This book explains how barriers to growth in rail freight transport across Europe can be overcome. It recommends a simple set of charges that create incentives for management and planning of train operations across national borders.

Twenty years of European reforms have not (yet) produced the railway market that was initially dreamt of. Competition remains limited. This paper looks at one element of regulation, charges for the use of railway infrastructure and other upstream services. In order to allow competition in rail transport services, access to infrastructure is subject to specific European Union (hereafter, "EU") capacity allocation and pricing rules as of 1995, transposed in the respective national laws. But in 2010, the Commission observed that "[t]he development of the railway sector and its capacity to compete viably with other modes of transport are still hampered by serious problems related [among others] to (a) inadequate financing and pricing of the infrastructure". This paper seeks to identify potential causes of why charging schemes have not (yet) been able to improve the railways' share. After having delineated the scope of the analysis, namely the tariffs of upstream railway services (1), this paper describes the EU rules that are applicable to those tariffs (2). That description is then subject to an evaluation of the achievement of the objectives pursued by charging schemes, through some examples (3), before this paper proposes the way forward (4). A short conclusion is provided summarising the main findings and recommendations (5).

Now that railway infrastructure and train operations have been separated in Europe -- at least for accounting purposes -- user charges for infrastructure are progressively being introduced to cover the costs of running trains. However, because of ...