International Contingency Management

Most incidents are handled at regional or national level by the responsible Infrastructure Managers. If trains on networks of neighboring Infrastructure Managers are affected, the traffic control center of the other Infrastructure Manager is informed directly and involved in incident management. This process is practiced daily between the European Infrastructure Managers.

If large incidents with significant international impact occur, international coordination of incident management is needed. For international disruptions longer than 3 days with a high impact on international traffic, the DB Netz AG will take into account the International Contingency Management (ICM) when cooperating with international infrastructure managers. More details are described in the International Contingency Management Handbook, which can be found under the link on the righthand side.

This handbook describes standards and procedures that aim to allow continuation of traffic flows as effective, customer-oriented and at the highest possible level despite an international disruption and assure continuous transparency of the status of the disruption and its impact on traffic flows for all relevant stakeholders across Europe. It defines disruption management and communication processes that complement national incident management procedures to allow for better international cooperation of IMs and ABs. The recommendations of the ICM Handbook do not interfere with national coordination processes and disposition decisions between DB Netz AG and the Applicants. The disposition rules described in the NBN (or the associated regulations) apply.

According to Article 54 (1) of EU Directive 34/2012, Infrastructure Managers have to prepare an emergency plan in case of serious incidents or serious disruptions of train movements. To support Infrastructure Managers in fulfilling their obligations in the event of serious incidents with international consequences, a handbook describes the international processes for dealing with such cases, the so-called "Handbook on International Contingency Management". You can find this under the link on the righthand side.

This handbook complements the national incident management of each individual European Infrastructure Manager and the requirements of the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/773 concerning the technical specification for interoperability relating to the subsystem "Traffic Operation and Management" of the rail system in the European Union, as well as other regulations regarding incident management.