Who moves my wagon group from Antwerp to Leipzig? For decades the answer was simple. One country, one provider, one phone call. Everyone knew who to contact.

Ask that same question today and the answer has become considerably more complicated. Around 70 railway undertakings applied for single wagonload funding in Germany alone in 2024. New operators have entered. Networks have expanded. Cross-border and domestic collaborations between different providers are already happening. The market for smaller consignment sizes is in structural change.

There is no lack of demand. No lack of capacity. It’s that finding each other, the right transport request matched against the right available capacity, across operator boundaries, at the right moment, still happens mostly via phone, email, and spreadsheets. In a market this fragmented, that friction is enough to kill a shipment before it starts. Smaller flows get deprioritised. Trains run with spare capacity no one knew about. Potential rail traffic quietly goes back to road.

That is the problem the Rail Capacity Broker is built to solve, not by replacing the relationships and expertise that make this market work, but by giving them transparency and a collaboration tool as a foundation they’ve never had.

Why collaboration has been hard to scale

The rail industry already knows how to collaborate. Cross-operator transport is not new. What is new is the scale at which it now needs to happen.

When a handful of providers covered most corridors, coordination by phone was manageable. When 70+ operators each cover fragments of the network, the combinatorial problem explodes. No single planner can hold all of that in their head. No email chain can efficiently match a transport request in Antwerp against spare capacity on a train running through Wiesbaden Ost. And no one has had the time to build the infrastructure that would make that matching and joint collaboration fast, reliable, and repeatable.

The result is a market that cooperates on the deals it already knows about, and systematically misses the ones it doesn’t.

What changes, and what doesn’t

The RCB is built around one insight from the industry: the relationships stay. The people stay. What changes is the coordination layer underneath them.

“Rail freight can’t become more competitive by doing the same things digitally that it did on paper. The processes themselves have to be rethought. The question isn’t ‘how do I find a provider faster?’, it’s ‘why am I still doing this the same way we did in 2006?’, Dominik Fürste, Co-CEO of Rail-Flow.

The Rail Capacity Broker doesn’t answer that question by automating away the people who know these corridors and these trains. It answers it by making their knowledge findable, and combinable, at a scale that wasn’t previously possible.

A lead operator still takes responsibility for the customer. Personal contacts remain visible on specific corridors. What shifts is how quickly a transport concept can be assembled from the pieces that are already out there.

A Platform for the future of wagon groups

Single wagonload transport is at a crossroads. State support exists in Germany and in other European countries precisely because policymakers recognise that without structural intervention, wagon group transport risks losing relevance for smaller volumes, and with it, the environmental case for modal shift.

The Rail Capacity Broker is Rail-Flow’s answer to that structural question. Not as a subsidy mechanism, but as market infrastructure: a neutral platform where supply and demand can find each other efficiently, where operators who couldn’t previously build an end-to-end offer can now do it together, and where a shipment that would have been too small, too complicated, or too time-consuming to pursue on rail can become a realistic option.

The MVP is live. Pilot transports are actively being sought. The platform is ready to be shaped by the people who understand these markets best.

If you have capacity to offer or a transport need to solve, the conversation starts here.

The Rail Capacity Broker is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Transport through the Future of Rail Freight programme (Z-SGV), developed in partnership with Fraunhofer IML and Captrain.