More than sixty decision makers and specialists discussed paperless international movement of freight by rail

Bern, Switzerland – The CIT, the UIC and RAILDATA joined forces to organise a workshop to promote paperless international movement of freight by rail. The workshop was held on 8 November 2006 in the CIT’s offices in Bern. It allowed a critical analysis of the situation to be made and allowed the problems both of railway undertakings and of their trade associations which still remain to be resolved to be identified.

The main action items proposed may be summarised as follows:

• take the maximum advantage of EDI by avoiding having to transport paper documents during carriage. If paper documents are required, then they are to be printed out at the location at which they are needed;
• reconsider the way international freight traffic is moved by railway undertakings and reconsider the rules and instructions applying to movement so that procedures based on electronic media become the rule and paper media are only retained as exceptions;
• have carriers create consignment notes based on customers’ transport orders; have customers and carriers agree the nature of those transport orders between themselves;
• extend the project beyond transport documents and other documents used to perform the carriage so as to simplify the requirements for the labelling of wagons also. The data held in IT systems offers significant advantages in terms of quality and in the availability of information;
• give priority to the NCTS Rail project in respect of relationships with customs authorities. The objective of this project is to allow electronic consignment note data to be used for the NCTS system and also to take into account additional customs requirements in respect of security.

The CIT, the UIC and RAILDATA will now draw up a more specific programme of work, defining the individual issues in more detail and setting down priorities. A further workshop will be organised in about a year’s time to assess the progress made and to consider if further action is needed.