The Rail Advisory Group (RAG) of Rail Freight Corridor 6 (RFC6) held its 9th Advisory Group on 26 January.

The meeting was the opportunity for the Corridor to present to Railway Undertakings (RU) and Terminals:

• The new Implementation Plan
• The 2018 timetable
• A state of play of the Corridor activities
• The outcome of the 2016 Customer Satisfaction survey

Since the corridor extension to Croatia has been agreed, attendees were informed that the next Corridor Conference would take place in Zagreb on 24 May.

RAGs are the consultation bodies where Railway Undertakings interested in the use of the Corridor can get information and provide input to the Corridor Management. As the representative for Mr Maieta, RAG Spokesperson, Mr Blass, Mercitalia Rail, presented to the Corridor management the most pressing issues to be addressed from the RU point of view.

With a view to giving RUs the opportunity to address their key issues, Andrea Galluzzi, Managing Director of the Corridor, invited Sandra Géhénot, newly appointed UIC Freight Director, to present the latest developments of the UIC project ECCO.

ECCO (European Cross Corridor Organisation) is a project initiated by UIC in 2014, designed to streamline processes across all railway undertakings and across all corridors.

The project provides the necessary coordination and exchange of information between the Advisory Boards in order to ensure RU needs are promoted efficiently and has set up a structure to monitor progress and to provide regular feedback which will help put in place the necessary improvement measures whenever required. ECCO stakeholders include RAG spokespersons.

In the context of this 9th RAG6 meeting, ECCO presented mainly:

• The work conducted on the issue of KPIs, which now involve ERFA, UIRR, Clecat and ESC, and informed that an expert workshop to discuss the feasibility of implementing those KPIs had been agreed with RNE and is due to take place in Vienna on 2 March;
• The ECCO harmonisation proposal for the Corridor one-stop-shop (C-OSS) for which the continuation of the initial cooperation with the C-OSS community was reiterated;
• The work conducted in the area of coordination. The ongoing poor coordination of infrastructure works along corridors is still a very problematic issue for most corridors and has disastrous effects on the rail freight offer and business productivity;
• The work undertaken under the umbrella of the CEO Task Force* to assess the feasibility of longer trains on the current infrastructure.

The meeting was very fruitful and allowed an open exchange of views on all these topics.

Visit the RFC6 – Mediterranean Corridor website:

https://www.railfreightcorridor6.eu/RFC6/web.nsf/OnePager/index.html

• The CEO Task Force is an initiative of 11 freight CEOS (ASTOC, BLS, B Logistics, DB Cargo, Hungrail, MRCE, Rail Cargo Group, SBB, SNCF, Mercitalia Rail and VDV) who, with the support of UIC and CER, grounded a task force dedicated to give high level support to issues of key importance to the competitiveness of rail freight.