I was there when the European Train Control System (ETCS) existed only as a few selected pilot projects for proof of concept rather than widespread rollout. Real commercial traction only developed in the mid-2000s, which makes ETCS roughly twenty years old as a deployed technology. In those twenty years, the industry conversation has quietly changed. Nobody seriously argues anymore about whether ETCS works. It works, it is in service worldwide, and operators who run it are largely happy with it. The argument today is a different one: whether anyone can still afford it.

The numbers behind the unease
Let us start with the onboard side, because there the evidence is settled. In early 2025, the European Commission and the ERTMS Deployment Management Team published a full study of onboard cost drivers. Its headline finding is remarkable for a technology two decades into commercial life: between 2018 and 2022, the cost of retrofitting ETCS to an existing vehicle roughly doubled, from around EUR 450,000 to around EUR 900,000 per vehicle. Upgrading an existing ETCS installation to a newer baseline rose in similar proportion. Mature technologies are supposed to get cheaper. This one got more expensive.

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