Germany’s state-owned infrastructure manager is suing the state’s own regulator in three court cases at once – over capacity rules, its cost ceiling and station charges. Both the ceiling and the 2027 charges hinge on federal maintenance funding that has not been agreed.
By Frank Andersson
On 20 August, DB InfraGO applied for freight charges 12.6% higher for 2027, according to industry association Die Güterbahnen – while the company’s own lawsuit against the Bundesnetzagentur keeps the cost ceiling those charges must fit under from becoming final. All three court cases sit with the administrative court in Cologne.
DB InfraGO owns and prices the network as a joint-stock company inside the state-owned Deutsche Bahn group, the same group that runs the country’s biggest train operators. The freight operators paying most of a higher charge are DB’s competitors. The Bundesnetzagentur is the federal authority that approves the company’s prices and polices access to its network.
The cost ceiling and the 2027 charges
The regulator caps the total costs DB InfraGO may recover from train operators; the company then applies for individual charges under that cap, which the regulator approves. Federal maintenance money lowers both steps: the more the federal government pays, the less operators must cover.
On 24 June the regulator set the 2027 cap at EUR 7.32bn, about EUR 231m below DB InfraGO’s own calculation. The gap rests on an assumption about federal maintenance funding that has not been agreed – and that a cabinet decision from 6 July suggests will be lower than this year’s.
DB InfraGO sued on 23 July, with an emergency application alongside. An unchallenged cap becomes final, the company argues, and later changes in federal funding could then never feed into the charges.
The prices themselves are not before any court. The original 2027 application went in last autumn, the regulator approved the charging system’s structure in March, and the charges were carved out for a decision due by mid-December at the latest.
The number now applied for, EUR 3.92 per standard freight kilometre, sits within a cent of where 2026 charges stood before the regulator reset them in July. Operators have been booking paths for the 2027 timetable since March without knowing which figure applies.
The capacity and station cases
On 17 July the regulator capped the share of contested capacity on Germany’s busiest corridors that any single operator may hold at 60–75% from the 2028 timetable, opening the way for Italo’s planned domestic entry. DB InfraGO went to court over the clause in August.
A draft of the network conditions implementing the clause goes to the regulator for review in the autumn, and the authority can demand changes. The lawsuit runs in parallel with that drafting.
The station cases are the oldest front and the only one with a result. In two summary rulings on 23 July, the Cologne court rejected DB InfraGO’s claim to higher station charges for 2025 and 2026; the main cases continue.
Those cases turn on a different question – whether the European Court of Justice ruling on regional track price brakes extends to station charges. The judges left that open and found the company had no entitlement to higher charges either way. The first judicial test of DB InfraGO’s courtroom line went against it.
The transport ministry
Steffen Bilger took office as transport minister on 29 July and has yet to state a position on the charging system his regulator and the state’s infrastructure company are litigating over.
The ministry’s core budget falls by about EUR 1.47bn to EUR 26.43bn in the 2027 draft, and the subsidy that damps freight track charges drops to just over EUR 200m, from around EUR 345m available this year.
Every open case is ultimately an argument about who absorbs figures like these – the federal budget, the infrastructure company or the operators paying the charges.
New entrants and the next dates
Italo has committed EUR 3.6bn including 26 Velaro trainsets for a 2028 German entry, and FlixTrain has up to 65 Talgo sets on order – 30 of them firm – arriving from the same year. Germany’s high-speed market is opening whether the pricing is settled or not.
On the regulator’s own 2025 figures, competitors already carry 67% of freight and 8% of long-distance traffic. None of them knows the price of access for 2027.
The next fixed points are a Cologne ruling in any of the open cases, the charge approval due by mid-December, the network conditions review in the autumn, and path applications for the 2028 timetable from April 2027. Whichever lands first will show whether the uncertainty is ending – or simply moving to the next timetable year.