The market share of European rail transport is stagnating at a stable level since the economic crisis. According to the Single European Rail Area Unit of the European Commission, growth is achievable through a unified European railway where the national railway companies carry out developments and modernizations. Patrizio Grillo, Deputy Head of this Unit, believes that a high-quality and efficient service could be realized by adequate financing and building up the required infrastructure.

Rail transport has traditionally been a strong presence in Europe. Its volume in the European Union has been steadily increasing up until the crisis. While in 1995, the rail freight transportation recorded 386 billion tonne-kilometers and the rail passenger transport recorded 350 billion passenger kilometers, by 2008 these values were 440 and 411 billion respectively, meaning a 14 and a 17 percent increase. As expected during the crisis, both the rail passenger and freight transport volume has decreased, but after 2009 these volumes began to rise again. This increase, however, did not result in increased market share of the rail transport so, therefore, rail passenger transport stagnated at around 6 percent, while the rail freight transport decreased with more than 2 percent to 10 percent.

According to Patrizio Grillo, the fact that there is still a number of different technologies used by the European railway companies - including different track gauge sizes, signaling, electrical equipment and technical standards -, strengthens the need for a unified approach and steers the discussions towards a single European railway area. „This is an ongoing long term project but the European member states, therefore Hungary plays an important role in it because it is a significant transit country and therefore it has a key position in the European rail freight transport"- said the expert.
„Seeing the growth potential of our national railway transport, we have decided that we would like to help our country's role in the regional and European railway by organizing an international high-quality railway conference" - said Ágnes Balla, the host and organizer of InnoRail 2013 Budapest conference which will be organized between October 28-30. The purpose of the event is to discuss the present and future of the European railway industry jointly with well-known foreign and Hungarian experts - Ágnes Balla explaining the underlying motives.

The main themes of InnoRail 2013 Budapest:
• Trends in transport policy; strategy, regulatory environment and economic challenges of railway infrastructure development
• Development of Railway Infrastructure, new Technologies
• Interoperability, automation and signaling systems, modern control and dispatch
• Power supply
• Risks and safety

The goal will be to create a tradition with this conference. This will be the commencement of a series of professional conferences to be organized every odd year with a focus on practical matters where the aim is to provide a forum for an exchange of views between different professional field of railway infrastructure, for the discussion of practical issues and for presenting novel innovative developments, tools and methods.

Schlagwörter