European policy on rail freight and military mobility tends to count capacity in the units in which it is funded and mapped. Kilometres of upgraded line, corridors on the trans-European network, grant amounts and the nominal annual throughput of terminals are all easy to aggregate and compare. The capacity a shipper, a logistics operator or an armed force can actually use is a different quantity. A train that can reach the gate of a terminal has not yet been unloaded. Its load units have not yet been placed in a yard with a right to stay there, or moved on by road or rail, and the terminal may not have the cranes, staff, spare parts, energy and information systems that turn a physical installation into a service. Each of these elements is governed by a different instrument: a train path allocated by an infrastructure manager, a contract with a terminal operator, a shunting service, a storage regime, a maintenance framework and, behind all of them, an economic model that has to fund operation and renewal. Investment in rail access can therefore be complete on paper while the logistics capacity it was meant to create remains conditional.