On 9 April the Freight Forum Plenary 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 resigned from his post as chairman of the Freight Forum as he had taken over new responsibilities in the ÖBB group. Jean-Pierre Loubinoux announced the nomination of Reinhard Bamberger, member of the Management Board of Rail Cargo Austria, and added that he was personally very pleased with this application, which will be submitted for approval at the next General Assembly. The meeting was chaired by the new UIC Freight Director Hans Günther Kersten. In his report Hans Günther Kersten put special emphasis on the goal to improve the market share of rail on the Euro-Asian rail freight corridors. This goal and the huge business potential on these corridors were also subject of a presentation by Roman Rebets, UIC Freight Department.

Nicola Lelli, UIC Freight Department, presented new project ideas for 2016. Based on the feedback from members, some of the ideas (for the European Region) will be further developed and presented at the European Region’s New Projects Workshop on 21 May at UIC in Paris.

Besides the new projects, the Forum was also informed about the ongoing ones, such as ECCO (Efficient Corridor Organisation), CIDROC (Compare International Dispatching Rules on Corridors), both successfully managed by Senior Freight Adviser Sandra Géhénot from UIC.

The study groups and special groups raised some of their issues:

• The Wagon Users Study Group (chairman: Nicolas Czernecki, SNCF, secretary: Bernard Schmidt, UIC) 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 (chairman: Roland Hartkopf, DB Schenker, secretary: Sandra Géhénot, UIC....) presented the 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 (chairman: Éric Lambert, secretary: Sandra Géhénot, UIC) announced the publication of the biennial “2014 Report on Combined Transport in Europe” (http://www.uic.org/spip.php?article3386).

Next meeting date (subject to approval by the new chairman):

• 26 November 2015, Freight Forum (Paris, UIC)

All presentations are available on the UIC extranet.