My 5 areas of priority for driving railway cost reduction
Published: 13 September 2025
Updated: 17 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.)
This article was published as part of the On Track with the Director page, a personal window into the thoughts, insights, and takeaways of Oana Gherghinescu, Executive Director of ERA.
