ERIM - European Rail Infrastructure Masterplan
Overview
Background & policy context:
The ERIM Project is a high-level infrastructure supply side overview of major international rail corridors, mainly for freight, within and between 32 countries. The ERIM network information covers about 50 000 route-kms of railway, which is recorded in a Geographical Information System as interconnected segments of routes, enabling specific corridors to be defined to suit particular business or political configurations.
ERIM is a high-level infrastructure supply side overview of major international rail corridors, mainly for freight, within and between 32 countries. These corridors represent only 21% of the total route length in the countries covered, but carry 47% of all passengers-kms and 62% of all tonne-kms of the 32 countries.
Objectives:
Based on the current and the planned 2020 infrastructure provision, the ERIM Project has proposed minimum upgrading targets for the existing and new installations, which are in line with existing international inter-government agreements on rail tranport, so as to harmonise the main infrastructure parameters and to optimise the infrastructure offer.
The ultimate objective of the ERIM Project was to make a contribution to a structured and appropriately funded European investment policy in the rail mode based on an integrated European Rail Infrastructure Masterplan. It acknowledges that optimum utilisation must be made of the existing network, but also underlines the importance of a Masterplan, as a means of galvanising consensus and commitment of all rail stakeholders. This should lead to an optimum level of infrastructure upgrading which will serve the business needs efficiently in 2020 and beyond and ensure a sustainable environment for the European community at large. The ultimate objective of rail strategies is to improve the market performance of the rail mode.
Although a high-performance infrastructure alone is not sufficient for success in the market place, it does constitute the necessary basis.
Methodology:
In order to analyse the infrastructure needs in 2020, ERIM has also established, in collaboration with its Member Railways, an estimation of traffic growth by 2020. The ERIM traffic growth forecast for the period 2006-2020 is 34% for passenger traffic and 57% for freight traffic. These estimations are within the range of the recent European transport demand forecast studies and can thus be taken as a plausible basis for the 2020
infrastructure analysis.
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