THE European Commission (EC) has approved the Europe’s Rail partnership, a successor to the current Shift2Rail (S2R) joint undertaking (JU).
Europe’s Rail will build on the results of S2R’s work to speed up the development and deployment of innovative technologies, with the new partnership focusing on digital innovation and automation to achieve the radical transformation of the rail system needed to deliver on the European Green Deal objectives.
The first meeting of candidate founding members for the future partnership took place last month.
“While we look forward to the next legal steps in the establishment of the new JU, our priority remains to deliver results and demonstrators to facilitate sustainable and smart mobility through a substantial digital transformation of rail,” S2R says. “Recent examples include the great work done together with our members and partners on European Digital Automatic Couplers (DAC) testing in Germany and Sweden, as well as ATO development in Britain and Switzerland.”
“EU partnerships will have a central role to drive the twin green and digital transition for the mobility and transport sector,” says EU commissioner for transport, Ms Adina Vălean. “To make our ambitions come true, we need to develop disruptive technologies bringing zero-emission vessels and aircraft to the market, we need to develop and deploy cooperative, connected and automated mobility, and we need to enable a more efficient and modern traffic management.”
The bill to establish the new JU is expected to be adopted during 2021.
