Potential impact of wagonload concept

This task deals with the cooperation model to successfully extend an existing Single- Wagon-Load (SWL) transport system. The international provision of railway services needs cooperation especially if smaller railway undertakings are offering these. To overcome barriers of national administrative issues and of course to find partners closer to the local markets of other regions in Europe the cooperation approach is crucial for a success.

The success of cooperation on the other hand is dependent on the cooperation structure. The structure needs to avoid high effort in the coordination, to create awareness for the options and the limitations of partners, to create a fair split of revenues and of costs etc. The win-win situation needs to be found as a basis for such initiatives.

In this work package the existing cooperations in railway business and the principles they follow are described to provide benchmarks for future developments. For the Smart-Rail SWL solution in France, the cooperation existing between BD Rail Service as operator and three railway undertakings is taken as a basis. From this starting point options for cooperation with international partners, be it forwarding industry or railway companies, need to be introduced.

This task reflects the process of developing such cooperations, the required arrangements, and the structure of cost and revenue sharing etc. The structure of this is mainly based on the risks taken by each participant.

Furthermore it shows the process of the search for partners, the identification and the meetings required to communicate and to disseminate such information to potentially interested parties. To find respective clients for such a network approach a tool has been developed to provide sufficient, even if rough, data about the expected transport costs on certain routes.

Smart-Rail aims to substantially improve the basic IT solutions for SWL services. For that reason the Smart-Rail initiative closed cooperation agreements with certain IT providers in the railway sector such as RAILDATA. The overall development of a cooperation model is described in its principles and critical success factors. The results of this task provide a general view on such models and the specific way to develop it within the Smart-Rail initiative.

For more information please read the report on ‘Potential impact of wagonload concept’