A study commissioned by the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER) has found that Europe has the ingredients to turn rail freight into a success story. It now needs to work with what it has to make the business reliable.
Reliability is the core issue that rail freight has to reckon with now. It is the industry’s “central commercial weakness”, according to Brussels-based economic research and public policy consultancy Rel-I, Ecorys and transport economist Prof. Oliviero Baccelli, who conducted the study. Rail freight loses customers because it fails to deliver on key commitments.
The good news: rail freight does not need any new EU legislative initiatives to start implementing competitiveness measures. Europe has adopted the Capacity Regulation already. The TEN-T parameters and the associated permitting Directive (designed to streamline the approval of TEN-T infrastructure projects) are in force, and a new state aid framework took effect in March. Moreover, DAC has a published investment plan.
Apart from resolving some of the permitting Directive’s limitations, the primary constraint is implementation. In essence, Europe just needs to get to work to execute what it has agreed on.
The rail freight industry itself can implement a part of these measures on its own: coordination and communication, early piloting of Capacity Regulation rules, and standardised statistics or data formats. For example, the study says that about a third of ordered train paths never run, but there is no unified statistic confirming this number. This makes it difficult to resolve, since there is no clear uniform measurement.
Other measures need to come from outside the rail freight industry. This includes a broadening of the scope of the TEN-T permitting Directive, Member State decisions like TAC predictability and financing for TEN-T projects, ERTMS and DAC.
Biggest impact and prioritisation
Survey respondents, which included not just railway undertakings, but also infrastructure managers, customers, combined-transport operators, terminal operators and more, identified four priority measures that they believed would make the biggest difference. In first place came the full implementation of the permitting Directive and a broadening of its scope to smaller infrastructure projects (diversionary and feeder routes) as well.
In second place came the implementation of the Capacity Regulation, followed by coordinated TCR (Temporary Capacity Restrictions) planning and minimum bypass requirements. Lastly, respondents identified TEN-T parameter delivery as a major step towards making rail freight reliable and competitive.
This does not mean that the four abovementioned measures are the only ones that could make a difference, they are just believed to be the most impactful. Still, the measures diverge in terms of their feasibility. The study recommends a focus on the most easily implemented improvements first: disruption-proofing the network through better-coordinated closures and capacity planning. This is mostly an administrative task with little associated costs. Similarly, countries should stabilise track access charges and enforce road rules according to the study.
In the longer term, Europe should improve rail network access (sidings, first and last-mile connections) and implement ERTMS and DAC, the study recommends. Again, the ingredients for this are in place. It ‘just’ needs a budget and implementation.