What % of the railway network is electrified

38 comments
  1. The Baltics look very bad, but not for long. Lithuania will have electrified 30% of its railway lines by 2023 – spending 363m euros on the Kaisadorys-Klaipeda section. When Rail Baltica is completed, the percentage will rise even further.

  2. This is misleading. This should be put into perspective e.g railway length per 100/km area.
    For example if you build 80years ago a railway it might not be feasible to electrify it now.

  3. One of my brothers in law works as an engineer for Deutsche Bahn. He is on the team responsible for electrifying the main Railway line along the Bavarian Czech border. It’s about 200 km of railway he said that it likely won’t be finished before the 2030s.

  4. Please be aware, that the percentage of electrified train tracks is neither a good or a bad sign. It is actually just the percentage of main tracks for long distance and high speed trains, because electrified tracks are really expensive. In rural areas train track are only financially possible, if they are not electrified. So achieving a really high percentage of electrified train tracks actually just means, that there is a lack of railway infrastructure in rural areas and a low percentage just means, that there are few national and international long distance trains.

    If we want to compare the state of railway networks from european countries, we need to look at the percentages of fossil and electrical train transport in all traffic.

  5. A more meaningful metric is percentage of passenger trips done on electric railways. There are a lot of tiny diesel railways that pull down the average but don’t really matter for CO2 emissions as they are seldom used.

Leave a Reply