Rail freight has a habit of describing its own situation in language that misses what it has actually achieved. The headlines emphasise fragmentation, regulatory drag, missed modal-shift targets. The internal conversations gravitate to what is broken. And in the middle of all that, an industry quietly went from near-irrelevance to representing the majority of European rail freight market share — and rarely gives itself credit for how it got there. 

Neele Wesseln, Co-Managing Director of DIE GÜTERBAHNEN, the association representing 126 private freight railways in Germany, spent her time at railXchange 2026 making the case that the cooperation story is already real, already working, and already unfinished. Asked on the Collaboration panel whether rail freight is a cooperation system or a silo system, she didn’t hesitate: clearly a cooperation system. The success story of private rail freight operators over the past two decades, she argued, would simply not have happened without it. 

That answer is more interesting than it sounds. Because the industry’s own self-image often defaults to the opposite. 

What the lobbyist sees that the headlines don’t

Wesseln represents a membership that spans companies with three employees to corporations with several hundred. And across that entire range — small, medium, and large — the cooperation is not aspirational. It is operational. The larger players draw on smaller ones for transport capacity. The smaller ones get access to networks they could never build alone. The interdependence is not a slogan. It is how the sector actually runs. 

What she sees from a lobbying position is a willingness among private rail operators to keep pulling closer together — to push past the technology stack that, by her own admission, is in many places several decades old, and to find practical paths through it. The optimism, she made clear, is not naive. It is observed. The sector is already at a point where cooperation works very well. The work that remains is to extend it, not to invent it. 

This matters because the political and media narrative about rail freight tends to skip this point entirely. A sector that defines itself by what it has not yet achieved gives away the credibility it has already earned. 

The Rotterdam project that proves the rule

Since April, six private rail freight operators — competitors, in commercial terms — have been sharing operational data in real time at the Port of Rotterdam. The mechanism is an app. The data covers track clearance, shunting movements, wagons that need to be moved, and live updates from the port itself. 

The purpose is concrete: increase capacity utilisation, respond faster to bottlenecks, move more freight through the port than any of the participating operators could move alone. The outcome is measurable. 

What makes this example worth pointing at is what it is not. There is no regulatory mandate forcing it. There is no neutral intermediary brokering the trust. Six operators identified a shared interest large enough to outweigh their competitive instinct to withhold information, and they built something around it. The technology is the easy part. The willingness to share is the rare part. And it is happening — quietly, productively, at scale — in a port that the industry already depends on. 

Why innovation is still moving slowly

If the cooperation story is already working, the question becomes why the rate of digital and AI adoption in private rail freight is not faster. Wesseln’s answer was direct, and it cut across the day’s prevailing mood at the conference. 

It is not that the operators she represents are disinterested in AI. It is that for many of them, the immediate question in 2026 is whether they will break even at all. Track access charges, energy costs, infrastructure uncertainty — these are not background concerns. They are consuming the management attention that would otherwise be directed at innovation. The panic of cost pressure, she said, is what is actually holding the sector back. AI has barely entered the conversation in member circles, and not because the technology isn’t ready — because the room is full of other fires. 

This is not a popular thing to say at a conference whose programme is largely organised around AI. But it was the kind of honesty that re-anchored the discussion in operational reality. The technology will not solve a margin crisis. It will not pay the energy bill. And the sector cannot innovate its way out of conditions that make innovation itself unaffordable. 

The climate question nobody put on the agenda

Wesseln raised one more dimension that the rest of the day had largely orbited without naming. The rail freight industry is rightly proud of its CO₂ advantage over road — that advantage is, in many respects, the entire reason the sector matters for European climate policy. But AI is energy-intensive. The compute behind every model, every inference, every agentic workflow has a carbon footprint that is not yet being reckoned with in most adoption decisions. 

For an industry whose value proposition is environmental, that gap matters. Deploying AI thoughtlessly — because it is fashionable, because a vendor promises efficiency, because no one has done the carbon arithmetic — is not consistent with the values that make rail worth fighting for in the first place. 

Alongside the climate question, she pointed at two more topics the day had skipped: data protection and the regulation of AI applications. These are not abstractions. They are the operating constraints under which AI will actually have to function in European rail freight. Not asking what we use AI for, when we use it, and whether it is the right application — those are choices the industry will be living with for the next two decades. 

The optimism is the message

What was striking about Wesseln’s contribution across the day was not the warnings, although they were sharp. It was the underlying confidence in what the sector has already built. 

The private rail freight operators in Germany did not get to over 60% market share by working in silos. They did not survive twenty years of asset-heavy competition with a state incumbent by refusing to cooperate. They built a working system, quietly, while the wider industry debate often focused on everything that was wrong with it. And they continue to extend that system — at Rotterdam, in operator-to-operator capacity arrangements, in the unglamorous daily work of moving each other’s freight. 

The challenge for the sector now is to recognise that story for what it is, defend the conditions that allowed it to happen, and resist the temptation to drop a layer of AI on top of an industry that still has not solved its track access charges. 

The cooperation is real. The next chapter is whether the rest of the system gives it room to grow. 

Neele Wesseln is Co-Managing Director of DIE GÜTERBAHNEN, the German association representing 126 private freight railways. She spoke on the Collaboration panel at railXchange 2026 in Frankfurt.