First railway package

The first railway package includes adopted in February 2001 EC Directives 2001/12 / EC, 2001/13 / EC and 2001/14 / EC . Its provisions are intended to ensure non-discriminatory access to the railway infrastructure in European railway law.

In order to make this possible, Directive 2001/13 / EC defines requirements with regard to the reliability, financial performance and professional suitability of railway companies, so that customers and third parties are protected and transport services are provided while maintaining a high safety standard. Directive 2001/14 / EC defines transparency requirements for access to railway infrastructure for all railway companies and also defines a trans-European rail freight network.

The background to the package was to make a regulatory contribution to several political projects at European level, in particular the implementation of the European internal market in the rail sector and the trans-European networks , which were laid down in the EU White Paper "A strategy for the revitalization of the railways in the Community" . For the first time, the "package approach" was also chosen in the railways sector, in the course of which several directives were fed into the legislative process at the same time and jointly debated and resolved.

The first railway package was expanded several times over the years (through the second and third railway packages ). The fourth railway package, which was launched by the EU Commission in January 2013, is a further change in several directives and regulations that go beyond the context of the previous railway packages.

Nevertheless, the "First Railway Package" remains the greatest change in the European Union's railways and contains the following key points:

The management of the railway company must be independent of state authorities (Art. 4 RL 91/440). This measure was aimed at legally separating all railways that had previously been incorporated into the state administration and turning them into companies with their own accounting areas.
The railway companies (with the exception of smaller and island companies) are to be separated into infrastructure and operations, through transparent bookkeeping. This measure was aimed at preventing the indirect support of rail transport operators from rail infrastructure providers. This measure was and is highly controversial: The EU Commission operates a complete separation of infrastructure and operations under company law, while large member states (including Germany) worked against the dissolution of their holding structures. The EU Commission tried several times to tighten this separation through infringement proceedings and even in recast (RL 2012/34).
The member states are given the opportunity to financially relieve their independently provided railway companies from old debts. This measure served to "clean the table" with state railway companies, which were largely the container for debts of past railway infrastructure construction. Most countries implemented this step relatively radically (e.g. Germany and France), others incompletely (e.g. Austria) in order not to let their Maastricht debt levels get too high.
All rail companies in the Community are to be granted free and non-discriminatory access to the rail infrastructure. This measure was aimed at dissolving the existing cooperation regime of state railways and allowing competition “on the rails”. As a result, several hundred small private European railways developed, which were able to gain market shares in competition against the state railways. The greatest expansion of the competition, however, arose from the competition of large state railways against each other, which became internationally active directly or through subsidiaries (many of them acquired through acquisitions).

Legally, the "First Railway Package" is a package of guidelines that largely amends existing guidelines in the railway sector. This is why the consolidated legal acts (up to “recast” 2013) carried their original numbers for years (RL 91/440 / EEC and others) up to the so-called “recast”, the new publication of the previously codified law in the directive on November 21, 2012.

The European Commission had called for this “recast” in view of, among other things, the slow implementation of market opening and the continuing interdependence of national infrastructure and rail transport companies. In a communication dated September 17, 2010 , she called for the package to be amended. To this end, it submitted a proposal for a directive on the creation of a single European railway area ( COM (2010) 475 ). The background to this is the infringement proceedings against a total of 13 member states of the Union due to inadequate implementation of the first railway package. After sometimes controversial negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union , Directive 2012/34 / EU for the creation of a single European railway area was passed on November 21, 2012 .