Rippling effect

The company recently published its first monthly update on the European container market, which highlighted how feeder connections in the Mediterranean are becoming critical constraints. These are services connecting larger ports on the Mediterranean Sea to smaller regional ones all across Europe.

The current disruptions are causing longer and unpredictable transit times, additional costs for demurrage and storage and equipment imbalances, Monti pointed out. “The core issue is not capacity shortage, but loss of operational timing and network stability”, he added. In other words, it is all about the timing mismatches: if a ship arrives late, it causes a rippling effect across the whole supply chain.

Is there an end in sight?

Given the current circumstances, it is hard to predict when things will go back to normal. The Strait of Hormuz, between Iran and Oman, continues to remain closed. A ceasefire between the US and Iran was signed yesterday and included the reopening of this corridor, used to move 20% of the world’s oil. However, Israeli attacks on Lebanon led Iran to close it again just a few hours later.

This uncertainty leaves little room for optimism, as the situation has been unstable since the end of February. Moreover, Hormuz is not the only key strait in the Middle East that has caused instability in the past years. Since 2023, the strait of Bab-el Mandeb, linking the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal, has been under stress due to tensions between the US and the Houthi in Yemen.

How is this crisis different from the one that took place half a century ago? Is combined transport in a better position to offer help than it was back then? How are the different industry segments coping? This and more questions will be addressed with Ersek and Koubek as well as the audience.

European Cargo Experience

The webinar will also be the perfect opportunity to get the latest on the upcoming European Cargo Experience, where Koubek will participate as a speaker. Organised by RailFreight.com in cooperation with World Cargo News and ProjectCargo Journal, this brand new event will take place in Gdansk, Poland, on 6 and 7 May.

The main focus of the event will be on digitalisation and automation in terminals. For example, the issues of data sharing and digital standards will be key topics tackled from different perspectives. Interoperability between different loading units will also be one of the main focus of the event.

As usual, there will also be a site visit and an exclusive networking dinner, as well as plenty other opportunities to mingle during the two days. Join the webinar to discover more about the European Cargo Experience and enjoy a discount on the ticket. Otherwise, more information can found here and you can secure your spot here.

With those 10 billion euros, Romania has managed to modernise 600 kilometres of railways. Another 900 kilometres of works are ongoing with an estimated value of 6 billion euros.

That is a lot of work that is still underway, but Staicu is happy about the point Romania is about to reach. After all these years, major investments are reaching their ‘delivery moment’.

“That’s quite an important milestone in our activity, because all of society, the European Union and so on only look at completed investments. No one is keen on hearing that you struggle, or you have issues, or you found out that you need to modify some laws internally or regulations. Everyone is looking for that missing connection or bottleneck that is making everyone spend days or weeks without moving their freight and passengers”, says Staicu.

TEN-T and Constanța

EU funding has primarily been directed towards the TEN-T network and associated corridors in Romania, specifically the Rhine-Danube corridor and the newly created Baltic-Black Sea-Aegean corridor. Over 80% of investments have gone toward completing these corridors, with a major focus on the Rhine-Danube corridor’s main axis, linking the west (Curtici) to Constanța.

Staicu highlights two projects on this axis that are close to completion. “We have works ongoing between Brașov and Sighișoara with two big tunnels now being drilled. The expectation is for it to be completed in 2028. In the meantime, the status is around 98-99% from Sighișoara to Simeria and further on.”

The overarching goal of these projects is to allow freight and passengers alike to move across Romania quickly. The Black Sea and Romania’s biggest asset, the Port of Constanța, play a central role in this idea. The latter has seen substantial investments in its links with the broader rail network.

As a result, it could serve as a more attractive entry point for goods into Europe. This holds especially true, considering that it is the largest and deepest container port in the Black Sea. It therefore also occupies a key position on the Middle Corridor from China to Europe.

An approach in stages

Multimodality (linking different transport modes) and energy efficiency (including extensive electrification and introducing new technologies) are current priorities to ensure the network supports economic growth, explains Staicu. The Danube river also offers opportunities for better multimodal connectivity to the European hinterland – which is why Romania is working on an extensive dredging programme to secure year-round navigability.

