It was the kind of question designed to produce a clean split. 

Katrin Höhne, moderating the Collaboration panel at railXchange 2026, put it to the four panellists directly: if you had to describe the rail freight industry — is it a cooperation system or a silo system? No middle ground allowed. 

The room expected disagreement. What it got was more interesting than that. 

Julian Hagenschulte, CDO at CargoBeamer, went first: silo. Asset-heavy industries don’t have strong incentive structures to cooperate, he argued, and rail freight is no different from construction or infrastructure in that respect. Events like railXchange exist precisely to chip away at that tendency. 

Jutta dos Santos Miquelino, transformation advisor and Co-CEO of and dos Santos, pushed back. She sees it differently — not because the silo mentality isn’t real, but because the actual requirement in rail is collaboration. The complexity of the system forces it, even when the culture resists it. 

Neele Wesseln, Co-Managing Director of DIE GÜTERBAHNEN, was unequivocal: cooperation. The success story of private rail freight operators over the past two decades, she argued, would not have happened without it. A sector that went from near-irrelevance to representing over 60% of rail freight market share didn’t do that by working in silos. 

Jörg Nowaczyk, CCO of GATX Rail Europe, agreed — with one important caveat. Collaboration works well between companies. Where it still breaks down is with national authorities, which remain stubbornly siloed even as operators have learned to work across borders and across competitive lines. 

Four people, four perspectives, one question with no clean answer. Which was, arguably, the most honest thing anyone said all afternoon. 

The data problem that everyone has and nobody solves together

Nowaczyk offered the most concrete example of both what collaboration can achieve and where it still falls short. 

On the positive side: the industry has reached agreement on a single data transmission format across virtually all European freight wagon fleets. The same interface, regardless of the provider. Wagon keepers can share position data, maintenance status, and damage reports in a standardised, digitally accessible format. That is not a trivial achievement for an industry spanning 30+ countries and several hundred operators. 

And yet — by his own admission — a significant proportion of operators still send damage reports as PDFs, or in some cases as manual handwritten notes. The infrastructure for digital exchange exists. Many choose not to use it. 

This gap between what is technically available and what is operationally practised sits at the heart of the collaboration problem in rail. It is not primarily a technology problem. It is not primarily a regulatory problem. It is a human problem — the habits, the trust levels, the change resistance, the comfort with the familiar — dressed up in the language of technical complexity. 

The customer who disappeared from the room

One of the sharper moments in the panel came from Hagenschulte, who noted that for the first forty-five minutes of the Collaboration session, the customer had not been mentioned once. 

It’s a pattern that repeats across the industry with uncomfortable regularity. Discussions about collaboration tend to organise themselves around operator interests, regulatory frameworks, and infrastructure constraints — all of which are real and important. But the customer — the shipper trying to move goods from Rotterdam to Prague reliably and at a competitive price — has a way of vanishing from these conversations. 

Hagenschulte’s point was not just a rhetorical provocation. It was a design principle. CargoBeamer’s data-sharing projects with infrastructure managers are motivated specifically by the ability to tell customers where their goods are and when they will arrive — not as an aspiration, but as a reliable operational capability. When the customer is the organising logic of collaboration, the conversations about what to share and with whom become considerably easier to have. 

Nowaczyk echoed this. GATX’s investments in telematics and sensor infrastructure — standardised across their fleet, open to customers via a self-service portal — are fundamentally about making the rail experience more transparent and therefore more competitive against road. The cooperation is instrumental to customer value, not an end in itself. 

What the port of Rotterdam is already doing

The most encouraging concrete example in the panel came from the audience. A participant from Reincargo described an active project at the port of Rotterdam where six railway undertakings — private competitors — are sharing operational data in real time to collectively improve track utilisation and respond to bottlenecks. 

Six operators. One shared dataset. No competitive secret given away. And the result is a port operation that moves more freight by rail than it could when each operator guarded their own slice of information. 

The example matters because it breaks the assumption that collaboration between competitors requires a regulatory mandate or a neutral intermediary to force it. The Rotterdam operators found a shared interest — efficient port throughput — that outweighed their competitive instinct to withhold data. The project is working. And as Neele Wesseln observed, the private freight railway sector has been demonstrating exactly this kind of pragmatic cooperation for years, even when the macro narrative about the industry emphasises its fragmentation. 

The elephant in the room: cost pressures and innovation

Wesseln introduced the dimension that the rest of the panel had largely orbited without naming directly: for many of the operators represented in her membership of 126 private freight railways, the pressing question in 2026 is not digital strategy or AI transformation. It is whether they will break even. 

Track access charges, energy costs, and infrastructure uncertainty are consuming the management attention that would otherwise be directed at innovation. And Wesseln added something that rarely gets said plainly at industry events: the environmental dimension of AI itself deserves scrutiny. The industry is rightly proud of rail’s CO₂ advantage over road. But AI systems are energy-intensive, and deploying them thoughtlessly — because it is fashionable, because the vendor promises efficiency gains, because no one has done the carbon accounting — is not consistent with the values that make rail worth fighting for. 

It was an uncomfortable note in a room that had spent most of the day celebrating AI as the solution to every problem. But it was the kind of discomfort that tends to indicate something worth sitting with. 

Three things that actually move collaboration forward

By the end of the panel, three practical conditions for better collaboration had emerged — not as a tidy framework, but as the residue of honest disagreement. 

The first is a shared goal large enough to hold competing interests. When the goal is abstract — “let’s collaborate more” — nothing moves. When the goal is concrete — “let’s get this cargo to the customer on time” or “let’s maximise throughput at this terminal” — the conversations about what to share and who does what become solvable. 

The second is a willingness to be uncomfortable. Jutta dos Santos Miquelino was direct: silo thinking is an emotional phenomenon as much as a structural one. People withhold knowledge not because they have calculated that sharing it would harm them, but because vulnerability feels dangerous. The managers she works with who coach twelve people responsible for 8,000 employees carry this dynamic every day. The technical solutions are almost always available. The willingness to expose your own knowledge and your own gaps — to say “here’s what I have and here’s where I need help” — is the rarer and more valuable thing. 

The third, and most actionable, is starting somewhere and learning. Hagenschulte’s observation about the gap between digital strategy penetration and actual workforce adoption — roughly 55-60% of companies in the room had a digital or AI strategy; far fewer had meaningfully deployed one — suggests that the barrier is rarely the strategy itself. It is the first step. And the first step, as every speaker across the day argued in their own way, is less about having the perfect plan and more about deciding to begin. 

The panel ended without a resolution to the silo-or-cooperation question. Which is, perhaps, the correct answer. The industry is both, simultaneously, and the work of the people in that room — and the industry’s broader leadership — is to shift the balance, one project and one relationship at a time. 

 

The Collaboration panel at railXchange 2026 featured Julian Hagenschulte (Chief Digital Officer, CargoBeamer), Jutta dos Santos Miquelino (Co-CEO & Partner, and dos Santos), Jörg Nowaczyk (Chief Commercial Officer, GATX Rail Europe), and Neele Wesseln (Co-Managing Director, DIE GÜTERBAHNEN), moderated by Katrin Höhne (Menlo79).