Responding to a parliamentary question, infrastructure minister François Bausch (déi Gréng) revealed that repeated strikes on the French rail network had heavily impacted lines 70 and 90. The result was that on line 90, over 11% of trains were cancelled during the morning  and evening rush-hours, up from 8% the year before. Outside of rush hour, over 12% trains were cancelled in 2018, up from 7% in 2017. Line 70 fared slightly better with 6% trains cancelled in the morning and 4.6% in the afternoon rush-hours, up from around 2% the year before.

When one removes the cancellations caused by French strikes, during the first six months of 2018 there were fewer cancellations, 3,246, compared with the same period in 2017 (3,822). The overall on-time rate of trains in Luxembourg improved slightly as well, with 92.2% of trains arriving no more than six minutes after the scheduled arrival time in 2018, compared with 90.5% in 2017.

Bausch wrote that on average 1,000 trains use the Luxembourg rail network daily. Because of the design of the network with trains converging on Luxembourg City, “bottlenecks can easily form as a result of minor incidents, be they domestic or outside of the country, having a domino effect on trains,” the minister explained.

The CFL is, meanwhile, working to improve capacity of the network, having opened the Pfafenthal-Kirchberg train station in December 2017, and Howald train station. In future, it plans to construct a new Luxembourg-Bettembourg track, a second viaduct in Pulvermuhl, a second track for Sandweiler-Contern, remove railway road crossings and expand the main train station in Luxembourg. What is more, the minister said CFL would integrate 34 new trains into its fleet between December 2021 and December 2024.