AT A FORUM in London on July 8 the President of the Union of European Railway Industries Rolf Eckrodt and his counterpart at the International Union of Public Transport Jean-Paul Bailly signed a Memorandum of Understanding on terms and conditions for procurement contracts. Although largely symbolic, the MoU marks the first concrete result of the Mass Transit Rail Initiative for Europe.
Marie was set up by Unife, UITP and the European Commission’s Industry and Transport directorates in March 1998. It is intended to boost the European urban rail market, with cost savings through harmonisation, more transparent procurement, and closer partnerships between suppliers and operators.
Noting that rail patronage is static or growing only slightly when the car’s market share is four times bigger and climbing rapidly, Bailly told the first Marie plenary forum, held in conjunction with the Unife General Assembly, that the time had come for the industry to ’stop fighting over shares of a shrinking pie, and work together to grow the business.’ Reiterating his call for public transport to play a bigger role in the search for sustainable mobility (RG 7.99 p411), Bailly said rail’s environmental advantages had to be backed up by a concerted drive to bring down costs.
VDV General Secretary Prof Dr-Ing Adolf Müller-Hellmann said the vision was ’to make rail mass transit the natural choice for future conurbations, fast, efficient and easy-to-use.’ He favoured further automation, dual-mode operation to eliminate interchanges, and universal smart-card ticketing. But he warned that ’the car will be forgiven everything in the search for boundless mobility’ - even an annual death toll way over 10000 people in Europe alone.
Working groups make progress
Presenting the results of Marie’s four working groups, team leaders Andrew Foster and Marc Girardot said that the first decision had been to concentrate on light rail, which was the fastest growing market sector.
Most progress has been made by the Terms & Conditions group. This aimed to reduce the disparity between national procurement practices, and produce common guidelines on such matters as intellectual property rights, warranties and liabilities, contract variations, liquidated damages and force majeure. Following the signing of the MoU, the non-binding guidelines will be circulated to all Unife and UITP members, with the aim of getting feedback on their practicality over the next couple of years.
The Life-Cycle Costing group found that operators used LCC to compare tender bids, but the suppliers saw it more as a mechanism to design-in product reliability or raise finance. It feels LCC offers a way to optimise product life, maintenance routines, tendering, and contract management and help feedback of operating experience into product design. Terms and definitions have been agreed between UITP, Unife and UIC, and the next step is to seek agreement on how to apply the various elements of LCC.
Noting a clear relationship between the availability and nature of funding and the design of light rail schemes, the Financial Engineering working group is looking at alternatives to the traditional reliance on public sector grants. The results of an independent study will be presented at a conference later this year.
Probably the most controversial proposals are from the Design group, which is looking to issue recommendations for harmonising key system interfaces, essential safety requirements and levels of performance. Foster says there is a need to learn from the aircraft and car industries where common designs and volume production keep costs down. He feels that harmonisation of standards will increase choice and allow innovation, which would be ruled out by prescriptive standardisation. However, a list of proposed interface specifications circulated last September brought a mixed response.
For new lines, these envisage bi-directional LRVs 2·65m wide with a 350 mm floor height, 1435mm gauge and 750 V DC. However there are problems with differing road width standards, disabled access and crashworthiness requirements. The group would like to find four to six cities planning new light rail lines prepared to act as a testbed for the harmonised specifications over the next few years.
When asked about the application of harmonised standards to the many diverse light rail networks developed over the past 20 years, Eckrodt suggested that ’backwards compatibility’ would be achieved gradually through the introduction of modular components or sub-systems, as well as the suppliers’ own drive towards a product platform approach.
