Competition on the Romanian rail freight market remains unfairly skewed in favour of the state operator. As the national government pours money into a rebirthed version of the defunct CFR Marfă, private operators lose out on fair opportunities. That is according to the president of private rail freight association OPSFPR, Simona Istrate.
Romania’s rail freight market is in a troubled state, follows from the pleas of OPSFPR. That has everything to do with the (eventual) disappearance of the practically bankrupt former state operator CFR Marfă. The new state operator Carpatica Feroviar has, in practice, replaced it. This move has sparked major controversy about Romania’s following of a 2020 EU state aid repayment ruling.
From CFR Marfă to Carpatica Feroviar
Romania’s state-owned rail freight sector has been undergoing a controversial transition from the financially troubled CFR Marfă to the newly created Carpatica Feroviar. CFR Marfă had accumulated substantial debts. In 2020, the European Commission ordered it to repay received incompatible state aid. This plunged the company into a financial emergency. Romania subsequently established Carpatica Feroviar in 2024 as a new state-owned operator intended to take over rail freight activities from the unsalvageable CFR Marfă.
Central to the controversy is the transfer of assets and operations from CFR Marfă to Carpatica Feroviar. If Carpatica Feroviar were to take over these assets and the associated operations, it would effectively amount to a reconstitution of CFR Marfă with new branding. As of the summer of 2026, Carpatica Feroviar has moved towards operations and has launched a major recruitment campaign. It has, indeed, taken over CFR Marfă assets and operations. Conveniently, Carpatica Feroviar did not inherit the state aid debts of its predecessor.
RailFreight.com reached out to Simona Istrate to ask about the auctions for CFR Marfă assets. Whether or not private operators are interested in acquiring these assets is beside the point, Istrate said. The core issue is, in her words, that “the state should not recreate, through a new public company, the economic advantages of the former state operator, while leaving the historical costs behind”.
It would appear that Romania is indeed playing around with the rules to return to its previous state operator arrangement. This not only follows from the takeover of assets (CFR Marfă was to sell 400 assets directly to Carpatica Feroviar, according to Romanian publication Club Feroviar). It also follows from the continued existence of CFR Marfă as a legal entity. Its rail freight license was rescinded on 10 November 2025.
“The company [CFR Marfă] was supposed to pursue its bankruptcy request before the court in May, but they ‘forgot’ to submit precisely the General Meeting of Shareholders’ resolution, the document without which the request could not be effectively examined”, Simona Istrate told RailFreight.com.
“The court therefore granted a new hearing in the autumn. In a state aid case where time matters, such a procedural omission is not neutral: it prolongs uncertainty and allows the activity to be reorganised around Carpatica Feroviar before CFR Marfă’s exit from the market is completed.”
RailFreight.com reached out to CFR Marfă and the Romanian transport ministry for comment, but received no response to its inquiries.
Carpatica Feroviar over functional infrastructure
The Romanian state has spent about 2 billion RON (€380M) on the capitalisation and operationalisation of Carpatica Feroviar, according to Istrate. With a part of this money, it has acquired former CFR Marfă assets. CFR Marfă, in turn, would use this money to pay back the illegal state aid to that same Romanian state. A financial merry-go-round.
All the while, private operators on the Romanian market pay the costs through underfunded infrastructure, says the OPSFPR president. While Carpatica Feroviar received 2 billion RON, infrastructure maintenance and renewals only received 3.093 billion. That is more than 300 million RON short of the allocated 3.388 billion RON (€644M) in 2025.
“This says something deeper about the way Romania understands railway market liberalisation”, Istrate comments. “Formally, the market is open to competition. In practice, private operators compete on an underfunded infrastructure, affected by speed restrictions, reduced speeds and poorly coordinated works, while the state finds the resources to create and finance a new public freight operator.”
No money, no infrastructure
As of 31 December 2025, there were 567 speed restrictions on the Romanian rail network, over a total length of approximately 1,688 kilometres. Out of those, 341 restrictions of over 1,185 kilometres were not covered in the timetable.
Crucially, infrastructure manager CFR SA explicitly states that, due to long-term underfunding, the degradation of lines and engineering structures and the volume of infrastructure overdue for capital repairs, the only measure currently available to the company in order to ensure safety is to reduce maximum speeds by introducing speed restrictions.
To return to the central point in the view of Simona Istrate: the question is not whether certain auctions are formally open. “The real question is whether the entire process is competitively neutral. Who receives public financing, who takes over the viable part of the former CFR Marfă, who is left with the debts, and whether the common infrastructure of the market is treated with the same urgency as the new public operator.”
As a result of these circumstances, the private rail freight association OPSFPR turned to the European Parliament’s Committee for Petitions with, indeed, a petition. It forwarded the petition to the European Commission, which subsequently said that it is monitoring the situation, but nothing more.