Shall we finally reconsider cargo railway?

The Green deal has a noble intention. We absolutely need to make sure our planet remains livable place. The practical problem with it is that many governments are not ready to deliver the goals.

From my perspective one of the main opportunity is the cargo railway. General consensus is, that cargo railway is environmentally and economically better solution than truck transportation. Even the Green deal counts with it. The main concern is that governments, ministries and regions are not prepared to support cargo railway. Why is that?

There is likely not one reason explaining why most of Europe (some countries are doing well though) fails the cargo railway and the will be mixture of various factors. I will certainly not know all of them and I may get some wrong — I’d be happy for your commentaries and discussion how to improve the situation. My view is as follows:

There is much lower barrier of entrance to enter trucking industry than cargo railway, therefore trucking is much more competitive, costs are pushed down, prices for customers more competitive

Roads are mostly here — yes, there is maintenance, but there are relatively few new roads being built; on the other hand building a railway or even increasing it’s capacity is a giant investment which is typically pushed away even for decades

Roads are more flexible, traffic jams are a norm in some areas. Therefore truck industry grows relatively unlimited by road infrastructure. On the other hand a traffic jam on the railways is unacceptable, so cargo railway has nowhere to grow (in many countries there is no free capacity on railways and passenger transport has clear priority)

Cities forgot the capability to plan cargo railway (as well as cargo river) transportation in their development plans; this is a bit more complex topic, for a moment I will narrow it down to investments — building a siding / bringing a railway to an industrial / logistics park costs more upfront, while roads need to be built anyway, so transport is already solved (who cares about TCO or environment, right?).

The roads are built with passenger cars in mind, therefore there are (almost) no investments for road cargo transport. Roads are built, from the infrastructure POV trucks have very little demands on public sector, they ask for little; On the other hand cargo railway (or cargo river transport) is a pain in the ass, needs to beg cities and governments for small investments — while these investments aren’t small, every sqm of land that cargo railway (or river cargo transport) needs, can be used for a commercial or residential estate with much higher revenue for city

Cargo railway and river cargo transport investments are mostly declined. In my view because public sector is unable to properly assess long-term costs and benefits of them in comparison with road cargo transport.

Recent weeks show another opportunity to support the cause — cargo railway is an excellent opportunity to lower reliance on oil. I know that independence is even harder to evaluate than total costs, but let’s try.