The Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER) said Europe needs a more pragmatic approach to reach the goals set by the Green Deal. For rail freight, this means “more flexibility on short-term capacity allocation”, as CER mentioned.

The need for more concrete solutions was brought up on Tuesday, 23 January, during a meeting at the European Parliament. At the meeting, headed by Rapporteur on the Capacity Regulation MEP Tilly Metz, participants discussed the Regulation on the Use of Railway Infrastructure Capacity, part of the Greening Freight Package.

What are the CER demands?

Other than more flexibility when allocating capacity, the participants asked for a better dialogue between Railway Undertakings, Infrastructure Managers (IMs) and applicants. This would be achieved through the establishment of a European Railway Undertaking Platform, CER pointed out. Moreover, sufficient funding must be deployed for the implementation of the Timetabling Capacity Redesign and the Digital Capacity Management. For these initiatives, CER is calling for Member States to provide funds for at least five years.

They are also demanding that any new governance structure shall avoid excessive administrative burdens for IMs. Additionally, CER is asking that “the functions of the Network Coordinator should be undertaken by the sector itself”. However, no more specifications were provided concerning this. Finally, they welcomed the introduction of criteria applied in case of scarce infrastructure capacity. On the other hand, they stress the importance of clearly defining the criteria, how they are applied and how often they will be reviewed.

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