When a plan’s not a plan, and a revolution isn’t a revolution – European High Speed Rail

Today the European Commission released its “plan to accelerate high-speed rail across Europe” (press release here).

Only it’s not a plan.

And Community of European Railways (CER), the state owned railways’ trade body, stated this will “revolutionise the way travel distances are perceived in Europe” (press release here).

Only this is no revolution.

All of this is about the Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions – Connecting Europe through High-Speed Rail (PDF of the 22 page document here).

And reading it leaves me thoroughly non-plussed.

A plan – were it to justify the name – tells you where you are you are going. This does not, other than to vaguely aspire to there being more high speed rail lines.

There is a map in the document (reproduced here, click to enlarge), but even within the niche genre of crayoning imaginary routes onto maps of Europe, this is a poor one.

I am not sure how Paris-Madrid – that at least is doable currently with changes, and is half built anyway (Paris-Bordeaux and Burgos-Madrid are done, Bordeaux-Mont de Marsan and Basque-Y are in various stages of planning and building, only Mont de Marsan-Irun is totally missing) – is framed as a new route, while Sofia-Athens that has no HSL whatsoever and is not even possible by train is not shown as new. And Sofia-Athens in 6 hours by 2035 is laugh out loud funny. Budapest-Bucharest in 6 hours 15 minutes is a good belly ache too.

So in terms of what lines would get built, this plan is a failure. It isn’t remotely precise enough.

You could instead reverse the thinking about what to build. Back in January I wrote about what a High Speed Rail plan should include, and one of the ideas was to identify where existing TEN-T plans could be uprated, from the existing minimum of 160km/h to 250km/h and above. This at least makes it into today’s document as an idea.

And then comes the issue: if lines are to be built, who is to initiate that (it sounds rather like that’s still the Member States of the EU from the document) and finance the construction (here too there are ideas, and we should know more in 2026).

But reading the document I am left with the impression that the Commission thinks that Member States and the railway industry is standing ready to build dozens of high speed lines, and all that is lacking is the money. But I do not see it that way – there is scant little political will in the Member States to want to get any major projects even done. Everyone is one step further back than the Commission seems to think.

And then we come to what would actually run on these lines that may or may not get built.

At least the problem is there in black and white – building lines does not necessarily mean trains run, especially on cross border sections. There are nice words about needing to sort out finance for new rolling stock, more powers for the EU Agency for Railways to coordinate path allocation, and even a EU-wide commitment to stop useable trains being scrapped (something I think I was the first person to publicly propose as an idea, in 2021). But on all of this the plan is a wish list – things that are to be proposed, worked on, suggested, coordinated. Some might eventually happen, but not just yet.

More widely I still take the view that we need EU-wide commitments to the service levels on EU-funded infrastructure – and I would frame this as a Europatakt – a commitment not only to how quick a trip is between city pairs, but how often that train would be offered, and where connections to other routes would be guaranteed. That sort of idea is nowhere in the Commission’s text.

A commitment to fix railway ticketing is in today’s document, although it has been known for months already that legislation on this is forthcoming. Welcome of course, but hardly new, and not high speed rail specific.

To sum it up, I can find very little I disagree with in this Communication. But likewise I cannot point to any line or service that is going to be more likely to be built or be run as a result of today’s document. I cannot see what concrete changes this is going to bring to us railway passengers. We want more high speed rail, sure, but what? Where? By who? In whose interest? Hard to say.

I will leave the final words to Community of European Railways. “CER and its members have worked intensively towards a high-speed rail master plan in the last 4 years and stand ready to help bring the vision to life” they write. Four years of work for an outcome this thin – that’s damning about the state of Europe’s railways!

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