Reference no: EM133005387

The Dutch Railway system processes 1.3 million passengers and more than a million tons of cargo daily with high reliability and safety and a low CO2 profile. In the coming 10 years, the daily number of trains will need to grow 30% to enable train operators to deliver on the growing demand for Passenger and Cargo traffic. This is a major challenge for the Dutch Railway infrastructure manager, ProRail. An obvious choice would be to change and grow the rail infrastructure within the Netherlands. But growing the infrastructure would require a multi-billion Euro investment and may take too much time and space in urban areas. So to meet this growing demand, ProRail Traffic Control needs to invest in technologies that make it possible to automate and digitize large parts of the now manual traffic control process. This way the transportation capacity can be increased with the current infrastructure. This article will focus on the strategic workforce challenges for the 700 Train Traffic Controllers and 150 operational planners whose jobs will change tremendously because of this.