With a view to strengthening the Railway Undertakings’ (RU) message in the corridor structures as foreseen by Regulation (EU) n°913/2010, UIC initiated a project last spring designed to streamline processes across all railway undertakings and across all corridors.
The following Railway Undertakings, DB Schenker Rail, BLS, FS/Trenitalia, SNCF, CFL multimodal, Captrain, Rail Cargo Austria, Rail Cargo Hungaria, B Logistics, SBB, CP, PKP, in cooperation with UIC, are now pleased to present the “Requirements of Railway Undertakings for the Implementation of European Rail Freight Corridors” (RFCs).
The document can be seen as a list of priority topics on which progress needs to be made on all corridors:
- Transport market studies
- Infrastructure bottlenecks
- Regulatory and operational interoperability
- Coordination of infrastructure works
- Traffic management procedures
- Use of Path Coordination System
- Definition and role of the one stop shop
- Organisational issues
- Train parameters
- Harmonised corridor document
- Harmonised parameters of access charges
- Easily accessible corridor websites
These topics are analysed in terms of their importance for developing rail freight traffic and implementation proposals are identified for each. They can be subdivided into three categories:
- The need for better cooperation between the Infrastructure Managers (IM) and Railway Undertakings (RU), to ensure that in-depth understanding and knowledge that RUs have of the logistics industry and end-user customers is sufficiently taken into account.
- Better cooperation between IMs along and across all RFCs to ensure seamless transport along the entire RFC networks, with other RFCs, and along feeder and parallel/diversionary routes.
- Cross border harmonisation of technical, operational and administrative processes, procedures and systems along and across all RFCs including diversionary routes, with a mechanism to ensure that best practice and lessons learned are exchanged on a regular basis.
RUs recommend that the items identified be implemented through greater involvement of RUs at the Management Boards and the establishment of working groups dealing with specific topics involving RUs and IMs.
The overall objective of the RFCs is to increase rail freight’s market share of European freight transport by providing a network with conditions of use to allow RUs’ freight trains to run reliably and seamlessly across borders. Failure to make progress in these topics will have an impact on rail’s costs and performance, the two most important factors on modal choice.
The brochure is available here: http://www.uic.org/spip.php?article3239
