UIC was represented by Marc Guigon, Senior Advisor Passenger Transport, Fabrice Setta, Senior Advisor Information Technologies, Joachim Baars, Timetable Expert.
TRAINOSE was represented by its Commercial Department:
- Commercial Director for Passengers: Theodoros Tolias
- Consultant ( former Commercial Director for Passengers) : Emilia Markopoulou
- Nikolaos Sourtzinos
- Maria Milioni
- Markella Evripioti
- Christina Tega
TRAINOSE was also represented by its IT Department:
- Triantafillos Karayiannis
- Filippos Karapetis
- Kostas Vanikiotis
OSE Infrastructure also participated in the meetings: - Anastasios Lambropoulos
Marc Guigon presented the UIC Passenger Department and the following working groups:
- Technical passenger groups which meet three times a year (TAP-MD, Maintenance and Development, TAG, Ticketing Action Group, REG, Reservation Expert group). TRAINOSE will participate in these technical groups
- CRTS: Commuter and Regional Train Services
- Toprail which is a group dedicated to tourism
- SMGG: Station Managers Global Group, and the Next Station Conference which will be held in Marrakech from 21 – 22 October 2015
- Intercity and High Speed activities, and the High Speed Congress which will be held in Tokyo on 7 – 10 July 2015
- URT, Universal Rail Ticket. TRAINOSE is now implementing e-ticketing, and is very interested to join this working group in order to validate its choices and implementation guidelines.
Marc Guigon then presented the general issues within Merits.
Merits is the central timetable database of UIC with all train data and all station data within wider Europe. This database is shared between all the members of the Merits-Prifis community in order to fill their own journey planners with the aim of providing timetable information and/or selling tickets in another country.
Since the end of 2014, TRAINOSE has been re-operating international passenger trains and wishes to publish its timetable data again in order to be visible in international journey planers (Eurail…).
Fabrice Setta and Joachim Baars then explained:
- The technical details of the Merits tool
- The EDIFACT standard format used to publish the timetable and station data in MERITS
- The MERITS rules and principles needed to be compliant with the MERITS environment
- The MERITS integration process
The session ended with a live training session with the MERITS web tool.
During the training, Trainose uploaded timetables for intercity trains between Thessaloniki and Athens. Six trains in each direction within the Merits system.
TRAINOSE will upload the remaining trains in the following days.
TRAINOSE finds the new Merits a very intuitive tool to use. Service data and stations can be downloaded with the FTP interface provided by the Merits tool.
Nevertheless, the objective of TRAINOSE is to automate the uploading and downloading of timetable and station data.
