Congratulations to Professor CJ Baker who was awarded £55,771 from the Commission of the European Communities for the project Living in a sustainable world focused on electrified rail.

LivingRAIL will develop scenarios on the state of living style, cultures, mobility and economic activities in Europe by 2050 and explore a vision on the future role of the environmentally friendly, electrified railways within them. LivingRAIL will elaborate prospective and normative scenarios investigating possible evolutions leading to a reduction of the environmental harm of transport and in the same time to increase or at least maintain our quality of life. 

Based on todays best practice the analytical work will investigate how the railways and related transport modes can develop technically and in organisational and operational terms to achieve the 2050 targets and how spatial and urban planning, transport policy and other areas can contribute to achieve the 2050 targets. A broad set of interviews and workshops using visioning and roadmapping techniques will be conducted.

LivingRAIL will foster an intensive dialogue between politics, rail sector, spatial planning actors and civil society to develop jointly technology pathways and feasible organisational options to implement the vision 2050. The target groups: political decision makers, railways, rail supply industry, transportation providers, spatial planning authorities, transport associations, passengers organisations and academia will be involved in the dialogue process from the very start.

Thus the LivingRAIL results will be checked in the reality and that will substantially increase their practical importance and pave the way towards implementing the finding...