Mr President, I would first like to congratulate Mr Savary on his drafting of such excellent reports. This is an important topic, but also an extremely complicated one. Mr Savary has taken good account of the views of others. My group supports improvement of the competitiveness of railways and liberalisation of competition. The first stage is to create the conditions for uninterrupted movement of trains over the entire region of the European Union. Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSIs) and common standards are a sine qua non for the development of railway interoperability. The rapporteur has quite rightly adopted a gradual approach. Technical solutions can vary a great deal. The competitiveness of railways should not be undermined by the imposition of additional economic burdens, even though common standards will lower costs in the longer term. Existing differences between national railway systems will make necessary some exceptions in the harmonisation of railway systems, so that no Member State shall have to face inordinate difficulties and so that current railway transport will not be jeopardised. This report outlines a course of action by which these exceptions can be accepted without jeopardising the principal objective. There is one further matter which would require fine tuning; this was outlined in Amendment No 35 by my Group. It applies to Finland in particular, but some of the applicant countries will be faced with the same problem in connection with enlargement of the Union. The matter referred to concerns Russian freight wagons, where technical solutions are applied which differ from those of the Member States, inter alia in the area of couplings and brakes. They are not necessarily inferior, but different. Russia is hardly about to change its standards in order to comply with the requirements of the Union. For Finland, this is an exceptionally major issue. Due to historical reasons, the track gauge in Finland and Russia is the same, but it is different from that in Europe in general. Russian wagons account for approximately 40 % – almost a half – of Finnish freight transport. The reason for this high percentage is that we do not want to take the risk of sending Finnish wagons to Russia, since experience shows that they are so very rarely returned. Russia, of course, is a country which leans heavily on rail transport, with a rolling stock which must equal that of the entire region of the EU put together In the review concerning point 5 of Article 5, Mr Savary proposes that when considering special cases, particular attention should be paid to the rolling stock of third countries. This proposal is very good, but the solution remains half-finished, as far as Finland is concerned. It will lead to unnecessary and laborious inspections of Russian wagons and to massive bureaucracy. There is no certainty either that Russian wagons in all instances would be regarded as special cases. This is why we have tabled an amendment of Article 7, which simply aims at making it possible to use third country freight wagons for traffic, as long as they do not cross the border between two Member States. This is the addition referred to as point f in the Committee’s amendment. Implementation of this proposal would give assurance that rail traffic in Finland could continue without becoming drastically reduced.

Political group: ELDR