Track access Consultancy support

Tender description

Iarnród Éireann - Irish Rail (IE) is the Irish national railway company in Ireland wholly owned by the Irish government. It is a subsidiary of Córas Iompair Éireann (CIE), the national transport company. Iarnród Éireann provides passenger and freight rail services as well as operating Rosslare Europort. Iarnród Éireann is organised into two divisions: • The Infrastructure Manager (IM) is responsible for establishing, managing and maintaining the railway infrastructure including traffic management, control, command and signalling. • The Railway Undertaking (RU) is responsible for the principal business of providing services for rail transport of passengers and freight. EU directive 2001/14/EC, now transposed into Irish Law as S.I. No. 249 of 2015, requires member states to implement a track access regime (TAR). As the Iarnród Éireann IM and RU divisions are not considered to be sufficiently independent of each other, given the structure of Iarnród Éireann, an independent essential functions body (EFB) has been established within CIE to perform the essential functions of capacity allocation and track access charging. CIE EFB now wishes to appoint a suitably qualified consultant:- • to recommend the most appropriate track access regime for the Iarnród Éireann network bearing in mind the characteristics of the network and the requirements of the statutory instrument (S.I.) and EU Regulation referred to above • to develop a model for the calculation of the track access charges that should be applied across the network. The model should be capable of updating on an annual basis.