Decades of debate about signalling systems have framed rail’s capacity crisis as an infrastructure problem. But the internet taught us that the most transformative capacity gains often come not from building more infrastructure – but from rethinking how existing infrastructure is used.
About the Author (and article)
Alberto Mandler is CEO and Co-founder of DirectTrainS, an Israeli deep-tech company developing operational concepts for dynamic train formation on standard rail infrastructure.
This article follows an earlier opinion piece on the drawbacks of ETCS by guest author Reinhard Christeller. Mandler responded to this article on social media to share his perspective. The text below serves as an elaboration of that comment – food for thought on how to move the rail freight sector forward.
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?