LIVE IN BRUSSELS AND ONLINE 12 & 13 March 2026
Ensuring Operational Readiness & Payback In The Context Of Complex Delivery & Financial Challenges
12 & 13 March 2026
Ensuring Operational Readiness & Payback In The Context Of Complex Delivery & Financial Challenges
12 & 13 March 2026
Since the inaugural ETCS Business Readiness Conference in London in July 2025, Europe has crossed a significant threshold — transitioning from isolated pilots to demonstrable, network-wide delivery.
Infrabel in Belgium has now completed ETCS deployment across its entire 6,400-kilometre mainline network, making it one of the most concrete examples of a full national rollout anywhere in Europe.
Elsewhere, programmes in Switzerland, Norway, France, the Netherlands and the UK are moving from rollout into live operation — demonstrating that ETCS can be deployed at scale without destabilising day-to-day operations, provided business and operational readiness is treated as a core delivery discipline.
ETCS Value: Proven for Some, Questioned by Others
And yet, despite this progress, many European railways remain uncertain about where ETCS genuinely proves its value. This is particularly true for some freight operators, regional passenger networks, and railways operating outside the main EU cross-border corridors, where the economics, operating models, and risk profiles are significantly different.
As one operator put it during our research conversations, “The question isn’t whether ETCS works — it’s whether it works for us.”
Unfiltered Operator Experience, Not Just Polished Case Studies
ETCS Readiness & ERTMS Migration Europe 2026 is designed for railways and infrastructure managers across freight, high-speed and regional networks that are pushing towards ETCS Level 2, while also being honest about where it is — and isn’t — proving itself operationally and financially.
Plus, through extensive conversations with operators since July 2025, a consistent set of unresolved commercial, operational and technical challenges continues to surface. These include:
What Justifies Itself on Dense Corridors Does Not Automatically Work Elsewhere
The conference explicitly recognises that ETCS is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. What delivers value on a high-speed, cross-border corridor does not automatically translate to a freight-dominated or lower-density regional network. The agenda therefore, examines how value can be defined, measured and realised under very different operating and commercial conditions — including where ETCS must coexist with thinner margins, mixed fleets and high sensitivity to downtime.
The aim is not simply to discuss operational delivery within individual freight or regional organisations, but to explore different ways outcomes and payback can be achieved — and what those choices mean in practice across diverse rail operations.
These realities shape the agenda throughout. While the full speaker line-up is still being finalised, the conference already brings together headline case studies that move well into lived operational experience.
On day one, Jochen Bultinck, COO, Infrabel, will reflect on the realities of delivering ETCS across the entire Belgian network — not just the technical milestones, but the cost control, programme complexity, operational compromises and sequencing decisions required to make national-scale deployment work.
ERTMS - Lessons From Switzerland
Dr Florian Käppler, Head of ERTMS at BLS AG, will share hard-earned experience of implementing ETCS Level 2 in a regional passenger environment, while simultaneously planning for FRMCS migration across Swiss and cross-border networks — highlighting the additional constraints operators face around availability, interoperability and commercial resilience.
The Dutch ‘No Fallback’ Approach
Returning speaker Thijs van Steen, Programme Director at ERTMS Netherlands, will provide an update on the delivery of the first tranche of the Dutch network and the planning of the wider rollout — including the implications of migrating directly to ETCS Level 2 without fallback signalling, and the operational discipline this approach demands.
What also sets this conference apart is its focus on balancing governance and delivery with the unforgiving reality of operational readiness. Speakers are encouraged to be open about what went wrong as well as what worked — because, as several operators noted, “That’s where the real learning sits.”
The agenda concentrates on:
Designing ETCS for Humans, Not Just Systems
Training, simulation and human factors sit at the centre of operational readiness. Sessions focus on how simulation is used to embed degraded mode behaviour, align control rooms and drivers, and expose operational assumptions before they surface in live service.
The programme is deliberately structured to engage both infrastructure managers and rail operators. Joint panel sessions bring both perspectives into the same room, allowing coordination challenges to be addressed directly rather than discussed in parallel.
Case studies go beyond what was planned to examine:
Sessions also address:
Avoiding Stranded Assets as Telecom and Technical Standards Change
Day two turns firmly to infrastructure and technical readiness, including large-scale retrofit of legacy fleets and the sequencing challenges this creates — particularly for freight operators. It also takes a hard look at FRMCS as an active planning constraint rather than a distant roadmap item.
Sessions examine the timing relationship between GSM-R obsolescence, ETCS baseline evolution and FRMCS migration, and how railways can protect today’s ERTMS investments while preparing for inevitable radio and telecom change.
The programme concludes with focused roundtable streams, allowing delegates to engage deeply with the issues most relevant to their networks — from freight retrofitting strategies to managing cost, certification and downtime across multiple software baselines, and ensuring degraded mode and human-factors readiness. This structure reflects the reality that meaningful progress is often made through targeted peer exchange rather than plenary debate.
Who This Is For
This conference is for:
