According to the European Commission, at the moment, there are over 11,000 national technical and security norms in the European Union. The European Railway Agency (ERA) currently has a regulatory responsibility being tasked with drafting the minimum interoperability standards in order to reduce this multitude of national norms and to permit the safe and seamless traffic of trains. The European Union has to contribute to creating and developing the Trans-European transport networks. In order to meet these objectives, the Union has to take all necessary measures to ensure the interoperability of networks especially in the harmonisation of technical standards. The pursuit of interoperability within the Union’s rail system should lead to the definition of an optimal level of technical harmonisation and make it possible to facilitate, improve and develop international rail transport services within the Union and with third countries and contribute to the progressive creation of the internal market in equipment and services for the construction, renewal, upgrading and operation of the rail system within the Union.
In order to continue efforts to establish a single market for rail transport services, it is necessary to establish a common regulatory framework for railway safety. Member States have until now developed their safety rules and standards mainly on national lines, based on national technical and operational concepts. Simultaneously, differences in principles, approach and culture have made it difficult to break through the technical barriers and establish international transport operations.
The simplification of procedures and technical harmonisation are prerequisites for the creation of a single European railway area and opening up competition in the sector. Interoperability is also a sine qua non for improving cross-border rail transport, which is essential for the territorial cohesion of the European Union. The authorisation for placing vehicles in service is issued by each national safety authority (NSA) on its national territory. There are major differences in how these authorities conduct the vehicle authorisation and safety certification procedures, and the procedures are often long and expensive. Available figures show that the costs of authorisation procedures can be up to 10% of the cost of locomotives by country. If these are used in three member states, the total costs can reach around 30%.
“The railway environment in the European Union has been undergoing profound changes, triggered inter alia by the three Union Railway Packages adopted since the early 1990s. The gradual creation of the single European railway area is characterised by a multiplication of actors, increased recourse to subcontractors and more frequent market entries. In this context of higher complexity, rail safety is critically dependent on the interaction between all players, namely railway undertakings, infrastructure managers, the railway industry and safety authorities. Safety legislation should take account of these developments and put in place appropriate information, management and emergency procedures and tools”, states a report of the Committee for Transport and Tourism within the European Parliament, published in June 2013.
Given the subsisting differences between safety requirements, which affect the optimal functioning of rail transport in the Union, it is of particular importance to continue the process of harmonising operational and safety rules as well as the rules on the investigation of accidents, the same report mentions.
Safety is critically dependent on the interaction between rail infrastructure, operations, manufacturers and safety authorities. Thus, appropriate tools should be used and developed in order to ensure and develop safety.
The intensity of cooperation between manufacturers, maintenance suppliers and railway undertakings has decreased over past decades. Therefore, it is necessary to harmonise the minimum maintenance intervals and quality requirements to ensure the safety of the entire rail system.
The Commission proposal has been called “revolutionary”. The Commission does in fact wish to do away with the authorisation for placing in service, retaining only the notion of “placing on the market” and leaving the railway undertaking (RU) responsible for the placing in service and running of the train. The measure is, of course, beneficial and will definitely increase railway safety and interoperability.
Another innovation is that the Commission wishes to give the Agency “operational” responsibility in addition to its “normative” responsibility: it would be the Agency that issued the “placing on the market authorisations” after collecting the certificates proving that the stock is in conformity.
According to the proposals for the recast of the Directive on railway safety, national rules, which are often based on national technical standards, are gradually being replaced by rules based on common standards, established by Common safety targets – CSTs, Common Safety Methods – CSMs and technical specifications for interoperability (TSIs). In order to eliminate the obstacles to interoperability, the amount of national rules should be reduced as a consequence of extending the scope of the TSIs to the whole Union’s rail system and of closing open points in the TSIs. For this purpose the Member States should keep their system of national rules updated, delete obsolete rules and thereof inform the Commission and the European Railway Agency.
The revision of the Railway Safety Directive is also an opportunity to adapt the text to take into account the evolution of the railway market where new professional actors or entities have been created. Extremely negative and unsought experiences from severe railway accidents show that these actors may assume important responsibilities in matter of safety. In the past, the vertically integrated railway undertakings were able to control internally the quality of all processes, such as the maintenance of rolling stock or loading operations. The present trend of outsourcing activities or services is leading to the emergence of new actors subject to increasing economic and financial pressure, while internal control is decreasing, as well as the overall quality of the railway market. This may have consequences for safety, unless a new way of monitoring is established, through contractual or other arrangements, to ensure that risk control measures are duly implemented by all relevant players: infrastructure managers, railway transport operators, entities responsible with the maintenance of rolling stock, suppliers of railway products and equipments and national railway safety authorities.
In order to solve partially if not totally the problems related to the authorisation of rolling stock, its placing in operation and implicitly interoperability, the responsible departments of the European Commission created since 2011 a Task Force bringing together all those concerned in order to analyse the problems encountered by the stakeholders during the authorisation process and identify areas for further improvement.
The Task Force identified three types of problems: the European rail legislation is not always properly applied, the European rail legislation is not always correctly understood and the EU rail legislation can be improved. Therefore, in addition to closer monitoring of the implementation of EU rail legislation and wider dissemination and training activities, a revision of the EU process for the placing in service of vehicles is needed. This issue is addressed by the Commission in its fourth package proposals. As the Commission says, the Fourth Package could set the grounds for real interoperability in the European railway network.
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