EU aims to make rail capacity a product — not a yearly fight
The EU wants rail capacity to work more like a product — with multi-year planning, defined priorities, and agreed rules for changes — rather than something that is fought over once a year in the timetable process.
That is the intent behind the Capacity Management Regulation. On 27 January, the European Parliament’s TRAN Committee backed the provisional agreement, moving the file towards a final plenary vote and adoption.
What the regulation changes in practice
The regulation sets out a three-layer approach to capacity allocation:
Multi-year planning: Defines longer-term priorities and the overall structure of available capacity before the annual timetable is built.
Annual scheduling: Keeps the yearly timetable as the central delivery tool.
Short-term adjustments: Sets clearer rules for changes closer to operations — including late conflicts, traffic disruptions, and capacity shifts linked to works.
Today’s rules still assume capacity is decided mainly in the annual timetable process, while parts of the EU freight rulebook date back to the early 1990s.
Why freight depends on stable train paths
For international freight, the problem is not only whether a path exists on paper. It is whether that path stays stable enough to plan terminals, crews and customer commitments across borders.
The regulation’s core promise is more predictability: fewer capacity decisions reopened each year, and clearer rules for adjustments when operations shift — especially where freight competes with dense passenger traffic on cross-border corridors.
Timeline: December 2030
After TRAN’s vote, the regulation moves to the final formal steps. The Council must confirm the deal internally, and the European Parliament must give its final approval in plenary.
It will enter into force 20 days after publication, but the first timetable under the new system is expected to take effect in December 2030.
The role of infrastructure managers
The agreement strengthens the coordinating role of infrastructure managers through the European Network of Infrastructure Managers (ENIM). ENIM will develop common frameworks for capacity management, disruption and crisis handling, and performance review.
Why it matters: The shift is less about a new timetable rule than a new planning logic: treating capacity as a managed product across years, not a fresh fight every December — a prerequisite for more predictable cross-border freight paths.