A body of the European Union
A body of the European Union
The Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking (EU-Rail) invites the European Rail Freight Sector, its Customers and other stakeholders to openly express their interest to be part of the needed phase of large-scale testing of DAC technology (Digital Automatic Coupling for freight trains incl. DAC based applications) in 100 pre-deployment trains according to the DAC General Master Plan.
DAC technology will be an essential game changer in the European rail freight transport. It will already be quite mature after the technological validation in the R&I activities of the ongoing EU-Rail Flagship Project 5 (in labs and through demonstrator trains). But, in order to successfully implement it in Europe and in line with the preconditions for DAC deployment set out by the European DAC Delivery Programme (EDDP) enabled by EU-Rail, it is necessary to allow sufficient time and resources for successful testing on a large scale of this technology.
The foreseen testing in different European regions is intended to prove functionality, reliability, availability, performance and added value of DAC in real-life operation. Sound and robust future investment decisions for the entire European Rail Freight Sector can only be based on feedback on how DAC applications perform in daily operation in different environments, geographical areas and operational conditions across Europe over a longer time.
This request is addressed to the entire European Rail Freight Sector including its customers and is transparently published on the EU-Rail EDDP website for any interested stakeholders to answer.
We kindly ask you to come back until 29 February 2024 to the coordinating EDDP programme (info-DAC@rail-research.europa.eu) with an expression of interest from your side to operate pre deployment trains.
Please find a document with further explanations
DOCUMENT ON DAC PRE-DEPLOYMENT TRAINS
RECORDING – INFO SESSION ON DAC PRE-DEPLOYMENT TRAINS
PRESENTATION – INFO SESSION ON DAC PRE-DEPLOYMENT TRAINS