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BERNER TAGE 2024: CIM Session – 6.6.2024 afternoon

The CIM session at the Berner Tage included presentations on trends in freight transport, starting with the possibility of revising the CIM Uniform Rules in the medium term. Mr Gerald Wieser (RCG, member of the CIT Executive Committee) flagged the important points of the CIM Uniform Rules that seem obsolete and need to be taken up again and developed to meet the current challenges of the rail sector. Mr Erik Evtimov (CIT Deputy Secretary-General) then detailed the five proposals made by CIT, which were communicated to the OTIF Secretariat and presented at the last session of the OTIF ad hoc Committee on Legal Issues in April 2024 in Vienna.

Mr Nicolas Czernecki (FRET SNCF) gave an interesting overview of the General Contract of Use for Wagons (GCU) around 20 years after its entry into force. The GCU is an original form of self-governance and self-regulation of wagon law and the freight market through a multilateral contract. The GCU’s strengths include, in particular, the notion of legal custody of the wagon and the efficient management of damage via the three principles of Overhaul with the Wagon Damage Report (WDR), Repair, and finally Liability Claim. However, the weaknesses of governance, the complexity of validating amendments and the non-coercive nature of the GCU can be seen as slowing down the evolution of wagon law in the current market. The current GCU appears then to be both shaped by the old paradigm of national monopolies and imbalances, to the detriment of railway undertakings. The multilateral contract must be modernised, simplified and rebalanced to maintain the full confidence of its signatories. Finally, the challenge to better integrate the GCU and maintenance provisions without complicating day-to-day operations in the sector will be one of the key-focuses of upcoming discussions in the sector.

Mr Erik Evtimov provided then some insight into the work done to digitalise the CIT documentation. In these developments, the rail sector is introducing international and supranational layers with data functionalities and this impetus towards digital from the sector is reflected in three megatrends in EU regulation: the eFTI regulation and exchange of data from business to authorities; TAF TSI including TAF operations functions and planning between carriers; and the TSI Telematics Package.

The topic of waste shipments by rail seems also to be a new trend in rail freight: problems and difficulties in this type of transport within the current regulatory framework were presented by Mr Tobias Grabner (DB Cargo) and Mr Guillaume Murawa (CIT GS). Cooperation between experts and organisations (UIC, CIT, OTIF, CER) is crucial to overcome the difficulties in terms of transport documentation, transhipments with other transport modes, or the exchange of information with the competent authorities. The new regulation on waste shipments may offer part of the remedy to such problems, notably with a central platform for data exchange.

Finally, the EU Commission’s forthcoming capacity management regulation and its impact on the freight market was detailed by Juan Jose Montero Pascual (Florence School of Regulation) in a targeted presentation to fully understand the challenges of a new way of managing railway infrastructure capacity that will be optimised with the new system. Mr Montero Pascual drew up his explanatory diagram of the EU Layer in the form of a square composed of the European Network of Infrastructure Managers (ENIM), the European network of rail regulatory bodies (ENRRB), the network coordinator supporting operational entities (Article 59 of the regulation) and the performance review body. This structure is being redesigned as part of the governance and oversight of the new infrastructure capacity management cycle.

Maria Sack (DB, CIT Executive Committee Chair) concluded the session by pointing out that freight traffic was undergoing a revitalization on several fronts, both in depth in multimodal relations and in regulatory aspects (COTIF Convention, European law, specific regulations on waste/dangerous goods), and that these impulses from the freight transport market needed to be accompanied by expertise, analysis and cooperation between stakeholders.