Lineas has recently become once again a state-owned company, a move that highlights the shortcomings of the opening of the European rail freight market. Rail Freight.com had an exclusive interview with the CEO of the company Erik van Ockenburg to better understand what this move means for the Belgian operator.
“Privatisation has not yet been a success. Illegal subsidies to state-owned companies made it impossible for private ones to compete”, van Ockenburg highlighted. Examples of these schemes were, for example, Deutsche Bahn and SNCF, which would move funds from their profitable branches into their loss-making operators.
“This can’t happen to Lineas because it is not part of any railway holding and it has no intention of becoming one”, he explained. Lineas is in fact now owned by Société Fédérale de Participations et d’Investissement (SFPIM), Belgium sovereign wealth fund, and not by SNCB. PMV (Participatiemaatschappij Vlaanderen) and WE (Wallonie Entreprendre) remain as regional shareholders as well. Moreover, the trend of illegal subsidies should stop altogether as various state-owned entities were investigated and often forced to restructure.
Break even by 2028
After a few years of financial struggle, Lineas is now getting back in shape, its CEO pointed out. First, Lineas received over 120 million euros – 61 million from SFPIM last July and 60 million from the Belgian government and the Flanders and Wallonia regions in February. The second step is to break even in 2028. “We are on the right track as we continue to grow, even if it is relatively slow”, van Ockenburg specified.
‘Three pockets of growth’
He explained that when he took over as CEO of Lineas a little over a year ago, he found a sector facing many challenges. In addition to the illegal subsidies, the industrial crisis that has hit Europe is a key factor in the struggle of rail freight. “The total rail freight market is declining or, at best, is stable. But there are niches and pockets of growth”. For Lineas, these niches are intermodal transport, the petrochemical industry and automotive imports.
Intermodal is “where the growth is”, according to van Ockenburg. The petrochemical sector is declining but it still has a significant presence in Antwerp, where Lineas controls most of the rail zones. For the automotive imports, Antwerp is still relevant but the main player is Zeebrugge, which hosts the largest automotive terminal in Europe, as the Lineas CEO underlined. The goal, he added, is to become “the most reliable railway undertaking in Europe”.
Lineas is already the main operator in Belgium and the third largest in France. However, the ambition is now to expand its international position further and create a solid presence in Germany and the Netherlands by 2030. “We can achieve that by introducing rail connections between Belgium and the Netherlands for the chemical industry and implementing Spain-Germany links”, van Ockenburg specified.
Impact of ETCS rollout
Belgium is arguably the most advanced country when it comes to the deployment of the European Train Control System (ETCS), as it completed rollout at the end of 2025. Van Ockenburg shared an anecdote that sums up both the pros and cons of this initiative. He recently hopped on a freight train running between Antwerp and Aachen and had the opportunity to observe how the driver had to deal with multiple systems.
“It is a safer system but I wish it was standardised a long time ago, we have been talking about it for 20 years and now we have multiple ETCS versions just in Belgium”, he said. More specifically, there are three different versions along Belgian railways, a challenge that does not always facilitate a driver’s job, but “does make transport safer”.
Another issue regarding ETCS is its cost. Equipping rolling stock with the on-board technology requires enormous financial investment, which does not always guarantee a return. Lineas has spent five million euros on this just this year, which is 1% of its revenue. However, “customers don’t want to pay for the additional cost caused by ETCS because they think rail is already the safest mode”, van Ockenburg observed.
