Only 17% of the EU's core rail network carried ERTMS by the end of 2024 against a binding 2030 deadline for full rollout. The figure was disclosed by the European Union Agency for Railways at InnoTrans 2026 on October 1, where Executive Director Oana Gherghinescu called for technical specifications to be "frozen" once mature.

What went wrong with ERTMS?

"I'll eat the humble pie on the agency side," Gherghinescu told the UNIFE Dialogue Forum. "It's not the fault of ERTMS, it's our fault."

The first ERTMS specifications were produced by the UNISIG supplier group in 2000 and written into EU law for high-speed lines in 2002, with conventional rail following in 2006. Gherghinescu said those documents were necessarily incomplete and developed through trial and error.

"Was it good at the beginning, was it complete? No. Was it good that it started? Yes. We had to start somewhere," she said.

The error, she argued, lay in placing the evolving system into legislation before it stabilised. Each subsequent amendment of the CCS TSI — the EU's train-control rule book — to correct errors or add features imposed costs on suppliers and operators who had invested against what they read as a stable baseline.

Who is ahead, who is behind?

European ERTMS Coordinator Matthias Ruete presented member-state plans showing only around 50% completion by 2030, and said he was "not quite sure whether we will even make the 50%."

He ranked Belgium and Luxembourg as "best pupils in the class." SNCF Réseau Deputy Managing Director Estelle Masclet joked that France represented "one of the worst." Ruete attributed part of the gap to politics: Belgium's commitments followed the 2010 Buizingen collision, which killed 19 people.

"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 reached 100% ETCS coverage by the end of 2025, Infrabel COO David Van De Sype confirmed. The infrastructure manager equipped roughly 1 000 km of its 3 000 km network with ETCS Level 2 in the final year alone.

What is Infrabel doing next?

Van De Sype said signalling had always been about capacity and the next step was to run trains at headways as short as one minute. Infrabel punctuality has risen from 87% in 2021 to about 93%, though he cautioned that ETCS alone did not explain the improvement.

Around Bruxelles-Central, where a six-track cross-city tunnel forms a major bottleneck, Infrabel is examining Automatic Train Operation over ETCS Level 2. Van De Sype cited Thameslink's central London core — which supports up to 24 trains/h with ATO over ETCS Level 2 — as the benchmark.

Why are costs rising?

Van De Sype estimated that the physical hardware inside an ETCS onboard unit amounts to "around €10 000 of components", yet final system prices run "in the million range." Wider deployment, he argued, would compress those costs.

"If everybody moves forward with ETCS, with EU links, with standardised systems, well, that's the way to decrease price," he said.

UNISIG General Manager Hartwig Schuster illustrated the problem through the myth of Sisyphus: years of work pushing an authorisation "stone" up the hill, undone by fresh legal interpretations, product failures and EU bureaucracy. Onboard ETCS retrofit costs, he noted, had roughly doubled to about €900 000 from €450 000.

UNIFE member Siemens Mobility Rail Infrastructure CEO Marc Ludwig said constant specification revisions were consuming "tremendous amounts of money and time."

"We need to come to a standard so that as an industry we can move faster [and] use our resources the best possible way," Ludwig said.

What does a "freeze" actually mean?

Gherghinescu said mature specifications should be held steady for a defined period — long enough for industry to industrialise deployment. UNISIG and other suppliers, in her reading, did not want bespoke engineering either.

"Their engineering time is too expensive to be wasted on them. So industry needs the standard suit, and they need scale," she said.

She framed the freeze bluntly: "I use the word freeze. 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."

For investors, the residual-value case is straightforward. "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.

SNCF Réseau plans to equip almost 6 100 km by 2044, Masclet said, and France has already paid a price for "excessive specification" and national customisation.

Ruete distilled the policy task into five Ss:

• Standardise
• Synchronise
• Stabilise
• Simplify
• Scale up

…plus one C: coordinate. The task includes phasing out national Class B systems, synchronising trackside and onboard rollout, and giving industry stable specs to shift from bespoke to repeatable engineering.

"If we do that," Ruete said, returning to Sisyphus, "I'm quite confident that the stone will stay on top of the hill."

ERA is finalising harmonised engineering and operational rules intended to be "copy and pasteable" into procurement, Gherghinescu said; whether EU institutions will commit to a multi-year pause on CCS TSI revisions now sits with the European Commission.