Climate Change Damage to Global Railway Networks: Going off the Rails
Railways handle a disproportionate share of global movement, carrying travellers some 2,470 billion passenger-kilometres a year. They handle an estimated 7% of global passenger journeys and 8% of international freight while producing only 1.2% of total transport emissions. They are also, paradoxically, among climate change’s most exposed victims; among the International Union of Railways’ approximately 200 members globally, not one has been spared the effects of climate change.
Many of the problems the sector is experiencing stem from a long asset lifespan. The majority were built before the concept of climate change was taken seriously – or even known. In the UK, for example, much of the network still uses Victorian-era structures that cannot withstand the impact of extreme weather. However, many of those constructed more recently are struggling because their design assessments of the impact of a changing climate were woefully inadequate.
Example: Spain’s Dual Failures
In Spain, the October 2024 DANA disaster in Valencia was a failure in the assessment of today’s climate risks, not engineering; the warnings were there, the science was there, but the institutional machinery to act on either was not put in place. With 99 kilometres of track damaged and €2.6 billion in infrastructure repair costs, it stands as a lesson in the consequences of having knowledge of the risks available but failing to act on it.
The winter of 2025–26 tells a different story. Relentless Atlantic storms battered Andalusia with record rainfall, repeatedly shutting down rail services through flooding and landslides. They were a result of climate change events impacting infrastructure that was designed many, many decades ago, when the known and anticipated risks were totally different. That failure cannot fairly be laid at the door of the engineers who built it, since the science linking warming to intensified precipitation wasn’t formalised until long after the concrete was poured. They are a lesson in the urgency of retrofitting climate protections.
The trajectory is worsening. Increased temperatures can cause tracks to bend and buckle, while more frequent storms can result in perpetual cycles of repair from fallen trees and flooding. Climate-related events could cause deterioration in robustness and punctuality, as well as premature ageing of infrastructure, resulting in an increased need for maintenance and renewal works and creating worsening cycles of crisis management.
This is the backdrop to our decision to create the ClimaTech project , where we have collated together a knowledge base of the material strategies that owners and operators can employ to reduce threats to infrastructure assets from the physical and transition risks posed by climate change. These strategies can be used to adapt infrastructure to reduce, mitigate, and avoid damage as the effects of climate change start to bite.
Railway infrastructure faces two distinct categories of climate threat, and understanding the difference matters:
Both types are worsening. Both cost money. But the chronic risks are in some ways the more insidious, because they accumulate quietly in asset values and maintenance budgets long before they produce a headline.
Flooding is consistently identified as the single greatest threat to rail infrastructure. Studies show that the most severe consequences for railways occurred after rainfall of 150mm or more fell within 24 hours, and include overflowing drainage systems, flooding and damage to tracks, landslides and even the collapse of bridges.
Example: Austria’s Deluge of Deluges
Austrian national rail operator ÖBB’s trains were forced to a standstill 1,900 times in 2023 due to adverse weather conditions, particularly floods and massive mudslides that followed thunderstorms. That’s no coincidence: a Nature study published in 2025 analysing 883 Austrian rain gauge stations found an 8% increase in daily and a 15% increase in hourly heavy rainfall over the past four decades.
This increase aligns with the predictions of Clausius-Clapeyron scaling. This is a vital tool for climate scientists, forecasting that for a single degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere can hold approximately 7% more moisture – so when it rains, it rains harder. In other words, Austria's railways are not experiencing bad luck – they are experiencing physics.
The US data is also bleak: washouts had a derailment rate of 88.2%. Meanwhile, Hurricane Sandy’s 2012 storm surge offers a benchmark for what coastal flooding means in practice: the cost of reconstructing just one of the affected New York subway tunnels was estimated at $1 billion, with other tunnels each costing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to return to service.
In a severe heatwave, rails can swell until their underlying ties can no longer contain them. The result is what’s known as a “sun kink”, when the rail gets visibly wavy, presenting a serious hazard as trains can derail on misaligned tracks.
Instances are worsening across almost every major rail network in the developed world, and are projected to intensify across all regions as temperatures rise. Under a 4°C global warming scenario, increased levels of extreme heat in the EU and UK are projected to boost transport operation and maintenance costs by €4.8 billion. Developing-world networks face the same realities but possess far less capacity to monitor or respond.
Success stories exist, however: in the US, mainline track-buckling accidents actually dropped by 52% between 2010 and 2021, largely because of improved heat management protocols and continuous welded rail standards.
Landslides are a deadly consequence of sustained heavy rainfall. They tend to affect large areas and need substantial engineering work to make the railway safe again, often leading to months of costly repairs. Moreover, they are incredibly challenging to predict: for example, just 13 of 147 landslips identified by Network Rail in 2023 were detected via remote sensors, despite the organisation spending £33 million on monitoring equipment. Most simply took rail operators – and passengers – by surprise.
Many of the world’s most critical rail corridors hug coastlines – think of the UK’s Great Western Main Line that makes its way along the Devon coast, or the Amtrak Northeast Corridor that snakes through some of the most flood-exposed urban terrain in North America. Coastal hazards and climate change significantly threaten the resilience of railway systems, increasing stresses on global freight transportation, supply chains, and economic stability.
Severe weather events paired with rising sea levels can cause railway lines to destabilise and even wash away once sea walls breach. Every centimetre of sea level rise has the potential to create new flood zones in coastal areas, as storm surges, high tides, and extreme rainfall events that previously stayed within safe bounds now tip over into inundation. Longer term, the risk of rail tracks that span the most low-lying areas ultimately ending up under water is very real.
