admitted documents, each dated and opened before writing. Figures from different documents are shown side by side and never added, because they measure different things. The single derived figure, RATP's operating profit as a share of revenue, is calculated from the two numbers RATP published and is labelled as our calculation. Documents we could not open are named as unread and are not used. The next piece in this chapter turns from the money to the companies a railway cannot run without.