From 20 – 21 November 2013, UIC organised a regional meeting in Vilnius, on the subject of Merits.
Merits is the central timetable database of UIC with all train data and all station data within wider Europe, including Russia and Turkey.
UIC was represented by Marc Guigon and Joachim Baars. The railway undertakings which attended this meeting were Lithuanian and Latvian national railways (LG and LDz).
The principal aim of this meeting is to enable the representative of the railways to work with the new Merits system in order to send and receive timetable data in the central database.

Marc Guigon presented

• An aspect of the TAP-TSI project, explaining the future organisation and the decisions taken within the last Commercial and Distribution forum of October 2013
• The points which are to be respected to provide Merits data to third parties, in accordance with the Merits Memorandum of Understanding
• The main differences between the old and new Merits system
• The adaptations of the Merits system to be compliant with the European TAP Regulation. So the Merits community will be able to fulfil the demands of Europe. These adaptations will be done in two phases. The first one can be developed now (filter data by RU…). The second one will be developed when the TAP-TSI governance will be in place (connection with the registry and the Retail Reference Data)
• The new members of the Merits community

Joachim Baars presented

• Principles and rules of Merits. The main object of the system is to integrate international train data
• Implementation of the rules by the new Merits system with a completely new process to integrate data based on border stations and train numbers. Integration of the complete European train data takes about four hours (three days in the old system) without any more manual interference. Thus, it is possible to perform the integration and export the integrated data every week for all the participants without additional cost
• Application of the new system by the Railway Undertakings LG and LDz by using the possibility of editing data in the central server by using a web based interface.

This meeting facilitated the data exchange between the participating railways and the central database, through training on all the possibilities of the new system.