Passenger rail may be recovering, but ERA’s latest safety and interoperability report paints a bleaker picture for freight: ‘long-term stagnation’, weaker cross-border performance and a falling modal share. RailFreight.com breaks down the freight-relevant data behind that assessment, showing where interoperability, ERTMS and digitalisation are still falling short.
This week, the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) published its Report on Railway Safety and Interoperability in the EU 2026. Covering both the technical barriers that still shape cross-border rail in the bloc, and the EU system’s overall safety performance, there were obviously some worrying figures; the report says the EU rail system remains one of the safest in the world, but reported more than 1,500 significant railway accidents in the EU-27 in 2024, including 750 fatalities and 548 serious injuries. The estimated cost of those events was put at around €3.4 billion.
Freight will have accounted for part of those accidents and costs, with the clearest freight-specific safety detail sitting in the report’s dangerous-goods data. For the sector, however, many of the sharper conclusions sit in the interoperability section.
“Passenger traffic is recovering while freight continues to face structural challenges,” said Oana Gherghinescu, executive director of the European Union Agency for Railways. “ERTMS deployment and vehicle authorisations show technical progress, but full seamless cross-border operation is still a work in progress.”
There are, however, some positive points for freight, in what Magda Kopczyńska, DG MOVE Director-General, called “real advances alongside structural bottlenecks”. Below are the 124-page report’s main freight takeaways.
Freight is stagnating, while passenger rail is recovering
ERA says passenger rail in the EU has entered a phase of sustained growth after the pandemic, with passenger-km rising strongly in 2022 and continuing to increase in 2023 and 2024. Freight, however, has not followed the same recovery path.
Rail freight shows “long-term stagnation”according to the agency, with the sector failing to meaningfully increase the amount of transport work it performs since 2006. Its share of the wider freight market has also continued to fall, reaching around 12% in 2023the latest modal-share data used by the report.
These trends, ERA says, point to “a widening gap between a dynamic passenger segment and a freight sector struggling to expand its market position”, with “implications for the EU’s modal-shift and climate objectives.”
Border times remain hard to plan
ERA says cross-border freight continues to represent a substantial share of overall rail freight movements, but its border data show large mismatches between planned and actual transfer times.
For international freight trains, the report says this points to “some difficulty in planning the timetable precisely and in keeping to it”: in many border areas, planned transfer time in 2025 was around 90 minutes longer than the real transfer timeand sometimes more than 200 minutes longer.
Freight transfer times were also significantly longer than passenger transfer times on almost all border sections crossed by both. In more than half of the analysed sections in 2025, average real freight transfer time was above one hour. Punctuality data showed a similar freight weakness: in more than half of the sections analysed, average exit delay for freight trains in 2025 was above 90 minutes and generally longer than passenger delays.
ERTMS rollout still far from corridor targets
ERA says ERTMS deployment is expanding, but remains uneven and “still far from” TEN-T targets. Full deployment on the core TEN-T network is due by 2030, yet by late 2024 ETCS deployment on the European Transport Corridors had reached only 15%. GSM-R, the 2G-based railway radio system used for ERTMS communications, was further ahead at 57%, but that still leaves much of the corridor network unequipped with a technology already approaching obsolescence.
Onboard deployment is also still limited across Europe’s passenger and freight fleets: ERA estimates that only around a quarter of operating tractive vehicles were ERTMS-equipped by end-2024. Contracted ERTMS-equipped vehicles are rising sharply, but the report warns of a time lag between contracting and entry into operation, and says “greater effort is needed” to accelerate onboard deployment for the 2030 core network target.
Freight telematics is improving, but not uniformly
The EU freight data-exchange standard Telematics Applications for Freight, or TAF, has been one of the stronger areas of progress. Designed to standardise operational data, from train-running information to handovers between actors, TAF followed “a more consistent upward trajectory” between 2019 and 2024according to ERA, with most functions now reaching medium to high maturity.
However, implementation is not uniform. “Differences between infrastructure managers and railway undertakings remain, although they have narrowed over time,” ERA says, with the former generally further advanced and the latter still showing greater variability across functions. Against that uneven background, ERA says the new Telematics TSI, which merged the passenger-focused TAP and freight-focused TAF rules into a single legal act earlier this year, should strengthen reporting, compliance and convergence across the sector.
More broadly, the report says progress in the widespread adoption of technical standards has “been delayed across the EU, often resulting in parallel developmentswhich in turn reduces the effectiveness of investments and slow system-wide benefits.”
National rules are falling, but technical exceptions remain
National rules for vehicle authorisation have decreased sharply, according to ERA, from around 13,450 at the start of 2016 to 695 by January 2026, reducing one of the formal barriers to getting wagons and locomotives approved for operation across different networks. However, ERA says the decline has flattened since the end of 2019.
Technical exceptions also remain common. Requests for non-application of TSIs, where projects seek permission not to apply certain EU interoperability requirements, remain at a “persistently high number”. ERA says such requests “may constitute technical barriers to interoperability”, with fewer requests generally corresponding to a higher level of interoperability across the EU railway system. Signalling-related non-application requests have also been consistently high. The result is essentially a smaller formal rulebook, but not a uniform technical system.
Wagons dominate ERA’s authorisation workload
ERA’s authorisation data show how much of the interoperability workload is freight-related. In 2025, the agency handled around 2,000 vehicle authorisation applications and authorised more than 21,000 vehicles, with most authorisations relating to wagons and most covering multi-country areas of use. Safety certification is also heavily freight-weighted: by the end of 2025, around 1,127 single safety certificates were valid, with the vast majority linked to freight operations.
