If you frequent casual websites, forums or even on Twitter, you may have come across the “every map ever”. It will seem familiar to nearly everyone: a map depicting unspecified national data, with Western Europe, Scandinavia and Canada in dark green, followed by the US, Eastern Europe in slightly lighter shades of green. Africa is assigned dark red, reflecting the persistent socio-economic problems of the region. European rail freight, however, breaks the pattern.
To be clear, the “every map ever” is a meme, meaning a joke, and is not to be taken too seriously. Yet, there is a grain of truth to it. Western Europe often scores exceptionally well on many indicators, earning it the dark green colour. Africa is on the other end of the scale with – usually – dark red. China, Russia, Latin America usually fall somewhere in between, depending on the metric, and often are assigned yellow or orange.
Europe has its own typical division, with the western countries scoring well, and the eastern ones scoring just a bit worse. It is good to remember that these are stereotypes, and rail freight proves just that. When it comes to the modal split, it is the western countries lagging behind the countries of the former eastern bloc.
The differences between European countries are sometimes stark. Take for example the Netherlands, with its Rotterdam port and hinterland connections to Germany. It scores a mere 6.4% on the modal share for rail in 2023. By contrast, Slovakia, a country not usually on the top of people’s minds when thinking about rail freight, scored a “whopping” 30.4%.
The map speaks for itself. Transporting goods by rail is much more commonplace, relatively speaking, in the east than in the west. For that reason, countries in the eastern half of Europe are miles ahead of the western counterparts in modal shift ambitions – at least in nominal terms.
There’s more to it
Yet, that does not tell the entire story. Beneath the surface, rail freight is doing badly all across Europe. In August, RailFreight.com found that only six countries in Europe managed to increase the modal share of rail since 2005. In most cases, the improvement was symbolic more than anything.
Rail freight is in decline in west and east alike. Some of the most spectacular deteriorations took place in the Baltics: Despite Latvia topping the list in 2023 with a 44% modal share for rail, that does not reflect the immense decline of rail that had already taken place by then. In 2009, the share of rail was still 85.4%. Similar developments are visible in Estonia and Lithuania, in all cases the decline of rail is connected to the covid pandemic and, most of all, the war in Ukraine.
Also in countries like Poland (-12.4% since 2005), Romania (-6.2% since 2014) and Hungary (-5.9% since 2014) the modal share of rail declined. There could be many reasons for this development, ranging from a competitiveness advantage for the road sector, to deindustrialisation, insufficient rail network maintenance and more.
In short, the “slackers” in the west have some catching up to do. The relative success of the rest, unfortunately, does not really reflect better policymaking. Rail freight is losing out to other modalities in the majority of those countries too, and existing successes are small. The higher modal shares are a legacy success more than anything.