CFR Marfă requested bankruptcy. Another rail company replaces it: “We have learned the lessons of the past”

The state operator CFR Marfă has officially filed for bankruptcy, Deputy Prime Minister Oana Gheorghiu announced. She described the moment as “a chronicle of announced failure.” The company replacing CFR Marfă is called Carpatica Feroviar, and its director told HotNews.ro that the number of employees has exceeded 1,000. He promises that the mistakes of the past will not be repeated and there will be no unnecessary expenses.

Oana Gheorghiu wrote on Facebook that CFR Marfă did not fall suddenly and that the Romanian state, instead of coming up with solutions, chose to cover the problem with postponements: non-payment, rescheduling and cancellation of debts to other state companies.

“I entered the bread properly”

The establishment of Carpatica Feroviar was approved by the Government in the fall of 2024, and the first employees were in April 2025 (15 employees, including Daniel Apostolache, current director of Carpatica and former director of CFR Marfă).

Hiring in larger numbers began at the end of 2025. The company had 600 employees at the beginning of April, but the pace of recruitment has accelerated, especially as tenders have been won and people are needed quickly.

Carpatica Feroviar currently has around 1,070 people and should reach 1,400 employees in June, says the director.

“CFR Marfă has filed for bankruptcy and is no longer operating as an operator, and we are executing the business plan approved by the European Commission. CFR Marfă no longer has a transport license since May 9 and Carpatica is implementing its business plan”, Daniel Apostolache, head of Carpatica Feroviar, tells HotNews.ro.

“I entered the bread properly,” says Apostolache. “At the time of April 10, we had only approved 20% of the contracts in the business plan, and now we are at 100%”

The number of employees, the director says, should be higher by 300 people by the end of June. The target for the end of the year would be 2,100 employees, but it is possible that the activity will go well with fewer.

“I'm going to test the activity with the 1,400 employees. The target is to reach 2,100, but I'm going to test with the 1,400 employees and I'd like to streamline the operations in a beach between 1,400 and 2,100 employees,” says Apostolache.

How far do the Carpatica Feroviar trains go? Trains carrying salt arrive in Hungary, trains for OMV Petrom arrive in Vienna, and freight trains with grain, oil products, cement and metals are sent to Ukraine, says the head of Carpatica.

Among the clients of Carpatica Feroviar, says the head of the company, are Electrocentrale Turceni, Oscar DownStream, Salrom, Complexul Energetic Oltenia, Societatea Electrocentrale Craiova, Socar and OMV Petrom

The rolling stock of Carpatica Feroviar is composed of 200 locomotives (electric and diesel in approximately equal proportions) and 6,450 wagons. The average age of the wagon fleet is 32 years, and for locomotives, after the last modernization, the average age of the fleet is 30 years old, says the company director.

“I will not make unnecessary expenses, I have learned the lesson of the past”

I asked Daniel Apostolache why Carpatica Feroviar would go, when CFR Marfă, of which he was also a director, went bankrupt.

“Because it can, because we have to and because we have what to do. I proved during my tenure as general manager at CFR Marfă that this can happen. The fact that we had that millstone around our neck – namely the state aid worth 570 million euros from 2020 – impacted my exercise and we did not make a total profit, but we had an operational profit year after year”, answers Apostolache

Regarding what will happen next at Carpatica Feroviar, Apostolache says that the business plan shows that the operator will reach a profit. “I will not make unnecessary expenses, I learned the lesson of the past, I saw that private operators know and can do things well, and I can also do well at this company.”

At the end of last year, CFR Marfă had 3,000 employees and total debts of over 4.7 billion lei. CFR Marfă employees did NOT automatically switch to Carpatica, especially since the new company will have a much smaller workforce. The locomotives and wagons were NOT automatically transferred either, but through complex procedures, because an automatic transfer would have been illegal.

CFR Marfă had 32,000 employees in 1998, 17,000 employees in 2009, reached under 9,000 in 2013 and decreased to less than 4,000 in 2021.

How the Carpathian Railway was born

Discussions about the company that will replace CFR Marfă intensified at the beginning of 2023. At that time, the Government was discussing an emergency ordinance, at the proposal of the Ministry of Transport, for the establishment of several companies that would play strategic roles in the region. Among them was Carpatica Feroviar, a company that would have the legal obligation to ensure the strategic transports of the Romanian state.

In October 2024, the Government approved the establishment of the railway freight transport operator Carpatica Feroviar SA The idea was that the new company would gradually replace CFR Marfă, an operator that has declined enormously in the last 20 years. “Carpatica Feroviar SA would carry out activities of strategic interest, but it will also deal with commercial activities”, the official documents from that time showed.

The estimate at that time was that the new company should be operational in 2025 and that it would be a state company, financed from its own sources.

Carpatica Feroviar, led by the former director of CFR Marfă

In March 2025, the director of CFR Marfă, Daniel Apostolache, resigned and it was announced that he would also take over the management of Carpatica Feroviar. Apostolache was director of CFR Marfă for three years and worked in the company since 2004 (he started as an engineer at the revision of Bucuresti Progresu wagons).

In mid-October 2025, the Carpatica Feroviar Romania company announced that it was starting the staff recruitment process,

The first Carpatica Feroviar Romania train ran in December 2025, transporting coal for the Oltenia Energy Complex. The new company then had several dozen employees.