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33rd Meeting of the CUI Committee on 14 December 2023

As one of the last meetings of the year, the CUI Committee took place on 14 December 2023. The online meeting was chaired by Alberto Gallo (Trenitalia) and well attended by various railway undertakings (SNCF Voyageurs, Fret SNCF, DB, SNCB, CFR Marfa, CD Cargo, Hellenic Train) and organisations (OTIF, CER). Discussions focused on very topical infrastructure-related issues in the current context.

First of all, “service facilities” have been one major topic of much questioning throughout 2023, especially whether the CUI Uniform Rules cover “service facilities”. After recalling the legal analysis of this question already performed, the head of the OTIF legal department Aleksandr Kuzmenko explained the latest note and OTIF-level analysis of this matter. Discussions then also focused on the liability rules applied in various contracts within service facilities, allowing certain recurrences and common points to be identified that could be standardised in the future. The next phase in the CUI Committee members’ work should be to exchange views on these issues to draw up a standardised document on the contractual framework of service facilities and the associated liability rules, which will be useful to all parties concerned.

In the second part of the meeting, CIT presented developments in EU legislation with the draft Regulation on the use of railway infrastructure capacity, and explained the important elements of the current proposal, the risks from the point of view of the CIT GS and the opportunities offered by the new framework for the infrastructure management and capacity system. The CIT GS also outlined that there might be a need to adapt the current RNE/CIT products in future and maybe develop new standard contractual documents. Elizabeth Bragina from CER gave some details of the next steps, with discussions taking place at European Parliament level of the text proposal containing the sector's comments.

Lastly, CIT briefly presented some existing and new projects at the end of the meeting, in particular the status of implementation of the TTR project and RNE's confidentiality project, which may lead to further cooperation between CIT and RNE in 2024

nina.scherf(at)cit-rail.org
guillaume.murawa(at)cit-rail.org