EUROPE: The European Union Agency for Railways has acknowledged that ERTMS specifications were put into EU law before they were mature, contributing to repeated changes and national variants. ‘It’s not the fault of ERTMS, it’s our fault’, said Executive Director Oana Gherghinescu, who said that mature specifications should be ‘frozen’ long enough to industrialise deployment. Speaking at the UNIFE Dialogue Forum on the European Rail Traffic Management System at InnoTrans 2026, Gherghinescu first stressed that ERA still had reason to be proud of ERTMS itself, describing it as Europe’s ‘flagship for safety, capacity and punctuality’. The problem, she argued, lay in how Europe had developed and implemented it. ‘I think we can align by being humble and accepting what we haven’t done right, because again it’s not the fault of ERTMS, it’s our fault’, she said. ‘So I’m eating the humble pie on the agency side.’ With only 17% of the EU core network equipped by the end of 2024, ‘that is not a good KPI for an organisation which calls itself the ERTMS system authority’. ‘Make ERTMS boring’ The first ERTMS technical specifications were produced by the UNISIG group of signalling suppliers in 2000 and incorporated into EU rules for control-command and signalling on high speed railways in 2002; conventional rail followed in 2006. Gherghinescu said those early specifications had inevitably developed through trial and error. ‘Was it good at the beginning, was it complete? No. Was it good that it started? Yes’, she said. ‘We had to start somewhere.’ The mistake, Gherghinescu argued, was putting the system into legislation while that process was still underway, meaning changes on the technical side then had to be reflected in the rules. ‘We were enthusiastic, we wanted to go for it, we built a solution and we put it into law’, she said. In hindsight, she argued, that had been a mistake. Companies outside the institutions had then treated that legislation as a stable basis for long-life investments, she stated. Every time the CCS TSI, the EU’s technical rules for train control and signalling, was subsequently amended to correct errors or introduce improvements, ‘someone in the outside world was suffering’, Gherghinescu admitted. Nor did the early specifications contain everything needed to turn the European rules into complete onboard and trackside products. ‘People took that as a menu and started to cook in their own organisations’, she said, producing national and project-specific variants that were compatible with the rules on paper but not necessarily interoperable in practice. ERA is now working towards harmonised engineering and operational rules that could be ‘copy and pasteable’ into procurement documentation, said Gherghinescu. ‘As boring as this might sound, I think we need to make ERTMS boring from that perspective.’ Rail suppliers reject EU claim that ‘limited competition’ is driving ETCS cost surge The best and worst pupils The admission came as European ERTMS Coordinator Matthias Ruete presented figures illustrating the scale of the deployment gap. Against a legal requirement for full rollout by 2030, current member state plans point to only around 50% completion by then, Ruete said, adding that he was ‘not quite sure whether we will even make the 50%’. He described Belgium and Luxembourg as among the ‘best pupils in the class’; SNCF Réseau Deputy Managing Director Estelle Masclet later joked that France represented ‘one of the worst’. Ruete said that the difference was partly political, pointing to countries where serious accidents had forced governments, infrastructure managers and the wider sector to align behind long-term programmes. In Belgium, the 2010 Buizingen collision, which killed 19 people, helped prompt a legal commitment to equip the entire network with ETCS by 2025. ‘When the driver is safety, you get politics, technical level, stakeholders all together, you get a multi-annual budget and you move ahead’, Ruete said. Belgium ultimately reached 100% ETCS coverage by the end of 2025, but only after a rapid final push: Infrabel equipped around 1 000 km of its roughly 3 000 km network with Level 2 in the final year alone. For COO David Van De Sype, the experience showed that the benefits come only after sustained upfront investment. ‘You have to invest first, and then later on you can have the fruits’, he said. From safety to ATO With the network equipped, Infrabel is now pushing the system further. Railway signalling, Van De Sype said, had originally developed as a means of increasing capacity, and ‘it’s still about capacity’: the aim was to run trains as little as a 1 min apart over the same infrastructure. But that throughput also had to be robust, he added, with punctuality providing the test; performance has risen from 87% in 2021 to around 93%. If everybody moves forward with ETCS, with EU links, with standardised systems, well, that’s the way to decrease price. He cautioned that ETCS could not account for the