The text studies the interactions between railway network and dynamics of settlement, demographic change and urban growth in the long term. The european state of the art discusses this polifacetic link, and, hence, avoid any determinist approach. If the construction of the railway network went hand-in-hand with the urban changes since the 19th century, territorial articulation changed several times, due to car competitiveness and to high speed rail’s expansion throughout Europe. The results of the retrospective analysis are confronted to recent litterature which articulate sociodemographic tendencies (like growing precarity and population aging) with territorial scenarios to enhance and territorialize railway performance indicators.