The Statistics Steering Committee held its autumn meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, on 24 – 25 October 2018 at the invitation of Czech infrastructure manager SŽDC.
The Committee is an executive body of the Statistics group, which develops appropriate methodologies and terminology for the harmonisation of railway statistics and collects data from member companies, calculates basic indicators and disseminates such data. These harmonisation efforts facilitate availability and international comparability of comprehensive and reliable railway statistics.
The Chairman of the Statistics group gave a welcome speech, which included information on the historical evolution of railways in the country, the reform of both the rail market and state railway company and a chronological time series of key indicators.
The Committee assessed and evaluated the pre-production phase of the key project “Improvement of RAILISA” (Rail Information System and Analysis). A further important element of the meeting involved brainstorming on the UIC Economic Footprint study developed by UIC’s Data, Economics and Statistics unit. The project will underline the societal importance of the railways.
The Committee revised and updated both financial and non-financial indicators used for benchmarking of member companies based on the statistical data gathered. It noted good progress in relation to a project to upload the Statistics Glossary (former UIC Code 390-1) into RailLexic. RailLexic is UIC’s terminology database and the leading reference in the field of multilingual railway terminology. The database contains approximately 16,000 terms in 23 languages. This project is a further contribution to harmonisation of terminology within UIC.
The Committee co-operates with statistical experts within other international organisations. During the meeting, it assessed the progress of the work of UNECE on the revision of the UNECE/ITF/Eurostat Glossary for Transport Statistics.
Within the scope of initiatives to harmonise reporting within the railway sector, the Committee discussed the “Key Performance Indicators for performance benchmarking” project developed by PRIME (Platform of Railway Infrastructure Managers in Europe).
The Committee also proposed, discussed and approved the agenda of the forthcoming plenary meeting of the Statistics group to be held at UIC premises on 22 November 2018.
As a complement to the meeting, SŽDC organised an excursion to the unique central dispatching centre in Prague for the Committee members. The centre was constructed for remote traffic management on 2,200 km of line in Bohemia and currently dispatches trains on 300 km of main lines.
For information on Railisa, please visit http://uic-stats.uic.org/ and send any comments to stat at uic.org
UIC members are invited to continue to provide data using our online tool: http://stats.uic.org/
