Call for the successor to the Europe´s Rail Joint Undertaking in the next European Research Framework Programme

As the greenest transport mode, rail transport is vital for Europe’s economy, security, and sustainability. The European Commission’s "Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy" ⁽¹⁾ sets concrete objectives and milestones towards the digitalisation and greening of the transport sector and rail. Achieving Europe’s climate neutrality targets by 2050, including a targeted 90% reduction in European transport GHG emissions, is only possible by attracting more passengers and freight to the rail system (long-distance, regional, suburban and urban rail). Rail therefore needs to increase its efficiency, attractiveness, accessibility and competitiveness.

A coordinated European approach to R&I is vital to accelerate the overcoming of the historic and obstructive fragmentation in the rail system and to deliver harmonised European-wide solutions, making the European rail system more agile, innovative, resilient, capacity-performant, achieve the goals of the Single European Railway Area (SERA) and Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T, including the comprehensive network) and make Europe more competitive.

With an annual global market growth of 3% (expected value of EUR 240bn by 2029) ⁽²⁾, and an investment of 3.6% of its annual revenue to R&I activities, the European rail supply industry is a global leader in design, manufacturing and maintenance of rail systems and products, corresponding to over 650,000 jobs in Europe. In 2023, EU rail passenger transport hit its highest level in years, reaching 429bn passenger-kilometres. Rail accounts for 1.8% of the EU’s total energy consumption in transport, while carrying 17% of freight and around 8% of passengers of EU27 inland transport. At urban node level and close to citizens’ daily needs, light rail, metro and regional/suburban rail have a combined patronage of over 30bn passengers per year in Europe, evenly distributed among them, meaning each local rail mode carries 10 times more passengers than air travel.

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(1) EC’s Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy’ - https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/mobility-strategy_en

(2) World Rail Market Study, forecast 2024 to 2029 - https://www.unife.org/news-resources/wrms/