EU funding has greatly helped Romania to implement these projects. However, money does not grow on trees and is in limited supply. Budgetary constraints exert a restricting effect on infrastructure works. While Romania tries to comply with all TEN-T standards (160 kilometres per hour for passenger trains, 22.5-tonne axle load, 740-metre train length, electrification, and ERTMS), implementing all of this is not always financially feasible.

As a result, the approach has recently shifted to tackling TEN-T standards in different stages of implementation. By prioritising the most critical infrastructure works, like axle load and electrification, Romania aims to meet the minimum interoperability standards first. These factors are must-haves for a train to be able to enter the network from neighbouring countries and to make unhindered cross-border traffic possible.

It is a bold strategy, but also a familiar one. Post-war Britain embraced the new town model with mixed success. Some places flourished, others struggled with identity, connectivity and economic purpose. This time, there’s an attempt to integrate transport thinking from the outset. The New Towns Taskforce report references rail repeatedly. Yet the question remains whether rail is being treated as a central organising principle—or simply as an afterthought once again.

Seven sites, seven different rail stories

The seven locations identified by ministers present a varied and uneven picture of rail opportunity. Tempsford, in Bedfordshire, stands out as the most obvious candidate for a modern railway town. Sitting at the intersection of East West Rail and the East Coast Main Line, it has the makings of a genuinely rail-led community. If planned correctly, it could anchor both passenger connectivity and logistics flows in a way rarely seen in contemporary British development.

Elsewhere, the picture becomes more complicated. Crews Hill and Chase Park in Enfield are already served by the Enfield Loop, yet its development potential is constrained by intense local opposition and competing land uses. It may well have the makings of a Strategic Rail Freight Interchange, whether that is politically palatable or not. Meanwhile, Thamesmead, long emblematic of 1960s planning failure, sits on the edge of London’s logistics heartland, where rail could yet play a transformative role if properly integrated.

The remaining sites lean more towards regeneration than true new towns. Leeds South Bank and Manchester Victoria North are urban renewal projects, dressed in new town language. Their rail futures are tied to wider and uncertain mass transit ambitions. Brabazon, on the north edge of Bristol, perhaps offers the strongest industrial and employment potential, with rail able to support both passenger access and light industrial logistics. Milton Keynes, already defined by roads, remains an outlier, despite the West Coast Main Line running through its core, and Network Rail’s out-of-town headquarters there too.

Learning from the first generation

The original New Towns programme offers important lessons, particularly in what not to do. Many developments of the 1950s and 1960s were shaped by the prevailing belief that the private car would dominate transport. Rail infrastructure was often marginalised or poorly integrated into urban design. The consequences are still visible today in places where stations sit far from centres of activity, disconnected from the communities they were meant to serve.

Take Livingston in central Scotland as a case in point. It has grown into a substantial town with a strong industrial base, yet its rail provision remains peripheral. Livingston North and Livingston South stations serve the settlement, but neither is embedded in a true civic or commercial heart. Industrial estates, meanwhile, are almost entirely road-dependent. This is not a failure of rail as a mode, but of planning decisions made decades ago.

Across Europe, more integrated approaches have delivered better outcomes. Dutch new towns such as Almere and Lelystad demonstrate how rail can be embedded at the core of urban development, supporting both commuting and economic activity. The UK now has an opportunity to revisit that model, but only if rail is treated as essential infrastructure, rather than an optional extra.

Building with rail in mind

Rail’s role in these new towns extends far beyond passenger transport. The construction phase alone represents a vast logistical challenge. Moving materials, aggregates and prefabricated components by rail could significantly reduce road congestion and emissions. In effect, this is a civil engineering programme of national scale—“Housing Surge To You,” if one were to borrow from the language of major infrastructure projects.

