European Railway Award 2012 Background
 

The European Railway Award regularly honours outstanding political and technical achievements in the development of economically and environmentally sustainable rail transport. The award comes with prize money, which will be donated to charity organisations of the laureates’ choice. The jury for the European Railway Award 2012 consisted of CEOs of rail and rail industry companies as well as stakeholders from the transport sector.
 

In previous years, the European Railway Award was awarded to late Transport Commissioner Karel van Miert (2007), Swiss Transport Minister Moritz Leuenberger (2009), former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez (2010), and British Labour politician and former mayor of London Ken Livingstone, (2011) as regards the Political Award. The technical award was awarded to former Director General of SNCF Jean Dupuy (2007), the inventor of the electronic train control system ETCS Bengt Sterner (2009), former Member of the Board of DB and former Chairman of DB Netz Roland Heinisch (2010) and Managing Director of Knorr-Bremse Austria Stefan Haas (2011).
 

First presented in 2007, the European Railway Award attracts more than 500 guests from all over Europe, including high-level politicians and transport stakeholders.

The laureates for the European Railway Award 2012 are:
 
Political Award Laureate

 
Karel Vinck (born in 1938 in Belgium)

Karel Vinck, former CEO of the Belgian National Railway Company, SNCB, former chairman of CER and now President of the Board of BAM, the company which manages investment in mobility of the city of Antwerp, Belgium, was asked by former Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot to take the lead on ERTMS deployment as the European ERTMS Corridor Coordinator. In this role, he supervises the implementation of ERTMS on the six so-called ERTMS corridors which are a backbone of mostly freight corridors. When taking on this responsibility, Karel Vinck declared that, in order for ERTMS to bring benefits, ERTMS implementation needed to go hand-in-hand with investments aimed at relieving bottlenecks and harmonizing the operational rules. He has put relentless effort to foster the interoperability of rail in Europe. His strategy and consensus building has been instrumental for the trans-European coordination of ERTMS.

 
 
Technical Award Laureate

 
Francois Lacôte (born in May 1947 in France)

Francois Lacôte became famous as ‘Mr Very-High Speed’ as he was the designer of the first TGV train set in 1971 and oversaw the test campaign that has established the world record in May 1990 on rails (515.3 km/h). He started his career in 1971 at SNCF and joined, in November 2000, the Executive Committee of Alstom Transport as Technical Director. He is now the chief engineer of the Alstom VHS flagship: the AGV, the self-propelled high-speed successor to the TGV. Furthermore, he was instrumental in developing the so-called “Duplex” TGV. It is unique among TGV trains in that it features bi-level carriages. The Duplex inaugurated the third generation of TGV trainsets, and was specially designed to increase capacity on high-speed lines with saturated traffic. With two seating levels and a seating capacity of 545 passengers, the Duplex maximizes the number of passengers carried in one trainset. While the TGV Duplex started as a small component of the TGV fleet, it has become one of the system’s main workhorses.

The award ceremony will be followed by the joint CER & UNIFE Annual Reception.