improvement alone, but Infrabel now planned to build on that performance. That would include replacing ageing interlockings and migrating further towards Level 2, allowing lineside signals to be removed and making Automatic Train Operation easier to introduce. Around Bruxelles-Central, where the six-track layout of the cross-city tunnel is a major bottleneck, it is already looking at ATO. Van De Sype pointed to London’s Thameslink core, where ATO over ETCS Level 2 could support up to 24 trains/h through central London, as an example of what could follow. Yet Belgium’s experience has also exposed the unresolved question of cost and ERTMS. Van De Sype said the hardware itself was relatively cheap compared with the final system price. ‘I guess there’s €10 000 of components, but the prices are in the million range’, he said. His broader lesson was that those costs would only come down if deployment moved beyond isolated national programmes. ‘You can beat about the bush, keep discussing, but finally you’ll have to do something’, he said. ‘If everybody moves forward with ETCS, with EU links, with standardised systems, well, that’s the way to decrease price.’ Five Ss and a C Ruete brought that task down to industrialising ERTMS at European scale. He condensed the requirements into five Ss — standardise, synchronise, stabilise, simplify and scale up — accompanied by one C: coordinate. That meant phasing out national Class B systems and regulatory ‘gold plating’, synchronising trackside and onboard deployment, and giving industry sufficiently stable specifications and funding to move from bespoke engineering to repeatable delivery. UNISIG General Manager Hartwig Schuster had earlier illustrated the problem through the myth of Sisyphus: years spent pushing an authorisation ‘stone’ uphill, only for unexpected legal interpretations, product failures and ‘the absurdities of the European bureaucracy’ to threaten to send it back down. The doubling in the cost of onboard ETCS retrofits, from around €450 000 to €900 000, showed what that complexity could mean in practice. ‘It’s not the industry’s fault’, Ruete said. ‘It’s our collective fault’, pointing to specifications and the expectation of ‘a tailor-made suit at the price of an off-the-peg suit’. With SNCF Réseau planning to equip almost 6 100 km by 2044, the cost of continuing to treat deployment project by project becomes increasingly consequential. Masclet said France had already suffered from ‘excessive specification’ and systematic customisation, increasing costs and slowing delivery. Perhaps more strikingly, suppliers themselves were making much the same argument. ‘We’re facing as an industry an ever-changing specification’, said Siemens Mobility Rail Infrastructure CEO Marc Ludwig. Constant revisions were forcing suppliers to keep integrating new requirements, consuming ‘tremendous amounts of money and time’ that could otherwise be used to accelerate deployment. ‘We need to come to a standard so that as an industry we can move faster [and] use our resources the best possible way’, he said. Dedicated ERTMS Coordination Office established to tackle lagging rollout Freezing specifications Gherghinescu said conversations with industry CEOs had convinced her that suppliers did not have a business case in customisation. ‘They don’t like tailored suits, even if some of us suspect they do’, she said. ‘Their engineering time is too expensive to be wasted on them. So industry needs the standard suit, and they need scale.’ I use the word freeze. I think we need to be as harsh as that. The same logic carried into financing. Standardised equipment that could be reused and sold on would retain more value than locomotives carrying multiple national onboard systems. ‘The locomotive with six onboard units is not of high residual asset value, so if I were an investor I would run away from it’, Gherghinescu said. Getting there, she suggested, would require ERA to hold mature specifications steady for a period rather than continue revising them. ‘I use the word freeze’, she said. ‘I think we need to be as harsh as that. It’s about freezing the specifications when we know they are ready to be implemented.’ That would give operators, lessors and suppliers ‘a period of time where specs are not moving’ and allow ERTMS to become an industrial project. Freeze the rules, strip out national tailoring and synchronise deployment, then scale up. ‘If we do that’, Ruete said, returning to Sisyphus, ‘I’m quite confident that the stone will stay on top of the hill’. Dedicated ERTMS Coordination Office established to tackle lagging rollout
EUROPE: The European Union Agency for Railways has acknowledged that ERTMS specifications were put into EU law before they were mature, contributing to repeated changes and national variants. ‘It’s not the fault of ERTMS, it’s our fault’, said Executive Director Oana Gherghinescu, who said that mature specifications should be ‘frozen’ long enough to industrialise deployment.
