Mr Jean-Pierre Loubinoux said:

It is my pleasure and true honour to address this ISO General Assembly in this prestigious great hall in Beijing.

I represent UIC, which is the world association of the railway operating community.

In a few figures, UIC is 200 members in 100 countries, one million kilometres of rail lines, and seven million railway men and women working to help serve the mobility of seven billion people on earth. UIC is also on average 85 conferences every year in 50 cities.
Our values our Unity, Solidarity and Universality. Our philosophy is to share, open and connect.
This is why we are not working alone and we are developing many synergies with other international associations and bodies. We cooperate as you can see with 100 partner institutions, among which the most important is our consultative status at the UN – ECOSOC, and my personal role as member of the High-Level Group on Sustainable Transport and Advisor to the Secretary-General of the UN.

Since its creation in 1922 UIC has been and is primarily a technical and business platform developing for and with its members and partners from the industry specifications, technical documents and processes, which are all international solutions for operation, design, construction, maintenance, management, commercial services of the railway system.

UIC has also been a pioneer in the domains of railway research and innovation across the world, and the promotion of four fundamental values: safety, security, sustainability and the transmission of knowledge of good and best practices to younger generations.

As I said, we are not doing this alone, and I’m happy to say here how precious our open and sincere collaboration is with some of the technical committees of ISO, in particular TC269.
UIC, through its members, is present in 23 technical committees or working groups, with an effective contribution through a liaison A. This collaboration for UIC is pragmatic complementarity between different stakeholders. This is already demonstrated through the interesting work performed through the cooperation agreements that we signed back in June 2014 with IEC, mainly in rolling stock and energy functionalities today.

This complementarity between the user requirements of the system and its components, between the processes and the products, can bring added value and optimisation of time and resources, therefore avoiding useless duplication or potential misunderstandings.

We are looking for a “win-win” approach, so that operating solutions are preserving safety, security and productivity, and are combining the standards developed by ISO or other standardisation bodies – and this in a comprehensive and coherent way, and above all in the ultimate interest of the customers.
I will therefore be very happy to see the experts from UIC and its members cooperate and work within TC269 and vice versa, in order to prepare and combine future UIC processes and ISO standards, in the domain of railways and according to our respective roles and expertise.

This is my wish and that of the UIC members of course, some of whom are common members of UIC and ISO, to develop this partnership further. We have, for instance, identified other topics addressed within TC269 or other technical committees of mutual and topical interest such as asset management and a common framework to include environmental issues in the procurement processes; such as the management of energy for international traffic or power related information protocols; such as the standardisation of processes in the domain of security or cyber-security with the Internet of Things; for prevention and precaution or for investigations.

These are just a few examples to illustrate our goodwill and our determination to share, open and connect with you. And I am happy to confirm that in the spirit of reciprocity, and in our agreement to cooperate, I am in my turn inviting the President of ISO, Dr Tong, to be our guest at the UIC General Assembly on the 1 December in Saint-Petersburg – probably in a climate of -30 instead of +30 degrees, but we certainly will have, and share, the same heat in our hearts.