The aim of this paper is efficiency assessment of railway companies from larger Europe during the most recent time period, taking into account different input-output configurations. For this aim, two-stage analysis is employed, where efficiency scores are obtained by DEA in the first stage, while in the second stage different statistical tests are conducted and Tobit analysis is used in order to evaluate influence of different environmental factors. It has been found that railways were oriented either on passenger or freight transportation, with only few companies demonstrating high performance in both modes. While companies from Western Europe showed higher performance than companies from Central and Eastern Europe regarding passenger and overall transportation, this is not the case concerning freight transportation. Except for few companies, there are no clear trends in performance during the period observed, in terms of constant efficiency level increase or decrease. Great impact of factors selection on results has been identified.

This paper presents the research on vehicle fleet energy efficiency impact upon overall vehicle effectiveness. Transport companies and companies with own vehicle fleets tend to enhance their resource effectiveness, and to increase their transport service quality with the objective of attaining a competitive position on the market. Since energy consumed for transport operations is an important transport process resource, a method for assessing transport process effectiveness has been developed with the objective of increasing vehicle fleet effectiveness and its energy efficiency, and the overall vehicle effectiveness human indicator has been defined accordingly. The developed method was then implemented in an actual vehicle fleet and variations of the overall vehicle effectiveness human indicator were researched, as well as specific energy consumptions for respective net transport volumes depending on the following indicators: vehicle payload capacity utilization rate and mileage utilization rate. It is shown that specific energy consumption influences overall vehicle effectiveness depending on both the payload capacity utilization rate and mileage utilization rate.