The NEW OPERA project set out to contribute to the goal of the centrality of rail in a pan-European dimension by assessing ways for:

• implementing the ERRAC Strategic Rail Research Agenda 2020 by capturing the threefold increase in freight volumes by 2020
• providing grounds for the establishment of 15.000 km of new and existing lines predominantly dedicated to freight
• revitalising the Rail business by applying NEW business models, NEW service culture through the use of freight dedicated rail infrastructure
• envisage transitions from the existing Rail business model based on rail infrastructure dual use to one more capable of capturing market demands and achieve productivity and efficiency gains based on dedicated freight networks, on the basis of 4 scenarios.

In particular, NEW OPERA contributed toward inverting the declining trend of EU railways by:

• Setting sound methodologies for the distribution of traffic flows over railway networks;
• Precisely localising traffic flows in the European area so as to give development forecasts;
• Providing a sound analysis of transport demand and supply over railway networks;
• Establishing simulation and modelling tools of traffic flows on medium and long-term perspectives;
• Providing an efficient decision-making tool;
• Allowing for the introduction of the concept of dedicated rail freight networks backed by a sound socio-economic and environmental assessment.

The achievement of these objectives should provide the market with:

• Significant increase of speed on the main European corridors of up to 100 %; present measurements made on railway networks (RFF) show, that the most critical point is the time lost on nodes to leave priority to passengers trains rather than the speed of the freight train.
• Increase in reliability and consistency of rail services competitive with those offered by road (hypothesis taken from EUFRANET).
• Important reduction of cost due to increasing rotation of rolling stock, increase of 'effective' driving hours of drivers and possible increase in length of trains: these are expected to lead a reduction from 30% up to 50% of operating costs.
• Very significant increase in rail network capacity due to more homogeneous speed of the trains, pointing at bottlenecks which have to be removed.
• Better combined utilisation of new infrastructure for High Speed Train and former rail li