Debrecen: Twenty years of promises about rail signalling have produced a European train control system that reaches roughly a tenth of the core network. The European Union Agency for Railways counts about 12,400 kilometres of the trans-European transport network fitted with the European Train Control System at the end of 2024, alongside some 8,730 vehicles, or 19 percent of the fleet. Every other kilometre still runs on one of the roughly thirty national signalling systems the single rail area was meant to retire.
The gap matters because the TEN-T Regulation fixes deadlines the current pace will not meet. Operators who want to run a locomotive from Hungary to the Netherlands still fit multiple onboard systems, certify each one nationally, and absorb the cost. Freight companies pass that cost to shippers, who compare it with a lorry that crosses the same border without any of it.
The Commission has answered with what officials call the ERTMS Deal. It bundles three things. First, a European blueprint that fixes one technical baseline so infrastructure managers stop ordering national variants. Second, a funding condition tied to a Single European Rail Area label, which would steer Connecting Europe Facility money towards projects that follow the blueprint and away from those that do not. Third, a fast-track authorisation route at the Agency for Railways for compliant projects, cutting the approval time that has become the industry’s loudest complaint.
Industry will press the case at a side event on 28 September at the Infrabel Academy, held alongside Connecting Europe Days. Suppliers want the blueprint frozen early, because a moving specification forces them to redesign hardware mid-contract. Infrastructure managers want the money before the condition, arguing that a label without a budget behind it is a penalty dressed as an incentive.
The deeper problem is sequencing. Onboard equipment only pays for itself when trackside equipment exists, and trackside equipment only pays for itself when enough trains carry the onboard kit. Neither side moves first without a subsidy or a mandate, and national budgets have spent the past two years absorbing defence and energy commitments instead. Poland, Denmark and the Netherlands have pushed ahead with national rollouts; several larger networks have not, and their delay drags the average down for everyone.
Fast-track authorisation carries its own risk. Speeding approval works only if the underlying designs genuinely match the blueprint, and the agency will need staff to verify that rather than rubber-stamp it. A label that certifies conformity nobody checked would erode the trust the whole scheme depends on.
Sceptics inside the sector make a blunter argument. They say the money would buy more capacity if it went into electrification, passing loops and terminal upgrades, where the return arrives within a decade rather than after a fleet-wide retrofit. Supporters reply that capacity gains stall at national borders without common signalling, and that the retrofit is the precondition for everything else.
What the ERTMS Deal has not yet produced is a number. No public figure sets out how much additional funding the label would unlock, over what period, or what happens to projects already contracted under national specifications. Until the Commission publishes that, the blueprint reads as an engineering document rather than a financing plan. The agency’s own third work plan already warned that deployment needs acceleration; the question the September discussion has to answer is who pays for it.
