Assessing the status and variation in rail interoperability in European countries.

This paper describes work conducted within REORIENT, an EC Sixth Framework project. One of REORIENTs objectives was to document and explain the status of transformation of the European railway sector from loosely connected national railways toward a functionally integrated, interoperable system. We assessed the status of interoperability within and between eleven countries in a railway corridor stretching from Greece to the Nordic countries. We assessed the variation in interoperability status across the countries according to a variety of aspects. The primary data source for the analysis was a set of interviews with the major actors and stakeholders associated with each countrys rail freight system. The (qualitative) information from the interviews was translated into numeric scores, which were subjected to statistical analysis. The objective of the statistical analysis was to provide an assessment of the relationships between the requirements and the implementation conditions. The statistical analysis involved both the identification of relevant relationships and an assessment of the strength of these relationships. Overall, we found that there was considerable variation in interoperability status across the countries on practically all of the requirements. However, there was also considerable variation in the status of the implementation conditions across the countries. As a result, we found that most of the variability was able to be explained by relationships that were found to exist between the requirements and implementation conditions. For the covering abstract see ITRD E137145.