Speaking at the UNIFE Dialogue Forum on the European Rail Traffic Management System at InnoTrans 2026, Gherghinescu first stressed that ERA still had reason to be proud of ERTMS itself, describing it as Europe’s ‘flagship for safety, capacity and punctuality’. The problem, she argued, lay in how Europe had developed and implemented it.
‘I think we can align by being humble and accepting what we haven’t done right, because again it’s not the fault of ERTMS, it’s our fault’, she said. ‘So I’m eating the humble pie on the agency side.’ With only 17% of the EU core network equipped by the end of 2024, ‘that is not a good KPI for an organisation which calls itself the ERTMS system authority’.
‘Make ERTMS boring’
The first ERTMS technical specifications were produced by the UNISIG group of signalling suppliers in 2000 and incorporated into EU rules for control-command and signalling on high speed railways in 2002; conventional rail followed in 2006. Gherghinescu said those early specifications had inevitably developed through trial and error.
‘Was it good at the beginning, was it complete? No. Was it good that it started? Yes’, she said. ‘We had to start somewhere.’ The mistake, Gherghinescu argued, was putting the system into legislation while that process was still underway, meaning changes on the technical side then had to be reflected in the rules. ‘We were enthusiastic, we wanted to go for it, we built a solution and we put it into law’, she said. In hindsight, she argued, that had been a mistake.
Companies outside the institutions had then treated that legislation as a stable basis for long-life investments, she stated. Every time the CCS TSI, the EU’s technical rules for train control and signalling, was subsequently amended to correct errors or introduce improvements, ‘someone in the outside world was suffering’, Gherghinescu admitted.
Nor did the early specifications contain everything needed to turn the European rules into complete onboard and trackside products. ‘People took that as a menu and started to cook in their own organisations’, she said, producing national and project-specific variants that were compatible with the rules on paper but not necessarily interoperable in practice.
ERA is now working towards harmonised engineering and operational rules that could be ‘copy and pasteable’ into procurement documentation, said Gherghinescu. ‘As boring as this might sound, I think we need to make ERTMS boring from that perspective.’
Rail suppliers reject EU claim that ‘limited competition’ is driving ETCS cost surge
The best and worst pupils
The admission came as European ERTMS Coordinator Matthias Ruete presented figures illustrating the scale of the deployment gap. Against a legal requirement for full rollout by 2030, current member state plans point to only around 50% completion by then, Ruete said, adding that he was ‘not quite sure whether we will even make the 50%’.
He described Belgium and Luxembourg as among the ‘best pupils in the class’; SNCF Réseau Deputy Managing Director Estelle Masclet later joked that France represented ‘one of the worst’. Ruete said that the difference was partly political, pointing to countries where serious accidents had forced governments, infrastructure managers and the wider sector to align behind long-term programmes. In Belgium, the 2010 Buizingen collision, which killed 19 people, helped prompt a legal commitment to equip the entire network with ETCS by 2025.
‘When the driver is safety, you get politics, technical level, stakeholders all together, you get a multi-annual budget and you move ahead’, Ruete said.
Belgium ultimately reached 100% ETCS coverage by the end of 2025, but only after a rapid final push: Infrabel equipped around 1 000 km of its roughly 3 000 km network with Level 2 in the final year alone. For COO David Van De Sype, the experience showed that the benefits come only after sustained upfront investment. ‘You have to invest first, and then later on you can have the fruits’, he said.
From safety to ATO
With the network equipped, Infrabel is now pushing the system further. Railway signalling, Van De Sype said, had originally developed as a means of increasing capacity, and ‘it’s still about capacity’: the aim was to run trains as little as a 1 min apart over the same infrastructure. But that throughput also had to be robust, he added, with punctuality providing the test; performance has risen from 87% in 2021 to around 93%.
