FP5-TRANS4M-R’s overall goal is to establish rail freight as backbone of the lowest emission and most resilient logistics chain in Europe, fulfilling the end customer requirements to their full satisfaction. Therefore, the project builds upon the goals and vision of the European Commission addressing the needs to significantly boost the rail freight transport through increased capacity, strengthened cross-border coordination and cooperation between rail infrastructure managers, better overall management of the rail network, and the deployment of new technologies such as digital coupling and automation. These goals set the foundation, frame, and ambition for the project.

Objective 1: Higher throughput and shorter transportation duration

Develop, validate, and demonstrate the FP5-TRANS4M-R technologies and thereby enabled train functions and operational procedures leading to:

• at least 40% decrease of train formation/decomposition time,
• train preparation time of at least 45%, while
• enabling freight train compositions up to 1500 meters

Objective 2: Maximize flexibility and reliability of rail freight services

Develop, validate, and demonstrate the FP5-TRANS4M-R digital rail freight services and software solutions significantly contributing to achieve in 2030 the MAWP objectives:

• Reduce average transportation time on reference corridor by 10-20%.
• Reduce operational dwell time at borders and other handover points by 50%.
• Reduce the number of additional operational stops (also limiting the energy consumption) by 20%.
• Reduce handling/response time for ad-hoc cross-border path requests by 70%.
• Reduce handling/response time for connected comprehensive intermodal offers by at least 50%.
• Reduced energy consumption and reduced footprint through less stops at borders by a minimum of 10%

Objective 3: Mitigating demographic change

With the demographic change not only the average age of employees is increasing but also less people are available for physically demanding work especially in yards, such as train preparation, coupling, uncoupling and further operational processes. FP5-TRANS4M-R provides the necessary technologies to automate/digitalise operational processes, but also instructions and guidelines to maximise the acceptance of the newly developed digital technologies.