Achievements So Far

SRRA 2020
On December 18 2002 ERRAC presented its Strategic Rail Research Agenda 2020 (SRRA) to the rail community. SRRA provides a vision for innovations in the European railway industry for the next twenty years. The SRRA proposes the development of enabling technologies in the area of railway interoperability, intelligent mobility, safety and security, environment, innovative materials and production methods. In includes ideas for individual company research as well as joint collaborative research. The technical annex to the SRRA publication contains more detailed reports of the ERRAC working teams on interoperability, intelligent mobility, global rail safety and security, environment, innovative materials and production methods.

ERRAC SRRA provided a valuable contribution to the development of the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme by outlining the sector’s priorities for research and by prompting some more concrete ideas for research projects.

RBS 2020
The first Railway Business Scenario (RBS) was developed during the preparation of ERRAC Strategic Research Agenda. The aim of this task was to identify the main drivers of railway successful performance and future growth. This work has since been updated by a dedicated working group of ERRAC. The focus of this latest exercise has been to find out the most important factors influencing the attractiveness of the railway use seen from the perspective of the end user.
The findings of this updated RBS are being finalised and will be extremely useful for re-visiting SRRA in the coming months and for identifying concrete research proposals in order to boost competitiveness of railways in the European Union.

Rail Research in the EU Member States
ERRAC has undertaken a challenging task of collecting information about the rail research programmes in various EU Member States with the purpose of comparing them to ERRAC SRRA 2020. This information has been analysed and put together in two brochures, first of which was published already in May 2004, the second one is due for publication in May 2005. These publications provide fact sheets on rail research programmes of the EU Member States with the objective of providing an overview of the current state of railway research on the national level as well as promoting the alignment of diverse research programmes with commonly defined ERRAC SRRA.

Investments in railways
ERRAC also looked into the investments required for railway infrastructure in Europe and what conclusions could be derived for railway research. One of ERRAC working groups drafted a paper on this subject “The research implications of the railway investment programmes in some of the EU Member States (Autumn 2004)”. This subject was also partially tackled in another publication released within the framework of ERRAC – “Light Rail and Metro Systems in Europe: current market, perspectives and research implications.”


More information on the accomplished ERRAC activities during 2003-2004 can be found in this document:

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