While highly regional, permafrost collapse offers a vivid illustration of slow-onset, irreversible damage that investors need to be aware of. Some 70% of infrastructure in the permafrost domain is at risk of thaw. Concerningly, there’s little wiggle room here: these figures would barely shrink even if Paris Agreement climate targets were reached. Thawing triggers cascading secondary failures as formerly hard ground softens and ceases to provide structural support.
Example: One of Russia’s crucial transport lines is melting away
Russia’s Baikal-Amur Mainline provides a dramatic illustration. The 4,324 km line was built by the Soviet Union across Eastern Siberia at a cost of $14 billion (or around $45 billion in today’s money). Without the structural support of the frozen earth beneath it, the railway would collapse and sink into peat bog layers that cannot bear its weight. These tracks are already sinking. This is a compound climate change impact: warming permafrost is being made worse by intensifying rainfall. Northern Russia is warming 2.5 times faster than the global average and permafrost temperatures have already increased by up to 2°C – conditions that were not considered in past engineering practices.
Wildfires are the most rapidly expanding climate threat to railway operations, and in some respects the hardest to plan for. Unlike flooding or heat, which affect infrastructure in predictable locations, wildfires can close lines anywhere they can burn, destroying track infrastructure directly, burning sleepers, melting signalling cables and collapsing bridges. Climate change is extending the fire season and creating drier conditions across larger territories. Additionally, smoke can extend affected areas far from the actual burn sites.
Example:
Record heat triggered wildfires that paralysed Canada’s entire supply chainThe destruction of British Columbia's Fraser Canyon rail corridor in the summer of 2021 offers a stark illustration of how – in a network with geographic chokepoints – a single climate event in the wrong place can stop the system. A heatwave made the nearby town of Lytton the hottest place ever recorded in Canada, hitting 49.6°C before burning to the ground the following day. Wildfires closed the mainlines of both Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway, Canada's two major freight rail operators, which between them operate virtually the entirety of the nation’s freight network. The same corridor was disrupted by fire again in 2023 and 2024.
There is also a subtler shift underway. A train track caught fire on a bridge in London after timber beams were ignited by sparks during the record-breaking heat of July 2022, a type of incident previously unknown in the UK. Climate change is not merely intensifying wildfires where they already occur; it is introducing fire risk to latitudes and landscapes with no history of managing it, and no infrastructure designed with it in mind.
The consequences of railway disruption ripple through society and the economy:
Example: Human costs, financial costs, economic costs in the UK
Three people were killed in Scotland in 2020 when a landslide derailed a train near Stonehaven after a storm delivered 51.5–54.6mm of rainfall over roughly three hours. Network Rail pleaded guilty to criminal charges over negligence and was subsequently fined a record £6.7 million for safety failings. As of August 2025, five years after the derailment, eight of the 20 safety recommendations issued by Rail Accident Investigation Branch in its 2022 report remained unaddressed.
A single major earthwork failure can paralyse a line for months. A 2013 landslip near Hatfield took six months to repair. The closure was estimated to cost Network Rail around £500,000 a week in fines alone. That's around £10 million in penalties before a single shovel of repair work is counted, let alone the costs of lost revenue.
But the economic costs extend far beyond the repair bill. When the Dawlish sea wall collapsed in 2014, closing the only rail link to Plymouth and Cornwall for eight weeks, the immediate repair cost was £35 million; however, the interruption cost the local economy an estimated £1.2 billion. This is the arithmetic that makes the case for resilience investment.
Example: 2024 Central European Floods
For a vivid illustration of how multiple climate risks can converge simultaneously, the Central European floods of September 2024 are hard to beat. Torrential rainfall swamped rivers across Austria, Czechia, Poland and Slovakia. Debris, weakened tracks, and flood damage combined to destroy elements such as electrical infrastructure and ventilation systems.
What makes this a useful case study is the compounding nature of the damage. The flooding didn’t just inundate tracks:
- it saturated the earthworks beneath embankments, triggering landslips;
- it overwhelmed drainage systems already at capacity from weeks of above-average rainfall;
- it knocked out signalling and power infrastructure; and
- it closed lines, forcing rerouting that amplified disruption.
This is precisely the compound-risk scenario that asset managers need to be aware of: a cascade of acute events landing on infrastructure already weakened by chronic stress.
With ClimaTech, we’ve put together a compendium of decarbonisation and resilience strategies to help investors, legislators and asset managers navigate the minefield of risks that climate change is bringing – and will bring – not just to the international rail network but to all infrastructure around the globe. With over a hundred strategies covering the three greenhouse gas emissions scopes, as well as floods, wind, heat, and wildfire risks, data on their key technologies, quantified effectiveness and relevant protection level provided, this is a key tool for the industry to increase resilience in a targeted manner. Covering all 101 TICCS® infrastructure subclasses in over 1800 technology applications, this tool grounds resilience measures in quantified, comparable evidence, vital for informing infrastructure investment decisions.
Climate change is a challenge with no precedent, namely a climate that is at odds with the one these assets were designed for. These are also assets that are essential to the basic functioning of society at every level. Every penny spent proactively reinforcing infrastructure against climate change will return manyfold savings; every delay to tackling carbon emissions will amplify the costs incurred.