Rail passenger numbers rose by 11.2% in the European Union in 2023, compared to the previous year, with some 429 billion passenger-kilometres (pkm) registered via rail last year.
According to Eurostat, this is the highest annual passenger-kilometre total by main rail undertakings since the data on rail transport was first collected in 2004.
Demand for rail transport grew consistently between 2015 and 2019, posting 9.4% growth over the period, with a peak of 411 billion pkm registered in 2019.
This was then followed by the pandemic period – with 2020 registering the lowest pkm performance, of just 221 billion kpm. This means that the total annual pkm has more than doubled in the years since.
Quarterly increase
The first quarter of 2023 saw the biggest increase in passenger numbers, with 21 billion rail pkm more than in the same quarter in 2022, a period that was still affected by the lingering effects of the pandemic. This represents an increase of 29.1%.
Of the 8 billon rail passengers in the European Union last year, close to half were travelling in either Germany (33.9%) and France (15.0%), while the number of passengers travelling by rail also increased notably in Croatia (29.0%), Ireland (28.7%) and Luxembourg (25.1%).
At the same time, Greece saw the largest reduction in rail passengers, year-on-year, of 17.0%.
Rail freight transport
In 2023, rail freight transport in the EU totalled 378 billion tonne-kilometres (tkm), marking a 4.9% decline from 2022, Eurostat noted.
Over the past decade, this performance level is the lowest since 2015, apart from 2020, when the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic caused an even larger reduction of 8.4%, bringing rail freight down to 367 tkm.
Rail freight performance saw year-over-year declines across all quarters in 2023, with the steepest drops in the second quarter (-9.2%) and the third quarter (-7.5%).
In 2023, Germany maintained its position as the EU’s top performer in rail freight transport, showing a modest increase of 0.7% compared to 2022. Across the EU, nearly all member states saw a decline in rail freight tonnage, with only Luxembourg and Portugal reporting increases. Read more here.
