On 9 October, the spokespersons of the Rail Advisory Groups (RAGs) of the nine EU Rail Freight Corridors organised in the UIC ECCO project met for the third time all representatives of the Rail Freight Corridors’ Management Boards (RFCs).

These meetings, initiated by the UIC ECCO project (http://www.uic.org/Corridors#Rail-Freight-Corridors-ECCO) a year ago, are designed to find a pragmatic way forward and agree on an efficient cooperation to progress key issues of harmonisation needed for the development of international rail freight.

On behalf of the Railway Undertakings (RUs), Mr Maieta, Trenitalia Cargo, submitted to the discussion a working document describing the RUs’ short term and medium term vision for the Corridor One Stop Shop (C-OSS) underlining the need for C-OSS to have harmonised processes and to propose the comparable services. RUs stressed the importance to have a single window for their commercial requests.

Mr Hartkopf (DBSR) then explained the RUs’ view point on the international path concept.

The animated but fruitful exchange led to the RFCs’ proposal to involve RUs in their next expert group on C-OSS to investigate in greater detail the requests and constraints of both parties.

RNE, also involved in this meeting, presented the migration plan for their international path booking tool called PCS and informed the meeting about the customer satisfaction survey they run on behalf of the RFCs. The results of the satisfaction survey will be presented in each RAG.

The next meeting of the ECCO-RFC group will take place on 2 and 3 December in Vienna.