‘It’s not ERTMS’s fault, it’s ours’: ERA chief admits mistakes behind fragmented rollout
Published on 2026-10-09
The European Union Agency for Railways has admitted that ERTMS specifications were incorporated into EU law before they were ready, contributing to the proliferation of national variants and repeated technical changes. “It’s not the fault of ERTMS, it’s our fault”, said ERA chief Oana Gherghinescu, calling for mature specifications to be frozen so the industry can finally deploy the system at scale.
Speaking at the UNIFE Dialogue Forum on ERTMS at InnoTrans 2026 last month, Gherghinescu acknowledged that European rulemakers had to accept their share of responsibility for the problems that have plagued the rollout of Europe’s common signalling and train control system.
“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.”
The first ERTMS technical specifications were produced in 2000 and incorporated into EU rules for high-speed railways in 2002, followed by conventional rail in 2006. Gherghinescu said the early specifications had necessarily developed through trial and error, but incorporating them into legislation before that process was complete had created problems for the industry. “Was it good at the beginning, was it complete? No. Was it good that it started? Yes”, she said. “We had to start somewhere.”
“We were enthusiastic, we wanted to go for it, we built a solution and we put it into law”, she continued. However, in hindsight, she said, that had been a mistake.
Operators, lessors and manufacturers subsequently treated those rules as a stable basis for investment. Each time specifications were amended to correct errors or introduce improvements, “someone in the outside world was suffering”, Gherghinescu acknowledged.
The early rules also left considerable scope for national interpretations and project-specific requirements, producing systems that complied with European specifications on paper but were not necessarily interoperable in practice. “People took that as a menu and started to cook in their own organisations”, she said.
From technical changes to industrial scale
Gherghinescu had already called for greater stability in technical specifications for interoperability (TSIs) and ERTMS as early as 2025, arguing that TSIs should remain unchanged for five to ten years unless safety required otherwise. At the time, she supported stabilising ERTMS specifications but declined to commit to a particular baseline or timeframe.
At InnoTrans, she went further in explaining why stability was necessary, arguing that ERA should stop revising specifications once they were sufficiently mature for widespread implementation. “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.”
The objective is to move away from individually engineered national solutions towards harmonised products that manufacturers can produce and operators can deploy across multiple networks. “As boring as this might sound, I think we need to make ERTMS boring from that perspective”, Gherghinescu said.
The financial implications are particularly acute for operators and rolling stock lessors, who must continually invest in equipment, upgrades and testing to meet different national requirements, often without a corresponding increase in the value of their assets. European railway associations, including those representing freight operators and lessors, have repeatedly raised concerns about the cost of fragmented ETCS requirements and the investment uncertainty they create.
Gherghinescu approached the problem from an investor’s perspective. “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”, she said.
She added that manufacturers themselves also needed standardisation rather than an endless succession of bespoke projects. “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.”