RailNetEurope (Association for facilitating traffic on European rail infrastructure) is a European association of rail infrastructure companies and authorities. The joint office of RailNetEurope is located in Vienna (Austria). Today it represents 38 institutions with the status of full members or candidates, which together operate a rail network of around 230,000 km.
The organization came into being in January 2004, when numerous representatives of railway infrastructure administrations founded an office that works in the field of rail infrastructure management and aims to simplify international rail traffic. This happened against the background of the liberalization of the railway markets in the European Union in the course of the interoperability goals and builds on the bilateral and multilateral cooperation agreements between the members that have existed to date, which contained mutual network access and route usage rights. This also made it necessary to separate the railway infrastructure and transport companies that had previously been part of the Forum Train Europe (FTE), which had emerged from the European Timetable Conference (SFAO) . The transport companies are still organized in the FTE.
International rail traffic is carried out by around 120 railway companies, which form the main target group of RailNetEurope. In addition, there are another 300 nationally operating railway companies.
