The European Performance Regime, the EPR project, initiated by RailNetEurope (RNE) and the International Union of Railways (UIC), stipulates that a Performance Regime should be implemented throughout the network within each member state. Whereas the EU directive applies to the traffic within a network, it was considered opportune to develop a performance regime for international trains. The final goal of the EPR is to stimulate the activity of infrastructure managers to increase the benefit of end customers.
The EPR project aims at improving the quality and punctuality of international railway services. The project was initiated with the objective to design a performance regime which could be used both for international and national traffic allowing a network to apply only one performance network in its territory. The EPR should be build on the delay minutes of international train runs along corridors monitored by the RNE Europtirails IT-tool and the EPR system should be fair, transparent and without excessive administrative burden. EPR was designed to be an incentive scheme to induce quality improvements and not a compensation system of damages caused by delays. In 2007 several freight and passenger railway operators joined the project and consolidated the integrated approach of infrastructure managers and railway operators. In order to analyse, in real situation, the data quality and transfer between the national monitoring systems and the Europtirails, three test-runs were organised along international corridors, namely Antwerp-Basle, Rotterdam-Milan and Verona-Munich, on a total of 1,300 passenger and 1,500 freight trains. In 2008, a second set of 7 test liaisons including 974 freight and 820 passenger trains was conducted to consolidate the previous test results.
In 2008 a Memorandum of Understanding on the EPR development was signed by many UIC and RNE members and in March 2009 UIC called for volunteering companies along the Europtirails corridors to start the preparations for the EPR Pilot Application. The following companies volunteered to be part of the EPR Early Implementers Group and agreed to start the Pilot Application in May 2010: ÖBB + RCA (Austria), Infrabel (Belgium), RFF + SNCF (France), DB Netz + DB Schenker (Germany), RFI + Trenitalia (Italy), Prorail (the Netherlands) and SBB + BLS(Switzerland). The EPR project team, including RNE and UIC members, has worked within the EPR working groups to define the Commercial, Operational, Legal/Contractual and finally the IT components. The components have been worked out in close collaboration with RNE who will be in charge of the concrete deployment of the ERP scheme. The described EPR components will be now tested during the pilot application and necessary improvements will be made during or after the pilot application. The provision of the contracted timetables by infrastructure managers and railway operators in due format and time frame is crucial to EPR as these timetables create the foundation / reference value to any delay monitoring. Whereas the long-term goal is to integrate the agreed operational timetables as far as possible into the EPR scheme, only trains with contracted timetables can be tested during the pilot application. Another cornerstone for EPR is the provision of the coherent train numbers with the timetables. A cross-reference table has been created to recognise the correlation between the different operational train numbers from national and the international train reference numbers specified by RNE. The EPR needs to include at least the origin, border stations, RU-RU handover points and destination of the train run, as well as the relevant points along the corridors, such as major passenger stations. When the big stations don’t dispose of measuring points with automatic data, the delays can be measured with a “master station” concept enabling the integration of trains. The validation of the delay responsibility between the infrastructure manager and the railway operators is done normally at national level. However, in the absence of national validation systems, this may be done also at international level if so required / decided. All delay codification and modification for national delays are executed only in national systems and will be sent subsequently to Europtirails. The international validation of cross-border delays will be done in a web-based EPR tool which will also display all proposed delay codes for the entire train run and the information will be sent to interested parties.
Specific EPR IT applications and associated functions need to be developed by RNE in relation to the definition of future EPR measuring points, validation of delay responsibilities, performance reports etc. Specific quality reports on data provision will be introduced by RNE which will endeavour to proactively help the infrastructure managers to fulfil the EPR data requirements.
by Pamela Luică
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