Abstract
As one of the major answers from the railway research community to the strategic challenges put by the European commission and by ERRAC (the European rail research advisory council), the integrail project aims at developing an intelligent coherent information system by integrating all the main railway subsystems. The objective is to achieve a higher level of coordination and cooperation between the key railway processes. The benefits will be higher levels of performance (in terms of capacity, average speed and punctuality), safety and optimised usage of resources. The paper presents the background which originated the project and describes the project objectives, methodologies and preliminary results.