THE CEO of Italian State Railways (FS), Mr Renato Mazzoncini, signed an agreement in Rome on April 7 with Mr Guillermo Dietrich, Argentina’s minister of transport, for FS to provide technical assistance for the Buenos Aires Regional Express (RER) rail project.

COAL services operated by Australian rail freight operator Aurizon have suffered severe disruption following heavy rain and flooding caused by Cyclone Debbie which made landfall on the Queensland coast during the last week of March.

THE German rail industry achieved a 5.2% increase in exports in 2016 to €6.1bn taking exports to 52% of total sales of €11.8bn. However, domestic sales fell by 12% to €5.7bn compared with 2015.

PAKISTAN Railways (PR) has announced that it will double over 5582km of track in 11 different sections across the country, with a build, operate and transfer (BOT) model likely to be adopted.

BRITISH Steel has opened a new long length rail logistics centre in Lecco, Italy, in order to meet growing demand in Italy.

RUSSIAN Railways (RZD) and Gazprom signed an agreement on March 30 to jointly finance the construction of the Northern Latitudinal Railway (NLR) in western Siberia.

SWISS Federal Railways (SBB) can look back on a successful year in 2016 with records in several areas: passenger journeys rose by 3.5% to 1.25 million per day, total freight traffic was up by 9.9% to 16.6 billion tonne-km, and the network was more intensively used than ever before.

THE European Union’s (EU) Transforming Transport big data research project, which was launched in January and runs through to June 30 2019, is preparing to launch a rail pilot project in Spain as one of 13 pilot schemes in Europe covering all modes of transport.

FRENCH National Railways (SNCF) is starting to use IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) on IBM Cloud to monitor train and infrastructure performance in real-time.

SWISS Federal Railways (SBB) has launched a new strategy which aims to combine its existing strengths with new technology to enable it to increase capacity, offer door-to-door journeys, and develop digital stations and smart freight wagons.