Yet the Taskforce report is notably light on rail freight. The only meaningful reference comes not in the seven preferred locations, but in the now-sidelined proposal at Heyford Park. There, plans for the Oxfordshire Strategic Rail Freight Interchange offered a glimpse of what integrated planning might look like. Freight, housing and connectivity were considered together, rather than in isolation. That approach appears largely absent elsewhere.

This is a missed opportunity. Britain may be largely post-industrial, but that does not negate the need for efficient freight networks. Modern railway towns are not built around steelworks and shipyards. They are built around intermodal hubs, distribution centres and high-value, low-volume logistics. If the new towns are to succeed economically, rail freight must be part of the conversation from the outset.

A question of ambition

Ultimately, the success of these new towns will hinge on the ambition of their planners. Rail can support jobs, improve sustainability and enhance connectivity—but only if it is embedded in the DNA of each development. Retrofitting rail infrastructure after the fact is always more expensive, more disruptive and less effective. Greenfield sites offer a rare chance to get it right first time.

There are encouraging signs. Tempsford could become a genuine railway town for the twenty-first century. Brabazon has the potential to integrate rail into a new industrial landscape. Even Thamesmead, with the right investment, could be reconnected to London’s wider transport network. But these are possibilities, not guarantees. Without firm commitment, they risk becoming diluted or deferred.

So, what part has rail really played in planning these new communities? The answer, at present, is uncertain. It is mentioned often, but rarely defined. Passenger connectivity is acknowledged, but freight is largely overlooked. If this programme is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, rail must move from the margins to the centre of the conversation. Otherwise, today’s new towns will become tomorrow’s missed opportunities.

During those 10 years, road freight grew in every EU country except for Luxembourg, Greece and Portugal. The largest increases were recorded in the Baltics and Romania. On the other hand, rail freight has been decreasing since the turn of the century. Between 2005 and 2023, only six European countries increased their rail freight modal share, with a much more contained growth compared to road freight.

Unreachable goals?

The picture painted by Eurostat is definitely a bleak one. Years of setting goals and talks on how to increase the modal share of rail have led to the exact opposite results: more trucks on EU roads. When available, data from 2025 showed that this trend is far from over and it is also impacting rail freight strongholds such as Switzerland.

Rather than getting close to reaching 30% in 2030, as dictated by the goals set by the EU, rail freight has been walking the opposite path. Some countries are trying to solve decades of ignoring the railway by implementing massive upgrade projects, which are causing just as many issues due to lines being unavailable.

The largest rail freight operators continue to lose money and are forced into restructuring to avoid bankruptcies or EU sanctions. Fragmentation remains a problem when it comes to implementing continent-wide initiatives such as DAC and ERTMS. There is some optimism transpiring for the future due to the conclusion of many construction projects, but the survival of companies until then keeps being uncertain.

The Deutsche Bahn holding, DB Cargo’s parent company, published its annual report for 2025 last week: a good occasion to dive deeper into the circumstances at its freight subsidiary. Things are looking better, but not exactly rock solid. Further restructuring changes could provide the needed push to get DB Cargo back on track.

DB Cargo’s restructuring proceedings, which started in 2022, are not immediately visible when looking at the company’s basic financial indicator: revenue. Note that this number includes data from all of DB Cargo’s subsidiaries, including outside of Germany. Revenue has remained relatively stable, hovering between 4.5 billion and 5.5 billion euros since 2017.

EBIT is more ‘all over the place’

How different does that picture look when looking at Earning before Interest and Taxes (EBIT). EBIT is an indicator of operating performance, but does not yet include expenses such as taxes and interest payments. DB Cargo has not achieved a positive EBIT during any of the assessed years, with lows recorded during the pandemic years. In other words, the company’s operations are fundamentally unprofitable.

This is underscored by the operator’s performance figures. During the pandemic, DB Cargo broke the downward volume and operational performance trends. It transported more freight and did more transport work in terms of tonne-kilometres. Despite that, the finances were worse than ever. The more the company transported, the more money it lost.

That is clearly not a good sign for a rail freight operator – especially when it can no longer count on money transfer from its parent company Deutsche Bahn. But for all the criticism that DB Cargo has received, there has been a turnaround in 2022 in the company’s financial performance.

