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EU-Rail February 2025 Newsletter
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Innovation: the key to maximising rail’s societal and economic impact
Rail can contribute to the growth of a smart, inclusive, competitive, and green society connected via a sustainable and seamless mobility network.
According to research conducted by EU-Rail, the key to maximising this potential is to position rail as an attractive alternative or complementary solution to road and air transport.
The study looked at how rail improvements and changes in mobility could impact rail traffic volume.
Key Findings
- Efficiently using existing rail networks, intramodal competition, yield management, and online ticketing can increase demand for passenger rail.
- Passenger rail will likely be impacted by deregulation, the electrification/automation of road transport, and the reduced competitiveness of regional aviation.
- Track charging policies help drive rail development, providing incentives for reducing capacity constraints, decreasing costs, and enhancing innovation.
Conclusion
- By inducing a modal shift from road and air to rail, EU-Rail’s innovations will ensure that rail delivers on its societal and economic objectives.
Assessing the impact of innovation
EU-Rail also evaluated the actual performance of its innovations, with a particular focus on measuring their ability for achieving expected results.
Key Findings
- Innovation is responsible for a 41% decrease in lifecycle costs for freight.
- It also triggered a 96% and 90% increase in capacity for freight and regional rail respectively.
Conclusion
EU-Rail’s innovations have resulted in significant improvements to rail, especially in the regional and freight segments.
Beyond innovation, EU-Rail also looked at:
Standardisation
Virtual testing
Human-centred design
Objective
Propose ways to transfer research results into standards needed to ensure a fast and easy exploitation of said results.
Motivate stakeholders to, at least partially, reduce physical tests.
Develop a concept for human-centred design that balances the benefits and risks of technological innovation.
Outcome
A global standardisation roadmap and guidelines for standardisation were developed.
Delivered recommendations for using methods for virtual validation and certification for rail components and sub/systems.
Studied the impact of Shift2Rail innovations mainly related to digitisation and automation on both the rail workforce and rail customers.
Who benefits
Infrastructure managers
Railway operators
Suppliers
