by Antonio Lopez

General Manager

Hit Rail B.V.

At a conference in the European Parliament hosted by interoperability experts of Hit Rail (www.hitrail.com), Brian Simpson, then Chairman of the European Parliament Transport and Tourism Committee, voiced his frustration at not being able to buy a single train ticket from Birmingham to Milan.

The railways in Europe, he said, should look at the airlines as an example of how to organize worldwide ticketing.

The main challenge for the rail ticketing interoperability has been the difficulty of getting different systems, developed in different countries and by different companies, to communicate with each other in a coordinated way.

There are two main areas of difficulty here. The first one is to get disparate IT systems to understand the "form" of the information exchanged, in other words, to let them use the same messages with different syntaxes.

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