When looking at the EBIT figures, there is a clear change starting in that year. Since then, DB Cargo has only recorded year-on-year improvements on EBIT. In 2025, the operator came very close to operational profit at -7 million euros. There are various reasons for this, and there are also reasons to think that this may continue into the future.

Subsidies contribute most

The main windfall, which cannot directly be ascribed to sound business management or a restructuring, came in the shape of subsidies. Germany approved a 300 million-euro subsidy for single wagonload (SWL) traffic in 2024. DB Cargo received 163 million euros from those funds, which are also reflected in the EBIT figures. Moreover, DB Cargo received millions in track access charge (TAC) subsidies. In 2025, federal subsidies totalled 305 million euros (195 million for SWL, 78 for TAC, 32 for investments).

Additional federal funding has clearly helped DB Cargo to substantially improve its operational result. This, of course, is not necessarily a solid long-term plan. In order to continue cutting costs, the freight operator has put several plans on the table. These pertain to some of the biggest expenditures: personnel, maintenance and unprofitable contracts.

Halving the workforce

DB Cargo is planning a massive workforce reduction of over 6,000 employees. That would shrink the size of the workforce (in Germany) by around 50%. Across Europe, DB Cargo has over 25,000 employees. Terminations have helped to save 149 million euros on personnel costs in 2025.

The company has also been ending unprofitable contracts. This deliberately shrinks the company’s business, while improving operational performance. It has also sold the intermodal business of its subsidiary Transfesa.

This is reflected in the rolling stock fleet of the operator. Its size is shrinking, and has been shrinking consistently for a couple of years. Simultaneously, DB Cargo has sold 60 locomotives to Beacon Rail and around 6,000 wagons to GATX in sale-and-leaseback agreements. The share of leased and rented wagons in the overall wagon fleet has seen an uptick in 2025 – despite volumes declining.

The increase in the share of leased and rented wagons during the pandemic years coincided with a growth in volume. That is not the case now. If DB Cargo continues to pursue this path of operational flexibility, its owned wagon fleet could keep shrinking in size.

As a result, the provision of locomotives and wagons should become more flexible. This creates financial flexibility as well – DB Cargo won’t need to pay for their maintenance. The operator also gained 300 million euros from the sale.

Together, the termination of unprofitable contracts, reduction in volume and decline in maintenance costs (along with some other things) helped to shrink material costs by 292 million euros, DB said.

Will it be enough?

The DB restructuring proceedings will continue going forward. Decentralisation in several business units that have their own rolling stock and personnel at their disposal should help improve operational efficiency. Further workforce reductions, bonuses for long-haul drives for train drivers and far-reaching SWL remodelling (going to four central shunting hubs) should also aid financial performance.

DB Cargo will need to “clarify details” on its restructuring plan in the summer of 2026. Only then, gradual implementation of the newly proposed plan will begin. With -7 million euros in EBIT in 2025, the company is close to achieving a positive operational performance. However, its net financial result was around minus 40-60 million euros, according to CEO Bernhard Osburg. There is some way to go to profitability by the end of the year.

Amid the rail freight industry’s hiccups, it is the private companies that remain stable. State-owned operators are failing to secure a spot on the scene.

Take a look, for example, at the graphs below. In 2021, incumbents (the dominant rail freight company in a country, often state-owned) lost their majority market share Europe-wide. Challengers (either private market entrants or foreign incumbents) are taking over. This trend has been ongoing for a long time already.

From 95% to 49%

A case in point is Germany. The Federal Network Agency has collected data on rail freight market shares since 2002. At the start of data collection, state-owned DB Cargo was the undisputed market leader. By 2024, the picture looked much different. Challengers held a majority market share of 61%.

This trend is not expected to reverse anytime soon. Domestic incumbents across Europe, notably DB Cargo and Hexafret, have had to reduce their activities due to EU Competition Law rulings. Moreover, the Polish national incumbent PKP Cargo is still in restructuring proceedings, which could therefore also give way to other market participants. However, the latter has had some success, growing its market share by over a percentage point in August 2025 compared to July.

