Europe’s rolling stock lessors sound the alarm over ERTMS
https://www.railjournal.com/analysis/europes-rolling-stock-lessors-sound-the-alarm-over-ertms/
An open letter from AERRL to the transport commissioner says that the ETCS specification must remain unchanged to reduce costs and enable the implementation of FRMCS. Robert Preston reports.
Photo Credit: David Gubler
PERHAPS unusually for a European industry association, the Association of European Rail Rolling Stock Lessors (AERRL) is not mincing its words when it comes to the European Commission’s plans to move to ETCS Baseline 4. At a time when work is continuing to update onboard equipment to previous versions and vehicle owners will soon also have to meet the cost of equipping their fleets for the Future Railway Communication System (FRMCS), the replacement for GSM-R as the communications backbone of ETCS, it has very real concerns.
“The Commission is playing with fire,” says AERRL chair, Fabien Rochefort. “It is implementing new technology but the benefits have not been demonstrated.”
Rochefort and AERRL secretary general, Carole Coune, have signed an open letter to the European Union’s (EU) commissioner for sustainable transport and tourism, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, and the chair of the European Parliament’s committee on transport and tourism, Elissavet Vozemberg-Vrionidi. The letter urges the European institutions to act “quickly and precisely” to ensure that ERTMS is deployed in a coordinated manner “from a single Baseline 3.4 release as foundation, with regulations that support the use of existing locomotives without imposing new limitations.”
Attached to the letter is AERRL’s manifesto for 2024-2029, setting out its commitment to achieve a net-zero Single European Railway Area by 2050. By making it easier to cross national borders and increasing capacity for freight and passenger traffic, ERTMS can help create a level playing field between air and rail, AERRL says, ultimately providing significant environmental gains through modal shift. To deliver this key enabler of the Single European Railway Area, AERRL says that the objective should be one single system version of ERTMS with long-term maturity to enable a “realistic” coordinated rollout across Europe.
“This target must be achieved by creating a first stable plateau as industry standard, which consists of a proven and available technology such as ETCS Baseline Version 3.4 System Version 2.0,” the manifesto says, and AERRL would like this baseline to remain in place for the next 10 years. “We cannot change the rules of the game every five years,” Rochefort says.
The cost of updating ETCS onboard equipment is a major concern for AERRL, which points out that lessors owned 63% of the cross-border electric freight locomotives fitted with ETCS in the EU, Switzerland and Norway as of 2023. The total number of all locomotives fitted was 28,150, of which 3650 were owned by lessors.
Rochefort is CEO of Akiem, which itself owns 750 locomotives, and says that work now in progress to upgrade onboard equipment to Baseline 3.6 is costing between €150,000 and €500,000 per locomotive. Although the EC is proposing a move to Baseline 4, “we haven’t even finished the implementation of Baseline 3.6,” he says, expecting delivery to stretch out over the next four years. Baseline 4 would require completely new hardware, according to Rochefort, and the complexity of a retrofit should not be underestimated. “A locomotive is not a smartphone,” he says. The EC wants to implement Baseline 4 “regardless of cost” while there is “no evidence” of the value it will provide, Rochefort says. “We cannot afford this technology, it is just impossible,” he says.
FRMCS challenge
Implementing FRMCS also raises the prospect of major costs for Europe’s mainly private rolling stock leasing companies, and AERRL says that the replacement for GSM-R must be compatible with existing versions of ETCS. “If not, rail will be unaffordable,” says Coune, while Rochefort is equally clear: “we oppose any solution that will requires us to upgrade ETCS for FRMCS.”
Their letter to the transport commissioner requests that “the FRMCS standard must be natively compatible with existing Baseline 3.4 standard,” and the AERRL manifesto says that FRMCS should be implemented independently of ETCS functions, as tying the two systems together could seriously hinder the speed of deploying FRMCS. AERRL wants to see FRMCS implemented as soon as possible, pointing to its greater capacity for data transmission.
Coune says that AERRL is stating its case at a key moment for the industry, as the deadlines for implementing FRMCS grow ever tighter.
Christian Kern, CEO of European Locomotive Leasing (ELL), points out that telecommunications providers are not expected to support GSM-R beyond 2032, while Version 2 of FRMCS, which will set the specification for rollout, is due to be finalised in 2027. Deployment will then take six years, he says, but if it requires a new version of ETCS then it makes little sense to fund onboard ETCS update or retrofit work if the version installed will have to be replaced after only three or four years.
AERRL’s letter concludes by reaffirming the long-standing commitment of its members to ERTMS, the timely deployment of the best technology and regularly upgrading their rolling stock fleets. “They remain dedicated to this but are sounding the alarm,” the letter says. “The abnormal instability of the regulations and the constant fragmentation must be ended, through European coordination of deployment and European decisions based on better impact analysis. Without decisive action on your part,” the letter says that ERTMS will remain “a patchwork of increasingly expensive technologies, holding back the development of rail transport.”
Categories: Analysis, Europe, Financial, Fleet, Freight, Policy
Tags: AERRL, Akiem, ELL, ETCS, European Commission, European Locomotive LEasing, FRMCS, Premium