ABSTRACT
EU opened the monopolies of railways by separating train operation and rail infrastructure management in order to improve performance and decrease costs. In 1995 the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) was the only railway company on the Dutch rail network but twenty years later, the number had grown to more than thirty: passenger- and freight operators, and contractors. From the beginning the Netherlands has opted for a full, legal and administrative separation of Trains and Infra. The business relationship is regulated in a well-functioning institutional triangle: Government-Operators-Infra Manager. Orientation and focus of all parties has changed significantly because of the separation: from informal task-oriented contacts to formal result-oriented contracts, and from technique to the business goals performance & costs. Therefore knowledge and skills had to increase to specify and manage cost and performance explicitly. Complicating factor was the decision to outsource all executive activities of the infra manager like engineering, material supply, personal safety and maintenance. As a consequence all associated knowledge and experiences left the company. ProRail became a pure asset manager, fully dependable of the quality of the service providers and executive information and knowledge from inspections, reports, information systems and training. In this paper I describe the principles of (rail) asset management, how ProRail manage performance through contracts and how ProRail secures systematically all necessary knowledge and information to stay in full control of performance and costs, and improve continuously.
