My 5 areas of priority for driving railway cost reduction
Published: 13 September 2025
Updated: 05 December 2025
On Track with the Director
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of joining the 15th Rail Directors' Meeting in Prague - an inspiring gathering of dedicated professionals from the EU Member States exchanging on the future of European rail.
I have shared my 5 areas of priority for driving railway cost reduction from the ERA side, around which I’m putting in place concrete actions in the ERA work programme:
- Removing the persisting cross-border bottlenecks at EU level and facilitating the accomplishment of SERA
- Ensuring that our specifications, especially for ERTMS, are fully mature and, once this is done, keep them stable for longer cycles
- Drive a stringer level of engineering harmonisation for ERTMS and strive for standardization of products to keep investment and upgrade costs down
- Streamline the authorisation and approval processes
- Smartly approach, from a regulatory perspective, the response to new developments (cybersecurity, climate resilience, HSR, military mobility, obsolescence of the radio system etc.)
