Call: Technical Assistance Rail Freight Corridors

The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) for Transport is the funding instrument to realise European transport infrastructure policy. It aims at supporting investments in building new transport infrastructure in Europe or rehabilitating and upgrading the existing one.

Trans-European Networks for Transport (TEN-T) policy objectives foresee:

• completion by 2030 of the Core Network, structured around nine multimodal Core Network Corridors.
• completion by 2050 of the Comprehensive Network in order to facilitate accessibility to all European regions

CEF Transport focuses on cross-border projects and projects aiming at removing bottlenecks or bridging missing links in various sections of the Core Network and on the Comprehensive Network (link), as well as for horizontal priorities such as traffic management systems.

CEF Transport also supports innovation in the transport system in order to improve the use of infrastructure, reduce the environmental impact of transport, enhance energy efficiency and increase safety.

Objectives:

The general objective of this technical assistance is to promote an effective implementation of Regulation (EU) No 913/2010 (hereafter: “the Regulation”) by supporting infrastructure managers and allocation bodies, in particular the management board set up in accordance with Article 8(2) and the one-stop shop set up in accordance with Article 13(1) of the Regulation.

In this context, the specific objectives of the technical assistance are equivalent to the objectives of the Regulation7:

• Objective 1: Improve coordination between infrastructure managers, Member States, railway undertakings and terminal owners/operators, both between these different groups of actors and – within the groups – across borders;
• Objective 2: Coordinate and plan investments to ensure that infrastructure capacities and capabilities available along the corridor meet the needs of international rail freight traffic, including as regards interoperability;
• Objective 3: Improve operational conditions for international rail freight services, in particular by coordinating traffic management along the corridors, including in the event of disturbance and monitor the performance of rail freight services on the corridors;
• Objective 4: Guarantee international freight trains access to adequate infrastructure capacity, recognizing the needs of other types of transport, including passenger transport;
• Objective 5: Facilitate the use of rail infrastructure for international rail freight services and support fair competition between rail freight service providers;
• Objective 6: Improve intermodality along the corridors.

The supported projects are expected to deliver deliverables, to be produced by the Management Boards and the RFCs’ One-Stop Shops (OSS) as defined in Articles 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18 and 19 of the Regulation.

Themes and priorities:

The scope of activities supported under this technical assistance covers the entire scope defined by the Regulation as well as any other activity that contributes to achieving the objectives of the Regulation.

Activities that can be funded:

The applicants are requested to produce the following deliverables as identified in the Lump Sum Decision, Work Package 6:

1. Implementation plan prepared and reviewed in accordance with Articles 9(1) and 9(2) of Regulation (EU) No 913/2010 (including objectives, procedures to coordinate traffic management, etc.);
2. transport market study updated in accordance with Article 9(3);
3. the document containing infrastructure works restricting available capacity published in accordance with Article 12;
4. documentation of the assessment of capacity needs and of the capacity provided and allocated to freight trains in accordance with Articles 13 and 14;
5. the register of capacity requests referred to in Article 13(5);
6. the document published in accordance with Article 18 of the Regulation (‘Corridor Information Document’);
7. the document(s) presenting the results of the monitoring of the performance of rail freight services and of the user satisfaction survey in accordance with Articles 19(2) and 19(3);
8. insofar as not covered by the documents referred to above, any other appropriate documentation of the activities carried out by the management board in implementing Articles 8(7), 8(8), 10, 14(6), 14(8), 15, 17(1) and 17(3) and, if applicable, of the coordination with the corresponding core network corridor in accordance with Article 48 of Regulation (EU) No 1315/2013.

Payment of the lump sum is conditional on the completeness of the deliverables addressing the elements listed above. Particular deliverables may be further specified in a Grant Agreement taking into account status and characteristics of a particular Rail Freight Corridor.

As the lump sum support will be calculated at the level of the defined work package, the content of the work package cannot be modified.

In case of the Rail Freight Corridors benefitting from the CEF support in 2021, notably in the form of a Programme Support Action (PSA) "Support for the establishment and implementation of the Rail Freight Corridors" there should be no overlap with an application subject to this call. Therefore, the start date in the application can only be after the end of the respective PSA for a given Rail Freight Corridor. Consequently, the lump sum for 2021 will also be reduced proportionally to the duration of the CEF supported Action in 2021.

Proposal page limits and layout:

• Part A to be filled in directly online  (administrative information, summarised budget, call-specific questions, etc.)
• Part B to be downloaded from the Portal submission system, completed and re-uploaded as a PDF in the system
• mandatory annexes and supporting documents (to be uploaded):
  • detailed budget table per WP (template available in the Submission System)
  • timetable/Gantt chart

The available call budget for Actions related to Technical Assistance to Member State – General Envelope is EUR 10,000,000.

Project budget (maximum grant amount): projects of any budget are admitted provided they are above EUR 500,000.

For this topic the grant will be a lump sum grant. This means that it will reimburse a fixed amount, based on a lump sum or financing not linked to costs. The amount will be fixed by the granting authority on the basis of the variable amounts it has prefixed and the estimates indicated by the beneficiaries in their project budget.