Capacity4Rail

To face the future challenge of increasing traffic and make the railway system more attractive and competitive, a step change will be needed to guarantee an adaptable system, offering a high operational capacity with high reliability and resilience to hazards. This step change will only be achieved through a global and combined optimization of the infrastructure, of the operation and of the vehicle performances.

CAPACITY4RAIL aims at paving the way for the future railway system, delivering coherent, demonstrated, innovative and sustainable solutions for track design, freight systems, operation and advanced monitoring With a comprehensive system vision, it will contribute to the development of guidance documents identifying further actions to be undertaken and the future technologies and systems to be developed.

It will give the demonstration that step change in railway infrastructure and operations may be achieved within the constraints of the need to maintain railway services while the work is being performed.

By nature, and as requested by the European Commission, CAPACITY4RAIL is directly supporting the E.C. White Paper. It will highly contribute to the development and definition of European Standards, future regulations, and European Research policy and will allow a high degree of interoperability.

CAPACIT4RAIL is also an invaluable introduction and pathfinder to the Shift²Rail Initiative.

With a limited financial input, UIC members will benefit from the high value of the scientific outputs and the technical development of this 15 M€ project, likely to generate further cost cuts in investments, maintenance, operations as well as an increase of the attractiveness and market share of the train freight business.