Rail freight and the chemical industry in 2026: what the data actually shows

The network is deteriorating where it matters most

Two indicators determine whether a chemical supply chain holds. Train cancellations and under-capacity trains are improving and that is real progress. But train delays rose from 27% in 2024 to 35% in 2025, an 8-point deterioration in a single year. And wagon immobilization has not moved. This resulted into the dissatisfaction of 69% of European industrial shippers who claim that conventional rail only partially meets their needs

For chemical shippers whose production cycles depend on predictable transit times, that trajectory matters.

Single wagon load in Europe: the segment under structural pressure

Single wagon load is the backbone of chemical rail logistics. Most chemical companies don't move unit trains between dedicated facilities. They move individual wagons between production sites, distribution hubs, and customer locations, often across multiple national networks.

In November 2025, at the UIC High-Level Freight Meeting in Copenhagen, single wagon load services were explicitly flagged as increasingly at risk. High shunting costs, limited network coverage, poor wagon visibility between handoffs. When data quality is poor, planning quality is poor and the cost lands with the shipper.

Wagon immobilization in petrochemicals: the number that changes how you plan

Across Everysens' petrochemical network, 55% of wagons were immobilized at any given point in 2025. That is the highest immobilization rate of any industry the platform tracks and it represents only marginal improvement from 58% in 2024.

More than half the fleet is sitting idle. Every immobilized wagon is a cost without return and a gap the planning team absorbs through safety margins that are no longer sustainable.

Most planning assumptions don't account for that. They're built on fleet size, not fleet availability. The gap between the two is where costs accumulate quietly.

What leading chemical shippers are doing differently

Three practices consistently make the difference. They treat wagon availability as a live planning input, not a planning risk. They work from wagon-level data rather than fleet averages. And they connect wagons, transport planning, and execution on a single platform so when a disruption hits, the impact is visible across the entire chain immediately.

Youri Trinh, in the Refining and Chemicals Supply Sales and Optimization team at TotalEnergies Germany, articulates the motivation well: the goal is to digitise a complex process for planning product shipments by rail, in order to better satisfy customers while optimising costs. Customer satisfaction and cost optimisation are both outcomes, and both depend on the quality of the underlying data and the planning processes built on it.

The full picture is in the 2026 benchmark

Current network performance. What the immobilization data looks like across chemical and petrochemical flows. What's putting single wagon load under structural pressure. And what leading shippers are doing to stay ahead of it.