If everybody moves forward with ETCS, with EU links, with standardised systems, well, that’s the way to decrease price.
He cautioned that ETCS could not account for the improvement alone, but Infrabel now planned to build on that performance. That would include replacing ageing interlockings and migrating further towards Level 2, allowing lineside signals to be removed and making Automatic Train Operation easier to introduce. Around Bruxelles-Central, where the six-track layout of the cross-city tunnel is a major bottleneck, it is already looking at ATO. Van De Sype pointed to London’s Thameslink core, where ATO over ETCS Level 2 could support up to 24 trains/h through central London, as an example of what could follow.
Yet Belgium’s experience has also exposed the unresolved question of cost and ERTMS. Van De Sype said the hardware itself was relatively cheap compared with the final system price. ‘I guess there’s €10 000 of components, but the prices are in the million range’, he said. His broader lesson was that those costs would only come down if deployment moved beyond isolated national programmes. ‘You can beat about the bush, keep discussing, but finally you’ll have to do something’, he said. ‘If everybody moves forward with ETCS, with EU links, with standardised systems, well, that’s the way to decrease price.’
Five Ss and a C
Ruete brought that task down to industrialising ERTMS at European scale. He condensed the requirements into five Ss — standardise, synchronise, stabilise, simplify and scale up — accompanied by one C: coordinate. That meant phasing out national Class B systems and regulatory ‘gold plating’, synchronising trackside and onboard deployment, and giving industry sufficiently stable specifications and funding to move from bespoke engineering to repeatable delivery.
UNISIG General Manager Hartwig Schuster had earlier illustrated the problem through the myth of Sisyphus: years spent pushing an authorisation ‘stone’ uphill, only for unexpected legal interpretations, product failures and ‘the absurdities of the European bureaucracy’ to threaten to send it back down. The doubling in the cost of onboard ETCS retrofits, from around €450 000 to €900 000, showed what that complexity could mean in practice. ‘It’s not the industry’s fault’, Ruete said. ‘It’s our collective fault’, pointing to specifications and the expectation of ‘a tailor-made suit at the price of an off-the-peg suit’.
With SNCF Réseau planning to equip almost 6 100 km by 2044, the cost of continuing to treat deployment project by project becomes increasingly consequential. Masclet said France had already suffered from ‘excessive specification’ and systematic customisation, increasing costs and slowing delivery.
Perhaps more strikingly, suppliers themselves were making much the same argument. ‘We’re facing as an industry an ever-changing specification’, said Siemens Mobility Rail Infrastructure CEO Marc Ludwig. Constant revisions were forcing suppliers to keep integrating new requirements, consuming ‘tremendous amounts of money and time’ that could otherwise be used to accelerate deployment. ‘We need to come to a standard so that as an industry we can move faster [and] use our resources the best possible way’, he said.
Dedicated ERTMS Coordination Office established to tackle lagging rollout
Freezing specifications
Gherghinescu said conversations with industry CEOs had convinced her that suppliers did not have a business case in customisation. ‘They don’t like tailored suits, even if some of us suspect they do’, she said. ‘Their engineering time is too expensive to be wasted on them. So industry needs the standard suit, and they need scale.’
I use the word freeze. I think we need to be as harsh as that.
The same logic carried into financing. Standardised equipment that could be reused and sold on would retain more value than locomotives carrying multiple national onboard systems. ‘The locomotive with six onboard units is not of high residual asset value, so if I were an investor I would run away from it’, Gherghinescu said.
Getting there, she suggested, would require ERA to hold mature specifications steady for a period rather than continue revising them. ‘I use the word freeze’, she said. ‘I think we need to be as harsh as that. It’s about freezing the specifications when we know they are ready to be implemented.’ That would give operators, lessors and suppliers ‘a period of time where specs are not moving’ and allow ERTMS to become an industrial project.
Freeze the rules, strip out national tailoring and synchronise deployment, then scale up. ‘If we do that’, Ruete said, returning to Sisyphus, ‘I’m quite confident that the stone will stay on top of the hill’.
Dedicated ERTMS Coordination Office established to tackle lagging rollout
Source: Railway Gazette
