State railways, what's wrong? CER's perplexing response to the European Commission's Passenger Package

The Passenger Package - three pieces of legislation proposed yesterday by the European Commission mostly to address issues with railway ticketing in the EU - have been a long time coming.No sooner had the ink dried on the 2021 Rail Passenger Rights Regulation, it was obvious it left many issues unresolved. The German Grüne, among others, put rail ticketing front and centre of their 2024 European Parliament manifesto, that led to von der Leyen taking up the issue in her Political Guidelines and Transport Commissioner Tzitzikostas charged with acting on the issue. And here we are now in 2026 with a legal proposal.Throughout that period of time, trade body for the state owned railway companies Community of European Railways (CER) has pursued the line: leave it to us, the railway companies, and we will fix the problems. We need no new law! Central to their efforts was the Ticketing Roadmap, an effort to get the state railways onto a shared technical system called Open Sales and…