Hit Rail BV and Raildata, two of Europe’s leading railway organisations in the promotion of interoperability and cooperation between railways across borders, have signed a new agreement that will see them work more closely together to promote existing services and combine their services to offer enhanced benefits to their users. Raildata is a special group within the UIC founded in 1995 by several European railway undertakings and is active in the fields of development and production of central information and data exchange systems for European freight rail transport. Its principal office is in Basel, Switzerland. Its prime objective is to provide IT services to freight RUs and ensure compliance of these services within new EU interoperability regulations (TAF-TSI).

The agreement is in response to ongoing freight railway liberalisation in Europe which has led to the entrance into the market of new smaller operators with fewer IT applications. It also responds to the introduction of EU Regulations requiring all EU railway undertakings to communicate using standard messages and a common interface.

The agreement, signed initially for two years with automatic ongoing one-year renewals, will see both organisations promoting each other’s services as being complementary and building a strategy of support and cooperation to provide enhanced services through a combined offering.

Both parties will seek to provide services to the European railway community whereby Raildata concentrates on services to the freight community and Hit Rail aims to connect railway players together and both to provide interoperability services.

The cooperation agreement will see Hit Rail managing the connections of Raildata’s existing members and being the recommended option for new member’s network connections. Hit Rail will offer Raildata members a ‘built-in’ link to Hit Rail’s path request app provided they use a Hit Rail Hermes VPN connection. The parties will also work jointly on the strategy for migration of the train composition message (known as H30) to the new version.

Both organisations will recommend that their customers use each others’ services, and have agreed to hold an annual joint meeting to review the cooperation and to also plan future cooperation.

Hit Rail BV is a private company in the Netherlands owned by 12 European railway companies. All its customers’ data centres and company networks are interconnected by a pan-European IP-based VPN named Hermes VPN, which is supplied by (BT and managed by Hit Rail. In 2013 the company launched its HEROS message interoperability service which aims to enable interoperability across disparate platforms in railway companies across Europe.