In addition to the operational business, an essential part of decarbonizing the transport sector is to plan and design the construction and maintenance of the railway system sustainably. It transpires that both society and politics are increasingly developing clearer ideas on how these topics should be implemented in practice. Current tenders in the German-speaking countries show that sustainability is included more and more in the evaluation criteria and the two opposites of “building ecologically” and “building cost-efficiently” are no longer mutually exclusive. Thanks to various incentives that clients are currently working on, the attractiveness of track construction and maintenance machines operating with zero emissions is increasing all the time, especially in Europe.

The one-day event demonstrated how diverse both the challenges and opportunities of decarbonization are.

“Climate action is a community challenge”, summarizes Michael Gilka, president of BVMB, the German Federal Association of Medium-Sized Construction Companies, the aim of all those involved in his keynote speech.

In an impulse session on “Research & Development”, Plasser & Theurer together with Axel-Björn Hüper, senior adviser and proprietor of InfraBauberatung (Berlin) introduced the activities on alternative drives within the industry dialogue. The discussion centred around what solutions are available today to make track construction and maintenance vehicles emission-free and how the associated process of transformation should be shaped. “The industry dialogue shows that there is a great desire for sustainable innovations from all sides.” In view of the latest developments, Mr Hüper is optimistic: “The railway was the driving force of innovation at the start of the industrial revolution, it can and should be the driving force of Industry 4.0”.