Ensuring the right priority for freight trains and improving intermodality along corridors have been two of the objectives for which railway operators have been militating over the past years. A law supporting their objectives was drafted in 2010, “The European railway network for competitive freight”. We all know the goal: reducing traffic congestion by setting international freight corridors managed by cross-border infrastructure authorities, as well as “the one-stop shops” for the allocation of routes.
But the establishment of these one-stop shops is one of the points that operators don’t really agree with. Until now, neither the forums, nor the European Parliament, the EU Council and the European Union have managed to give a final verdict.
Railway freight traffic has been facing difficulties for over 30 years from different reasons: industrial challenges, construction of highways and new logistics demands from the undertakings. The rather weak progress of the railway freight transport so far are caused by various factors, such as the weak competition development and interoperability, but also the lack of capacity in terms of a reliable and quality infrastructure dedicated to international freight transport.
“Introducing completely new one-stop shops to handle customer requests for paths on international rail freight corridors adds a completely unnecessary administration layer. Even worse, parliamentarians are mandating the use of complicated and expensive IT systems, which do not correspond to any market demand. If such systems are put in place, it will cost the railways millions of Euros in development, migration and maintenance to absolutely no avail”, declared for Railway PRO last year ex-CER Executive Director Johannes Ludewig. Competition between the different infrastructure managers has to be encouraged. Regulation 913/2010 stipulates that “to facilitate infrastructure capacity demands for international railway freight services, it is necessary to name or set up a one-stop shop for each freight transport corridor”.
The resort to a one-stop-shop for all undertakings requesting an international path should not be made compulsory. The traditional way to request paths via each national infrastructure managers or via one lead-infrastructure-manager should be kept at least as a fall-back solution in case the one-stop-shop fails.
“The One-Stop-Shop is a technical body, set up by the Management Board of a rail freight corridor. Its primary role is to provide information to applicants, to receive and answer capacity requests and to allocate the dedicated capacity on the corridor (pre-arranged train paths and ad-hoc capacity). Thus the One-Stop-Shop will help to make the application process for international train paths smoother than today”, declared for Railway Pro sources from DG MOVE.
However, achieving continuity along the corridors will be a process which will take some time. The users of the corridors – which already act on a European transport market where borders have largely disappeared – will for sure be a driving force in this process.
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