Mr Jean-Pierre Loubinoux, Director General of UIC, welcomed the members present at the meeting of the Rail System Forum on 24 October at UIC in Paris. He stressed the importance of occasions such as these to discuss future projects and activities.

Mr Loubinoux highlighted that the results of the projects in the years to come were good overall considering the portfolio of ongoing projects, the response for the new opt-in projects and in addition the positive results of the calls in answer to projects financed by other external programmes. He added that the responses for new projects had not yet all been received and that this situation made it difficult to evaluate the share of each member.

He mentioned that the sudden departure of members from ongoing projects or activities creates a very difficult situation for UIC to distribute the remaining project work among the other members, and that this should not be happening according to the principles governing UIC’s work.

Mr Loubinoux also mentioned the importance of the FRMCS project, which is the most important project for the next 20 years to come in the improvement of telecom and signalling input following GSM-R.

He mentioned a number of activities considered significant among the work of the Rail System Forum and highlighted that the Save the Date for the Global Signalling Conference in Milan next March had already been announced, inviting members to register quickly for this important conference in 2018.