Across Europe, railway undertakings and operators are facing severe capacity restrictions to infrastructure due to growing combination of last-minute changes to closure of lines, lack or low quality of alternative routes, simultaneous works and poor cross-border coordination. The result is an interrupted rail network that is becoming increasingly difficult to operate reliably and increasingly difficult for customers to trust. This is no longer an operational problem for railway undertakings. It is a threat to European supply chains, industrial competitiveness, the Single Market and Europe's ambition to shift freight from road to rail. Europe needs to act now!
ERFA proposes four Actions which will determine whether customers will be using rail tomorrow!
There is an urgent need to consider the users of the network, especially at this time of the year, where closures and restrictions are even more numerous (see non-exhaustive list of recent closures in ANNEX and represented with red signs on the MAP of the TEN-T network above). (....)