DEVELOPING BENCHMARKING METHODOLOGIES FOR RAILWAY INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT COMPANIES Richard Anderson Robin Hirsch Mark Trompet William Adeney Railway Technology Strategy Centre, Centre for Transport Studies, Imperial College London United Kingdom 1. INTRODUCTION Since the 1990s, the European Commission (EC) decided that to allow fair competition on the European railway network, the separation of essential functions in the sector was required. This has led to the separation of functions such as licensing, capacity creation and allocation, charging, the monitoring of public service obligations and the provision of train services. EC Directives such as 91/440 have far-reaching implications for the management of the railway infrastructure. Significantly, separate, dedicated ‘Railway Infrastructure Management companies 1 (Infracos) have been created in most EU countries, providing the essential separation between the management of the rail infrastructure and use of the infrastructure. The creation of separate Infracos necessitates a new approach to international railway benchmarking. European Railways have only recently been vertically separated and in many countries, the process is not yet complete. To date, therefore, most national railway benchmarking has either encompassed the traditional vertically integrated railway, or it has focussed on internal benchmarking. The recent exception to this has been the INFRACOST study performed by the UIC, of which the early stages focussed on the activities of both building and maintaining the infrastructure. External benchmarking requires valid comparisons of performance between different companies, so attaining a reasonable level of comparability is essential. Railway Infracos are hugely complex and comparing performance between them can be hindered by the large extent of external factors (such as geography and train service density) that influence performance. Moreover, different Infracos throughout the EU define and measure their own performance (such as reliability due to good infrastructure) in many different ways. In particular, Infracos often wish to focus on measures of performance that are different to the total (integrated) railway. In July 2001, the European Commission, as part of the 5th framework growth programme, commissioned a 2-year project, known as IMPROVERAIL 2 . Its objective was to support the establishment of railway infrastructure management in accordance with Directive 91/440, and other newly issued