MARATHON - Make Rail The Hope for protecting Nature
Overview
Background & policy context:
By operating faster, longer and heavier trains, the freight rail service will be more effective. The European manufacturing and logistics industry will derive substantial service and costs benefits from this innovative business approach.
Objectives:
The MARATHON objective is to increase rail network capacity by: (i) lengthening the trains, (ii) increasing the total trains weight and (iii) increasing the train commercial speed. The project is founded on:
- rail freight capacity generation;
- increase of commercial speed leading to better service;
- traffic bundling for economies of scale;
- and operating costs reduction.
The costs reduction is a direct effect of "transporting more with less resources". The improvement of service performance is achieved through technology innovations, better management systems and operating controls.
Summarised, the aim is to extract the maximum productivity from the existing rail infrastructure for producing efficiency, reducing operating costs and attracting new traffic to rail.
Methodology:
The consortium consists of 16 partners. The project is due to run for 36 months. MARATHON is broken up into several work packages. Each work package ("WP") has a manager who is responsible for coordinating the activities of the respective work package. The work packages are as follows:
- WP1: Market Uptake;
- WP2: The Specifications and Systems Architecture;
- WP3: The Application of Technologies;
- WP4: Business Case Simulation and Evaluation;
- WP5: The Pilot Test;
- WP6: Dissemination and Knowledge Transfer;
- WP70: Administrative and Financial Coordination;
- WP71: Technical Coordination;
- WP72: Quality Management;
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