On 28 September the Freight Steering Committee held its second meeting of the year. UIC Director General Jean-Pierre Loubinoux opened the meeting and introduced Reinhard Bamberger from RCA as new chairman of the Freight Forum and – in accordance with CER – of the High Level Freight Meeting (HLFM). Dimitry Verbov from RZD will be the new vice chairman of the Freight Forum.
The issues discussed were as follows:
- CEO Task Force, created by the HLFM last May to tackle the most important issues freight is currently facing in Europe
- Results from the Opt-in Process concerning proposals for freight projects
- Cooperation UIC – UIRR on loading rules
- Announcement of the next Global Rail Freight Conference in Rotterdam (22 – 24 June 2016)
- News from our partner organisations CIT and CER
The project managers reported on the progress of on-going projects:
- ECCO (Sandra Géhénot)
- eRail Freight (Patrick Mantell)
- Energy recovery (Nicola Lelli)
- Automatic Coupling (Nicola Lelli)
- Last Mile GIS (Patrick Mantell)
Status reports on issues from the Freight Study Groups and Special Groups:
- Study Group Wagon Users (Nicola Czernecki)
- Combined Transport Group (Éric Lambert)
- Study Group Operation (Andreas Althoff)
- ATTI (Bernard Schmitt)
- Global Team of Experts (Roman Rebets)
The Freight Forum Plenary will take place on 28 October in Budapest and for the first time will be also open to the GA Assistants of the UIC General Assembly so as to enable the latter to obtain first hand information about all relevant current freight topics.
