Not only Turkey, but also Europe has long term targets for railway.

Europe is expecting a 60% increase in demand for rail freight, thus CER (The Community of Europen Railway and Infrastructure Companies) has the following targets:

• Bring the market share of rail from 17% to 23%
• Increase the commercial punctuality of block trains to 97% with 60 minuttes tolerance (trucks have 95% punctuailty)
• Increase the commecial speed of block trains to 60km/h (trucks have 50 km/h)
• Provide 90% correct ETA information

For these CER focuses on 6 main freight corridors in Europe. The target is to achieve following critearias in these routes:

• Increase the train length to min 750m in and min 1000m in some intermodal routes. min 1500m is adviced in long term.
• Standardize the axle load at 22,5to/axle. 90% of the theese corridors already have this.
• All these corridors meet the loading gauge of GB/PC45 which allows high-cube containers and rolling highway. But GC/PC400 is prefered in long term.
• Increase the technical speed of the lines to above 100 km/h (93% of the corridors meet this criteria).
• ETCS/ERTMS Level 2 is the minimum target value in these corridors. Level 3 is adviced in long term.
• GSM-R will be the only telecommunication method accepted in these corridors.
• 2 tracks in all these corridors
• Reach to 100 trains/day in each direction of a double-track line.

These need not only infrastructure upgrades, but also;

• Rail cars with stronger coupling system
• Non air-pressure-based breaking systems
• Stronger traction units
• Longer feeder lines and customer sidings
• New marshalling yards