National Technical Rules

National Technical Rules (NTRs) are those rules (standards) which the Interoperability Directives require each Member State to notify in the absence of Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSIs). ‘In the absence of’ includes situations where a TSI has not been written yet, where it contains an identified ‘open point’ or where a derogation from a TSI has been notified. The purpose of the notified NTRs is to provide additional controls to ensure that the essential requirements as specified in the Interoperability Directives are met. The notified NTRs will not supplement the TSIs on performance related issues, nor repeat requirements mandated by the TSIs

RSSB is responsible, on behalf of the industry, for proposing to the Department for Transport those industry standards that should be notified against each of the TSIs for use on the GB mainline railway. The Department for Transport may need to notify additional requirements (eg, the code of practice on station accessibility) in order to ensure the notified NTRs address all of the essential requirements.

The industry process to be used for identifying and managing proposed NTRs for the GB mainline railway is set out in part 14 of Issue Two of the Standards Manual which came into force on 5 December 2009.

Additional guidance related to the wider context in which the management of NTRs takes place has been approved by the Industry Standards Coordination Committee (ISCC).

As an output from this process, RSSB provides the Department for Transport with lists of measures from Railway Group Standards (RGSs) which the industry proposes should be notified as NTRs for each of the TSIs, either published or under development. The NTRs provided by RSSB are intended for use only by Contracting Entities on the GB mainline railway, as defined in the Railways and Other Guided Transport Systems (Safety) Regulations 2006.

Where a Contracting Entity working on the mainline railway wishes to do something different to the requirements set out in NTRs which are RGSs, they will need to seek a derogation from RSSB and the relevant Standards Committee(s) in accordance with 14.4 of the Standards Manual. The application form which a Contracting Entity should use in these situations is the same form as for Deviations from RGSs.

For some TSIs, there are open points where the mainline railway does not yet have a RGS to address the particular issue. A further output of the cross-industry process is a list of other, non-RGS, documents related to these open points which may be of use to Contracting Entities in determining how to close out the open points which are not fully addressed by RGSs. The list of related documents is available below.

Where there is an open point which is not closed out by a RGS, the Department for Transport require each Contracting Entity who is doing work on the mainline railway to propose how they are going to address any such open points relevant to their project. Contracting Entities may seek observations and comments from the relevant Standards Committee(s) on the proposed way forward in accordance with 14.5 of the Standards Manual. An application form for this purpose is available below.

The Department for Transport publishes the NTRs and project-specific technical rules that have been notified by them to the European Commission for use in Great Britain. These notified rules are available from the Department for Transport’s website.

The lists of NTRs and related documents will be subject to periodic review in response to changes in the status of the TSIs (eg, from unpublished to published), the closing out of open points in the TSIs and as GB standards are developed or withdrawn. Updated lists of the proposed NTRs will be provided to the DfT every two months, in line with RGS catalogue and Periodic Operating Notice (PON) dates.

Please contact Jon Taylor on 020 3142 5601 if you require further information regarding NTRs.