Blog posts

Why intermodal transport will become essential in the future.

How rail digitisation unlocks Europe’s strategic mobility

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.

As more operators enter a fragmented market, finding the right capacity for wagon group transport still happens by phone, email, and spreadsheets. The Rail Capacity Broker changes that.

Drawing on CargoBeamer CDO Julian Hagenschulte's talk at railXchange 2026, this article argues that digital transformation succeeds or fails on the human and process side, not the technology choice, and shows how CargoBeamer's "AI Agent Factory" turns employee-reported problems into working prototypes within two weeks.

Rail-Flow's Intermodal Digital Hub bundles CRM, capacity brokering, transport management, order processing, and invoicing into one modular platform, cutting manual effort and giving forwarders and operators real-time visibility across the entire intermodal transport chain.

At railXchange 2026's Collaboration panel, four rail industry leaders gave four different answers to whether rail freight is a cooperation system or a silo system, revealing that the real barrier to collaboration is human trust and habit rather than missing technology or a concrete shared goal.

At railXchange 2026's Optimisation panel, four industry voices clashed over whether rail freight's stalled digitalisation is a technology, organisational, or procurement problem, ultimately agreeing that the real cost lies in the slow, invisible competitiveness gap created by inaction.

MICE DESK CEO Bernd Fritzges argues at railXchange 2026 that the orchestrated, human-controlled automation which transformed hotel convention sales a decade ago is directly applicable to rail freight's scheduling chaos, and asks why the industry is still waiting to adopt it.