Utrecht/ Oslo, October, 2023 – Bane NOR, the Norwegian railway infrastructure manager and Hit Rail B.V., the European rail industry’s IT specialist, have entered into a contract for the operation of the Common Interface (CI). Effective immediately, Hit Rail has installed and is now operating the CI by providing it to Bane NOR as Software as a Service (SaaS) on its cloud IT platform, hosted at Amazon AWS.
Hit Rail’s cloud platform is a robust, reliable and scalable IT infrastructure on which to offer new, innovative IT services to railway companies. The Common Interface is the prescribed specification for interoperable message exchange for the European Union’s TAF (freight) and TAP (passenger) Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSI) issued by the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA). In order to support the industry’s efforts to achieve compliance, Hit Rail is able to offer to operate the CI as a service on behalf of railway companies.
Bane NOR joins the growing number of IMs and RUs for which Hit Rail operates the Common Interface service, as part of their efforts to implement the EU’s TAF and TAP TSIs. By having the CI as a service, companies can dedicate their efforts to adapt their own systems to the TAF and TAP TSI standards without having to operate the Common Interface on their own infrastructure or having to train their own personnel on the software.
Karsten Kleppe, manager of IT Traffic and Customer section at Bane NOR, said: “Hit Rail helps us to improve the quality of the data flow towards RNE, and provides good support and responds quickly to inquiries ”
Antonio Lopez, general manager of Hit Rail, said: “The CI cloud-based services that Hit Rail provides to Bane NOR are critical for Bane NOR’s exchange of TAF and TAP TSI messages with Rail Net Europe. This will help to improve the efficiency and transparency of services and we are delighted to be able to support them in taking the next step in pan-European compliance.”
For more info please contact Hans van Walsem (vanwalsem@hitrail.com)