In the European Union, the use and maintenance of rail freight wagons is regulated by two directives, one from 2006 for their use and one from 2019 for their maintenance. The Swiss Federal Office of Transport (FOT) is asking the European Railway Agency (ERA) to make a clear statement for the revision of the oldest one as it “no longer reflects the current state of the art”.
The two directives are the General Contract of Use for Wagons (GCU), and the so-called ECM (entity in charge of maintenance) Regulation. The GCU was mostly written in 2006 and the ECM Regulation was published in 2011 and revised in 2019. “The ERA needs to make a clear statement that the outdated GCU provisions must be revised”, a spokesperson from FOT told RailFreight.com.
What is Switzerland asking?
One of the problems with the CGU is that some provisions regarding the division of safety responsibilities between railway companies, wagon keepers and maintenance workers create confusion. In other words, the FOT stated that some of the CGU provisions are outdated and “much less stringent” than the ones in the ECM Regulation. The FOT spokesperson highlighted four GCU points that need to be addressed to make it more compliant with the ECM Regulation.
The first one is Article 7: Technical admission and maintenance of wagons. The other one is Article 19 in conjunction with Appendixes 9 and 10. Article 19 concerns the handling of damage, while the two appendixes specify the conditions for the technical transfer inspection of wagons and the minimum conditions and measures to restore the running order of freight wagons. “Swiss railway legislation, however, does not require any adjustments when it comes to the maintenance of vehicles in cross-border traffic”, the spokesperson added.
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