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Annual Report 2021
RFC Amber is presenting its third Annual Report. This new report gives a comprehensive summary about the activities and achievements of 2021. In spite of this situation of uncertainty, several important achievements of RFC Amber during 2021 deserve to be highlighted.
One of the most important achievements is that the number of path requests received rose by 140% compared to the previous year. With this development we left behind us the due to the pandemic rather low numbers during 2020 and exceeded even the numbers of our initial year of operation 2019. The number of freight trains of RFC Amber border sections also shows an increase, indicating a recovery from the mostly pandemic-related decrease in 2020; in 2021 the number of trains is even slightly higher than during the initial year 2019. For a still rather young corridor like RFC Amber publicity is an important field of activity, in which we made also many important achievements in 2021.
However, 2021 also brought changes and new challenges. This concerned in particular the financing of our corridor activities. The Programme Support Action (PSA) became extended until the end of September 2021, but the remaining funds under the Action were rather limited, thus only allowing a smaller portion of costs to be covered from it during the extension period. At the same time the continued financing of RFCs announced by the European Commission became delayed and connected to much uncertainty regarding the amount, form and conditions. When the call for proposals for the new Technical Assistance for RFCs finally was published just before Christmas, it became clear, that the amount allocated to our corridor in the Lump Sum Decision of July 2021 would become reduced again due to the extension of the PSA. Thus, in terms of financing, 2021 was a year, in which the work of the corridor to a higher degree than originally expected relied on the financial contributions of its Members.
Last, but not least, we would like to emphasize, that RFC Amber organized in November 2021 again its annual meeting with the Railway and Terminal Advisory Groups (RAG-TAG). Held as a hybrid-meeting in Budapest, it was the first meeting since the beginning of the pandemic, which allowed participants to join both in person and online. We would like to sincerely thank the entire team working in and for our corridor, our Spokesperson and Members of the RAG-TAG and all other stakeholders for their continued commitment and dedication to RFC Amber. We wish all of you a pleasant reading of this Annual Report.
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