Rail transport carries only a modest share of passengers and freight across the EU, yet it is widely regarded as one of the most important tools available for meeting Europe’s climate targets. The European Union has spent decades building a Single European Railway Area but persistent gaps in governance, infrastructure investment and cross-border coordination continue to limit its potential.
To help guide EU decision-making in this field, Dr Marco Brambilla and Dr Karoline Führer of Ecorys have led a study on the future of sustainable railway transport in Europe for the European Parliament’s Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA), working alongside a team of researchers and railway transport specialists. The study will be presented at the STOA Panel meeting on 30 April 2026.
The ESMH spoke with Dr. Brambilla and Dr. Führer ahead of that presentation about the study’s findings and what they mean for European policymakers.
The EU railway system is often described as both a European success story and a work in progress. What does the present-day landscape actually look like?
Karoline Führer & Marco Brambilla: The EU has made real progress in building a Single European Railway Area. Safety standards are now common across borders, market liberalisation has brought lower fares and better services in several countries, and the overall regulatory framework is far more coherent than it was two decades ago.
But the gap between ambition and delivery is wide. Cross-border operations are still fragmented. The roll-out of common digital signalling systems has been slow. Infrastructure works are planned nationally, timetables are built around domestic traffic, and investment decisions follow national logic. When a train crosses a border, it effectively enters a different system, with different rules, different priorities and different constraints.
The infrastructure itself is also under strain. Large parts of the network are ageing and decades of underinvestment have left a serious maintenance backlog. For passengers, that means more delays, speed restrictions and cancelled services. For freight operators, it means unreliable train slots and longer transit times, which makes rail less competitive than road transport. Deferred maintenance leads to higher costs over time, progressive loss of network capacity and a system that is increasingly less resilient.
Rail carries a modest share of both passenger journeys and freight across the EU, yet it is described as central to the EU’s decarbonisation goals. How do you reconcile that gap?
Karoline Führer & Marco Brambilla: Railways are central to the EU’s decarbonisation strategy because they offer the largest and most immediately scalable emissions reduction potential in transport. Rail is already the least carbon-intensive transport mode, responsible for only around 0.3% of transport-related GHG emissions, while providing roughly 10% of passenger transport activity. Unlike road and aviation, rail has consistently reduced its emissions since 1990, largely due to electrification and energy efficiency gains.
Achieving the European Green Deal objectives depends on shifting passengers and freight away from road and short-haul aviation, which together account for the vast majority of transport emissions and where decarbonisation is more difficult or slower.
Yet both passenger and freight rail are facing structural problems that limit that potential.
Karoline Führer & Marco Brambilla: When we mapped the trends and drivers shaping the sector, the picture that emerged on both passengers and freight was the same: the potential is there, the performance isn’t.
Demand for rail from passengers is real. What limits growth is whether rail can meet the factors people consider decisive: door-to-door travel time, reliability, ease of booking and frequency. Where rail delivers on these, passengers choose trains over aviation. Where it doesn’t, particularly on cross-border journeys, they choose road or aviation, which simply offer simpler and more predictable journeys regardless of the environmental impact.
For freight, the challenge is more profound. Rail is losing ground because it struggles on what matters most to freight customers: reliability, flexibility, transit time and certainty. Freight shippers will only shift to rail when it can deliver a competitive end-to-end service and today, that is too often not the case. Rail freight doesn’t need to become greener to grow. It needs to become more reliable.
Your study points to two interconnected areas where action is needed: governance — how the EU plans, funds and coordinates rail as a truly integrated system — and technology, which is often presented as the key enabler but which your analysis treats with considerable caution. Can you explain how these two dimensions relate to each other, and what getting them wrong would mean for Europe’s rail ambitions?
Karoline Führer & Marco Brambilla: Governance is the foundation. As long as planning, funding and investment decisions remain predominantly national, rail will continue to work reasonably well within borders but fail precisely where it matters most: on the cross-border journeys where its climate and connectivity benefits are greatest.
Advanced technology does not change that equation. If anything, the more ambitious and costly technologies become, the more acutely they depend on the very coordination that Europe’s rail system currently lacks. Slow deployment of digital systems is not caused by technological immaturity, it is caused by countries planning and funding separately, on different timescales, with no binding obligation to coordinate.
This is especially true for highly capital-intensive technologies such as hyperloop which carry extremely high investment costs, unproven scalability and limited compatibility with the existing network. In a fragmented environment, they risk absorbing funding and political attention away from maintaining and upgrading conventional rail, while delivering benefits only on a handful of routes between major cities.
The question policymakers should ask is not only “Is this technology promising?” but also “Do we have the governance, funding stability and coordination to make it work at scale?” Where the answer is no, the priority should be to strengthen the system first.
A final question. To the sceptic who thinks rail will never compete with road and aviation, and to the policymaker who needs to act: what is your message?
Karoline Führer & Marco Brambilla: Road and aviation dominate today largely because they operate within simpler, better-optimised systems, but also because they do not pay the full cost of the damage they cause. Carbon emissions, air pollution, noise and congestion are real costs absorbed by society rather than priced into tickets or freight rates.
Although rail is capital-intensive and slower to adapt, its challenges stem less from the mode itself than from how it is governed and financed. Where rail is reliable, frequent and well-integrated, it is the only mode that has consistently reduced its emissions over time. On a true cost basis, the playing field tilts considerably in rail’s favour.
Levelling that playing field is a political choice. The focus should shift from asking whether individual investments are justified or which technology is most exciting, to governance, sequencing and system performance. Maintenance, reliability and cross-border coordination are far more decisive for passengers, freight and decarbonisation than flagship projects alone. The choices are real — between coordination and fragmentation, between investing in the existing system and placing high-risk technological bets. Rail’s future in Europe is not constrained by technology, but by governance. Without stronger coordination, stable funding and long-term planning, even large investments and advanced technologies will deliver only partial results.