Driving modal shift requires a mental shift: the Rail Freight Forward (RFF) coalition has identified five key technology gamechangers to achieve the goal of 30% market share by 2030. On Friday last week, 18 February 2022, the DP-RAIL consortium and user community, together with the European DAC Delivery Programme (EDDP) team, co-organised a workshop interlinking two such gamechangers, the Digital Platform (DP-RAIL) and digital automatic coupling (DAC). The first interactive workshop hosted over 80 attendees and aimed to gather the high-level IT requirements for DAC migration and future operations. Consortium participants engaged in a discussion on the current IT fleet specifications, as well as IT must-haves and nice-to-haves for DAC operations.

Both the DP-RAIL and EDDP teams were assigned homework and are looking forward to a second workshop taking place on 24 March 2022, the aim being to further discuss the findings and extrapolate them to European scale. The findings will feed into the migration plan, which is required for the overall business model.