The kick-off meeting for the UIC Resilient Railways facing Climate Change: Heavy Rains (ReRa-Rain) project was held online on 5 April via Teams, with 15 participants from Adif, IP, PKP, NR, RFI, SBB, SNCF, Sydney Trains and UIC. 8 of the 11 members participating in the project were represented at the meeting.
The members of the UIC project management team (PMT) leading the meeting were:
- Mercedes Gutiérrez, Head of AM, Infrastructure & Interfaces with Rolling Stock
- Frédéric Hénon, Head of Operations & Safety
- Lucie Anderton, Head of Sustainable Development
- Ignacio Presa, Intern
The kick-off meeting was opened by Mercedes Gutiérrez. After a brief introduction of all the members attending the meeting, Mercedes presented the project itself, explaining the background, overview and preliminary objectives.
Ignacio Presa then presented the results of the preliminary questionnaire sent to each member, the objective being to better define the starting point for the project and members’ expectations, among others.
Finally, time was set aside for questions and answers and the next steps to be taken were established as the final agenda item.
ReRa-Rain is a UIC initiative. For the coming period 2022-2025, the objective is to examine the resilience of our railway infrastructure, leading the way in adapting to extreme weather conditions and climate change by carrying out the following actions as a minimum:
- Identifying and assessing the vulnerabilities we face, planning how to manage them and describing adaptive or resilient solutions;
- Assessing rail subsystems affected by heavy rain, analysing landslips and geotechnical problems, infrastructure issues and potential damage to signalling and communications equipment;
- Studying and quantifying delays in the operation and temporary closure of lines due to heavy rain;
- Producing scenarios to focus actions;
- Identifying use cases whereby railway infrastructure helps the environment to better face extreme weather conditions.
