Rail

T&E believes that the decarbonisation of the transport sector cannot be achieved without ensuring that clean transport solutions are affordable to all. Rail (like all public transport) plays a key role in providing basic, affordable mobility to people who have no access to individual transport modes.

But today, rail can be very expensive. It is often a barrier for families who wish to shift from road to rail and for travelers looking to opt for rail travel rather than air. Greenpeace recently looked at 112 connections in Europe and found that rail tickets are on average 2 times more expensive than air tickets.

T&E welcomes the several initiatives in European countries to reduce the price of rail. In Spain and Germany (Germany recently introduced a €49 monthly ticket giving unlimited access to the country’s local and regional rail network) both governments have decided to strongly subsidise regional and local transport allowing citizens to shift from road to rail. In Belgium, the government has decided to bear the cost of track access charges and energy for night trains with at least one stop in Belgium.

T&E calls on the EU and member states to lower rail tolls and VAT to make rail cheaper. This will not only lower the price, making rail travel more accessible to a broader range of citizens, but also reduce operating costs allowing both incumbent and new rail operators to launch new rail services.

In 2023, T&E and Back on Track found that setting a 0% rate of value-added tax (VAT) on cross-border night routes and reducing the track access charges (TAC) can lower the ticket prices for night trains by between 3% and 48% depending on the passenger profile.

In 2025, the European Commission will propose a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation. This regulation must enable consumers to seamlessly combine tickets from different rail operators into a single booking. One major barrier to cross-border rail travel is the lack of ticket information shared by rail operators with booking platforms, forcing consumers to make multiple, burdensome bookings.

T&E believes the EU should require all rail operators to fairly allow independent booking platforms to sell their tickets. This would make international rail travel easier for citizens and help rail companies optimise train occupancy.

Infrastructure is a key factor in the competitiveness of rail services. Significant disparities persist between EU countries, with many relying on outdated and unreliable rail lines that cannot support fast or frequent trains. The EU budget remains a small part of the funding needed for rail, but is of great importance to cross-border connections and member states under the cohesion framework.

T&E works to prioritise those investments that bring the best benefits to interoperability. We also push for an effective implementation of the TEN-T regulation. National interests have dominated rail infrastructure investments for too long. It is time for a stronger European approach that delivers on a true single European area.

We believe the priority should be to focus on maintenance, digitalisation and targeted upgrades. ERTMS deployment in particular needs a stronger focus to boost international services and to increase the quality and capacity of the infrastructure.

European night trains are slowly making their comeback in Europe. They are one of the solutions to shift passengers from air to rail. Nevertheless, the night train business model suffers from structural and regulatory disadvantages compared to planes. As a result, it is often more expensive for passengers to travel by rail for the same distance, despite the low-carbon impact of this transport mode. Years of underinvestments have also reduced the comfort and the availability of rolling stocks.

T&E and Back-on-Track Europe have shown in their 2023 briefing how the EU and Member States can easily reduce the price of a cross-border night train ticket and push for the creation of new lines by reducing the value-added tax (VAT) and the track access charges (TAC).

T&E wants the EU to table a thorough strategy to facilitate night trains development to remove the interoperability barriers between Member States and reduce the cost of operating night trains.

Rail, by its small carbon footprint, and at the condition of strengthening its efficiency, is an accelerator of decarbonization of the freight sector. The more rail is used, the lower the effort to electrify road transport will be. On long distances, electrification for trucks is harder to achieve, whereas rail is particularly suited to cover these distances.

T&E managed a rail freight platform between 2015-2019. This platform provided us with the opportunity to meet with key stakeholders in rail and organise workshops to discuss some of the main setbacks to modal shift. We have learned a lot about why rail freight is not growing in Europe. These findings, as well as some stakeholder opinion pieces, can be found online at lowcarbonfreight.eu. This site offers some suggestions on how policymakers can play a bigger role in supporting modal shift as a means to decarbonise transport.