The higher degree of flexibility among private companies may prove to be a decisive factor in market development. The rail freight market is moving away from traditional goods, such as bulk, towards intermodal traffic. This is also where private operator PCC Intermodal takes the largest share in Poland, for example. It beats PKP Cargo and the foreign challenger DB Cargo Polska.

Medway’s headway

The rise of vertically integrated private logistics companies may further send the public operators into retreat. A dramatic example of this is the takeover of Portugal’s state-owned rail freight operator, CP Carga. In 2016, MSC acquired the company and rebranded it as Medway.

Now, Medway is making a headway into Spain as well. State-owned Renfe Mercancías is getting rid of the majority of its freight operations by setting up a joint venture with the MSC subsidiary. Within a decade, the lion’s share of freight operations have gone private on the Iberian peninsula.

Renfe Mercancías is expected to continue operating strategic services, but will transfer its steel, intermodal and “multi-product” services to the joint venture. Similarly, Romania opted to establish a new rail freight operator after the bankruptcy of CFR Marfă. It followed a similar logic, saying that it needs a public operator for strategic operations.

Rail freight will not be the same

The future of public operators may be just that: dedicated to non-commercial but strategic work, such as single wagonload operations. It may not be, or end up somewhere ‘in between’. For example, DB Cargo’s restructuring plan seeks to position the operator for commercially viable international operations, like intermodal. At the same time, it wants to continue offering single wagonload services, albeit at fewer shunting yards than it does now.

Clearly, the role of state-owned operators is changing. Private companies are proving to be more competitive. Whether or not there is a role for the state incumbents in future commercial operations? That remains to be seen.

Covering all bases

Other confirmed speakers are Martin Koubek, Head of Silk Road at Metrans, Alexander Prahl, Head of Global Partnerships & Business Development at Tailwind and Janusz Kuzmicki, Shipping Director at Chipolbrok Gdynia. Moreover, Stephan Stiehler, Sales Director Intermodal at Konecranes and Anton Bernaerd, Business Development Director at Camco Technologies will bring their expertise regarding terminal equipment.

With such a diverse speaker panel, we want to touch upon all those elements that make a terminal the perfect intermediary between different transport modalities. From data standardisation and data sharing to automation and loading units, the European Cargo Experience will be an all-encompassing event and a must-attend for anyone in the transport and logistics industries.

The details

The event will be held at the Mercure Hotel Gdansk. On the first day (6 May), there will be an exclusive site visit to Baltic Hub followed by a special dinner at Canis, a marvelous location in the heart of the city. The second day (7 May) will feature the programme of the event, with insightful conferences and networking activities. Do not miss out, stay updated on the programme here and secure your spot for the European Cargo Experience here.

The ongoing conversation about ETCS – its cost, its pace of rollout, and whether alternatives might serve the industry better – is one the rail sector genuinely needs to have. The system embodies three decades of hard-won interoperability work across dozens of national signalling regimes and regulatory bodies. That institutional weight is not trivial. Critics who question its economics and timelines are right to do so; defenders who warn of fragmentation risk if it were abandoned outright are also right. Both arguments are valid.

But both are also talking about the same layer of the problem: signalling. And that may not be where the most urgent capacity gains are hiding.

Consider the numbers. A European Commission study published in February 2026 found that just 19% of EU rolling stock currently carries onboard ETCS equipment. By 2030, that estimate rises to 40%. More than half the current fleet – 51% – has no fitment plans at all. Full network-wide benefits, which require near-universal fleet coverage, are realistically a matter of decades, not years.

Meanwhile, rail freight’s modal share in the EU stands at roughly 17% of inland freight tonne-kilometres, essentially flat for over a decade, against a European Commission target of 30% by 2030. Freight customers are already being turned away today because the network lacks capacity. The gap between ambition and reality is not a signalling gap alone. It is an operational gap – and it is widening.

