Romania’s rail freight transport records fourth highest growth rate in EU in 2017

In 2017, Romania recorded one of the highest growth rates in rail freight transport in the EU, ranking fourth among member states by growth of the segment, according to data provided by Eurostat.

Rail freight in Romania increased by 1.5 billion tonne-kilometers in 2017 – the second consecutive year of growth and close to the level recorded in 2008, before the financial crisis.

In 2008, rail freight transport totalled 14.15 billion tonne-kilometers, but crashed to only 9.83 billion tonne-kilometers in 2009. In 2017, it reached 13.78 billion tonne-kilometers.

In 2017, rail freight transport in the European Union (EU) increased by 13 billion tonne-kilometres compared with 2016, reaching 416 billion tonne-kilometres. This represents a year on year rise of 3.2 %, and follows a positive trend since 2013. The level of rail freight transport in 2017 is at its highest annual level since the low point of 353 billion tonne-kilometres in 2009 associated with the economic crisis.

Annual growth between 2016 and 2017 was registered in 17 EU Member States. In absolute terms, Germany recorded the largest decrease over this period (-3.9 billion tonne-kilometres), followed by Latvia (- 0.9 billion tonne-kilometres) and Italy (-0.3 billion tonne-kilometres).

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In contrast, four countries reported absolute increases of more than 1 billion tonne-kilometres over the same period, namely Poland (+6.2 billion tonne-kilometres), Hungary (+2.8 billion tonne-kilometres), Lithuania (+1.6 billion tonne-kilometres) and Romania (+1.5 billion tonne-kilometres).