On 19 February the Freight Steering Committee held its first meeting of the year. UIC Director General Jean-Pierre Loubinoux opened the meeting and welcomed the participants. He informed them that Ferdinand Schmidt had retired from his post as chairman of the Freight Forum and Freight Steering Committee. The meeting was chaired by the new UIC Freight Director Hans Günther Kersten. The Director General and the Freight Director warmly thanked both the former chairman and the former Freight Director Miklós Kopp for their work.
The meeting started with a project presentation of HRMS (Harmonisation – Running Behaviour and Noise on Measurement Sites) of the Rail System Department. This project foresees the use of RFID tags on wagons, which would have an impact on Freight RUs.
Nicola Lelli presented new project ideas for 2016. Depending on the feedback of the Freight Steering Committee members some of these ideas will be further developed.
New and ongoing projects were presented and discussed:
• Destiny Project
• Workshop on Railway Theft
• ECCO (Efficient Corridor Organisation)
• CIDROC (Compare International Dispatching Rules on Corridors)
• Transcontinental corridors
• Last Mile GIS
• Automatic Coupling
• Energy Recovery
The study groups and special groups brought up some of their issues:
• The Wagon Users Study Group mentioned the ongoing discussion on liability rules of the GCU and the budget extension for the upgrade of the Coreda database (Wagon Commercial Responsibility Database).
• Study Group Operation revealed first preliminary results on the parking brake force tests, which confirmed the better brake performance of composite brake blocks than calculated in the RP44 recommendations.
• Combined Transport Group announced the publication of the biennial "Study on Infrastructure Capacity Reserves for Combined Transport by 2015”.
Next meeting dates:
• 9 April 2015, Freight Forum (Paris, UIC)
• 8 October 2015, Steering Committee (Paris, UIC)
• 26 November 2015, Freight Forum (Paris, UIC)
All presentations are available on the UIC extranet.
