Parliament in the Netherlands recently voted on two proposals to accommodate rail freight. A motion on 740-metre trains passed, whereas lower infrastructure fees could not count on support. The rail freight sector thus remains at the mercy of infrastructure manager ProRail, which is set to grow track access charges rather significantly.
The main setback for Dutch rail freight concerns next year’s TACs. Those will increase substantially. All across the board, the charge per train-kilometre will surge by around 36%. On top of that, ProRail is adding another 0.1% inflation indexation, for what it’s worth.
| Train weight class | 2025 fee (€/train-km) |
2026 fee (€/train-km) |
Absolute change | Relative change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Up to and including 120 tonnes | € 0.4354 | € 0.5928 | + € 0.1574 | +36.1% |
| 121 to 160 tonnes | € 0.5442 | € 0.7410 | + € 0.1968 | +36.2% |
| 161 to 320 tonnes | € 0.6923 | € 0.9426 | + € 0.2503 | +36.2% |
| 321 to 600 tonnes | € 0.9622 | € 1.3101 | + € 0.3479 | +36.2% |
| 601 to 1,600 tonnes | € 1.5457 | Merged into 601–3,200 tons (2026) | ||
| 1,601 to 3,200 tonnes | € 1.8635 | Merged into 601–3,200 tons (2026) | ||
| 601 to 3,200 tonnes (2026) | New bracket in 2026: € 2.2231 | +19% to +44% | ||
| Over 3,200 tonnes | € 2.0202 | € 2.7507 | + € 0.7305 | +36.2% |
Based on the above data, nearly half of all freight trains in the Netherlands (those in the 601 to 1,600 bracket in 2025) would see their TACs grow by around 44%. Heavier freight trains, between 1,601 and 3,200 tonnes in 2025, would be subject to a 19% increase. Those are big jumps. However, the bad news does not end there: Traction prices for electricity will also increase by around 41%.
There is, despite the bad news, also an upside to the story: parking and shunting fees will shrink by 13% to 43%, rail freight association RailGood points out on LinkedIn.
But alas, there is a setback for rail freight here too. Intermodal operators will have to start paying almost three times as much in annual rent for long non-electrified sidings, where they set up their spare sets of wagons. “Spare sets are needed to cope with the dynamics of the transport chain and provide customers with a still somewhat acceptable delivery time and reliability”, RailGood elaborates. “That is necessary because of the many works and infrastructure disruptions on the railways.” And what’s more, the Dutch infrastructure ministry will also stop its subsidies on these infrastructure fees from 2026 onwards.
There might be a good reason for these growing charges. After all, infrastructure managers need money to maintain and improve the rail network. However, RailGood does not see any qualitative improvement, which is reasonably to be expected. Besides the growing TACs, the association also condemns the still exorbitantly high parking and shunting fees, which are not nearly seen at similar levels in Germany and Belgium, even with the planned fee reductions.
Crucially, there is a real risk that poor performance and high prices will lead rail freight to lose out to other modes of transportation: the notorious reverse modal shift. Despite that, there does not seem to be much interest on the side of the Dutch authorities, be it parliament or the ministry, to really invest in rail freight.
That is incomprehensible to RailGood: “Government parties feel there is no budget to reduce infrastructure charges for rail freight. There is money for everything, including at the Ministry of Infrastructure, but not for this.” Notably, the ministry decided to invest one billion euros in a highway from the Port of Rotterdam to Germany.
The Romanian experience
It is clear that the rail freight sector suffers from the soaring infrastructure charges. However, in the long run, it may very well have negative repercussions for the infrastructure manager itself as well. For example, Romania’s infrastructure CFR hiked infrastructure charges at a somewhat similar pace during the past couple of years.
TACs grew by 8% in 2023 and another 15% in 2024. Other service fees, such as shunting and parking, rose by up to 65% on 1 April 2025. In other words, the average rail operator could be paying 33,000 euros per month in fees in 2025, as opposed to 20,000 euros in 2024.
OPSFPR, the private rail freight association in Romania, concluded that the charge increases backfired on CFR. The infrastructure manager saw its March 2025 TAC revenues drop by more than 1,3 million euros compared to March 2023. The conclusion was that there is no long-term gain from these hikes, even if short-term revenue grows.