Welcome to the April edition of Surbon Signal (read time: 5 mins).
This month, reflections from the first UIC Passenger Week in Paris, a round-up of useful reading, and what's coming up.
As promised last week, a few reflections — this time from UIC Passenger Week, the first edition of what UIC hopes will become a regular fixture in the international rail calendar. The final numbers were a useful signal in themselves: over 200 participants from 35 countries and 93 companies UIC, which speaks to the appetite for cross-border conversations in rail right now. UIC's headquarters in the 16th arrondissement is a beautiful building, full of memorabilia from the history of European railways. There was an engraved train mirror that caught my eye in particular, though, it turned out, not quite check-in compatible!
1) Rail is the greener mode — but it is not a frictionless one
The case for rail came through strongly across the day. However, on the return journey home offered a timely reminder that the operational reality is more complicated. My Eurostar was delayed because the train ahead of us had struck a wild boar, a category of incident that is becoming more common on European networks as wildlife populations grow and habitats are squeezed.
SNCF Réseau is piloting some genuinely interesting responses, from drone-based thermal monitoring with local hunters to acoustic deterrents and targeted fencing. These are not the glamorous end of the sector, but they matter. In the race against the car, small, repeated service disruptions are exactly the sort of issues that nudge people back behind the wheel — and recovering a passenger's confidence after a bad journey is much harder than keeping it in the first place.
2) The human voice still matters — and so does the will to keep serving
Two of the most memorable contributions of the day came from very different ends of the customer-experience spectrum. Simone Hérault — the voice behind SNCF's station and on-board announcements for more than three decades, and probably the most listened-to person in France — reflected on how passengers relate to that voice, including an anecdote about being asked to record a personal message for a couple's 30th wedding anniversary. It was a reminder of something the industry can easily overlook: even in an era of apps, journey planners and dynamic information, the human elements of the service — a voice, a tone, a welcome — are often what passengers actually remember. Her interview in the afternoon was a test of my French!
Oleksandr Shevchenko of Ukrainian Railways (UZ) spoke from a context that put the rest of the day's customer-experience conversation into sharp perspective. UZ lost 172 train cars in 2025 alone and manufactured 66 from scratch. Over 1,000 railway workers have been killed and 3,000 wounded. Passenger services share rolling stock with civilian evacuations, transport of the wounded, and top-level diplomatic travel. And yet: 89% of tickets are now sold online (up from 64% in January 2021), the UZ mobile app has been named Europe's top rail app for 2026, onboard menus have tripled, barrier-free stations and train cars have been built, and NPS has risen 6% over three years. When trains are delayed by five hours or more, UZ and World Central Kitchen hand out free meal sets. They have also built cross-integrated drone-and-train tracking systems to keep passengers from becoming targets. It was, quite simply, the most serious argument I heard all day for what customer experience actually means — not a layer of polish on a working system, but a daily choice to keep serving people under conditions most European operators will, hopefully, never have to imagine.
3) Ambition, technology and the Single Ticketing Package
The strategic theme running through the morning was multimodal ticketing and cross-border integration. Two contributions, from very different angles, framed the challenge well.
From the passenger side, Delphine Grandsart of the European Passengers' Federation was direct about the current experience: people are willing to switch modes, but they are confused and frustrated. How do I book cross-border? Why are the prices different on different websites? What happens if my connecting train to the airport is delayed? When the answers are unclear, passengers take the easiest option and that is often not the most sustainable one.
From the supplier side, Colin Girault-Matz of Wiremind made a complementary point about what actually has to be in place behind the scenes for seamless booking to work. A clean, API-based integration layer, using standards like OSDM (the Open Sales and Distribution Model) , is the unglamorous precondition for almost everything else, including the agentic AI use cases that are now starting to appear in revenue management and pricing. Without that foundation, the customer-facing ambition does not land.
Both points connect directly to the European Commission's forthcoming Single Ticketing Package. The proposal is due to be published on 13 May 2026 CleanTechnica, and covers two key files — the Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation (SDBTR) and the Multimodal Digital Mobility Services Regulation (MDMS) T&E. But regulation alone will not close the gap. What came through clearly at UIC was that if operators, infrastructure managers, technology providers and national authorities do not actively work together — sharing data, aligning standards, accepting each other's tickets during disruption — not much will change. And in that scenario, the car reigns supreme. Individual operators cannot solve this on their own. That is why platforms like UIC Passenger Week matter: they create the space for the conversations that have to happen before the regulation lands.
2) Useful reading
🚄 UIC Passenger Week 2026 — post-event review — UIC's own write-up of the inaugural edition, including the programme highlights and the strategic themes taken forward. A useful starting point if you missed it. Read here
🐗 Wildlife on the line — how SNCF is managing animal collisions — SNCF Réseau's own account of how it is tackling wild boar and other wildlife strikes, from drone-assisted hunter partnerships to acoustic deterrents and targeted infrastructure.Read here
🚌 UK DfT publishes 10-year zero-emission bus order pipeline — The DfT has released an aggregated 2026–2035 pipeline of anticipated ZEB orders across England, Scotland and Wales, pointing to around 23,000 vehicles over the decade, with demand peaking around 2030 and double-deckers taking the largest share. Indicative rather than definitive, but a useful signal of sector-wide demand for manufacturers, operators and authorities planning fleet transitions. Read here
🚇 Dubai's transport project pipeline: what's coming next - A round-up of Dubai's next wave of mobility projects, led by the newly announced Dubai Metro Gold Line (42km, 18 stations, AED 34bn, serving 1.5 million residents). Read here
3) Upcoming events
3 June — UITP Academy: Setting Up and Managing a Public Transport Authority (online) I will be speaking at the first UITP Academy training course in June on lessons learnt regarding bus procurement The programme is designed to help participants establish and develop empowered transport authorities — covering governance structures, legal and financial frameworks, funding models, and how to bring municipalities, operators and institutions together effectively.
23–25 June — UITP Urban Mobility Training, Dubai
About Surbon Consulting
Surbon Consulting helps public transport operators, authorities and suppliers win contracts and deliver social value — with 18 years of experience and over 40 public transport bids across the UK, Europe and the Middle East. Want to know more? Book a call or explore articles and resources including the new Social Value Quiz.
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