en.Wedoany.com Reported - Italian private high-speed rail operator Italo is advancing its plans to enter the German high-speed rail market, having recently submitted an application to the German federal network regulator Bundesnetzagentur seeking long-term route allocation contracts and minimum capacity reservations. The company has planned an investment of €3.6 billion for this initiative, with the goal of commencing operations in 2028. The operational plan includes hourly train services on the Munich-Frankfurt-Cologne-Dortmund corridor, as well as services every two hours between Munich, Berlin, and Hamburg. In response to this development, Deutsche Bahn has called on regulators to clarify the policy framework to prevent new entrants from disrupting the existing cross-subsidization mechanism of the national rail network.
At the heart of this dispute is whether to re-establish long-term track usage agreements and capacity guarantee rules for market participants other than the incumbent operator within Germany's already congested rail network. Since 2017, Germany has abandoned long-term framework contracts in favor of annual path allocation based on timetable periods to maintain maximum operational flexibility. From Italo's perspective, securing clear long-term operational expectations is a prerequisite for deploying large-scale capital, including the procurement of Siemens Velaro high-speed train sets. However, DB InfraGO, the infrastructure management company controlled by Deutsche Bahn, opposes this stance, arguing that any regulatory exceptions or capacity quota guarantees for new entrants would introduce additional market distortion risks on lines already heavily congested due to long-term renovation works.
The debate over track access rights in Germany unfolds against the backdrop of the overall liberalization of European rail passenger transport. However, unlike other open-access markets, Germany faces particularly prominent infrastructure constraints. In 2024, the European Commission proposed an initiative to implement a "one-ticket, one-journey" rule by 2029, aimed at simplifying cross-border and multi-operator ticketing processes and strengthening passenger rights protection (Source: European Commission, 2024). Nevertheless, despite efforts at the European level to lower entry barriers for operators, the realities of Germany's rail network struggle to support increasingly intense competition. Data shows that in 2025, overall spending from Germany's infrastructure fund reached only 54% of its target, with the transport infrastructure segment lagging further behind at 52% (Source: Handelsblatt, 2026). This lag in infrastructure investment stands in stark contrast to Italy's high-speed rail development model, where open-access competition between Italo and state-owned operator Trenitalia on dedicated infrastructure has doubled passenger traffic on the Rome-Milan corridor within a decade.
Italo's entry plan poses a direct challenge to Deutsche Bahn's current cross-subsidization model, under which revenues from more profitable high-speed rail lines are used to offset losses on regional routes. If regulators approve Italo's request for capacity guarantees, it could set a precedent, forcing DB InfraGO to prioritize commercially oriented open-access operators in resource allocation, thereby affecting the internal balance of the national rail network. Given that Germany's transport infrastructure financing has not yet reached half of its planned targets, introducing high-density high-speed rail competition without expanding existing network capacity could further exacerbate the country's long-standing punctuality difficulties (Source: Reuters, 2026).
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