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 for identifying and managing NTRs for the GB mainline railway has been revised by the industry representatives and the Department for Transport at the Industry Standards Coordination Committee (ISCC). This process has been agreed and can be found below.

As an output from this process, RSSB provides the Department for Transport with lists of 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.

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.

The process for managing NTRs requires that each Contracting Entity propose how they are going to address any open points relevant to their project that are not closed out by RGSs, and to seek the views of the relevant Standards Committee(s) on the proposed way forward. A template for describing the resulting ‘project-specific technical rules’ is available below and needs to be used in conjunction with the process described above. Comments or proposals for improvements to this template would be welcomed and should be addressed to Adam Milligan, preferably in writing, at the contact details 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 Adam Milligan on 020 3142 5560 if you require further information regarding NTRs.