On 17 November the ECCO members (spokespersons of the Rail Advisory Groups (RAGs) or their designated representative) met the representatives of the 9 Rail Freight Corridors Management Boards (RFCs). The meeting welcomed around 30 participants.

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. RUs are convinced that if a close collaboration with RFCs takes place at an early enough stage, processes meeting the expectations and constraints of both parties can be developed more easily.

The focus of the meeting was placed on the following issues:

Cross Border Interoperability: for which an overview of applicable rules at the border points of the 9 RFCs is being developed

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) proposed by ECCO in previous meetings and for which the feedback from RNE was given in terms of implementation feasibility

The RNE led satisfaction survey: despite the general acknowledgement that the questionnaire and survey process had improved compared to previous editions, RUs were informed that the number of responses is still relatively low. In order to improve this, RNE asked the RFCs to get feedback from their customers at the next RAG/TAG meetings

Transport Market Study and the proposed next steps in order to have a harmonised approach to corridors

The Sector Statement list of priority actions: for which the ECCO group offered its collaboration to progress the KPI issue in the light of its work which served as a basis for the discussions on KPI in the RU Dialogue sub group on freight

The RU-IM Convention on timetabling, an initiative led by the UIC-CER Freight CEO Task Force and aiming at developing, together with Infrastructure Managers, a set of 8 guiding principles for their collaboration

The next meeting will take place in Paris, in June 2017.