Brussels Hands Rail Operators a Single Market, with 2031 Timetable in Sight

The European Parliament has cleared the final legislative hurdle for the Capacity Management Regulation, ending more than two years of negotiation and handing the bloc's rail industry the closest thing it has yet had to a single market for track access.

The regulation, formally adopted on 19 May after a second-reading vote in Strasbourg, replaces the 2010 freight corridor rules and amends the 2012 governance directive. It is the most substantive overhaul of European rail planning in more than a decade and is intended to lift rail's share of the freight and passenger markets by curbing the cross-border bottlenecks that have long blunted the sector's competitiveness against road and aviation.

At the centre of the reform sits the European Network of Infrastructure Managers, or ENIM, a Brussels-coordinated body that will align long-term planning, disruption management and performance reviews across national networks. Capacity will be allocated across three horizons: strategic planning every five years, annual scheduling and shorter-term adaptation. A penalty regime, denominated in euro, is designed to compress disputes and provide legal certainty to operators and infrastructure managers alike.

The Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies, the sector's main lobby, welcomed the vote and confirmed that preparatory work was already underway for the first timetable to run under the new framework in 2031.

For operators, the prize is meaningful. Cross-border freight, in particular, has been hobbled by incompatible national rules, with trains routinely losing hours at frontiers. For Brussels, the regulation is a load-bearing element of the Greening Freight Package first tabled in July 2023, and a test of whether the bloc can deliver on its modal-shift ambitions before the decade is out.