The lesson from a network that did scale

In the 1960s, telecommunications engineers faced a version of this same challenge. The telephone network operated on what became known as circuit switching: every call reserved a dedicated line, end to end, for its entire duration. The system worked. It was reliable, safe, and technically sound. It was also catastrophically inefficient. The reserved wire sat idle most of the time. Scaling was exponentially expensive. The economics broke down the moment volume grew.

Packet switching did not replace the cables, but it changed the protocol for using them. Data was broken into packets, each finding its own path through the network dynamically. There was no reserved capacity, no end-to-end pre-allocation, and no idle infrastructure. The physical layer remained largely the same; the operating logic was reimagined entirely. The internet followed. Then email, video, cloud computing, and the digital economy as we know it – all built not on new cables, but on a smarter way to use the ones that already existed.

European rail still operates on the circuit-switching model. Every train holds a dedicated slot through the network, allocated end to end. Even if only a portion of a freight train needs sorting, the entire consist uses up a yard slot upon entry, delaying the onward movement of the wagons that did not require sorting. A delayed service creates ripple effects across adjacent paths. Capacity is consumed by buffers and waiting time, not by the movement of goods. The tracks exist. The wagons also exist. What has been missing is a different way of thinking about the operating protocol.

Operational innovation as an overlay, not a replacement

The question worth adding to the signalling debate is this: what is rail’s equivalent of packet switching? What operational concepts allow trains to use existing slots more dynamically, within the signalling infrastructure already in place, without waiting for a network-wide upgrade to unlock them?

One emerging direction is the ability for train sections to couple and decouple at operational speed. Take the shunting yard scenario: a freight train where only part of the consist requires sorting no longer needs to commit the entire train to the yard. The section that needs sorting diverges on the run; the rest continues on the main line, preserving the slot from the outside rather than consuming it from within.

The yard, now freed from holding the full consist, can dispatch an already-sorted section that couples on the run with the moving section. The same slot enables two operations. No new track is required. Neither are new signals, nor a change to the signalling certification. The logic of the network changes without the network itself changing.

This is what an overlay approach looks like in practice: operational concepts that sit on top of existing infrastructure, extracting capacity that the current system structurally leaves unused every day. It is not a replacement for signalling modernisation. Rather, it is a parallel track of progress that does not have to wait for the long migration to ERTMS to complete.

Layers, not sequences

The deeper lesson from the internet is not that infrastructure does not matter – it is that infrastructure and operating protocol evolve best together, in parallel, not in sequence. The physical network mattered enormously; packet switching would have had nothing to route across without it. But framing new protocols as something to pursue only after the infrastructure is fully upgraded would have been a costly mistake. Both layers advanced simultaneously, each making the other more valuable.

The same logic applies to rail. ERTMS migration should and will continue; moving block and digital supervision will eventually deliver the headroom that fixed-block signalling cannot. That work is necessary and worth doing well. But treating it as a prerequisite for operational progress means accepting a decade or more of avoidable stagnation on a network that is already turning away demand.

ERTMS migration should and will continue

The industry needs to think in layers: the long signalling migration on one track, and a parallel investment in overlay operational concepts on another. Modular train formation, smarter slot logic, on-the-run coupling and decoupling – innovations that do not require the signalling layer to change before they can begin delivering value. Both advancing simultaneously. Both contribute to a network that can actually carry the freight volumes Europe needs it to carry if the 30% modal share target is ever to be more than an aspiration.

Rail has the infrastructure. The slots exist and the tracks are there. What the internet showed us is that the operating logic is not fixed: rather, it is a choice. And choosing a smarter one does not require waiting for the hardware to catch up.

Is the industry ready to have that conversation in parallel with the signalling debate – or will operational innovation remain a second-tier topic until the migration is done?

Instead of costly upgrades, the focus should be on modernising rolling stock fleets and fixing critical issues like level crossings and outdated tracks, argued Ganaylyuk.

This position could count on both disapproval and support. For example, Fiorenzo Ambrogio, who works for Europe’s first intermodal company (1969, according to Ambrogio himself), did not at all agree with Ganaylyuk’s point of view.

