On 6 February 2020, the first meeting of the year of the Commuter and Regional Train Services Working Group was held at the headquarters of BLS in Bern, Switzerland. The meeting was hosted by Hans-Bernhard Fiechter, Head of Offer Planning at BLS and was chaired by Bartłomiej Buczek (PKP SKM), chairman of the group. There were representatives from PKP SKM, BLS, FGC, CIT and SENER. UIC was represented by Marc Guigon, UIC Passenger Director, Vanessa Perez, Senior Passenger Advisor, and Laura Petersen, Senior Security Advisor.
Marc Guigon presented the latest news from the UIC and then the meeting started with a round table with some news from the members.
The focus of the meeting was the work progress on the CRTS Handbook; after an inspirational presentation given by Sandra Dobler from CIT, the group discussed the roadmap for the chapter dedicated to legal issues.
The second part of the meeting focused on the chapter dedicated to “safety and security”. After a presentation delivered by the Security team from BLS about the main challenges they face in their daily business, Laura Petersen, UIC Security Department, gave a presentation focused on the future trends and solutions regarding security. The members overviewed the chapter provided input and validated the contents of the final draft.
The meeting concluded with a discussion on the forthcoming activities of the group and the plans for cooperation with other bodies in the rail and transport sectors, as well as the next three years of activity focusing on digitalisation, multimodality, mobility as a service (MaaS) and customer communication.
UIC CRTS Handbook
The UIC CRTS working group is developing a Handbook to provide an overview on best practice regarding Commuter and Regional Train Services on a global scale.
A survey has been designed to focus on the most important strategic issues and to understand the different ways of dealing with them depending on the different framework and network conditions.
If you are interested in participating, it will take you about 10 minutes to answer this survey. Please consult it here: https://bit.ly/2P2xFJO
This group is open to all UIC members, so do not hesitate to contact us should you wish to participate. The next CRTS meeting will be held on 9 June in Warsaw, kindly hosted by PKP.
