Eurostat’s 2025 road freight data gives rail freight a useful map of where to look for trailer traffic, and where not to overstate the opportunity.
EU road freight reached 1,886bn tonne-kilometres in 2025, up 0.9% on 2024. By tonnes, the largest intra-EU country-to-country road flow was Germany-Netherlands at 86.9m tonnes, followed by Germany-Poland at 68.4m tonnes and Belgium-France at 55.9m tonnes. Germany was origin or destination in six of the ten largest flows.
For rail, the first filter is distance
Most combined transport economics improve when the main rail leg is long enough to offset terminal handling and first- and last-mile trucking. In practice, that points above roughly 500 km, especially for unaccompanied semi-trailers, swap bodies and containers. The second filter is terminal access. UIC defines terminals as the road-rail interchange hubs of combined transport, and notes that semi-trailers are attractive because they can be coupled directly to a tractor without a road chassis. The disadvantage? Semitrailers are ideal when delivered just-in-time. If not, they can take a lot of space, especially because, unlike containers, they are not stackable.
Three largest road flows in Europe
Using a conservative 20 tonnes per loaded semi-trailer, the three largest Eurostat flows alone represent around 10.6m trailer-equivalents a year:
- 4.35m on Germany-Netherlands
- 3.42m on Germany-Poland
- 2.80m on Belgium-France
That is not the same as rail-capturable traffic. The Germany-Netherlands and Belgium-France flows include many short-haul port, border-region and industrial movements where rail adds two terminal operations to a trip that road can complete directly. Their value for rail is more often as part of longer chains, not as standalone bilateral flows.
1. The best immediate target is Germany-Poland. Its 68.4m tonnes are large enough to support dense terminal-to-terminal services, and much of the market can exceed 500 km when flows run between western and northern Germany and Poznań, Warsaw, Łódź, Wrocław or Upper Silesia.
This corridor should be treated as the first rail-trailer growth pool: Ruhr/Rhine-Main/Hamburg/Bremen to central and southern Poland, with gateway use towards Ukraine only where customs, wagon capacity and terminal slots are secured. The operational case is not built on one train replacing one road lane; it is built on repeated departures, balanced east-west loading and enough terminal cut-off reliability for forwarders to sell it as a trucking product with a rail middle leg.
The challenge here is the growing demand for passenger rail across Poland, which limits, i.e. currently slows down freight rail. Plans of Polish government promise relief of this, but it will take years to build. In addition, just like the case of Czechia-Germany, there is the limiting capacity of electrified corridor border crossings for freight rail. At the moment, freight operators currently rather look at growing and easier container market in intermodal, with both flows by New Silk Road from China to Europe and growing importance of Polish Baltic ports as gateways of goods to Central and Eastern Europe.
2. Spain-France is the second-best long-distance opportunity among the top ten flows. Eurostat’s chart puts it at about 50m tonnes, or around 2.5m trailer-equivalents at 20 tonnes per load. Here the distance screen works better than on Benelux flows: Catalonia, Madrid, Valencia and the Basque region to France, Germany or Benelux regularly put the rail leg above 500 km. The constraint is not scale of demand but corridor performance across the Pyrenees, terminal capacity and interoperability. Rail can win where it avoids driver hours, border road congestion and long empty repositioning, but only if shippers can book regular trailer-capable services rather than occasional trains. Plus, the capacity of usable railway lines due to gauge difference on some lines.
At the same time, the infrastructure manager Adif is focusing on terminals, 740 m sidings, and corridor lines overhauls for traffic from ports and Ro-Ro vessels which also have promising volumes (e.g. semitrailers volumes from Africa/Morocco), meaning allocation of resources for higher volumes to France might take some time.
3. Germany-France is the third target, despite being smaller than some neighbouring flows. The Eurostat top ten chart puts it at about 43m tonnes, roughly 2.1m trailer-equivalents. The total includes short Alsace, Saarland, Baden-Württemberg and Lorraine traffic that rail should not chase. The better segment is northern and western Germany to Île-de-France, Lyon, eastern France and further south, where rail distance becomes long enough and terminal density is higher. Here, interoperable locomotives, companies with valid certificates are a bigger issue, although recent trends for both Siemens and Vectron platform, and Alstom and its Traxx platform show country roster change for east-west rather than by-now-dominated north-south corridors.
4. Austria-Germany and Czechia-Germany are next. Both are around 41-42m tonnes in Eurostat’s top ten chart, each close to 2.1m trailer-equivalents on the same payload assumption. The Germany-Austria market has useful distances when traffic runs beyond Bavaria into northern Germany, the Ruhr or ports. The Czech-German market is more mixed: Saxony-Bavaria-Czech border flows are too short, but Moravia, Prague, Ostrava and Silesian industrial traffic to western and northern Germany can fit combined transport. These corridors need selective service design, not broad modal-shift claims.
Where the numbers mislead
Germany-Netherlands is the largest flow, but it is not the largest pure rail opportunity. Rotterdam and Dutch logistics centres already have rail and inland waterway options for long hinterland moves. Much of the bilateral road volume is short, dense and time-sensitive between the Netherlands, North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony. Rail’s better role is to attach Dutch origin cargo to longer services towards Poland, Czechia, Austria, Italy and southern Germany.
Belgium-Netherlands and Belgium-France have the same problem. The volumes are large, but the geography is compact and inland waterway competition is strong in the Rhine-Scheldt system. The opportunity is not to replace Antwerp-Rotterdam or Lille-Kortrijk trucking by rail. It is to consolidate port, chemical, retail and food traffic into longer trains from Antwerp, Zeebrugge, Liège, northern France and Benelux terminals towards eastern and southern Europe.
Spain-Portugal is smaller in the top ten list, at around 24m tonnes, but it deserves a separate view. Within Iberia, Lisbon/Porto to Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza and Valencia can exceed the distance threshold. Rail can address driver scarcity and long road hauls, but the market depends on Iberian terminal coverage, reliable domestic paths and international standard-gauge links for traffic continuing beyond Spain. It is a growth case, not the first European-scale conversion pool.
What should be built around the flows
The recommendations are therefore corridor specific. First, concentrate trailer-capable train products on Germany-Poland and Spain-France, because they combine scale with enough distance. Second, develop Germany-France, Austria-Germany and Czechia-Germany by selecting lanes above 500 km and ignoring border-region traffic that road will keep. Third, use Benelux flows as feeders into long-distance intermodal networks rather than treating them as full rail-substitution corridors.
The policy side points in the same direction. The European Court of Auditors concluded in 2023 that intermodal freight still does not compete on equal terms with road because of regulatory and infrastructure barriers. The revised TEN-T framework puts more emphasis on transhipment terminals, 740 m trains and ERTMS deployment, all of which matter more on cross-border trailer corridors than on short national shuttles.
Eurostat’s 2025 road map does not say that rail can take the biggest road flows. It says that rail should stop looking at national totals and start ranking truck corridors by three tests: annual tonnes, rail-leg distance above 500 km, and terminal-to-terminal repeatability. On that basis, the best first bets are Germany-Poland, Spain-France, selected Germany-France lanes, and the longer Germany-Austria and Germany-Czechia flows. The next market test is whether operators can sell those lanes as scheduled semi-trailer capacity with enough frequency to make forwarders change dispatch plans.
