On 14 May the Freight Forum (FF) under the chairmanship of Ferdinand Schmidt, head of ÖBB-Technische Services GmbH, held its spring meeting at UIC headquarters in Paris.
The main topic on the agenda was the review of projects for 2015. Among the proposed new projects are: Brake Tests to assess the new calculations of the holding force of the new composite brakes. A study on how Dry Ports can assist corridor developments in the interest of Railway Undertakings and a comparison between the different Dispatching Rules impacting RUs.
In two of the projects, Nicola Lelli, a new advisor in the Freight Department, proposed to certify UIC as an Assessment Body according to new EU regulations and to streamline RU staff Training Rules.
The ongoing projects and finished projects were also discussed, such as Electronic Consignment Note (ECN), Track Access Charges or Efficient Corridors (ECCO) and Lars Deiterding from HaCon presented the freight related Shift2Rail initiatives.
The Special Groups, Study Groups and organisations related to UIC such as CIT and CER presented their activities.
All presentations are available to Freight Forum members on the UIC extranet (https://extranet.uic.org/)
The next meeting dates are:
- 23 – 26 June 2014 Global Rail Freight Conference in Vienna (http://grfc.uic.org/)
- 27 November 2014 Freight Forum in Budapest