Costs change the picture

Ambrogio points to the broader impact of shorter trains on traffic and efficiency, a key point in Ganayluk’s article: Splitting a long train – such as an 800-metre train – into two shorter trains does not actually reduce overall waiting times at level crossings; in fact, it doubles the number of trains passing through the crossing. This results in more frequent closures, ultimately increasing total waiting time for road users, Ambrogio said. By contrast, Ganaylyuk argued that longer trains would achieve that effect by keeping level crossings closed for longer.

The second point of Ambrogio relates to costs. Operating two trains instead of one requires double the locomotives, double the personnel, and significantly higher operational costs, making the approach inefficient and economically unsound, he says.

What do customers want?

A more supportive response came in from Phil Mortimer, Director of TruckTrain Developments Ltd., a UK innovation company in the rail and intermodal freight market.

“This is all playing to the supply side economics of the rail sector but increasingly this [740-metre trains] separates rail from the market, which is not wanting infrequent massive trains but rather routine replenishment in smaller quantities”, Mortimer commented. “This is the fundamental flaw in the case for heavier trains particularly for the intermodal and logistics sectors which are driven by very different imperatives.”

Mortimer added to Ganaylyuk’s argument, saying that rail needs a more agile train model facilitating smaller and intermediate volumes and distances. Additionally, Mortimer believes that rail freight should operate at passenger train speeds to minimise the impact on fellow rail network users.

“A considerable body of technical, commercial and economic evaluation of short, fast, fixed formation (5-7 wagons) self-propelled bi-directional trains has been undertaken here to make rail a more attractive option for shippers. It looks to be feasible and a credible alternative to ‘more of the same’ using existing technology and operating models”, Mortimer told Ganaylyuk.

Passenger and freight at the same speed

That last comment – addressing train speeds – latches on to a central point of Ganaylyuk’s argument: he believes that longer trains reduce throughput. That has everything to do with lower speeds and the velocity mismatch with passenger trains, but also with longer loading and unloading times. Aligning train speeds could improve capacity and improve efficiency on the rail network by eliminating ‘hiccups’ – possibly a better alternative to longer trains.

In terms of engineering, Europe is stuck in the old days

A response by the retired American economist and railway teacher Jim Blaze focused on different points altogether: “It’s a lot more than just about train linear length between the locomotives and the last trailing [wagon]. Track infrastructure has geographic limits as to passing use of train paths – and more than length is important”, Blaze commented.

In terms of engineering, Europe is stuck in the old days, according to Blaze. Europe’s maximum axle loads have not improved since WW2, he says. The continent also lacks double-stack operations.

“To beat trucks, maritime and even pipeline competition rail freight needs more than longer trains”, Blaze claims.

Some reflections on the matter

These three highlighted reactions are just some of many. They reveal a – in the eyes of the current author – surprising diversity in perspectives on the need for 740-metre trains. The mainstream view is that 740-metre trains are a necessity and Europe needs to enable them as soon as possible.

Yet, not everyone holds this to be an undisputed truth. This also applies to ETCS, which may bring serious inefficiencies along with its implementation.

Fortunately for those who adhere to the mainstream perspective, 740-metre trains are central to European rail policy. They are part of EU guidelines on implementing the TEN-T network, for example.

There is no reason to think that the EU will change its mind on train length ambitions. However, the email exchanges following the publication of Ganaylyuk’s piece, as well as the responses on social media, have proven to be fruitful. They reflect the industry’s diverse views, helping to establish a conscious weighing of pros and cons.

Drawbacks of 740-metre trains include, for example, a mismatch between the service offering (longer trains) and supposed customer demands (more frequent trains). On the other hand, longer trains could help rail freight operators substantially by reducing the costs associated with train movements.

Perhaps longer trains won’t create customer value by increasing the frequency of services. They could instead provide an impetus by lowering the cost of transportation – a different avenue of progress. But again, it is worth being mindful of the downsides. They could give a hint as to where the future rail freight industry may find its customers, and where it will cede its modal share to the road and rivers.