Among the messages delivered by the different speakers during the UIC Global Rail Freight Conference held in Rotterdam end of June, several ones can be kept in mind:

• Rail freight actors and stakeholders must think of the future of railways as a whole network and not only corridor by corridor: in this context, it is important to have both administrative and technical harmonisation, to continue to develop interoperability and facilitate cross-border operations, but also to have adapted regulations, to create a favourable legal and tax scheme to reduce the cost burden;
• Rail freight actors and stakeholders should not forget the key player: customers of this business who play a crucial role. If they take into account expectations from the market: regularity / reliability; if they develop more door to door solutions and adapted services in connection with customer needs, with the dimension of flexibility and price stability - not so bad in rail, adapted equipment, developing safe transport, based on operation excellence. If all these aspects are regrouped, “there is room for rail between air and sea if we can match the market requirement”;
• Rail freight actors and stakeholders have all the reasons to remain optimistic; there is still progress to make as the present business model is at risk. But digitalization offers opportunities and thanks to “new blood” and the introduction of young skilled people to new technologies and to new mobility, perspectives offer a great future to re-invent railways through new generations, characterised by digital skills, customer obsession, able to act with flexibility, accepting job mobility, new organisational models, procedures, processes.
• Rail freight actors and stakeholders finally have to continue their common efforts to improve the image of the sector, which is not what it should be.

Six take-away messages to keep in mind for the next Global Rail Freight Conference:

• Customers: without them, rail freight has no prospect for development;
• Corridors: they have become a self-evident fact shared by all organisations with TEN-T Days, not only in Europe but at a global, transcontinental level, including East-West and North-South connections; services will make the difference; we have come from vision to reality, we must go from policies to business cases;
• Centres: it was already the message in the GRFC organised in Vienna in 2014 and it becomes a reality: more and more logistics hubs are created, as interfaces which offer capacity to maximise loads and they offer possibility of added value services;
• Complementarity: rail is not at all, but the backbone of a new transportation mix that can also be fed and de-fed (example of the incubator of the Port of Rotterdam); partnership with shipping is progressing and Rotterdam was the best symbolic choice to share this evidence;
• Collaboration between all stakeholders, between associations and organisations, between shippers, forwarders, operators and major owners to better harmonise, to improve interoperability or legal aspects with common continental framework (through the General Contract of Use for Wagons (GCU) for example);
• Creative connectivity to boost innovation, to take best advantage of digitalisation and the introduction of very concrete ideas, respecting intrinsic drivers of railways such as safety, security, sustainability

The same week, end of June, Ministers from 22 European Union Member States and over 2,800 transport experts and CEOs joined the 2016 edition of the high-level transport conference “TEN-T Days” in Rotterdam. This edition covered the development, implementation and financing of the Trans-European Transport Network, with a particular focus on the Commission’s Investment Plan for Europe .

The Commission was represented by Vice-President for Energy Union Maroš Šefčovič, Vice-President for Jobs, Growth, Investment and Competitiveness Jyrki Katainen, Commissioner for Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn, and EU Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc.

Commissioner Bulc said, “Only days after we allocated €6.7 billion to priority projects as part of the Connecting Europe Facility, the TEN-T Days offer another opportunity to mobilise funding for transport investments. Implementing the Trans-European
Transport is not only about building new infrastructure, it also serves our broader objectives such as the decarbonisation and digitalisation of transport.”

UIC participated in these Ten-T Days and was pleased to follow these discussions by organising in the same place the UIC Global Rail Freight Conference.