These directives claim to ensure high levels of safety and interoperability for rail business across Europe.

The second railway package had to be transposed into national legislation before 30 April 2006. The 10 countries failing to notify the Commission of their transposition of the two directives (2004/49 and 2004/50) are Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Slovenia and the Slovak Republic. These Member States failed to respond to the Commission's reasoned opinion sent in October 2006, therefore the Commission has decided to take the case before the European Court of Justice.

Directive 2004/49/EC on railway safety aims at strengthening rail safety by ensuring full transparency in relation to safety procedures in force. It lays down a procedure for granting the safety certificates, which every railway company must obtain before it can run trains on the European network. The objective is to gradually bring the national safety systems to the highest common European standards, which would be set by the Commission after preparatory work carried out by the European Railway Agency at the technical level. It also requires Member States to set up an independent safety authority and an accident investigation body for rail transport.

Directive 2004/50/EC updates legislation already in force on the technical interoperability, which is needed in order to operate cross-border services and cut rolling stock costs on the high-speed network. The Directives allows for a change in working methods so that faster progress can be made on interoperability also on the conventional network. Geographically, interoperability will be extended to the entire open rail network of the European Union.