European Parliament approves regulation on railway infrastructure capacity

EUROPE: The European Parliament has given its final approval to the Regulation on the Use of Railway Infrastructure Capacity in the Single European Railway Area. This aims to increase rail’s share of the freight and passenger markets by improving cross-border co-ordination to reduce network congestion and increase reliability.

The core objective is to move away from fragmented national timetable planning toward a more co-ordinated European system which will be able to squeeze more capacity out of existing infrastructure without necessarily building new lines.

‘The Capacity Regulation is a key milestone for the rail sector to make existing capacity more efficient and increase it by 4%’, said Alberto Mazzola, Executive Director of the Community of European Railways & Infrastructure Managers, following the European Parliament’s approval on May 19. ‘CER commends the co-legislators for their dedication in reaching this agreement. The sector is fully committed to implementing the new framework and delivering results for smoother, more predictable planning of passenger and freight services as soon as possible.’

MEP Tilly Metz (Greens/EFA), European Parliament rapporteur for the legislation, said ‘freight transport will benefit particularly, as these changes will help it meet current challenges’, while ‘in the future, passengers will be able to buy their international tickets much earlier, which will make it easier to plan journeys’.

Legislation timeline

The Regulation replaces the older framework for allocating capacity and partially overhauls rules in Directive 2012/34/EU, while also repealing Regulation No 913/2010 on rail freight corridors.

The railway sector has already taken steps to prepare for the changes, and organisations such as RailNetEurope held sessions to discuss the changes amongst rail infrastructure managers. The regulation applies to all domestic and international rail services, but it will particularly benefit services that are more complex to arrange, such as running a freight train from the North Sea ports to northern Italy, central Europe or the Balkans, as well as cross-border passenger services including night trains.

The approval of the European Parliament was the final legislative step, after the EU Member States in the Council adopted their first-reading position on April 21 2026, following the political agreement reached in trilogue negotiations in November 2025.

Those trilogue negotiations were the decisive final bargaining phase between the European Parliament, the Council of the EU and the European Commission on the proposed Rail Capacity Regulation. Their purpose was to reconcile the Parliament’s and Council’s differing positions and agree on a single final text. The crucial trilogue meeting took place on November 18 and 19, under the Danish Presidency of the Council and concluded with a provisional political agreement, ending more than a year of negotiations after the Commission had first put forward the proposal in July 2023 as part of the Greening Freight Package.

Two bodies created

The regulation introduces two new bodies, the European Network of Infrastructure Managers and the European Railway Platform.

ENIM will bring the railway infrastructure managers from the Member States together under one umbrella to ensure that capacity allocation and disruption management are tackled at a EU-level.

ERP will unite the users of the network to provide what CER said would be ‘a robust and co-ordinated market voice in implementation’.

Main benefits

The Regulation is designed to benefit the entire Single European Railway Area, but in practice the biggest gains will likely be concentrated on international and freight-intensive parts of the network, especially the TEN-T Core Network, the Extended Core Network and the European Transport Corridors that integrate former Rail Freight Corridors. These are the lines where cross-border path allocation, timetable harmonisation and capacity bottlenecks have historically been the greatest challenge.

The main beneficiaries will include operations on major north–south and east–west freight corridors, such as the former RFC-based international axes linking ports, logistics hubs and industrial regions and rail approaches to major maritime gateways such as Rotterdam, Antwerpen-Brugge, Hamburg, Bremerhaven, Koper, Trieste and Mediterranean ports, where freight flows regularly cross multiple borders. Dense central European networks will also be beneficiaries of the Regulation.

Implementation of the Regulation

Implementation will be gradual, with a five-year programme to set out strategic plans by 2031, to be followed by annual scheduling and, finally, short-term adaptation.

The first annual timetable fully prepared under the new framework is expected to be the 2031 timetable cycle, with publication in 2030 and application beginning on December 14 2030. Some provisions will start earlier, between 2028 and 2031.

See also