The development of road-rail CT depends to a very large extent on the quality of service offered by the company or companies providing the rail traction, that is to say by the sector of the railway undertakings.

Quality Groups

Since 1999, the Operations Commission of INTERUNIT (an organisation containing the railway undertakings and the UIRR member companies) has also taken care of the “quality” aspect, most notably by means of creating “quality groups”. The latter are composed of representatives of the motive power companies and of the UIRR members, whose main objective is qualitative control of the CT direct trains and finding solutions in the event of major difficulties.

This close collaboration has made it possible to put in place a European system of control of CT trains. With the active support of the UIRR Office, regular inspection of the punctuality (and of the causes of delay) of CT trains has been achieved by means of the collection of statistics harmonised at European level.

Monitored Corridors

As things stand at present, the following routes are subject to this regular inspection:

• transalpine traffic (via France, Switzerland or Austria)
• traffic to and from the Iberian Peninsula (Belgium and Germany)
• traffic to and from the new Union Member States
• other traffic (Belgium-Switzerland for example)

In 2006, this represented more than 21,000 CT trains inspected in 10 important freight corridors, or about 50% of the total traffic of the UIRR member companies in unaccompanied international transport.

For each route and for each direction, the following data are collected:

• routes involved
• number of trains
• number of trains on time: a train arriving less than 30 minutes later than the time scheduled for presentation of the first loading unit under the gantry crane
• number of trains arriving late
  - by 30 minutes to 1 hour
  - by 1 hour to 3 hours
  - by 3 hours to 6 hours
  - by more than 6 hours
  - by more than 24 hours
• reasons for delays
  - force majeure (bad weather,…)
  - operations at terminals (gantry crane breakdowns,…)
  - railway operations (lack of motive power or driver absent, internal strikes within
  the RUs, repair work,…)
  - other

For reasons of pertinency of the analysis and of the measures to be taken, the UIRR seeks to involve the infrastructure managers (IM) in this work.

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