Member States agreed its first-reading position on the single European railway area directive. Whilst agreeing with the objective of the recast Commission's proposal, the Council considers a number of its provisions to be too far-reaching or not clear and simple enough. It therefore modified the key parts of the proposal, i. e. the conditions of access by railway undertakings to service facilities, the financing of railway infrastructures and charging for their use, and the functions of the regulatory body supervising the railway market.

The Council stated its position on the draft directive establishing a single European railway area, following the political agreement reached last December. The draft directive is a recast merging and amending the three directives of the "first railway package" on the development of European railways, the licensing of railway undertakings and the management of railway infrastructure.

Whilst agreeing with the objective of the recast proposal, the Council considers a number of its provisions to be too far-reaching or not clear and simple enough. It therefore modified the Commission's proposal, and in particular its key parts. Among the changes proposed, the Council cancelled the proposed requirement for the service facility operator to be legally independent from railway undertakings using the facilities and replaced it by a requirement of independence in organisational and decision-making terms, as far as essential service facilities are concerned, while other facilities only have to comply with the separation of accounts. Moreover, this independence requirement does not mean that a separate body needs to be created.

In addition, the Council proposed that granting a temporary reduction of the infrastructure charge for trains equipped with the European train control system (ETCS) should be optional and not compulsory, as advocated by the Commission and the European Parliament. Furthermore, also in contrast to the Commission and the European Parliament, the Council considers that the development strategy to be published by infrastructure managers only needs to be indicative and that no fixed deadline should be set for ensuring that managers' accounts are balanced. With regard to the separation between management and use of infrastructure, the Council is not in favour of further separation requirements and is of the opinion that the issue of a general separation should not be tackled in this directive.

On the other hand, the Council reduced the parts of the proposal for which the Commission should be empowered to act autonomously by adopting "delegated acts". Moreover, the Council did not take into consideration European Parliament's amendments that would introduce substantive changes to provisions of the railway package which remained unchanged in the Commission's recast proposal, since such amendments go beyond the limits of a legal recast as defined by an inter-institutional agreement.