The rail freight industry is characterised by staff shortages all over Europe, but Germany might have found an effective solution: the WILSON.Share initiative. Led by the pro-Rail Alliance, the new platform allows companies to ‘share’ staff, be it train drivers, shunters, wagon inspectors or roster planners, despite some persisting hurdles.
The WILSON.Share platform began its pilot phase in 2023, with 18 companies participating. Now, it will become available to all interested parties and, at least initially, it will be free of charge, the pro-Rail Alliance said. “The goal is to enable companies to react more quickly to delays and short-term staff shortages by mutually assisting each other with employees”, the association added.
The idea came from the fact that train drivers do not necessarily spend most of their working time driving, only between 35 and 55% according to the pro-Rail Alliance. A lot of the rest is spent transferring from one place to another on passenger trains or waiting for their freight trains to arrive. Given the lack of reliability, typical of the rail freight industry, these trains might arrive once a shift is over or they might arrive on time but a company might not have drivers immediately available.
WILSON.Share
“This type of work is often unsatisfactory for train drivers because most of them would actually prefer to drive trains themselves rather than wait”, the alliance explained. Enter WILSON.Share. The platform would enable the deployment of staff from one company to perform duties for another one, if circumstances allow it. The platform was developed in cooperation with software company Menlo79 and consultants Enginec and SCI Verkher.
The regulatory burden
Despite being positively assessed, the WILSON.Share platform still presents a few challenges, especially in terms of regulation. “Each railway company has its own set of rules, sometimes several hundred pages long, which has so far made it difficult for companies to share personnel”, the pro-Rail Alliance specified.
As a consequence, workers participating in the project would have to learn the regulations of every company they are assigned to, and sometimes even pass an additional test. This, the alliance argued, creates an unnecessary hurdle that does not improve safety. The objective will thus now be on standardising all these different sets of regulations to create a harmonised environment that facilitates sharing staff.