Train drivers crossing the bloc on a regular shift carry up to four separate national authorisations between them, a quirk of the single market that has survived two decades of integration and is now headed for a rewrite. The 2026 work programme of DG MOVE names a revision of Directive 2007/59 on the certification of train drivers, alongside an overhaul of the European Union Agency for Railways mandate, as the two legislative legs that will carry the high-speed rail plan unveiled on 5 November 2025 into operational reality. Both proposals are expected to land before the summer recess, and both will be tested against a single political question: whether the bloc is finally ready to swap national rules for European ones in a sector that has resisted that move longer than any other.
The driver certification file is the more politically charged of the two. National rail regulators have built up parallel testing regimes, language requirements and safety endorsements that, taken together, mean a driver licensed in France cannot operate a service into Belgium without a country-specific add-on, and a Slovak driver cannot run into Austria without separate Austrian sign-off. The Commission is targeting that architecture directly. Officials briefed in early May say the revision will move towards a single European certificate with limited and clearly enumerated national supplements, and that the European Union Agency for Railways will be empowered to issue the certificate centrally rather than coordinating between national safety authorities. The driver’s unions, organised through ETF, have signalled they will accept harmonisation of the technical content but will resist any erosion of language proficiency requirements on safety grounds.
The Agency mandate file complements the driver work and goes further. The Commission wants to give the Valenciennes-based agency authority to remove what it calls redundant national rules, the accumulated stock of country-specific safety, signalling and rolling-stock requirements that infrastructure managers cite as the principal cost driver on cross-border services. The agency’s chief executive estimated in a February speech that close to forty percent of national rules in active use have no safety justification beyond historical accident and could be retired with no loss of safety performance, freeing capacity and reducing certification time for new rolling stock by months.
Behind both files sits a harder commercial logic. The Commission’s high-speed rail plan committed to a network linking all EU capitals by 2040, with travel times between major city pairs halved and direct competition with short-haul aviation built into the design. That commitment is impossible without operators able to deploy crews and rolling stock across borders on a commercial basis comparable to road freight or aviation. Industry submissions to the Have Your Say consultation on the high-speed plan, which closed on 31 March, made the linkage explicit. Operators including SNCF Voyageurs, Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr and the Italian incumbent argued that without driver and rolling-stock harmonisation, the network plan is a map of intentions rather than a viable commercial proposition.
Member States have begun to position. Germany, France and Spain have signalled support for centralisation of certification, in part because their national champions stand to benefit from cheaper cross-border deployment. The smaller national operators in Central Europe are more cautious, fearing displacement on routes where higher national operating costs currently serve as a barrier to entry. The Czech presidency in the second half of 2027, which will inherit the file, is already mapping the qualified majority required to push the Agency mandate revision over the line. The driver certification revision faces an easier route on paper but will carry the longer political tail.
