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2007 discharge: European Railway Agency ERA

2008/2270(DEC)

PURPOSE: presentation of the final accounts of the European Railway Agency for the financial year 2007.

CONTENT: this document sets out a detailed account of the implementation of the Agency’s budget for 2007. It indicates that the Agency’s final budget amounted to EUR 16.6 million (including a reserve of EUR 1.9 million), as compared with EUR 14.4 million for 2006.

As regards the staffing policy, the Agency (which is located in two cities: its administrative seat is in Valenciennes whereas its meetings have to be held in Lille) officially set out 116 posts in its establishment plan. 95 posts are currently occupied + 4 other posts totalling 99 posts assigned to operational and administrative duties.

The activities carried out in 2007 are as follows:

Safety

  • creation and bringing into service of the Safety Database;
  • completion and submission of the first set of Common Safety Methods to the Commission;
  • a draft recommendation on the methodology for setting common safety targets;
  • setting up a task force on peer review to facilitate mutual recognition of safety certificate;
  • development of a common approach to safety reporting.

Interoperability — Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSI)

  • completion of the preliminary draft of the TSI infrastructure and TSI Energy;
  • intermediate report on TSI Rolling Stock;
  • work on Revisions of the TSI Operations and TSI Freight wagons;
  • work on TSI Telematics for Passengers;
  • report on the certification of maintenance workshops;
  • study on the relationship between the 1 435mm and 1 520mm railway systems;
  • development of registration of Rolling Stock.

European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS)

  • established as System Authority for ERTMS;
  • database for ERTMS change requests;
  • recommendation for updating version 2.3.0 of the ERTMS baseline;
  • study on Safety Approval of ERTMS systems.

Economic evaluation

  • implementation of the methodology to create ‘applied methodology’ documents for each recommendation;
  • launch of the DREAM database initiative (Database for Rail Economic Analysis Monitoring);
  • provision of support to European Commission.

The complete version of the final accounts may be found at the following address: http://www.era.europa.eu/public