EUROPE: The European Rail Freight Association has called for the sector to get the same strategic approach and level of attention as high speed rail, pointing out that the European Commission’s recently-published proposals to accelerate the development of a pan-European high speed rail network ‘barely mentioned’ freight.
‘Issues faced by high speed [rail] and rail freight are closely interlinked and should not be addressed in a silo approach, but rather with equal importance’, ERFA President Dirk Stahl said on November 13. ‘For instance, removing national rules, financing ERTMS and issuing vehicle authorisation in an efficient way thanks to an adequately funded European Railway Agency will benefit high speed and rail freight.’
ERFA said the Commission’s Connecting Europe through High-Speed Rail document published on November 5 only directly mentions freight when referring to the additional capacity that high speed lines would free up on parallel conventional lines, and in the context of the Capacity Regulation that will help to optimise train path allocation including cross-border requests.
ERFA said these are important topics, but the plan ignores other challenges that impact both high speed and freight operations, and so its aim is to ‘make sure the voice of private and independent rail freight companies is being heard‘.
The plan says that a lack of co-ordination between national approaches has led to the cost of ERTMS products doubling in the last five years. ERFA said a revision of the European deployment plan should include binding targets as well as a new governance architecture to ensure that a single, stable version with backward compatibility will be deployed EU-wide as a standard.
The plan mentioned the need for EU member states to set track access charges in a way that encourages full and optimal use of the network. ERFA said this is of key importance to the freight sector, and is need to ensure that cross-border projects currently being built such as Rail Baltica, Lyon – Torino and the Fehmarn Belt fixed link are useful for all traffic.
