The members of the working group of the UIC project “Lasting Infrastructure Cost Benchmarking” (LICB) will meet on Wednesday, 27 May in Paris to discuss and to further specify their work programme for the next six months.

Besides the continuous benchmarking of normalised annual expenditures for maintenance and renewal of the state railway infrastructure, further in-depth analyses are on the agenda to better understand and to explain remaining cost differences among the countries. The impact of heavy maintenance activities as well as the traffic mix (passenger and freight) on track asset lifetimes will be analysed to identify individual steady state track renewal rates. These will be matched with current renewal rates to explain different levels of renewal expenditures to the infrastructure managers.

A detailed analysis of train affecting infrastructure failures will focus on switches and crossings as well as on the signalling system, as those are the most vulnerable asset groups within railway infrastructure. Asset utilisation, failure rates and expenditures will be compared in order to identify patterns and possible correlations.

The results of LICB will be used by the participating railways to identify their own position within the international context, to identify and exchange good practice in order to improve their individual performance.