On Monday, July 21, 2025, a meeting of the top management of ČD Cargo with representatives of the trade union central offices took place. The main topic was the continuation of the company restructuring. The transport volumes of all carriers on the network of Správa železnic declined by another 5.3% in the first half of this year. ČD Cargo was no exception: we have recorded decrease in performance by 3.2% during the same period. It means that after the fall of transport volumes in 2023 and 2024, the decline has been persisting also in 2025.
The decline in transport volumes is caused above all by structural changes in the economy which are bringing permanent diversion from the fossil fuels in the energy and heating industries, lower production of steel in Europe (as an example we can mention termination of crude steel production in Liberty Ostrava) or also outages of energy-intensive chemical production. These factors have been followed by uncertain situation in the automotive industry, return of timber harvesting to the period before the bark-beetle calamity, and at the same time, the need to halt the single wagon load losses. “To retain our competitive advantage and stabilize ČD Cargo also for the future, we must pursue the next stages of the ongoing restructuring. This is, unfortunately, connected with downsizing of all our capacities. We reduce numbers of freight wagons, locomotives, and we cannot avoid further dismissing of our employees,” says Tomáš Tóth, the chairman of the ČD Cargo Board of Directors
The ongoing fall in transport volumes on the Czech and European railways in 2025 and further decline predicated for 2026 induce the necessity to adopt other restructuring measures. “Regrettably, based on the market signals and discussions with our business partners, we need to recon with further decrease in volumes of the traditional commodities. This will require another reduction in the incurred overcapacities. Now, we already know, that the total transport volume in 2026 will not be higher than 45 million of tonnes. We are intensively preparing next steps in the area of reduction in the rolling stock, and other important negotiations with our trade union partners are planned for the next weeks where we will be discussing the total reduction in the number of employees of our company by approximately 700 by the end of this year. In the longer term, we need to be prepared for the fact, that if we are not able to get new commodities on the rail, the ČD Cargo volumes will stabilize at some 40 million tonnes of transported goods annually,” concludes Tomáš Tóth.
Of the 700 employees mentioned above, discussions have been initiated at today’s meeting with the trade union partners regarding the departure of 287 operational employees due to their current redundancy. This will be followed by discussions on reductions at the level of technical and economical staff, including a reduction in the number of the operational staff to the level of performances planned for the beginning of 2026.