The EU Commission paper on the establishment of a 'Primary European Rail Freight Network' confirmed that European authorities wanted to create the necessary conditions and level playing field for the development of a long-term sustainable freight mobility.

Infrastructure investments are costly, though, and take a long time to come to fruition; hence the need to adopt a realistic midterm strategy for developing the use of freight trains, to bridge the gap until new infrastructure investments will be completed and providing the much needed capacity.

These goals could be achieved by removing gradually over time rail track conflicts between freight and passenger rail services, by developing corridors predominately dedicated to freight and extracting the best productivity from each available modality or from a combination of them all.

Several EU Commission projects such as NEWOPERA, FERRMED, BRAVO, TREND, REORIENT, CREAM, RETRACK, UIC projects like ERIM + DIOMIS, together with research councils such as ERRAC and EIRAC, have approached the freight corridors dimension.

NEWOPERA, assuming a growth in transport demand between 2 to 3 times the European GNP, was more ambitious in perceiving the necessity of going beyond the corridors dimension for arriving at a wider and more integrated perspective, by developing a European Rail Freight Network.

The TIGER project rationale was driven by the European need for achieving a higher degree of effectiveness, efficiency and competitiveness on the Rail Freight Network. This was perceived to be the key to a more sustainable freight mobility. Reduction of road congestion, accidents, emission and negative climate change effects would lead to a safer and better environment and improve quality of life for European citizens. Trend breaks in global trade in particular, handled by giant CTS vessels, and brought about by EU enlargement and by the enormous traffic flows with Far and South East Asia, highlighted the impossibility of road modality sustaining by itself future European needs for freight mobility. Port congestion had become a common feature in both North and South Europe to the extent that only a new distribution system to/from ports to inland destinations, based on industrial intermodal shuttle trains, could represent the solution to this problem.