(1)

With a view to pursuing the efforts to create a single market in rail transport services, the European Parliament and the Council have adopted Directive 2004/49/EC (3) establishing a common regulatory framework for railway safety.

(2)

Originally, authorisation procedures for placing in service railway vehicles were dealt with by Council Directive 96/48/EC of 23 July 1996 on the interoperability of the trans-European high-speed rail system (4) and Directive 2001/16/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 March 2001 on the interoperability of the conventional rail system (5) for new or upgraded parts of the Community rail system, and Directive 2004/49/EC for vehicles already in use. In accordance with better regulation, and with a view to simplifying and modernising Community legislation, all provisions regarding authorisations for placing railway vehicles in service should be incorporated in a single legal text. Therefore, the current Article 14 of Directive 2004/49/EC should be deleted and a new provision regarding authorisation of placing in service vehicles already in use should be included in Directive 2008/57/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 June 2008 on the interoperability of the rail system within the Community (recast) (6), (hereinafter referred to as the ‘Railway Interoperability Directive’), that has replaced Directives 96/48/EC and 2001/16/EC.

(3)

The entry into force of the 1999 Convention concerning International Carriage by Rail (COTIF) on 1 July 2006 brought in new rules governing contracts for the use of vehicles. According to the CUV (Uniform Rules concerning Contracts of Use of Vehicles in International Rail Traffic) appended thereto, wagon keepers are no longer obliged to register their wagons with a railway undertaking. The former ‘Regolamento Internazionale Veicoli’ (RIV) Agreement between railway undertakings has ceased to apply and was partially replaced by a new private and voluntary agreement (General Contract of Use for Wagons, GCU) between railway undertakings and wagon keepers whereby the latter are in charge of the maintenance of their wagons. In order to reflect these changes and to facilitate the implementation of Directive 2004/49/EC as far as safety certification of railway undertakings is concerned, the concept of the ‘keeper’ and the concept of ‘entity in charge of maintenance’ should be defined, as well as the specification of the relationship between these entities and railway undertakings.

(4)

The definition of the keeper should be as close as possible to the definition used in the 1999 COTIF Convention. Many entities can be identified as a keeper of a vehicle, for example, the owner, a company making business out of a fleet of wagons, a company leasing vehicles to a railway undertaking, a railway undertaking or an infrastructure manager using vehicles for maintaining its infrastructure. These entities have the control over the vehicle with a view to its use as a means of transport by the railway undertakings and the infrastructure managers. In order to avoid any doubt, the keeper should be clearly identified in the National Vehicle Register (NVR) provided for in Article 33 of the Railway Interoperability Directive.

(5)

In order to ensure consistency with existing railway legislation and avoid undue burden, Member States should be allowed to exclude heritage, museum and tourist railways from the scope of this Directive.

(6)

Before a vehicle is placed in service or used on the network, an entity in charge of its maintenance should be identified in the NVR. A railway undertaking, an infrastructure manager or a keeper could be an entity in charge of maintenance.

(7)

Member States should be allowed to fulfil the obligations to identify the entity in charge of maintenance and to certify it through alternative measures in the case of vehicles registered in a third country and maintained according to the law of that country, vehicles which are used on networks or lines the track gauge of which is different from that of the main rail network within the Community and for which the requirement to identify an entity in charge of maintenance is ensured alternatively by international agreements with third countries and vehicles used by heritage, museum and tourist railways or military equipment and special transport requiring an ad hoc national safety authority permit to be delivered prior to the service. In these situations the relevant Member State should be allowed to accept vehicles on the network for which it is competent without an entity in charge of maintenance being assigned to these vehicles or without such an entity being certified. However, such derogations should be subject to formal decisions of the relevant Member State and be analysed by the European Railway Agency (hereinafter referred to as the ‘Agency’) in the context of its report on safety performance.

(8)

When a railway undertaking or infrastructure manager uses a vehicle for which no entity in charge of maintenance is registered or for which the entity in charge of maintenance is not certified, it should control all risks associated with the use of such a vehicle. The capacity to control such risks should be demonstrated by the railway undertaking or the infrastructure manager through the certification of their safety management system and, where applicable, through their safety certification or authorisation.

(9)

For freight wagons, the entity in charge of maintenance should be certified according to a system to be developed by the Agency and to be adopted by the Commission. Where the entity in charge of maintenance is a railway undertaking or an infrastructure manager, this certification should be included in the procedure for safety certification or authorisation. The certificate delivered to such an entity would guarantee that the maintenance requirements of this Directive are met for any freight wagon of which it is in charge. This certificate should be valid in the whole Community and should be delivered by a body able to audit the maintenance system set up by such entities. As freight wagons are frequently used in international traffic and as an entity in charge of maintenance may want to use workshops established in more than one Member State, the certification body should be able to perform its controls in the whole Community.

(10)

Maintenance requirements are being developed in the context of the Railway Interoperability Directive, in particular as part of the ‘rolling stock’ technical specifications for interoperability (TSIs). As a result of the entry into force of this Directive there is a need to ensure coherence between these TSIs and the certification requirements for the entity in charge of maintenance to be adopted by the Commission. The Commission will achieve this by modifying, where appropriate, the relevant TSIs using the procedure envisaged by the Railway Interoperability Directive.

(11)

Since the objective of this Directive, namely further developing and improving safety on the Community’s railways, cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can therefore, by reason of the scale of the action, be better achieved at Community level, the Community may adopt measures, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity as set out in Article 5 of the Treaty. In accordance with the principle of proportionality, as set out in that Article, this Directive does not go beyond what is necessary in order to achieve that objective.

(12)

The measures necessary for the implementation of Directive 2004/49/EC should be adopted in accordance with Council Decision 1999/468/EC of 28 June 1999 laying down the procedures for the exercise of implementing powers conferred on the Commission (7).

(13)

In particular, the Commission should be empowered to revise and adapt the Annexes to Directive 2004/49/EC, to adopt and revise common safety methods and common safety targets, and also to establish a maintenance certification system. Since those measures are of general scope and are designed to amend non-essential elements of Directive 2004/49/EC, inter alia, by supplementing it with new non-essential elements, they must be adopted in accordance with the regulatory procedure with scrutiny provided for in Article 5a of Decision 1999/468/EC.

(14)

A Member State which has no railway system and which does not envisage having one in the near future, would be under a disproportionate and pointless obligation if it had to transpose and implement this Directive. Therefore, such a Member State should be exempted, for as long as it has no railway system, from the obligation to transpose and implement this Directive.

(15)

In accordance with point 34 of the Interinstitutional Agreement on better law-making (8), Member States are encouraged to draw up, for themselves and in the interests of the Community, their own tables illustrating, as far as possible, the correlation between this Directive and the transposition measures, and make them public.

(16)

Directive 2004/49/EC should therefore be amended accordingly,

1.

the following points shall be added to Article 2(2):

2.

the following points shall be added to Article 3:

(*1)   OJ L 191, 18.7.2008, p. 1.’;"

3.

in Article 4(4) the term ‘wagon keeper’ shall be replaced by ‘keeper’;

4.

Article 5(2) shall be replaced by the following:

5.

Article 6 shall be amended as follows:

6.

Article 7 shall be amended as follows:

7.

Article 10 shall be amended as follows:

8.

the following Article shall be inserted:

9.

Article 16(2) shall be amended as follows:

10.

the following point shall be added to Article 18:

11.

Article 26 shall be replaced by the following:

12.

Article 27 shall be amended as follows:

13.

point 3 of Annex II shall be deleted.