30 participants from 15 different countries participated in the European Level Crossing Forum (ELCF) plenary meeting at the UIC HQ and the ILCAD Task Force meeting to debrief on ILCAD 2017, and prepare ILCAD 2018, that took place on 1 December 2017 at SNCF Réseau in Gare du Nord, Paris.

Jeroen Nederlof, Chairman, and Isabelle Fonverne, Secretary, welcomed all participants
(specialists in level crossing safety from the railways, communication departments,
research centres, the industry).

Andrew Evans from the Imperial College London and Peter Hughes from the University of Huddersfield presented “Risks to vehicle occupants and pedestrians per traverse at British level crossings”
It showed the importance of the availability of data to better tackle this issue.

Allan Spence, Network Rail: “Helping level crossing users to take safe decisions”
His presentation focused on how NR can help ALL users (young people, elderly persons, impaired persons) using LC safely.

Witold Olpinski, Senior Specialist at IK Poland presented a "Series of Polish domestic LC – related scientific and technical bi-annual conferences – conclusions and recommendations”

Pavlina Skladana, Researcher, CDV Czech Transport Research Centre presented: “the attitudes of children and youth to railway trespassing, results of focus groups”
She presented the issue of young people trespassing on the Czech railways using shortcuts. Some young people concerned were interviewed to know the reasons.

Jan Perutka, Researcher, CDV Czech Transport Research Centre presented the “Analysis of accidents at protected railway level crossings (with lights, with or without barriers) in the Czech Republic”

Jeroen Nederlof, System Manager, ProRail presented “how to make level crossings more visible”. He explained the results of the pilot test they have carried out to make LC more visible to LC users

Grigore Havarneanu, UIC Research Advisor presented the “SAFER-LC project, with a focus on the Human Factor component”

At the request of Maria Hedqvist, Trafikverket, Chairperson of the UIC Occupational Health and Safety Group (OHSG), the Security Division of UIC had sent a questionnaire to its members to know more about “existing abuse of railway agents/maintenance staff”; it was decided at the UIC Safety platform meeting to present this question to ELCF members to know about their experience as far as potiential abuse of maintenance agents working at level crossings in their country.

On behalf of the Security Division, Grigore Havarneanu, gave an overview of the results of the questionnaire.

Virginie Taillandier, Smart crossings Project Manager at SNCF presented the interfaces of TECH4RAIL with smart crossings.

Dale Jones, Business Development Manager, RedWall RVR Division, OPTEX presented their ”Next Generation Obstacle Detection Systems”.

Jeroen Nederlof, ELCF Chairman and Isabelle Fonverne, ELCF Secretary:

• Informed that the UIC Safety Platform members endorsed the decision to integrate ELCF as a new working group of the UIC Safety Platform from 01/2018. ELCF members symbolically signed the charter 2018 at the end of the meeting
• They invited members to a “Special event on level crossing safety together with the UIC Safety Platform” at UIC HQ on 14 February 2018

They called on members to host the “GLXS 2018 (Global Level Crossing Symposium) in autumn 2018: date and place tbd.
They also requested ELCF members to host the 2018 autumn meeting.