Legal background

According to Article 30(6) of Directive (EU) 2016/797, NoBos shall participate in, or ensure that their assessment personnel are informed of, the relevant standardisation and coordination activities of coordination group of NoBos and apply, as general guidance, the administrative decisions and documents produced as a result of the work of the NB-Rail group.

NB-Rail group presentation

The NB-Rail Coordination Group, in short NB-Rail, is composed of four technical subgroups with a restricted number of participants and each headed by a subgroup leader (and a deputy), to discuss specific technical issues related to the following rail subsystems:

  • Infrastructure (INF)
  • Energy (ENE)
  • Rolling Stock (RST) and
  • Control-Command and Signalling (CCS).

    • A Strategy (STR) subgroup oversees the collection, review, finalisation and validation of the outputs of these technical subgroups, before voting at the Plenary meetings as official RFUs, Q&Cs or FAQs; the STR subgroup also deals with transversal issues (impacting more than one sub-system) and produces the associated output. The STR meetings and the PLE sessions are headed by a Chairman, who is supported by a Vice-Chairman.

    This organisation is well reflected in the library of the corresponding NB-Rail Interest Group in CIRCABC.

    All the subgroups are composed of representatives of NoBos, while the European Commission (EC - DG MOVE) and the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) generally participate as observers. Member States' representatives may take part to NB-Rail activities as observers too. Furthermore, European standardisation organisations (e.g. CEN, CENELEC, ETSI) can be invited to join NB-Rail meetings as needed. Other interested parties may be also assist as observers following previous agreement by NB-Rail (e.g. OTIF).

    Two secretariats are in support of the NB-Rail Group activities:

  • an administrative secretariat (AS), responsible for the logistics of the plenary meetings;
  • a technical secretariat (TS), assisting the chairman/vice-chairman and the subgroup leaders/deputies in their duties.

    • The official communication of the NB-Rail Group is managed by both secretariats on the CIRCABC platform hosted by the EC. The TS is also the web master (Leader) of the NB-Rail Group space in CIRCABC and manages the access to the platform.

    Note

    The Coordination Group of the NoBos, also called NB-Rail Group, should not be confused with the NB-Rail Association (NB-Rail AISBL), whose membership is voluntary for NoBos and whose publications are accessible on the Association website, either publicly (Coordination page), or with a member login. The TS is the web master only the public part (Coordination page) of the NB-Rail website, which contains almost the same public content of the NB-Rail Group library in CIRCABC (i.e. main NB-Rail contacts, voted RFUs, Q&Cs and FAQs, and upcoming meetings).