RailNewcastle – Erasmus Intensive Programme

RailNewcastle, which is an intensive rail programme in Newcastle upon Tyne, the UK, addresses explicitly the following main objectives of the ERASMUS SUB-programmes:

1) To improve the quality and to increase the volume of student and teaching staff mobility throughout Europe, so as to contribute to the achievement by 2012 of at least 3 million individual participants in student mobility under the Erasmus programme and its predecessor programmes (ERA-OpObj-1);

2) To improve the quality and to increase the volume of multilateral cooperation between higher education institutions in Europe (ERA-OpObj-2);

RailNewcastle will improve the quality of railway and logistics higher education and increase the volume of the students and teaching staff mobility by bringing together students and professors from ten European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) from nine different countries into one class room to rub shoulders, discuss and produce a valuable outcome based on knowledge sharing, innovative thinking and creativity joined in a plausible way to stimulate a vital multilateral collaboration in the railway and logistics education and training.

Specifically, RailNewcastle will work with twenty professors with comprehensive experience in railway and logistics coming from different locations from Europe. Each participating institution, excluding TU Technische Universität Braunschweig, will nominate, recruit and bring to RailNewcastle six undergraduate students to attend the intensive programme.

Collectively, students and teaching staff will form a working environment of approximately 70 people working together and learning from each other about logistics principles for efficient and green railway systems.

RailNewcastle supports the idea of the EU integration and enlargement, with the purpose of contributing to the EU aim of moving towards a “Knowledge based society”. There are significant differences in higher education between Eastern and Western Europe, which present challenges and opportunities to learn from each other. Therefore, RailNewcastle puts at its heart to work closely with participants from New Member States (Bulgaria and Romania in particular) and Turkey.

The programme promotes logistics principles for efficient and green railway systems which are in line with the sustainability agenda of the European Union in general. The concept of logistics principles for efficient and green railway systems is one of the political and social drivers indicated in the Freight Transport Logistics Action plan of the European Commission (COM(2007) 607 final), focussing on the planning, organisation, management, control and execution of freight transport operations in the supply chain, being one of the main drivers of European competitiveness and hence a prime contributor to the Agenda for new skills and jobs – one of the 7 flagship initiatives of the EU’s growth strategy for the coming decade “Europe 2020”.